Transcription
Welcome to the show, everybody. We have got Evan Richie here from Coconut Cleaning. And I'm going to frame this properly within Home Service Accelerator. You and I have not even talked that much off camera up until this. I have shown Coconut Cleaning to like all of our students for branding. Like when people say, like, what does social media look like? What does like a good website look like? I have sent Coconut and Green Mango to so many people. All the Home Service Accelerator people watching will see that. So I want to start. You've done a decent amount of podcasts with Cam. So, I want to start just super quick and just go high level. Tell us the story about how Coconut started. We don't have to take a ton of time on it, and then we'll just dive into like some really good tactical stuff.
Yeah, super simple. I was working a job 15 years ago, uh, in the banking industry. My buddy said, "Hey, my buddy's starting a pest control business. Let's go sell for them." It was Green Mango starting. Uh, terrible experience. Cameron and I laugh about it, but after about a month, I said, "Dude, you guys got to figure it out." And I went into pest control. That led me into, uh, starting a Zoro's franchise under an owner of another one. Uh, decent experience, but got out of that. And then a couple years later, um, I saw Cameron with Green Mango and they were just blowing up. And then I also saw a Pineapple Pools truck driving around. And, uh, we ended up connecting and we made Coconut Cleaning in a day. And about two weeks later, we had a van on the parking lot ready to go.
Okay, cool. And what year was that?
'20. Uh, 2017. September 4, 2017.
Okay. So, you're on year eight. Nine?
Eight. We're about to finish eight.
Okay, cool. So, started with one truck. Now, how many in just the Phoenix location?
25.
25 vans in the Phoenix location.
Okay, cool. And then what does the Phoenix location's revenue do per year?
So, Phoenix revenue is at $6 million.
Okay.
Yeah. And what's interesting, we'll just dive right into it there. So, Phoenix is the wagon. It's the one you started with, but then you've gone a different approach to some of the other brands where you've gone the franchise route.
Yes.
Give me like, let's just get tactical on that. What was the decision on whether you're growing like In-N-Out Burger style private or like Chick-fil-A franchise?
Yeah.
Here's what's funny. It was not intentional. So 2021, I had four guys working for me that were all A-player guys, and they were getting ready for dental school, medical school, law school, and they said, "Hey, we love, we like you, we love Coconut, we want a piece of the pie." I'm like, "Dude, have you seen the margins?" Like, it's not. No. But they were adamant in doing something. And so, I stumbled upon franchising, talked to an attorney, six months later, had a, I was a franchisor, right? Didn't even read the FDD, the Franchise Disclosure Document, and it's 140 pages. I just knew that basically it's a rule book where the attorney asked for help was like on very specific things as far as brand rules, things like that. I went to those same four guys. I said, "Here you go, but you can't stay here." And they all went to Salt Lake, Nevada, um, Austin, and Dallas. And so, starting franchising, I had zero intention of being a multi-location franchisor past those four guys. In fact, I didn't sell another one for two years because I didn't want to. I didn't, didn't want to have like the Chick-fil-A setup, McDonald's setup. I didn't want a hundred offices out there. It kind of just, I'm very happy with what I'm building here and I'm very happy that those guys can go build it elsewhere. But the prospect of finding people, having them buy in, and then kind of seeing if they were going to maybe hurt the brand or help, just scared me too much. And so I was just building Arizona and letting them grow as well, the other four locations.
Okay, cool. And now...
That's changed in the last six months. So, I was going to say now, like I was looking at your socials yesterday. We just opened up a California one.
Yes.
Okay. So, that's exciting.
Yeah. And Minneapolis.
Okay.
And we have probably about 11 others in the pipeline.
Wow.
Yeah.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. And just for everybody to clarify, I don't even think we touched on it. It's not an interior cleaning company like a maid service. We didn't even touch on what. So, for anyone that's listening that doesn't know,
Give us just the elevator pitch, cuz you and I know. Give us the elevator.
It's called living surfaces. And even that, so like I understand living spaces, like now I get it more, but it's living surfaces, meaning basically anywhere that you interact with in your home, couch, carpet, tile, area rugs, mattress. Those are the stuff that we truck mount hot water extract and clean. We actually dabbled in the maid service stuff and we closed that real fast in about 90 days because it was just a race to the bottom. So, um, no maid service, no window cleaning, nothing like that. It is purely just us doing truck-mounted hot water extraction for all those living surfaces.
Yeah. And I've had that same experience as a consumer. Like house cleaning is so commoditized. Like the, the cleaner we have come here, she's like $120 bucks a visit and she is like doing my laundry.
Can I ask, like, do you know her by her name or her business?
Clarissa. Yeah. I don't know her by her business.
And she's so good. It's like, but it's so commoditized. As long as they show up and they clean, like what else? What else do I care about?
I got Juliet that cleans my house. I don't know what her LLC is. She shows up in an unbranded car. I don't care. She cleans my house for $100. I'm like, "Cool."
Yeah, I agree. It's so commoditized. Like even at Home Service Accelerator, people will be like, "Oh, we're thinking about starting a cleaning division." I'm like, "Brother, I think you should keep the main thing the main thing."
Don't.
Yeah.
Okay. That's that's really interesting. You had the same conclusion. So, what's interesting, you talked about zero res and one of the things that I'm so fascinated about about your guys' model specifically is when we look at the home service business world as a whole. Every, it's flooding with new guys, private equity money, everything else. At least from the outside looking in, I very rarely hear people come in and say like, "Oh, I'm starting a, I'm starting a living services upholstery, couches, tile, grout cleaning business." It's not like a darling quite like a lot of the other ones. Like, everyone's doing pests now. Everyone's doing windows, everybody's doing pressure washing. Pressure washing has become like a race to the bottom. Was that part of the process of starting it? Like, did you kind of see that even eight years ago?
Yeah, there's, there's an adage that a few of these bigger entrepreneurs say that anytime I'm in the process of trying to figure out our margins, trying to scale, and I, I realized just like, so I had two years helping Cameron at Green Mango and it was already perfect as it was, but I came and helped with some things. I can, I feel like I can confidently say because of the level at which I helped grow that thing, it was so much easier than the carpet and tile cleaning space. It was so just linear. A new customer, average contract value, here's when I profit. But our space, I just think it's one, there's no qualifications to get in, which is wild. So, it's unregulated. Anyone can go buy a machine. But if you buy the right stuff, it's $100,000. It is all predicated on how well you do in the home and that, that job average. It will sink you so fast if you don't have guys going in there offering other services. And so my thought process is is that the entry level at which you can get in as far as knowledge is super easy, but then the how-to and actually having some margins in this is all predicated on your ability to deliver an amazing experience and get that, that ticket a lot higher. And I think people just don't want to deal with that struggle.
Yeah. And you can tell me if I'm completely off base, but from the outside looking in, like I feel like the biggest challenge in that business to actually make it work versus being a commoditized race to the bottom with no margin is like you have to be so focused on like individual performance on the employee. Like specifically them going out for what the customer thinks is going to be a $199 couch clean, but like how do we actually service them, get the ticket up to there, and then also like really dialing in...
And do that in a way that isn't like salesy where they want us out again. So, it's, it's all...
Which is perfect.
Yeah.
I'm going to read you a quote from someone that I admired the quote a lot. You can tell me if you know who it is. "In a perfect world where everything is free, what would you get done on the sales process?" That was you.
Yeah, I was like, that's something I, I say that a lot, man.
That was your, that stuck out to me. I was listening to you guys the other day and I was like, "Dude, as far as like the opening disarming sentence for a rep or somebody to talk to a customer, that was like gold. I'm taking that."
The bread and butter, man. Well, I walk into, I'll walk into a house and, and again, it's like, I'm here to clean the couch, for your example. Um, how do I, how do I one, get your why behind the cleaning? Um, why'd you go with us? What's your experience with with uh couch cleaning, carpet cleaning? Um, there is so much I can do in that house. I, I think on average the upsell availability, which is so cool, is around $2,100 per home. Meaning, on average, I could find $2,100 in work. Um, we're not there. We're like $450 job average, but it's how do I want to approach like what's my desired outcome from this customer experience and I want to be your cleaner as long as you're here in the home. And, and I just found that question for me, just saying, "Hey, look, you know, budget aside, money aside, if I just said, you can get everything done in here for free. Like, what's the first thing you would say do this?" And everyone's always like, "Oh my gosh, tile and grout I want done. It's disgusting." Where if I went a different approach and I said, "Hey, did you know we do tile and grout cleaning?" Like I can, you know, measure and get you an estimate for the tile and grout. I'll probably have about a fourth of a response that I would to like just hip to hip talk with me like, "In a perfect world, it's free. What do you want done?" Because when you go about it like that, "Hey, in a perfect world, if everything was free, it's way more disarming on the sales side. They don't feel like they're being upsold."
Correct. And so that's like one of the things that we've struggled with with Valley Christmas is like how do we get the average ticket higher where it doesn't feel like the designer, the salesperson, we call them designers, is just like wreaking of sales breath.
I love that play though. The designer. That's cool.
Oh, of course. Yeah, because you know, we, in that business, we're very white glove, like high-end. We don't really even go to the East Valley at all. We're like all Paradise Valley, Scottsdale, Arcadia because...
Don't dabble in the East Valley.
Drive time. No, I mean, dude, there's so many guys. It's a race to the bottom out there and everything. But that was one thing I thought was really interesting. And then, um, the other thing you said on top of that was like, you try to find internally like at Valley Christmas and then in Home Service Accelerator, like find like the little wow moments that you can fabricate.
Yeah.
And so you guys took it a step further where it's like, you find one or two things to do for free.
Yes.
That's the catch. Is that it's like, if the, if the question is asked, "Oh, I would do my tile and grout done." Or like the customer says that in response and I say, "Well, cool. It'd be $150 for it." It's like, "Oh, you caught me." Like, "You got me." And that's not what we're trying to create. So, what I would do after that question is like, they're like, "Oh my gosh, I would for sure do the tile and grout." I say, "Hey, you know what? We did the walkthrough. Let me do the master bathroom, no charge. I'll show you what it's like, and then when you're ready to move forward with the cleaning for the whole home, I'll leave the invoice with a with a copy of the quote." And everyone after they see the master bathroom is like, "Just do, just do the rest of the house." Like, "Do you want me to?" "Okay, that's fine if you want me to do that. I can do that." Or sometimes our routes are built in a way where it's like, actually, I can't.
That was gonna be my next question.
Yeah, like, so it's, it's not a scarcity built in, but most everything we do as far as the, the highs and the good customer experiences, we try to systemize the recipe that creates those and duplicate it as often as possible.
Yeah. And so on that with carpet, tile and grout, furniture, air ducts in some locations,
Is there ones that you're kind of pushing your techs to be like, "Hey man, don't do the grout for free. That's pretty labor intensive versus like something else?" Or is it just like, find whatever's high impact?
High impact. What do they want? What, what again, in their perfect world, if they're like, "Hey, can you guys do the couch?" And you notice there's two other rooms with couch setups. It's like, "Hey, why the couch?" They're like, "Oh, it's just disgusting. I lay there. There's, you know, my kids are a mess." It's like, they're not, they're not telling you why they aren't getting the others done. They're telling you why they want this one done.
And so when you project that same like why onto like other things in the home, and then you say, "Well, cool. We're getting the sectional done. It's at $330. Great. Yeah, cool. If you don't mind, I just noticed that this setup over here, you got the two rockers. Can I clean those for free for you?" "Uh, why?" "I just would like to do that for you. It's just one other, you know, set that it's cleaner, and I noticed that, um, that seems to be a room a lot of people are in. I think you'd appreciate it. I think I could clean that up pretty good. No catch. I'm not expecting to get the third room for free. It just, it's just how it works. Is the guys are allowed to do whatever the customer needs and wants the most. They find something to give for free."
Yeah. And then at like the macro level, it's very clearly just like the law of reciprocity. Like the more you give, give, give, the more people are going to feel indebted to do something back in return. Whether that be get the additional, get the additional part of the house, the additional couch, or be more incentivized to leave a five-star review with a...
Photo referral.
Referral. But then the other thing, which would kind of take us right into it.
Yeah.
Probably better chance of signing up for Coconut Club.
That's it. That's it. Yeah. But before we go there, I do want to see, do you know the data? And it's okay if you don't on like, cuz I'm fascinated by like that that kind of model of they come in wanting one thing typically, like you run crazy promos. I get the text cuz I, you met the husky. I had you guys clean my couch one time.
Um, and you guys did a good job. And the little dog pissed all over it. And so you guys actually, you guys, you guys actually got it done pretty well.
Do you know the data on like what your average ticket coming in pre-booked? Yeah. Versus what it ends up being on the back end? Do you mind sharing the number?
We're pre-booked $160 on average with about, um, anywhere from $230 to $270 in upsell.
Okay. So you get to about mid-400s.
Yeah.
Okay. And that's the model where I think probably you would, you were kind of hinting at, like, that's where most companies are going to fail.
Correct. Is they're going in and they're ripping $160. Their techs getting paid 20 something bucks an hour after taxes, insurance, everything else, drive time, vehicles, you're cooked if you're doing four $160 jobs.
I was just talking to my CFO about that. And I said, when you look at the hands in the top of the funnel. So the top of the funnel is like customer entering into my business. You got acquisition cost. You got the phone salesperson. You got the manager making a commission on the phone salesperson. You got the technician manager making the money on the technician. And then COGS, overhead. We're left with almost nothing. If it stayed at that $160 amount, literally almost nothing. We'd be in the red.
Yeah. That's actually, we, five years ago, I owned a junk removal company. That's why we stopped.
Because it, so many of the calls were couch removals and we were like, "Dude, we're sending two dudes out in a truck for $150 couch removal. It just wasn't penciling and drive time, everything else." So, that's really interesting. Like that's like that can clearly be like the reason that you're either going to win or...
That's funny cuz we, we, I reached out to a few junk removal guys and I said, "Hey, if you want, you know, a return on your pickups, like bring some of your couches here. We'll clean them for like 90% off and you can flip, you know, some uh furniture." And we got a couple guys that make a killing off of it.
That people take you up on that?
Oh yeah. Because we got people, we got vans, it takes us 20 minutes to clean it. So we charge $50. They can sell that couch for $500.
Yeah. And then the economics of that rep, cuz they can do what? Like the, the good techs, when I was listening to you guys, the good techs were doing like $2,500 or $2,900 a day.
Yeah.
Right. And so with that, one of the things that I was fascinated by and it's something I've been desperately trying to do in the Christmas light business and in Home Service Accelerator is like performance pay.
Yeah.
But not just like, "Oh, you did a good job, you got like a little bonus for like a five-star review." It was the Tommy Melo like that's like your level one or what the...
Level one. And then level two. Yeah.
And so for you guys, your model is somewhere between 18% of revenue goes to that...
Correct. Yeah.
To that tech. For the technician. Yeah.
Yeah. Will you walk us through...
The comp structure for like performance pay? Because I think that's like when I talk to everybody, myself included, because again, the audience that listens to this, like my audience is like...
The reason people listen to me is I'm not trying to pretend to be a coach. I'm like, I just got off the truck like a year and a half ago. Like we just had our first seven-figure topline year. Decent margin, about 28 to 35% depending on the year.
Fantastic.
So, it's fantastic. But it's also in a seasonal lighting business, so you better have good margin. Christmas light...
Right. So with that, most of the audience here has like just got maybe employee two, three. Like that's like the framing of most of it.
How do you comp? Like what's like a perfect world of comp where it's actually performance-based and you get A-players?
So this is, um, this has been something the last eight years that I've worked so hard on because it, there have been times where I've paid way too much money. There have been times where I've paid too little. And I feel like the one that we have now is, uh, I, I heard something very profound and I forgot who it was from, but he just said, "At what points of your business are you most profitable and duplicate that as much as you can over and over?" And so I looked at our most profitable points and I said, "Okay, it's when a technician was making a sliding scale between 15 to 19% based on production." Here's the caveat, too, is that it has to be geared around a standard of performance that the 15% is like the baseline for, like, "Hey, you can work here if you have a $400 job average." And then anything beyond that is where they start making additional rises in their compensation. And so ours very simply, is now it's between 16 and 18%. And this is where that Tommy Melo advice came in phenomenally, which was, uh, the area of our ticket that was non, um, revenue performing from a salesman was our environmental fee and our COGS and our overhead. And he said, "Take your, um, COGS, your overhead, and anything else that you bake in there for taxes, all that, and remove that from your revenue." So revenue minus those things. And then you do the performance pay. So that's, that's huge. So we were always doing like $25 environmental fee. Our COGS are about 11 to 15 bucks. And so there's a good $50, $60 of that job that is just like us having to provide to have that job done that the technician didn't produce. Like, we got that customer from a $160 job average, uh, or a $160 initial ticket. Like, I was paying out on that $60 of revenue. And I started taking that out and the techs were like, "What the heck?" I said, "Okay, here's the level two aspect. You can make 16% of your revenue minus COGS, but then if you have a Coconut Club closing average of 20%, you make 18%. And if you have 25, basically every 5% moving forward after that is an extra $500." So my guys have a baseline column A responsibility where most of their revenue comes from, and any additional income is produced on things that don't historically happen at certain levels, but they can make a significant amount of more money more should they start pushing the needle in another area. So if I say, hey, like, I used to pay for reviews, but I found out that just organically without paying for anything, like people were, it's about one in 10 were giving us reviews. And so I'm like, "Why am I paying when like naturally people give us reviews?" And so I said, "Hey, look, um, you do about 70 to 80 jobs in a month. That tells me I'm going to get seven to 10 reviews just because of who we are. Every review after 10 is going to be $15." So rather than like $70 review. So now they're like pushing to get higher reviews, right? So it's the same concept. Your revenue is the biggest one. That's what keeps us alive. You can make additional jumps in your commission percentage should you sell more people on the subscription rate. So now you're reaping more from column A as you help the company more, which is get us people that are in the pipeline longer and their, you know, their LTV with us is just so much longer.
Yeah. And that's something like implementing change sounds really easy on a podcast like, like, you know, like you, like we've, you and I both, and probably most of the people listening, it sounds great and then when it comes into execution...
When you change a model...
To an existing staff of how many people did you have? How many techs did you have when you changed this model?
Um, 35 techs.
So you have 35 people that are used to a certain model.
Correct. And now this new model actually incentivizes top performers. Correct. So culturally it helps.
But did you get pushback hard?
And did you have attrition of employees because of that? Or...
Does that actually show you who probably needs to go anyway if they're not incentivized by higher performance?
Yes. I'd say yes to all of them. Okay.
Because in, in a little way, all those things happen. But I would say one of the things that I'm not the proudest of, but to avoid the, uh, perception of, "I've got this figured out in 2024," I let go of half of our staff. Um, and that was a big deal for me because, um, one thing that supplements having a great culture is I was so big on our people having, you know, the opportunity to buy homes, pay off their debt, and I wanted them making the right money. What naturally came of that and in, in creating an intentional culture where people felt valued was I had five sets of brothers at one time, and then I had multiple sets of siblings working in the office. One maybe worked in the office, one on the van. And so when people say family, it's like, I'm not really big on like, "Hey, we're family." Um, but it just also naturally happened where it's like, I have 11 sets of siblings in our organization. And for me, as far as like changing things and cutting, cutting people, it took five years for anyone to like quit.
No one quit.
Um, and then I realized, man, my margins suck. Like in 2023, I'm like, we're at four to 10% margins. Like, we absolutely suck in Arizona. And I got to a point where I'm like, "What is our most profitable points of the business?" And it's when this, it's ran this way with a salesman on the van and a technician, and a salesman's bouncing between vans. Like that's our most profitable point. I'm like, "If I implement that, that means I need like 15 less technicians." And I was like, "But the others that were able to stay all made about 30% more." And so any perception of people like, "Oh, we have it figured out." Back to your point, the, the pain of not having these things figured out sooner was one, loss of significant amount of income for me. But then two, like, one of Cameron and I's biggest pain points is paying payroll. Like anytime we're short, we're paying payroll. I'm like, "This is stupid. Like I have a charity. Like this isn't, we're not making any money." And so the, the pay was a big deal for me to figure out. And so I wanted a culture where our best and top performers and those standards were enforced, and then I reverse-engineered the behaviors that those people demonstrated and I put those into our company, you know, mission and standards, and then it rewards the people that just go all out and continually get better. And then all the people that gave the pushback were the ones that just don't drive results. Plain and simple.
Right. But it's easier said than done when I'm actually saying, "Hey, you're one of the few that we can't keep." Or, "Hey, you have a $300 job average. Mark has a $500 job average. Every time I give you a route over him, I'm going to lose $800."
Right.
So, how do I find more Marks? And then how do I let these people know that like, it's not personal, it's just, it's not working with you?
Yeah. And like that change in 2023, I imagine it impacted topline quite a bit. Here's what's crazy. This is why I stand by it. Um, we were doing $5 million in 2023 with half the staff. In 2024, we did $5.4.
You grew while...
We grew and our margins jumped 17 to 19%.
More? Yeah.
Or up to 19%.
Yeah. That's it's crazy. It's like I, I made a tweet about this the other day in like the small business X community where it was right after talking to Cam. I had watched a bunch of your stuff online and then I had had a conversation with, do you know Dave Carroll from Dope Marketing?
I don't. Wait. Yeah.
In Minnesota, they do like all the signs and stuff. Yeah, they're, he's an awesome dude. So, we just interviewed him.
And then I talked to one more guy as well who had had a pretty, a nine-figure exit. Um, and I tweeted, it's like, because I'm on the social media game just a little bit now, like Instagram, YouTube, whatever else, doing the podcast, I've noticed a trend and like when I sit down and have a conversation with somebody where you can tell that like this dude knows his numbers, like this dude is running a profitable business. The guys who are like pretending on social media talk about topline pretty much exclusively and very rarely talk about...
Bottom...
Yeah. Even the gross profit or, you know, indirect labor, your, you know, overhead, all that.
Yeah. And so like one of the things that is like it was when you were talking about it was like convicting to me because you were like, even talking about calculating the commissions for the techs, you were like, "Well, the cost of goods sold shouldn't be accumulated with that." To me, I hear something like that and I go, "That's something that I personally would just like never even go pull the hood out, like go pull up the hood and look at because I'd be like, either A, if I'm being honest, probably afraid of the pushback I'm going to get, or B, if I just bury my head in the sand and don't do that deep of a dive, then I'll just like, you know, it's like, what's the hormosi thing? Like most of the, most of the, most of the magic you're looking for is in the problems you're avoiding." And like, was that kind of like at a certain point in 2023 you were like, "I've felt this for a long time. Doing a couple mill in revenue at the end of the year, it's like there's not that much left over."
There was nothing there. And I, I think for me, it was, uh, we just, my dad's perfectly healthy now, but there was, there was a small scare and I just remember like, he's an entrepreneur. Um, best man I know. Best man I know. And, um, when that happened, it was like, in this short 24-hour period, it's like he's going to pass. And then I'm like, I'm thinking of my mom. She's 70. They don't have like that, that retirement saved up. I knew at that moment I couldn't help.
And that crushed me. And I went back to our margins. I'm like, "Dude, I got people who couldn't care less about this company buying their second or third vehicle, buying pontoon boats, buy, I'm like, I need to eat first. And if I have a, you know, if I can stick to my morals in that I don't want to eat first plus make an extra million on top of that. If I can say, I need to get myself to a healthy profitable standpoint and then I need to dream bigger and get bigger in my goals because no one's goals outside of buying a home and paying for a vehicle could happen because of my limiting beliefs. And when I looked at the prospect of like, I can't even help my mom if my dad passed,
That crushed me. So I went right back to the drawing board. Um, told some of my, my managers, I said, "Hey, I think we're going to have to let go of a lot of people and a lot of you are going to have to do the work." And when it actually got down to like why certain people were doing things versus another, it really only added about 10, 15% on the existing managers and employees' plate to do a little bit more volume and bandwidth, but they were all making 30 to 40% more. And what was cool is it was the right people. It was the right people that have always been there that are like, "Hey, you don't have to pay me my commission if you know the company's not in the best standpoint." And so I was so much happier to pay 50 people the right pay and, and some than 97, um, an okay amount of money.
Yeah. And I think that's like, that's probably, that's one of the more real things and stories anybody's ever told on here. But I think it's really interesting like when I look at a newer business owner, myself included, it's like, okay, I want to have this, I want to have this culture, right? You know, you hear everybody talk about it's like, it's A-players, it's everything else. The first thing you jump to is like, take care of them financially.
And then it's like, you know, then you get backed into a corner here where one of the things even we had in Valley Christmas was I was like, "We got to get away from compensating people off of topline."
Yeah. So like managers were, you know, director was getting 2% of revenue installed, and then manager was getting 1.5, and then, you know, then it was trickling down. And I was like, "Guys, that's not, nothing, that's a lot." And so you do the math at the end of the year, you're like, "This is not working." Because there was no performance baked in at all. It was just like, it didn't matter if that job took eight hours, the job took four, they were getting paid the same.
Yeah. And so that's, man, that's a, that's incredibly impactful for people listening, myself included. So I appreciate it. I do want to change gears because marketing. I want to make sure that's...
Branding is A1 from the colors, the van. We'll try to patch a photo up of the vans on here.
Talk to me about when was the moment where like organic, not just like paid running Facebook ads, not just like run some Google ads. Where did you have this epiphany like organic social media in this brand is worth investing? Because I know it's not just you with an iPhone. You've got staff built behind that. Now we have a $50,000 a month marketing team,
Right?
That keeps the brand going and keeps it alive, keeps it fresh, and then also is looking for new and innovating ways. And that's that's like labor. That's not our spend on marketing. That's like our team for marketing is $50,000 a month.
Yeah. Are you using an agency? Like a brand agency?
We're in-house.
Oh, in-house. Okay, cool.
In-house. So, um, here, here's what I'd say about branding is, you know, the, I forget what Indiana Jones movie it is where he steps out onto that ledge that you can't see. He has to take that leap of faith. Um, I remember when starting Coconut, Cameron, Cameron's like, "Dude, trust me, bro. Like, we need the rims." I'm like, "We don't need the rims. Like, $3,500 for some rims, bro. Like, let me get some money coming in. I'll go out with the little chromies on there with the blue van. That's it." He's like, "Okay, but just trust me." I'm like, "Fine." Like, literally zero dollars in our account. Cameron saying, "Trust me, bro," on the on the black rims.
Mhm.
So there is a lot to branding that you don't see the value of it until you start thinking like a consumer and how you purchase. And if you just started thinking like, "Man, I buy from the companies that look good, they give me that good feel, and I know that they're putting time and money into it." So I would say for me, um, it was about three months in, and here's the funny story that you could, you know, bring up with Cameron tomorrow, um, is in my mind, seeing them at Green Mango in 2017, they're seven years in, I'm like, "They're killing it." And I think Cameron would be the first one to say like, "Sure, but like, we were also drowning because it was, they were at this weird expansive moment where they're growing but not profitable, and they are profiting here and there. They start Pineapple Pools. Was that the right thing to do? Because we're taking our eye off the ball a little bit." Um, my first month is like, I looked at Cameron. I'm like, "All right, so what do I do, man? Like, you're, you're the business guy." He's like, "Bro, go knock. I don't know. Like, go work." I'm like, "What do you mean?" Like, our, our packet, like you're doing mango packets with coconut stuff. Where are the sales? He's like, "I don't know." I'm like, "Dude, we have no customers coming in." And so, uh, "Go knock." So, pest control.
"Go knock, dude. Go, go, go find some people. I don't know. It'd be anywhere but here." My, my, my point where I was like, "I hate this guy," is like, I came to the office like a couple months in and I was using the restroom. He's like, "Why are you here?"
I'm like, "Okay, one, first of all..."
"Just chill out."
"We are both owners here." But luckily, there's no employees to be around there. Anyway, um, I realized really quickly that there wasn't any amount of someone's previous success or someone's how-to for some things that was going to make this thing work.
Mhm.
And so the organic side was, how do I like, who is my customer avatar? And then more than just like, "How can I market to them?" It's the thought was like, "Where's their attention?" Like, if my people are, you know, 30 to 35 years old, have a couple kids, you know, have one of their first homes, where are they at? And they're they're watching for Taylor Swift tickets. They're obsessed with Stanley's. They're obsessed with all that. So, the first thing that we did was a Louis Vuitton giveaway, dude. So, we, we're like, "Another $2,500 for a purse. Hey, call in, like our page, and we'll give someone this this Louis Vuitton purse."
Just for execution. What do you mean, call in?
Um, like, call into our office and book an appointment, you'll get 10 entries. Um, but just like our page, comment, you'll get one entry. So, we started having people call in and they're like, "Hey, if I get, so if I get..." Is there an amount of money I could spend? We're like, "Hey, if you spend more than $500, you'll get 30 entries."
So, to get more, they were they were trying to like game, like, "How do I get 30 entries?"
The phone started blowing up and we're like, "Okay, cool. So, I'm going to be forever committed to wherever my avatar's attention is, like I'm going to take a piece of that attention and sell carpet and tile cleaning." And so that very quickly I realized that that was the play for Coconut. And what's super neat about our franchises is that in the four that went out, four reached, or three reached $500,000 their first year. The other one was $400,000. Um, and now they're all hovering around $1.2 to $1.5 million. Um, and growing. And they all went to that same recipe of like, "I'm going to find a few influencers. I'm not going to put money into marketing. Um, and we're simply going to say, 'Hey, we're here. We're going to grab a few Stanley's and say, 'Hey, for the next 10 people that call, we're doing a free Stanley.'" Um, and that has just, it's proven so well for us. But here's the important thing back to brand is that if you're not a company that invests in brands, or you have, you have 20 followers, and the image and aesthetic of your company isn't there, um, it, it may not work. It only works because people are like, "I want that van in front of my house on my neighborhood so people see like I'm a clean person."
Mhm.
That's that's a huge caveat to that.
Yeah, that's that's really interesting because it's somewhat of a flex.
Yes.
So, we had this epiphany with, we were, I had seen like for Christmas lights, yard signs were going to be huge.
Yeah.
Right. Everyone...
The little bandit signs.
Bandit signs. And I was like, "Okay, hold on. If we're the high-end, like super, super like, we're by far the most expensive, but that's just like where we wanted to be."
Sure. Yeah. I was like, "Am I going to get pushback for these yard signs?" So, we were like, "Well, let's make them look really pretty." Because in the back of my mind, I thought, "Is it a flex to show your neighbors in Paradise Valley that you paid to have this beautiful display?" Oh my god.
While like, you know, the other neighbor down the street was like, you know, throwing up some Walmart Home Depot like on their house. It's like, if it's a keeping up with the Joneses neighborhood already, which the people we serve are. So, we made these yard signs and then for like the first 20, I asked people and they all said like, yes. Every single one said yes. I think one person ghosted and just like didn't respond. We just put it out anyway.
Yeah.
And so then I said, "Stop asking."
Yeah.
So we didn't even ask anymore.
And it was, you know, a, like this was two years ago. So it was like a hundred something bandit signs that were branded pretty and it was just like, "Holiday display done by Valley Christmas." Fancy cursive looks good. Put in the yard. And then we would just send an automation after we closed out the job in the CRM that said, "Hey, just to give you a heads up, we threw a sign out in front of your yard. It looks pretty. It like kind of tells the story. Absolutely feel free to take it out. We'll come grab it." Whatever else. We've had one person last year. We did like 204, 205 jobs. One person got upset.
And they were just a Karen.
Yeah.
Like, if one person out of 205 is not an outlier. If five people were mad, I'd be like, "Okay, it's an operational problem."
It's almost better you take it down anyway.
Yeah. But it's that really interesting keeping up with the Joneses thing on the brand where like that was like eye-opening to me where like as a business owner, you're thinking, "Oh, I'm just out, especially a new one, you're thinking like, 'Oh, I'm just out and doing a service. It's like I'm being paid to put up lights.' The guys are getting paid to put up lights, but there's so much emotion tied to it that I feel like the good brands understand and the bad ones don't."
Yep.
And that was like very applicable, very applicable for us. Do you have the numbers on like your organic socials? Like you've had Instagram reels on coconuts then get like multiple eight-figure million views.
Y...
Do you have the numbers on like tracking links or anything like the unique links on socials? Like how much of your revenue comes from organic socials or is it hard with like the influencer campaigns, everything to truly track?
I would say it's hard, but if I were to put like, um, all those things into a bucket, I'd say about 35% of our current growth and expansion comes from organic.
That's insane.
Yeah. So, like, I'd say 70% of our marketing budget is labor versus direct spend because I want the best people overseeing where, where $30 or $40,000 is being spent. And so the $50,000 is for a couple of top talent marketing people that manage $30,000. And it sounds crazy, but it works. And what they bring on the organic side, it always surpasses our expectations. It's phenomenal.
Yeah. And it's kind of like, it's the same reason we do YouTube from Home Service Accelerator. It's like, because if you go into two camps of like paid, like Google pay-per-click ads, you either generate the sale, get a customer, sell them the Coconut Club, or you don't, and that money you just sunk is gone forever.
Yes.
Versus like, there is some staying power to organic social media that no one really talks about. It's like the amount of touches you can get on people. You're buying f, you're buying followers from that, all that jazz. And so there's a little bit more like lifetime value versus...
Just like sunk cost into the paid ads, 100%. And so that's been very apparent, but that's crazy. 35. I would have guessed like 20 at most.
Yeah, around 35% when you throw in the influencers and all the other organic combination.
Okay. Cam talked to uh the Home Service Accelerator group call like a week ago and we we we were running out of time but we touched on the organic uh and like dude after the call probably 15 people reached out to me was like get more info on the influencer campaigns.
Are you comfortable sharing the strategy behind that?
Here, here's what I'd say. Um, it's so hard to deliver and from from the like, so Kate, my wife, is our CMO. The amount of interactions that she has with influencers, I know that very few people will ever duplicate what we do, regardless of me saying it. Um, and I know that, and this is that's why I throw in the little brand caveat, is that I've had people say like, "Oh, so you just reached out to influencers and give them something a little free and then they post for you, dude." Like, where where it all started was around that same time, six months into Coconut. I reached out to my sister who's got like a million followers and all this stuff. And it was hard for me 'cause I try to keep her humble.
And I'm like, I'm I'm sitting over here like begging. I'm like, "Hey, uh, let me come clean your house." She's like, "Okay." I'm like, "For a post." She's like, "And do you know how much these are worth?"
Yes.
I I won't share, but it's it was a lot of money. And I'm like, "A story." She's like, "Just come to my house. I'll record." She recorded some of my cleaning. Dude, nothing happened. She didn't post. She didn't do anything. So, I'm like, "Okay, she's dead to me." Like, I'm never going to her house again. I spent four hours cleaning her house.
Okay. All of a sudden, one day I was taking the sales at the time. The phone just started blowing up and I pick up like, "Evan, Coconut Cleaning." They're like, "Hi, I saw you on Little Luna. Um, can I get a clean?" I'm like, "Oh, cool, cool." And I'm like, "Pull the phone away. Another call. Another call. Another call. Another call." She put together this sick video of uh my cleaning and she posted as a story and she said, "Hey, use code." People were like, "Can I use code Little Luna for 50%?" I'm like, "Christian, we don't do 50% off." Like, what? But then I'm like, also getting, I got 27 sales in one day from a story.
Damn.
And that's where it started. So, uh.
Were those million Arizona based?
Um, I would say the first three to 400,000 was all like here. Um, in terms of like local. But then it turned, then she just got way big and now it's, you know, now it's way bigger than that. But um, it it was it was cool for me to experience that, but also at the same time, I had to step back and I'm like, I just booked a week and a half of work. I can't even take another new sale. And so it was very hard. But this this is why I say people people won't do it or they'll have a hard time doing it. And and here's why. For a week and a half, I did zero producing of revenue and I went and serviced people with 50% off. When I say zero, it's it's dramatic because I'm like, my prices were already so small because I wanted people in the door. So I'm like, $99. I'm going to houses for $49. Um, so when I go out pre-booked at $49 and they're using Little Luna 50% off, they're like, "I'll get this done, this done." I'm like, my tickets were finished like a hundred bucks. I'm like.
For six hours of work.
Eight hours of work. So I'm like, dude, like they're like, "Oh, your sister said like if I just say that I, you know, follow her, that you'll do more." I'm like, "I'll dance. I'll do something. But I'm not doing any more work, dude. Like that's a lot." But um, it's it's very hard to do influencers at scale because then you're actually doing free work. We have a guy who makes a lot of money who all he does is our influencers.
So let's say.
So you can't, because you can't give an influencer free pest control like like Green Mango can because it's not like that's gonna that's going to bury you.
It's it's going to bury you because you don't know what the ROI is. So like me sharing this stuff is we now for the last four years have a guy making, you know, 70 to $90,000 who all day every day he just goes to influencers. So if you think about that salary, you know, 6 to $8,000 a month is towards a guy that goes and and gives a good presentation in front of influencers. And we have softwares that track their posting and the ROI and clicks and all that. But um, the first year or two, it almost sank us because we were we went gung-ho on getting all these influencers in the door. Then it looked like we're just cheapy because now we're everywhere. But like we're doing 50, 60, 70, 80% off. Like we we had to match so many things from the promotion, the call to action, how we wanted to be branded to make it work. About 2 years in, because it was 2 years in where we we almost we outgrew our capital. And I didn't even know that was possible. I'm like, how do I outgrow the amount of money that we have? They're like, well, it takes you the second service to really profit. So, until you see that person a second time, you know, it takes you about four months to see that person a second time. So by month three, if you do this many services, like you guys will be out of cash.
Yeah. So you guys had have been doing this in like 2018, 2019?
2018, 2019. Yeah.
So this is before I even had a business. Like I was a sales bro.
There you go.
I graduated college in 2017. And I went to GCU, so it's local.
And uh, I remember the first time I ever saw Coconut Cleaning's brand was like 2018, 2019. It was this girl I went to college with that had like 2,000 followers. Now, she's blessed in the looks category. So she was definitely trying to do the influencer thing.
But I I remember seeing her like use, you know, "I Coconut Cleaning's out, cleaning my couch today." And again, like this is in this is etched in my mind before I was a business owner, mind you. And I remember thinking like, what brand is paying this chick with 2,000, maybe 3,000 Instagram followers to post this? Like, how? Like, is this girl an influencer? Like, it like it blew my mind. But with influencers, you want micro niche local influencers.
Yep.
Right. So, because we looked at doing this for Christmas, but the average ticket, like very hard to give a loss. Like you can't, we don't have a loss leader that we could.
Yeah.
Give them for that. So, we looked at like, I had my assistant gather like, "Give me every notable influencer in Arizona." That's not going to work. We have Bachelor contestants with 500,000 followers from all over the nation where their prices just weren't going to make sense. And then I was listening to you guys on the uh, your guys' podcast.
Um, remind me the podcast name.
Premium Mindset.
The Premium Mindset. So yeah, you guys should definitely listen to The Premium Mindset. I was about to call it the 1% Mindset. Premium Mindset.
I remember listening to you guys talk about like the volume of the influencers being like micro-niched or whatever you guys were talking about there. And it got me thinking like, it has to just be mega-scaled local micro-influencers. And that's probably where people on the outside looking in, 99% of the time will get it wrong. Yep. It's like, oh, 400,000 followers. Like, no. Here. Yes. That's It took me five years to learn that. So, that's so cool that you could just, you know, get that in a short amount of time from just your own your own doing this. But, uh, it took me about five years 'cause to to that point is we started reaching out to like, well, that lady has this many followers and we got this many. We almost multiplied the amount of sales we were going to get by the followers and it there was no correlation. We have some of our greatest influencers that are moms that live in an apartment that have 1500 followers, but all 1500 went to their high school two years ago and they're all right here.
Um, but it it was funny for me to see like, oh, we're going to, they have 3 million followers. Like, that's crazy. And then we're getting calls from like Australia. They're like, "Hey, I saw you on this per like, can I'm like, where are you calling from? This number looks weird." They're like, "From Australia." Oh gosh, we forgot to tell these big influencers that this is only Arizona. And then we find out like how many are really either bought, whatever. And then also there's these trends on social media where it's like, "Follow me if you follow me and my husband will get me a car." And it's like, it's it's it's fake. Where I would say five years ago, longer people had like genuine connections with their influencers.
So, um, right now we have about a list of 120 influencers that we see at different volumes throughout the year.
But overall, we did around 900 different influencers to get that 120.
And those 120 are like our brand ambassadors now. Like they're the ones that like we'll invite to an event at the end of the year. Um, a lot of thanks, giving them direction for the next year. And that's where I just know like people, it almost bankrupted us a few times doing this. So, good luck.
Do you think that the TikTokification of all of the social medias is going to have an impact on that strategy? So how like everything is for you based now versus like 5 years ago, if I followed a thousand people, there's a pretty damn high chance that that follower showing up on the feed versus now?
Can I tell you something I'm excited about with TikTok? Please. I don't know if it's going to work, but anytime Gary Vee says something, I listen. Same marketing wise. And he says like, shopping live is huge. I love cologne. This is like, very few people know this. I love cologne. Over 130 bottles. I'm finding these little kids buying a couple Louis Vuitton colognes and then they hop on live and they sell like little decant, 10 milliliters of it.
And they're, you know, they'll buy a Louis Vuitton bottle for $370 bucks and then, you know, they're making 50 or 60 little decants from it. And you know, they're they're making $600, $700.
Mhm.
So something I am excited to try in the home service field is we are creating a room at Coconut where we will be on TikTok live cleaning and doing sales promotions while people are there that, "Hey, if you're watching and they're cleaning a couch, hey, call our office right now and you get, you know, X amount off a couch cleaning." Or "The first person that calls in and mentions this is going to get this." To like rather than like focus on the the dancing aspect of TikTok and all that fluff, I am looking at what's working. And it does seem that there's going to be a market where, hey, if you're already cleaning out a home and the customer is okay with it, just record yourself on live cleaning and that people can ask for certain promotions during that live event where they could get better promotions during that than if they called in regularly.
Yeah, the TikTok like QVC, the QVCation of TikTok. Home and just set up a, you know, a 360 camera and and well, I guess and also like a phone, hop on live while you're setting up a home and say, "Hey, anyone chimes in, messages in while we're setting up this house, you get whatever." I'm excited to try it.
Yeah, that's really interesting because like even now, like I have 11,000 followers on Instagram. So like very small. But but we've we run a lot of ads for Home Service Accelerator. And so what happens when you run ads at like, about sometimes a thousand bucks a day, you buy followers.
Sure.
Just by natural proximity, if you're reaching, you know, a couple couple thousand people a day, you're going to buy some followers.
Couple 20,000 people a day. What happens is like they're not mega fans immediately until they see the content. They're like, "Okay, I like it." Whatever else. And so one of the things that I've kind of seen and I've curious, like Instagram 5 years ago used to just be like, "All my followers will see everything." Now it's like, I'll post a Reel with you and it might get 4,000 views or it might get 500.
Yeah. So if I was if I was an influencer trying to do like sell my, you know, social media because everything has gone to that "for you" algorithm side of things, I'm wondering what that's going to do for influencer payment and all that going forward because like even my stories, there's certain stories I post that get a thousand views and then there's other stories I post that get 200.
That's weird. Yeah, that's weird. And so it's almost like everything's gone to that algorithmic TikTokification-based.
I would say if you ask you ask Kate, my wife, those videos that went viral with tens of millions of views, she's like, "I don't know. I don't know how it just for whatever reason, we posted it with this thumbnail at this time and the next day it was at 100,000 and then 1.5 and then 3 million." She's like, "So I'm just going to keep duplicating that." So, if you you'll see a very pivotal point on our Instagram page where we always put a cute thumbnail on top of gross videos. We've taken away all the cute thumbnails. We have a, you know, shout out to Cole Welch who's our model that, you know, gets hit up after all of our photo shoots because people are like, "Who's the guy in the photo though?" Um, Cole Welch has lost his spot on the, you know, the thumbnails. And it's just if we're showing a contrast of cleaning a carpet, the thumbnail is that thing. And that has single-handedly changed our um, the amount of people that interact with our videos. But aesthetically, I hate our page now.
Right?
It's weird how that all kind of shifted. But now people see, you know, this video of like pouring out nasty water and it's driving millions of views. And we then put that into an ad because it works organically. So then we put that into an ad and that ad converts so much higher.
Yeah. And then I'm thinking about you long-term franchising. The more states you get, the more like those high-impact mega viral videos are going to be because like right now, like we have a window cleaner in Home Service Accelerator who got like three million views on a video and he goes, "I didn't get from it."
Right?
He's like, like.
We don't understand it.
He's like, "It's it's nationwide."
So it's just it was a satisfying video. So like one of the things we talk about uh in Home Service Accelerator a lot when guys are like, "What kind of content do I make?" And I'm like, "I'm not even the content guy. We just started pouring thanks to Jake coming in." Like we just started pouring like resources into content. And so one of the things that I said and I think I heard it from Hormozi or somebody else. It was like, educate, entertain, social proof.
I love that. Like one of those three. And so if you look at yours.
Yeah.
Yours are doing two, sometimes three things every single time they go viral.
And so your wife's being humble, but she's being like, "I don't know why it went viral." It went viral because it was entertaining. So like super aesthetically pleasing.
Like scratch the monkey brain thing of like why we watch, you know, a guy pressure wash a drive or that landscape guy who like cleans.
Favorite videos.
Yeah. And so then it's like it's clearly that there's a little bit locally of social proof, like somebody else paid to get this done. You know, you see you're inside someone's home. And then some of them are education, obviously. But like this is the the scratching the monkey brain thing of like the satisfying video is very clear.
Yeah.
I've I mean, I've seen you guys, you have to have hundreds of millions of views accumulated.
Yes. Yeah. It's it's it's it's a lot now. And um, we're still, you we're still trying to understand how to maximize on that with better copy, better call to action, better hooks, better trailers for things. So like we're I feel like even if we're doing good now, I feel like in the coming six months, it's going to be pretty dang cool.
Okay, I like that. Last marketing thing and then we'll go like uh I think you're probably the best guest for culture. Oh,
that we've talked to just based on like how I've listened to you talk uh on your podcast.
About it. But the last marketing thing.
Yeah.
So, I got my couch done a while ago.
Probably a year ago.
Yeah.
In the last eight weeks, I've got a weekly text.
Yeah.
Every week. A lot of guys push back on that and say, "Don't over SMS because opt-outs, whatever else."
You're doing it.
Yeah, we're doing it. And I imagine it's crushing because I have not opted out and you stay top, you you stay top of mind once a week. Every single week I think about Coconut Cleaning one time. That in the last two months has dropped our acquisition cost by 50 bucks. And you get opt-outs, 0.02%. Really really low. They got it down to the time uh to the personalization because like sometimes you get the like, "Air, where it's like, enter name and then you see the promotion." You're like, "What is this company doing?" Like they do like pre-production on a text message blast for a few hours. Like they're making sure that thing is like, I want this as human as possible so someone sees it and they're not like, "Huh?" But 0.02% 0.02% opt-out rate. And it has dropped our acquisition cost $50. Which if people don't understand what that means for us, you know, if we usually had a $100 acquisition cost and now we have 50, like we just freed up so much of our marketing budget to either continue to double down on ads, whatever, we can put that money wherever we want to put it. But, you know, if we're acquiring, you know, 1,500 to 2,000 new customers per month, and we just took $50 off that acquisition cost, like everyone's happy and crazy. And and those text messages, as long as they're value driving and giving, they always work.
Yeah. Interesting. So, do you think your marketing mantra is the more better new? Like when you have something working, it's scale it till it breaks, make it better, then try something new.
Um, yes. Yeah.
I think it's Yeah, I think it's Hormozi.
Yeah, I was think because I was thinking about like, it's better like for us, it's probably better, more new.
Okay.
Um, I'm constantly in the refining process of every little tweak of marketing, the customer experience. I'm obsessed with the customer experience. I have boards in my office of every touch point of a customer interaction from text message blast to 48-hour reminders, 24-hour reminders to if, hey, if they they spend over $700 with us, they're getting this kind of a video from me. If they sign up for the Coconut Club, they're going to get this video. Then we're going to deliver chunk cookies is going to go to their house and deliver chunk is so good, right? So, it's like I'm obsessed with the customer experience and every touch point between marketing and calling us to uh retaining them as long as possible. It's all intentional.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, on the customer experience, because we'll go right into it. One of the things I thought and I'm actually implementing it this year is you say weekly one-on-ones.
Yes.
That's a lot of time.
Yeah.
But you think it's worth it. So.
I I know I know it's worth. You know, I shouldn't have said think like clearly it's worth it.
So.
Is the model like if you have like you as an owner and then you've got, you know, you're I imagine a director of each department and then managers? Are you going to director, director going to manager, manager going to staff? Or are you.
I'm just with the executives. So I have three executives. I meet with three executives. The other three executives have the middle managers and.
The trickle effect.
Okay. And each one of those, whoever's there, direct report.
Gets an hour-long weekly one-on-one. And it's it's not emotional. It's not like, "How are you feeling?" It's very KPI.
Numbers. 15 minutes to an hour is more fair. 15 minutes to an hour is more fair.
Okay.
Um.
I don't know why I thought.
Yeah, they're they're pre-booked around 30 minutes.
Okay.
Um, but the most important thing is like, "How are you? How are your KPIs? What are your constraints to getting your bonus?" So, if you know that that manager wants to meet with you and ensure that you hit your bonus, you're excited for that one-on-one. And if you say, "Dude, I can't hit my bonus because the packets aren't being made. So, if I get a bonus off referrals, and a lot of referrals come from the packets, where are my packets?" Then it's like, "Cool. Now, I'm going to make sure that in between our next one-on-one, like that won't be an issue for you." But that's the main center focus. How are you? KPIs? What are your constraints to getting your bonus? And um, if that's accomplished and we're good to go, great. Sometimes it turns into like, "I'm just I have a lot going on with my employees. I really struggle with knowing how to help this one." And it's like, it's making a very specific plan for helping them with other things too.
Gotcha. And when you do it like that, this the byproduct of it is if there is some passive aggressive like maybe angst brewing for whatever reason, because you've structured it organizationally every week, it's very clear like it's going to get addressed very quickly.
Yes. Yes. And here's what I'd say. Don't talk to me about anything in between our one-on-ones that is an operational problem. And here here's where that would sound weird. Everyone everywhere. And I noticed it first at Green Mango. Everything is urgent and important. And you know what? I've been doing business eight years. Almost nothing is urgent and important. Almost nothing that I've ever dealt with outside of ice kicking down our door. That was pretty urgent. and important.
But.
What happened?
Yeah, that's a crazy story, you know, maybe for another time. But um, my managers know that like, hey, you know, if laundry machine broke, right, we're good for 5 days until we meet again, right? Like there's nothing so urgent important. So like that 15 to 30 minutes of one-on-one has saved me five phone calls, five texts because they know they're going to talk to me in a day or two. And there's nothing, "Kate, Google Ads is down. You're competent enough to figure it out." Um, I want to hear how you're going about it, how you fixed it, or how you haven't fixed it in a day or two, but we're all going to go out and do our individual thing that moves the needle the most.
Between our one-on-ones.
And so, you feel like that also just like gives the positions agency to make decisions themselves?
That and our time isn't being wasted on like random things because someone hasn't said something or we don't have random blow-ups from people who finally get to a breaking point because so and so keeps leaving their lunch in the the refrigerator for too long. It's like everything is done very organized and systematically too. And then it, it's what's uncomfortable as the leader is to have people call you and then say, "Hey, like just reviewing that call. This wasn't urgent. So I don't know how you're doing. Are you doing okay? I'm doing okay." Just to let you know like that wasn't an urgent call.
And that goes back to like organizational change. Like there's going to be some friction when you implement that.
Yep. Yeah.
It'll it'll be for a month or two, but then when you do the same to them, no one hears from me for one-on-ones for new things in between our one-on-ones.
I'm not randomly showing up saying, "Elsa, can you make this and make this?" It's like it's just not happening.
Yeah. And so it's kind of subconsciously empowering everybody to take control.
Yes. It's like uh I think it was Dan Martell talked about like in his company it was uh if the problem can be fixed, it was during managers and above. The problem that you're dealing with can be fixed for less than $1,000, you have full free reign to go fix it. No, you don't need to talk to anybody else. So kind of that similar that similar kind of empowerment mindset.
Yeah. That's that's been that's been hard for it's been hard for me.
For a variety of different reasons.
Yeah. One of the and I'm curious and like I think part of the reason people like to listen is like I just selfishly will ask the questions that I'm dealing with because someone else is probably dealing with it.
So one of the things that we're dealing with is as we've grown, the organization changes year-over-year drastically, especially with the seasonality. Like four years ago, I was doing everything myself. Now we've got director of ops, backend office managers, all this jazz. One of the things that we struggle with is we retain people pretty well. But when we've created the new leadership positions, sometimes the leadership position doesn't get the respect from the people who have been here for longer. And they come straight to me with a text and it's like, "No, no, no, go to the manager, go to the director." And I, and it might be rooted in security, but it's like when the, for example, like the way we have it structured is like, there's me here and I'm managing the managers. And the right, so there's like maybe five direct reports to me. There's the install lead, the sales lead, and then the office. So four.
And Jake. So four.
Yeah.
And then Jake has an editor under him. Sales guy has sales people under him. Director has install managers under him.
And like one of the things that I've struggled with is delivering the like, "Hey, don't talk to me. Go to Jack."
Yeah.
"Hey, like without sounding like like, 'Oh, here's the owner. Like he's probably doing his podcast. Too big for us now.' But, you know, two, three years, you know, like I'm being funny because we have 1,800 YouTube subs. So it's like kind of a joke. But like that's been hard to deliver on.
Yeah.
Like it's one thing to say, "Okay, they're going to me." And then the kid calls me stressed out. Manager calls me stressed out. It's like, "Hey man, call Jack." Click. It's like, "How did you implement that when people because I'm sure in the beginning people were going over manager's heads to go talk to you."
Yeah. Uh, it doesn't happen anymore. And the be the best analogy I have for these scenarios has less to do with telling the person not to call you. And it's more to do with like, I think I think of my kids. And I was telling Kate this 'cause you know, she's a stepmom. She's like, "Dude, like the kids around like 12:00 during the summer, they just get so annoying asking for lunch." And I'm thinking this too. Like they just start like, "Hey, they're knocking on the door. They're like, 'Hey, if if Kate's with this kid and I'm with this kid and they're like, 'Where's our lunch?'" I'm like, "You know what's funny? Business is a lot like that. It's like, why don't I have an alarm at 11 to say, 'Order lunch, make lunch.' Okay, so I started ordering lunch, making lunch at 11. I never got the nagging anymore." So I think addressing this issue has a lot more to do with how you approach the issue. And if anything ever happens twice, it's like, "How can I mitigate this from happening?" So, it's during the onboarding of a new employee, are you going over a checklist of the constraints and the problems that you always go over with new employees and addressing it right there? "Hey, there's going to be a few times where during the heavy workload that um, you're going to want to reach out to me because you're going to think that I can do something faster than the manager. It's ultimately just going to go to the manager. So, it actually creates a longer process. So, here are the two reasons that you can reach out to me and nothing else. And that is if your manager is not responding to your problems, you can relay that to me. Or if you have an issue with the manager that's done something to make you lose trust in their leadership ability, you can reach out. Everything else, you can't reach out to me." I know it sounds super rough. I just have to say super are super focused on um what I'm trying to do, which is feed, you know, business into the funnel. That manager is there in play to make sure you have everything you need to succeed.
Yeah. And so with new employees, it's not an issue. It's with returning. So that makes sense. That's just expectation.
Yeah, it's it's the same thing like, "Hey guys, uh, I'm going to hold on all hands one month before October 15th." I think you said like October 15th is when it gets busy.
Um, here was last year's issues. Here's how it's working moving forward. And I understand you may not respect a certain manager. Um, but we're all trying to make sure that this goal is getting done. So here are the five calls that I got last year that I I don't want this year. They can't happen. Don't have time for it. And if you guys want the jobs there, that makes that gives everyone the, you know, the money to pay for your meals and everything. I need to stay focused on what I need to. So this type of call, this type of call, this type of call, this type of call, don't call me again.
Got it. I like that. It's good.
More preemptive.
Yeah. And then this is the last thing I'll touch on, then we can wrap it up. You guys obviously like culture. You need a certain type of person, right? You want someone really aggressively one that wants to control their own destiny financially by making more money, but it also is like a very specific temperament.
Like usually the guy really money-focused can also have some.
Potential personality things. Yeah. Like, you know, the best some of the best sales guys I've ever worked with were not very well-liked, right?
Like the most talented ones.
So when you guys are you guys getting a lot of referrals from existing employees to like bring you to their friends? Is that the lion's share? Are you blasting Indeed? Are you doing all that to find techs?
No. My my humble brag for the first six years of Coconut is I never had an Indeed post after the first one that I had in 2018. Um, one Indeed post, I got a technician named Sheldon. And then from there, Sheldon referred Mark. Mark referred Matt. Matt got his brother. It just it just happened from there. And then all the way up till 2024, I never made a post um or an Indeed post. This last year we did it because we're um I saw how the company that acquired Green Mango, how little they cared about proximity positions, meaning like customer service. They said if we hired nationally and say you can work from home, we open the job pool up to more qualified people. And so more recently, probably people have seen posts for like inside sales or customer service because I'm more bent on finding the right people. And if they live in Texas and I ship a laptop out to them with all the, you know, the tracking stuff. Nonetheless, like they're infinitely more qualified than maybe who's available and ready here in Chandler. So, and then also on the executive level, trying to find higher-end people. It just sometimes it doesn't work where not a lot of people are friends with other executives that I'm maybe trying to head hunt. And right.
And so that's why I'm making a post. But.
Like take away the main friction point of like, you got to move to Arizona.
Yeah.
Like you're in Texas right now. You do it from home. That makes sense.
Okay, cool. So last thing, Coconut's five-year plan. What is it?
Five. So in five years from So right now it's $250 million, 86 franchises equals $250 million in in revenue. Um, we want to be the nation's most trusted and preferred cleaner. So, um, I'm infinitely more attached to finding the right people. I don't want 200 locations. I want 86 locations, very specific, that we've done a lot of market analysis on. And, um, my goal personally is to create 100 millionaires. And so, I feel like I can do that for our franchising process. And so, um, at those specific levels of growth and at every level of 20 franchises, 35, 47, and different metrics, I know like what we're going to need. And so, um, it's very specific, very targeted, and nothing's getting in the way. So, 250 million, 86 franchises, 100 millionaires.
Got it.
Whether it's executives through long-term incentive plan or the franchises, that's the goal.
And do you eventually want to sell to private equity or something or have an exit or you want an income generating machine?
Maybe go public.
I don't know.
Yeah.
We'll see.
That's the first time someone said that.
Yeah, we'll see. I mean, there's there's a lot of different options, but um, I think most importantly, I'm I'm just more attached to like, hey, what do our customers want? What are they going to want in a few years? How can I streamline that and deliver that and then create such a successful foundational few franchises that more just start pouring in? And I don't want to put a dollar into finding these brokers for franchises, man. It's crazy. They want half the franchise fee. If a franchise fee is $50,000, they want $25,000 for finding someone. So, um, Cameron and I are going to make our social medias geared towards finding the right people who want to join us in on that journey. And um, it's it's it's coming along.
Yeah. Cuz like when you talk about like organic social media, it's like it's all about trust. So like a head hunter is going to be like numbers on a screen.
Yeah.
Like the franchise A, franchise B, like they're going to look at Coconut the same way they look at like anything else. But if it's, "Hey, I've been following Evan's podcast for three years. I've seen the dude talk." It's like, what is the I think Google like released a thing at 74 or 4 711.
Yeah, I just heard this too. There's four hours of consumption or four platforms, seven hours of consumption, 11 touches. I think that's what it is.
Yes. Yeah. And so I mean like it makes sense with why like even with us at Home Service Accelerator, as it's grown, like the community entry fee or anything else, we get substantially less sales friction as the YouTube gets consumed more.
Because when they see they see you, they hear you talking for an hour and a half versus like numbers on a screen on a franchise document, they're like.
It's going to be way different. Part of the reason I think Hormozi like he talked about like talking to these Bear Sterns and like these big tech or these big finance guys in New York. He said like the biggest thing I can provide them on the private equity side is that I can get a smaller percent or I can give more percentage than some random private equity firm that no one knows their name because I have built goodwill.
Yes.
And so that makes a lot of sense.
That was his message for two years. "I'm Alex Hormozi. I have nothing to sell you." Which.
He created a big brand that ultimately like it we all got into that pipeline and then there's ascension later.
But it's it's it was the reciprocity and it was the "I want to give, give, and give." And should you happen to see the value in what I'm giving and want to more tailored approach, I've paid five grand to go to Vegas to meet with them.
And dude, I added yeah, I added couple percent to our bottom line from that meeting. So it's like the enterprise value on company, you know, going up, you know, 50 to $60,000 a month just right there.
Goes up six, $700,000 in enterprise value. It's like, I'm happy I paid that five grand.
And maybe some people look like now he's selling everything. It's like, "Dude, I can't wait for Saturday for his book launch."
Yeah, same.
It's going to be sick.
Yeah, I reserved it too. We have both of them sitting out there. Usually, we have them over here.
Yeah.
Yeah. That's uh So, you found that investment worth it. The the Vegas one was five grand. We thought about doing it.
I'll give them more like whatever. There's just some people that are at pinnacles that of where I want to go. And um, the you shall know them by their fruits in business and in a lot of areas of life to take principles apply and see it work for free.
I'm drinking the Kool-Aid.
For same. Home Service Accelerator is literally a hundred million dollar offer blueprint. Like you could see every single thing we do from the sales side, the marketing side, everything. All of our ads are educational. Yeah.
They're all educational and they're all like it's the entire anyone that reads that book and we've had customers come in and be like, "This is literally just $100 million offers." Like, "I can see it." I'm like, "Yeah, it's exactly right."
It's a more tailored approach through your experience and.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Well, dude, thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate it. I know we went a little bit over.
Oh, good.
Coconut Cleaning. Make sure you uh you guys follow Evan. I'll link the socials and his uh podcast in the in the bio here. So.
Awesome. Appreciate it, dude. Appreciate it.