Workshop: Schädlingsbekämpfer von 50 Mio. auf 1 Mrd.

0:00Unternehmer/Gast I own a pest control company. We're $50 million this year. >> Big body. >> I started I'm third generation. I'm the one that had the story about the Undercover Boss. Um when we acquired a company. And I want to know how how do I get it to a billion dollars and what's holding me back is manpower. We built a recruiting engine and we kill it, but honestly there's these cycles that you run through and now we've gotten to this cycle where our A players kill it. We hire an A player and they get off then it's they're fine, but we've got constant churn at the lower levels of the company.

0:37>> knocking, right? >> Yeah, well no, we don't do we don't we only do about a million dollars a year in sales from door knocking. The rest of it's organic, acquisitions. >> Oh, so you're doing M&A? >> A little bit, yeah. >> Okay. >> So I bought a $3.6 million company last year. I average around a million maybe a half a million a year in acquisitions. So probably average. >> [snorts] >> So it's mostly organic. I'm growing about 20% 21% organic annually and then the rest of it has been so

1:04Alex >> When you say organic annually, what do you mean? >> I mean paid LSA organic Google search >> Okay, so paid ads. Okay, got it. >> pay but yes, absolutely. There's a little bit. SEO >> Okay. >> current customer upsell, referrals, all those types of mostly a sales organization is what I would oriented as, but not like I said, we do about a million door-to-door. Um >> Out of 50? >> Yeah, out of 50.

1:29>> So 2% of sales come from door-to-door. >> Yep, and I I mean we do have a budget to scale it up to about 4 million next year. >> Okay. >> Um because we're trying to figure out all right, how do we get to a billion dollars? I mean the guys that are doing it are either massively funded and acquiring you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or they are been around for 75 years or they're door knocking. >> What's your EBITDA right now? >> Uh 20% so we had eight eight million last year. >> So you got eight in EBITDA, you want to get to a billion in sales or billion dollar evaluation?

1:56>> Billion dollars in sales. >> Okay, so you need 20x. Um, how many what is each market do roughly? >> Uh, the average branch? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, 2 million. >> Okay. So 950 to go. Uh, >> Exactly. >> Yeah, yeah. Uh, only only 475 locations to go. Okay. So, I mean the like I mean Do you have a time frame or you just would like to get there?

2:25Alex >> Well, in under 20 years. >> Okay, yeah. Um, it's likely um, do you have like some special sauce? >> Realistically, um, I would say that we have an excellent execution on sales. Um, our our supply is the issue not the demand. >> And supply of sales people? >> Uh, well that is. Yeah, absolutely. That's it's mostly it's not about the sales people. It's typically about the delivery of the product. >> Of like literally just the pest control services?

2:51>> Yeah, we get backed up, you know, like every year. That's our constraint. We have >> Is that what you're saying the A players from? That's where you're saying the constraint is is for them? >> Uh, no, no. I I think we're killing it A players. Our our problem is we we we don't have uh, we we're not retaining any average talent if that makes any sense. And so our A players are quickly rapidly rising through the ranks. We end up promoting them. They end up running a branch or whatever. And next thing you know, you you don't have any average average talent if that makes any sense.

3:16>> So, not a bad thing. But um, so manpower is the issue on the delivery side, right? >> Yeah. >> Okay. So, what's the what is the recruiting methodology that you have for the deliverers? >> How are we recruiting now? >> Yeah, to get the the delivery team. >> LinkedIn, uh, indeed, um, and then we um, indeed was the majority the vast majority. And then a lot of outreach, a lot of individual. Like we we treat it like a sales organization.

3:45>> Yeah, the recruiting. Yeah. So, but that's still the constraint is what you're saying. >> It's yeah, it's it's the retention of the employees. >> Oh, so you can get those deliverers, they don't stick. >> They don't stick. That's right. It's a hard job. >> Yeah. >> It's a lot It's a lot of work. >> Or do they have a career path? >> They do, but it's so quick that the A players are like step into that and then you see >> say so quick, how many steps are there? >> As far as getting identifying an A player? >> Well, how many promotions are there in the career path?

4:12Alex >> Oh. Let's see, team lead, branch manager, regional manager. Um that's >> Three? >> So three. >> Okay. So I'll give you a little little little tactical Tuesday. Um >> [sighs] >> So beyond what I would consider the soft cultural stuff, which is probably beyond the scope of an answer that would be reasonable and actually executable for right now. Um the way that I like to think about career ladders, and this applies to roles that are repeated within an organization, so this is sales, this is video editors, whatever, right? Is that you've got title and you've got pay.

4:55And so I like to think of each one of the rungs that you just had, there's three. I think that you could make this into nine or 18 rungs. And what ends up happening is that instead of it being like "Oh, I I'm in. I'm not an idiot, so I got promoted, and I'm better than not being an idiot, and I get promoted again. That's it, and now I'm going to leave because there's no other There's no career advancement for me, right?" That's probably one of the reasons the literally the reason they'll cite on the way out, right? >> Yeah.

5:19>> Okay. So we just need to create career advancement. So So I'll just use I'll use sales cuz everyone kind of understands that, but you can translate it over. So if we have or delivery, it doesn't really matter. So I have junior, normal, and then senior for each role. And so we say the first thing you're going to do is you're going to go from junior to junior that's paid more.

5:46And then you're going to go to We're not going to call you junior anymore. And they're like, "Thank god." And that comes with a perk, which is that you don't have to work on Saturday nights. Great. Then from there, we're going to go to here with a little pay bump. Then we're going to say, "Great. After you get your pay bump, you're now a senior pest deliverer." >> [laughter] >> Non-del- non-pest Yeah, they're not delivering pests. They're like, "Here's some rats." Um And then here we have our senior plus, right?

6:15But all of this could be the first title that you had. And then you repeat this at title two, you repeat it at title three. And so what happens is they're always three to six months away from another promotion. And so it's like whenever you're about to leave, that way there's there's like there's always career advancement that exists. And so and by alternating title {slash} perks The guy would cuz if you just do title People I mean, to be fair, people will just take a title bump and they'll still go out and have a steak dinner with their girlfriend. It works.

6:44But if you can have that and a great parking spot or that and you don't have to work Saturday nights or that and you can pick your calendar or that you know, like there's always a couple of perks. You get a better truck, whatever it is, right? Um those things you can scatter around. And on the first day or the orientation process, we like to say like you are here. This is where you're going to be if you do this. This is where you're going to be if you do this. And so we tie these two objective measures.

7:09And what I really like to do with these is that I like this with total volume. So, think about it like uh in the deliveries. It's like once you get your first you get your first uh you know, 20 five stars, you get to junior plus. And we get and we want that first one to be like right there, right? Cuz that's where some of the the biggest turn is right in that first, you know, 30 to 45 days, I'm guessing, right? So, it's like how do we get the how do we get how do we make the first one a 6-in putt? Okay, great. So, we have this one, they get their first win. Hey, I think I I my job. Great. And then here we're like, okay, now you got to get to 100.

7:45And so then we basically start expanding the reinforcement cycle for each of these roles, so that it's always just a little bit further, but there's always something to look forward to. And this is what there's a lot of there's a lot of solutions for your issue or there's a lot of elements to the solution. This is one that I can deliver to you in 6 minutes. >> Perfect. No, that's great. I uh I think our our our main constraint really has been we haven't been very creative >> Yeah.

8:11>> really. I mean, and that's what that's one thing I'm I'm really seeing. A lot of people quickly rose >> Yeah. >> rose like they they came in, they performed really really well, ended up moving up really fast, making a lot of money, yeah, but then you have people that are real slow and they bounce. >> Yeah. >> So just give them more ways to win. >> Yeah, that's great. Thank you. >> Yeah, you bet. >> [applause] >> If you're a business owner and you're not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly, where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.