Mastering Growth: Unlocking the Secrets to Scaling Home Service Businesses with Mike Claudio

It's time to level up a few thousand degrees with a Lava Hot podcast and host Joseph Connell Jr. You'll hear from ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things, From tech startup CEOs and marketing professionals to authors, investors and sales trainers. This show will be packed with information to help you level up in life or business taking you from on fire up to Lava Hot.

Hello and welcome to Lava Hot podcast. I'm your host, joseph Connell. Today we are in for a treat. I'm really excited about this episode. The gentleman that I have today that we are going to be interviewing is a guy that I actually had on to our show about a year and a half ago. Unfortunately, due to an internet issue, we were not able to release that episode just because it got cut off. Ever since then I've been trying to get Mike to come back on to the show. I know he's a very busy guy. I definitely appreciate his time. I appreciate that he was able to make some time to come on to the show. The reason why I really wanted him on was in that short-lived episode. One thing that I noticed is that we're very aligned in the fact that we work with home service companies. While I generally focus on the marketing side, he helps businesses completely scale. That just resonated with me. Some of the nuggets of wisdom he was dropping on that episode just had me really wanting to get him back on to the show. Let me give you a little intro to Mike Claudio. He is the founder and CEO of WinRake Consulting. He's the CEO of ProfitPanda. He also has the Big Stud podcast. On YouTube you can also find a lot of great content. Just look for Mike Claudio. Mike, welcome to the show.

Hey man, appreciate it. It's cool to finally see this come to fruition. It's pretty cool to see how much has changed since that first attempt happened. Here we are. It feels like a long time later, but also overnight. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago. It's cool to see people who stay consistent. I'm somebody who prides himself on consistency. There's not a lot of people that stay consistent with podcasting and content and adding value and giving back Kudos to you for being somebody who's stuck with it. You even have a podcast left to bring you back on. There's so many people that start it and have the idea and have the desire and have the interest, but then don't stick with it. Congratulations to everyone keeping up with it, because that's uncommon.

Yeah, absolutely no. No, I appreciate it. When I first started, I said that I was going to give it five years. I committed for the long hauls, Something one of my mentors told me If you're going to do it, just commit to it long term. If it's worth doing once, worth doing a hundred times, don't start it and quit Surprisingly. That's a lot of things in life, I think, where just being in a long enough time horizon can really show the results. Enough about that. I'm looking forward to getting into this episode. As I mentioned, Mike has this business that's centered around scaling and helping not only people but their business growth, specifically in that home service space. The home service category, if you will, has really been where I've lived for the past about 10 years. It seems to be what I've always attracted into the marketing agency To have a gentleman on here that will be able to speak to some of the pitfalls of scaling home service companies, some of the bottlenecks that happen, whether that's a people issue, a service issue, a marketing issue. I love these type of conversations, especially when somebody has worked with hundreds of companies and being able to see what works, what doesn't work. I really want to dive into it. I want to start by asking what inspired you to start WinRate Consulting, and then I think we can dive into some of the questions from there.

In 2017, I had some success over a couple of years in the remodeling space and the roofing space. There were people in my ecosystem in Charlotte, north Carolina, even just like my local B&I I was very successful at a local B&I over those years and they saw what I was doing to grow and scale and evolve Just the success I was having in client acquisition. And I didn't have a marketing budget. They knew I was like guerrilla marketing stuff. So we started asking questions how are you doing this? What are you doing about that? How did you hire that guy? What's that process? How's this? I've been doing video for the intent of revenue generation since 2013-14. I've been in this game of content creation before it was even a game to an extent. Who's asked a lot of questions? In 2017, I kept taking calls from people and helping them and giving them advice and seeing the improvement, seeing the advice I was giving actually working. I wasn't giving advice for the intent to sell somebody something. It was just like what are you doing? Well, this is what I did. They tried and it worked. I'm like shit, I actually do know something. At the end of 2017, I was a commission-driven person. I'm a revenue-generated driven person. I've always had sales on my blood Sales a lot. You look at return on effort. Is this an over-bringing me revenue? I'm putting a lot of time into this. I need to find a way to monetize it. That led to WinRate being formed in April of 2018, was official opening date. Then I was still with the Roofing Company, basically beginning of 2019, I went full-time. Since beginning of 2019, we're going on five full-time years. We've coached hundreds of companies. I've had a lot of success with people.

Very cool. One of the questions that I know I had in your experience working with local to mid-sized companies, I would imagine, is the primary focus, especially when you're dealing with home service what are some of the initial problems that you see inside of a business? Is there a handful of things that are usually a trend within the home service industry in terms of bottlenecks that they have within their companies?

I've coached in that zero-to-a-million space. I've coached in the three-to-five, I've coached in the eight-to-ten, I've coached in the 20-to-30 million. I've coached in the 80 million Each of them had some form of a unifying issue of the whole team didn't know the mission. Why are we doing this? What is the desired outcome? A lot of business owners at the beginning it's like I've got to make money because I've got bills to pay. Then it's like I've got to make money because I've got employees to pay. Then it's like I've got to make money to pay these invoices. The dollar becomes the mission. When the dollar becomes the mission, everything makes sense. It becomes very fragmented, it becomes very disconnected, it becomes a lot of no one really knows exactly what the standard is. That's a unifying thing. I've seen at different-sized companies, obviously the bigger the company, maybe the the lesser, that there's something there because they got to a certain level, you know. But I think, like when I come in and say, like why? What is the mission? Why are we here? What's the desired outcome? What's the North Star, what's the lighthouse? And they're like money. I right there, I know that like, that business is not where it could be and I'm not going to say they're failing. People are saying, well, my God, I don't know the mission, I'm doing just fine. Well, doing just fine and reaching your potential is not the same thing. And people hire win rate and people work with Mike and our team because they want to, like, maximize their potential. Like, right, you know, our mission statement is to guide, you know, individuals and companies in the home service space to greater levels of success. Like, that's our mission statement, right, greater levels of success. And so not having that mission, not having that unified thing that everybody's making decisions toward every investment is, toward every initiatives, toward every, you know, application, every marketing agency, it all has to work towards some unified desired outcome, or each of them makes sense, all those decisions make sense, but you have a fragmented organization. What this this sales rep is doing is different than this sales rep Depending on how long they've been here. Right, this production manager compared to this production managers using different like processes because of how long they've been here. Because each season you are solving problems based on the short term pain, not saying well, does this play into the long term picture? And I say that's more of a unifying that creates dozens of different problems. But but I don't think that's home service focus either. I'd say most business owners I've talked to you know lose track of why they started at some point when making money becomes more important than executing the missing and um, it is scary sometimes, with a mission above revenue or mission above profits, or mission above people, or you have to fire that person or you have to fire that client, and but that's how you build a sustainable long term business, not just a how much money can I grab in this season? And I think there's a lot of people who started companies in the last two or three years that learned that in 2023, you know, like it was not difficult to win 2019, 2020, 2021, even 2022. And you started seeing some changes in 2023. I think there was. It kind of showed who was a real entrepreneur and who was in it because they just want to make money. Um, yeah, my mission has always been more than the money, but you know, we grew this year. We grew about 40% this year. You know, which was a like it was a small growth year, but you know bigger numbers as the, you know the as the ecosystem evolved. But we took a stabilizing year this year intentionally. We slowed down growth this year on purpose, um, to get control of some things, but, like, because of that, because we started getting a little bit away from the initial mission, we started getting more focused on, you know, revenue or like hitting certain profit numbers, that making an impact. Then, like we weren't way off, but I saw a trend in that direction. So I pulled back on the range a little bit this year and, um, yeah, got very intentional on internally focused to rebuild a foundation because we hit, we, hit, we, we, we'll, we'll breach the $3 million mark this year on the coaching side and, um, I wanted to rebuild a foundation that could get us to like eight to 10. And we needed we needed to slow down this year to do that. So I think a lot of people are just always in a rush to the next thing, like roofers trying to do fencing, bathroom guys trying to do hardwood, you know, exterior guys trying to do interior, like it's just people are chasing money, not a unified mission, and that becomes six it, you. It ends up being a very aggressive roller coaster of success and failure because there's no unifying, like measurement of standard or mission.

Right, so I I want to. I want to talk a little bit on the marketing side, um, just being my nature, and then I want to talk a little bit about the sale side as well. Um, you know, when it comes to marketing, I you know me personally, like I have certain things that I look at when I first start working with a client. You know how they're running their marketing budget, where it's going, you know what they're doing to bring in leads, if they even have some sort of system for tracking, um, but I'd love to hear your approach to, uh, maybe analyzing that. Or, I'm not sure, if you bring in, like a vendor for for certain things, um, but I'd love to hear your approach to that in terms of, like, what you look at and what mistakes you typically see. Um, you know home service companies making when it comes to their marketing that you know might be preventing them from increasing their, their customer acquisition.

Yeah, I think the first thing, I think most companies are really lacking in the tracking side, like you said, like even understanding where leads are coming from. What are they spending on marketing? You know, I think a lot of businesses just spray and pray a little bit and they're like how many, how many places can we be? And that must be good. And so one of the first things I typically look at on the marketing specifically is where are we spending money and what is the return on that? And you know, I tried a client recently they're about a three to $4 million moving company and they were marketing and, like you know, magazines and sponsorships and events and Google ads and Facebook, and I was like, okay, like are you tracking? Like the first step was like, are you tracking where leads are coming from? Not great, okay, we're going to spend the next 90 days getting better at tracking where leads are coming from. Like that was the first step, because I can't give you feedback, so we start knowing what the results are. And then you know then the next 90 days, we locked that like, okay, tracking things, the individual marketing efforts, cause you know when you're, when you have a very robust marketing scheme, like I'll just use myself as an example. Like YouTube, podcast, facebook group, instagram, tiktok, facebook like main page, other people's audiences like this it can be very difficult to see, like where it started, right, like, yeah, someone might be listening to this podcast episode, might go to my podcast, listen to 10 episodes and find me on YouTube, then find me on Facebook and then reach out in a year. It's impossible to be like, guide that back to this piece of content or this effort. But for, if you do a good job on the inbound leads, you know asking questions, especially home service, like it's like most home service companies don't have the robust of a content strategy, right, and so you know the figure now, like what are we tracking? Are you even having your sales reps asking the questions? Sometimes it's that. Are you using your own content strategy? Are you even asking the question where did you hear about us? Yeah, like basic shit. But like you lose track of that when it's just more money is the goal, not proper spend, not proper analytics, not proper management of ROI, and so, like, my thing primarily is not so, like I'm not a paid advertising guy. Um, I didn't have it when I was running companies. We didn't have it. We didn't make a budget for it. Like I was the prospecting networking, you know, self-generated, organic guy Like that was that. I'm best in that. And so I don't dive into people's ad campaigns to see if they can be more efficient, but I look at what platforms are you spending money on, what leads are coming from that, and then what conversion rate do we have on those leads? Because I don't want to just look at how many contracts you got. We'll say it's also like what are the quality of the leads that are coming from it. You know, using a very, a very wild example, if it's like I have 100 leads from Facebook and close 15 contracts, but I had 11 leads from Google and close nine, you might say Facebook was more successful. I would say Google was. Because you have, you're not qualifying. If I just all right, let's look at the Facebook sign. Let's say is the messaging wrong? What walk me through the client journey and I'm like, yep, right there, that form is bullshit. That doesn't help at all. We need to change these three questions to get that down to closing 15 out of 50, not 15 out of 100,. You know, because clicks cost money and it costs time and what people I think also miss I don't say mis-measure, don't even look at is the cost of bad leads for your sales reps. Low quality leads is very energy depleting. You have somebody who's been a sales rep and ran a sales team for many years, like you start going on a bad lead route and people stop wanting to try as hard, they stop wanting to go out and spend the extra time. It's like oh no less, 10 didn't sign shit. These are all shitty ass leads. Come on, man, we're the good leads that. And so like it's energy depleting to like fill your pipeline with like leads. I'm not knocking you, but marketing agencies like look at how many leads I got, look at how many clicks I got. I don't want, I don't care about the number, I care about the quality. You know I'd rather close nine out of 11 than 15 out of 100. Because that's 85 people that got misled into believing you were the right solution for them, and so that also doesn't help your brand right. And so like, all in all, I look at efficiency more than quantity of the marketing. So like, let's look at everywhere you're spending money. Let's look at how many leads you got and then how many conversions you got, so we can look at cost per lead, cost per acquisition, as well as what is the percentage of leads that get contracts or that close. Even you know, depending on the business, it can be different things. You know, I like tracking leads to contracts contracts to close, because that leads to contracts tell me how many people do we qualify out? And then contracts to close. It's how good are we at closing the people that we qualified? And so those are different parts of the sales process or different parts of the client journey. I can pinpoint to say what do we need to change here to increase that knob? Right? You know, business is a machine, right? It's individual little cogs working together. So I look at like, hey, our qualifying percentage is dog shit. Let's tweak our verbates, let's tweak the report, let's tweak the form, I mean, let's tweak the copywriting here. Let's change this piece of content to increase our qualifying. So we're only dealing with the top options. Changes the outcome.

Yeah. So I feel like this is a good segue because everything you said made 100% sense. Like you know, for me when I the way our agency works is, we'll typically come in and we'll look at all of the marketing you're doing and you know we'll manage the relationships with those vendors and we'll look at the lead flow and oftentimes and where I'm going with this question, it's gonna be in pipeline management and a sales process. So in the marketing side of the board, the one thing that I've always seen is that you know, if we can help get the phone to ring, we can help a form get filled out, we can help a lead get generated, but then what happens after that is turned over to the company? Whether you know it comes down to how the person answers the phone. Do they convert that caller into an actual appointment? How important do you feel it is to one have a formalized sales strategy or a sales process? And then also, how important do you feel it is to have some level of pipeline management Meaning when a lead gets assigned to a rep, that you're managing that pipeline to be able?

to-. I'm gonna start with the pipeline, because that one I'm more passionate about. Pipeline is a living, breathing environment. It is not a parking lot. You, I think I see so many people where, like their sales meetings turn into like talking about the top 20%, most highest, like the highest likelihood to close, and they forget about the other 80 and then they have this incredibly embellished pipeline with shit that's not getting attention. Like I'm big on. I'm big on a lot of different stages in a pipeline because in each stage can be a trigger to somebody on what needs to happen next, like even first touch, second touch, third touch, long-term nurture, you know, interested but not ready. Like I like different stages because if everybody in the ecosystem knows what it means to have somebody in that stage and exactly the activity that's necessary. Heavy activity, I'm heavy follow through, I'm heavy follow up. You know I'm aggressive on like pushing an opportunity through or out of the pipeline. This is not a parking lot and so I'm huge. I'm huge on stages and processes and, unlike now with like a lot of the CRMs, you know I used to run, like, like I ran a fucking $5 million roofing company out of a spreadsheet. It wasn't smart but we did it. You know I had stages and I had different. Like you know automatic, you know conditioning on stuff, but like it's not a parking lot and I want automation now even too. Like you can put people into like let's say my case, like interested in one-on-one. When we move somebody in there, there's a short-term nurture sequence over like three weeks of like content that they're getting text or emailed hey, you were interested. Here's some automatic follow up. And then even in the automatic follow up, like we have a okay touch one automatic, touch two, manual, touch three, automatic, touch four, automatic, touch five, manual, touch six automatic. So like I'm even plugging the sales rep back in because I'm huge on that human element, I'm huge on that relationship building, I'm huge on the you know how powerful emotion and delivery and engagement is, and so I want that lead because, like we're a high-ticket environment and I want that lead to know that we care about them, cause we do like it's not faking it, but sometimes it can be like sometimes it can be, you know, come across as just another sales reps. You know pitching, coaching, but like we care a lot and I want them to feel that from the first time they reach out Cause when you see my content, even right now, like I'm faking passionate, like you feel it, you see it, I'm a really strong communicator and I know that, and so when people see that piece of content, that's what they're expecting when they call in right, when they submit that lead. They don't want that first touch, like hey man, like thanks for reaching out, hope you're doing well, here's some automatic fucking bullshit copyright email. I want them to be like when they talk to somebody. I want them to be as excited as we are to like bring them into our ecosystem and help them. So I'm like I think that answers your question on the pipeline side. Is there any further questions you have on that?

Yeah, the next side to that is how important a having a formalized sales processes.

So it's. For me, it's more activity focused than, like, scripted. I'm not big on scripts. I'm big on like okay, when you go to the job site, this is what you're going to do. When you leave the job site, this is the follow up video you're going to send. This is what a follow up email or text message looks like. Deliver on time. Like. I'm big on teaching people how to follow through what they say they're going to do. Right, even teaching a sales rep how to manage a task list or like a you know an activity portal, or like even just being able to remind themselves of like hey, I'll fall with you on Tuesday. The amount of people that say, hey, I'll fall with you on Tuesday and don't fucking write it down or put it in their calendar, put it in their task manager, all right, it's insane to me. Insane to me. So, more on, like giving them the activities that I believe will provide the best desired outcome. More than a script. I'm not a scripted guy. I want to hire people who are high communicative and then give them the resources and tools to stay in the activities that I believe will produce the best results. But even then, I like giving people autonomy to kind of be themselves, because that's where the passion, that's where the authenticity, that's where the vulnerability comes in. And so I'm more, I guess, parameters than specific structures, other things, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I want to talk about people because you know every business they're made up of people and you know, I'm curious your take on. You know, inside of organizations like what, how people can become a bottleneck within a business. I'm sure you have probably seen that, where you know, like the, as John C Maxwell says, the law of the lid. I'm curious how often you see that the lid of the business is the CEO, or maybe even like the next layer down, whether it's like management, service management, things like that, like what do you? typically see. And then, what do you advise there?

Yes, I'm going to say it a little different. I think we're saying the same thing, but I see it differently. And so, because I'm in an environment where, like we are here to coach the business owner to improve, what typically happens is the coach gets on the calls, gets the information, grows, evolves, improves, you know, becomes a better leader, becomes more efficient, becomes stronger in their roles and responsibilities, but they don't know how to coach the people on their team with them. And so it creates this gap, right, creates this delta where if, like you know, like the business is running, the business leader grows but everybody else doesn't grow with them. It creates this delta where, like, that person was probably good enough last year, but now that the leader has evolved over the last 12 months, that person didn't change, they're not actually worse, they just didn't evolve up to the new level that the machine was operating at. And that's typically where bottlenecks or slowdowns or issues are presented, is it's very rarely that person didn't get worse, and that does happen. I mean, I'm sure there's someone else, I'm not sure. Jim got worse. He sucks now, right? No, I'm sure, I'm sure that's out there. But what I see more often is and mostly because of the world we live in in win rate is. I'm here to help the business owner increase success in business and life. When you do that, they become faster, they become more efficient, they become more standard focused. Right, there's a lot of business owners that don't operate by standards. They don't even implement standards or talk about them. So then when they start implementing standards, man, that person now seems like they're under performing. No, they're performing exactly the way they were. The rules changed or the speed changed or the game changed, and the problem is he didn't change, she didn't change. They're actually not worse, they're just not evolved with everything else that's going on. And so, from that perspective, I think it happens a lot. And so when I first get a client, I tell them it's like you have to continue to invest into your people or you're going to out evolve them and you're not going to enjoy your business anymore Because your standards are going to increase, your efficiency is going to increase, your ability, your vision is going to increase, your dreams are going to increase and you better bring your people with you, or it's going to create real issues inside your organization. That being said, I am very profiring people. I use the same analogy a lot, and maybe just because my grandfather was a farmer and one of the best ways to grow a new crop is to turn over the last year's crop. Right, you got to turn over the soil to get the best. So I think turn over is the greatest thing you can do to build the most fruitful ecosystem. Win fast win often is a tagline for the company, but the clients here laugh that it really should be fire fast, win often. Because I'm always a mountain of comparing people, because typically by the time a client has brought it to my attention, they've known for a while they needed to fire that person. So it's not that I'm like I hate people and I hate employees and I want to fire people, but typically by the time a business owner is vocalizing frustration to me, I've used the same trigger If you are talking about an employee to your spouse, it's time to fire them. Like if you're complaining about an employee to your spouse, that means it's boiled over an acceptable level. But here's the real trick, and this is just the truth you might have to fire them because you underserved them as the leader, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't change the fact that they have to go because they become toxic, they become slowing you down, they become cancerous, they become an issue across the board and like it could be like, hey, man, I did not serve you, I did not set you up for success, I didn't give you the tools, I didn't give you the time, I didn't give you the training, but you are still toxic in this environment. I'm going to have to let you go because I'm stuck with this business. You can go find a new job, but this is my baby, this is my mission, this is what supports my family. It's my fault, but you're still fired and that's the truth. And so I think you know turnover is a big part of how you fix bottlenecks, but I think a lot of times I want to avoid them by, like, helping our clients or the business that we work with. You know, help their team, evolve with them and turn the leak Because, like most CEOs aren't CEOs. They're not actually on their business. They're in their business, right, especially in those home service. They're still running fucking. You know work orders and sales calls and you know managing the finances and checking receipts and shit and like when you're doing that, no one's leading the team and you might think it's. You know well, I got to step in and help the guys. The fuck you do that's their job. When we're helping them do their job, no one's stepping in to help the CEO do their job, like that's just the truth, and I've helped a lot of people change that mindset. And when you do that, you are actually more capable of investing in your team and helping them grow and then understanding who can evolve and who can't. You know, one of the biggest questions that I think really helps and is a leader sitting down with the employee who's underperforming and say are you interested in evolving into these data points or this avatar? Like you're here, we need you to be here. Are you interested and willing to go through that evolution? You know it happens a lot with like technology. Right, it's like an old school guy has been in the business for 30 years. He doesn't want to use an iPad. Okay, well then get him like, get him up to an iPad or get him out, because he's stopping your business from evolving, and that may not be fair to that guy, but it's also not fair to that guy to think he doesn't have to change and will keep his job. That's not the ecosystem we operate in anymore. And so, if it's sitting on, say, are you willing and interested to go through the evolution from where you are to where I need you to be? If the answer is no, dude, let's go find you a company that can benefit from where you are right now, because it's not going to work here. And I say it with a smile because, like it is a good news. It's good news that you and I are going to have to fight for the next six months until we blow up at each other and have to fire you. Let me go help you land on your feet somewhere. Yeah, I'm, like, I'm big on giving severance packages. Like, if I'm firing you because I underperformed you or it just didn't work out on an idea I had or a position I filled, I'll give you a two or four week severance to get help, get your feet up. Take your pay away today. And, like you know that's crazy you had to fire them. Well, yeah, but like, for a lot of reasons, like that new position didn't work out the way it was going to, I didn't train, I didn't know what, I didn't know when I hired them. Like I give people the benefit of the doubt to say like, hey, I'm going to give you a little bit of leeway or a little bit of lead time to go find something else, but this ain't it, it ain't here and like it's not, no matter how hard you try, it's not, we're not going to connect those dots. Because you just told me you're uninterested in going through that change. Great, now we know that and we can make a change and we can go find you. So we'll fuck you. This place sucks anyway. Then why are you mad? I've said that to people like this place sucks anyway. Cool, so you should be happy right now. Right, I'm not offended that if you think this place sucks all of a sudden, this is great news for you. Let's go find you somewhere. You can be happy and people get so. Just, they don't know what to do with themselves when I communicate to them like that Cause it's like you want to fight you on that. I literally just told you where I'm letting you go. Like the fact that you think this place sucks is actually in your favor, because it actually doesn't, or you wouldn't be this angry Like. So I just I take it for what it is, but yeah.

It's funny cause you said you said triggers and I'm almost curious if oftentimes, when you first start working with the company, if, if you, I, if you can tell, okay, we're going to have to let this person go, I'm curious how often they're almost looking for the permission to make the hard decision to let somebody go.

So what it is. It's not permission to let them go, it's permission to say I've tried everything I can. I think most business owners hold on to employees when they feel like they haven't served them enough. They give them like, well, I haven't helped them enough, so let me give them another month to figure it out on his own. So I think it's more of a hey man, you've done everything you can do, like, so yes, it's permission, but it's not so much permission to fire them, it's permission to accept the fact you've done everything you can do. Cause I think that feeling of I underserved that employee is one of the bigger reasons people delay firing people. Because they feel like it's my fault, like well, I didn't really give them what they needed, so I can't really hold them accountable, and then like you need to evolve first, but that doesn't change the fact that they're slowing the entire mission down, like they still have to go, and so it's helping people determine, like what is enough invested into an asset for us time to let it go? Because I do look at headcount as assets. You know I look at every hire. You should be. You should be able to have it, see a calculatable return on investment and people have to say, well, that's so inhuman, it doesn't. I don't fucking care what you think. The truth is, employees are investments, because every employee should bring you a return on investment. People forget that. They think, well, it's just overhead. No, it's not. It's a fucking investment in an asset that's supposed to bring you value, to compensate the business for what you're paying them, above and beyond what it costs. And if you can't see that, if you're not getting a return on investment, that person can't stay, because when you do that, you're putting the whole mission at risk, and so you have to make the hard decision. You have to. There's no choice.

Yeah, so so one thing that I've heard businesses say, especially on the topic of investing in their people, is you know what if I invest in them and they end up leaving? Like we go through maybe it's sales training or leadership coaching or whatever it is, and then they end up just taking that knowledge and leaving, and I'd be curious what your thoughts would be on that.

I mean, one of the greatest things I've heard on this and I don't know who said it, it definitely wasn't me. It was that statement what if I train them and they leave? And the response is what if you don't and they stay?

Yeah, Brian Tracy, I think it's the yeah.

I've heard it probably a hundred different ways, but it's like so this is where I have an issue with that. What people see is the bad employees going to take advantage of it and they forget that there's other employees. I will capitalize from it. That's why I'm quick to fire, right? So if you have somebody on the team right now that you believe is going to take your training and leave, then you miss hired or forgot to fire them when you were supposed to. Their core values don't align, they're not. They're not about the mission, they're about themselves. Well then, you shouldn't have brought that person into the team to begin with. So the issue wasn't in the training, it was in the hiring, it was in the core values, it was in the accountability, it was in the. Once you were triggered by somebody to think that they would take this training and leave with it, you should have fired them, not not train them. And then, because what happens? I see this happen a lot like Young business, like, I'll say, green in business. You know they build up this person and then they go out and start their own company as a competitor, right? Well then the next person gets less training because they're trying to limit that. And then it happens again, and then it happens again, and then you're actually lap. You're actually training your own company into the ground to be just good enough to not suck, but not good enough to be able to do it on their own. Like I made a statement for my company because I have eight coaches on staff and each of them are CEOs of their own companies and I said from the beginning I want People on my team who could do it on their own but don't want to because of the mission in the culture I build. And so like I want people who are capable of doing it alone or on their own but don't want to because of how good of a leader I am, how powerful our mission is and how incredible our culture is. And I did that. Like I have people right now who run multi seven-figure companies to show up to my team call on Fridays Because they're so in love with the mission, they're so in love with the potential, they're so in love with what they're doing, they love the culture, they love the team. You know I have 16 or 17 employees now and I think eight of them Are the eight of them or CEOs of their own companies right now and like they can absolutely go coach on their own. They could probably, would probably make more money if they went to try to do it on their own on a per client basis, but they wouldn't have the team, they wouldn't have the culture, they wouldn't have, you know, the client base we get to be around, they wouldn't have the ecosystem they wouldn't have. What I believe is I'm a very strong leader. I believe that about myself, that's how. That's how I can walk into a five to ten million dollar company and know I'm going to bring value. And so, like that's what you have to want to aspire to build is I want people who could, because if you don't have people that can do it On their own, you'll never have leaders in charge. And there's a big difference between leaders in place and leaders in charge. Leaders in place are fucking placeholders. They're just spilling a seat, but they come to you for every fucking real question. They won't. They won't make any decisions on their own. A leader in charge Owns their decision-making, owns their department, owns the investments as if it was their own Because they could operate on their own. But they want to be a part of what you're doing. And so people who have that scarcity mindset, like oh, I'm not gonna trim because the last guy left and started his own company. Like business owners forget how fucking hard business is. Like you know how hard is a run a business. You think that person's gonna be able to figure it out? Chances are unlikely. I Welcome people to go start their own company. It's hard, it is really really hard. But then, like the business owner forgets that because they're like middle, they're like middle performer, decide to go start his own company. Like we'll fuck that guy, do. Let that guy go figure it out how hard it is and come back. A better person, yeah, you know. Or more valuable asset, because they know how hard it is now so they're more dedicated that they don't want to do that again.

Yeah, or help give customers in that marketplace a gap between what Forest Service looks like or a poorly run company looks like, as opposed to working with a professional company. Hey, before we because I know we're running short on time here I wanted to ask about Profit Panda, just because you know I wanted to hear a little bit about what you're doing with Profit Panda that way. I know you had mentioned before this show that you know it kind of connects in with the home service side, that it was kind of tailored for that. But I would imagine it goes beyond that. But share with me what exactly you guys have going on with Profit Panda.

Yeah, so Profit Panda is a fractional CFO bookkeeping service provider for contractors. So the company's been around for a while now. So Madeline Stout is the founder. She was working with some of the WinRae client base and I vetted her for a little while and I hired her as my fractional CFO in bookkeeping services for about probably 18 months ago and then about six months ago we started the conversation of like she needed to scale the organization to support people better and she felt like I was somebody that could help her do that, and so we basically we became partners. I'm an equity partner in the organization and sitting in the CEO role, helping guide the company to the next level, and so what I see in this space is so many people hire bookkeepers and get you know very few bookkeepers that I've seen okay, I'm not judging anybody, but from the customer where we deliver reports on time and that's something we really focus on and we do that accurately or even able to understand the reports that you get, like PNLs and balance sheets and cash flow reports and job costing and AR and AP and budgeting. There's so many things that a bookkeeper is just not going to bring you and that's where the fractional CFO services come into play. It's not just giving you the reports, it's having somebody that can sit there with you and help you understand your reports. What do you need to bring in per month to cover your not? What is your overhead burn rate? Like? And these are all things that, like I'm not the best at the technical side of the bookkeeping stuff, like that's not my skill set. I'm the team, I'm the team builder. But I see so many people struggle with, like they're really great decision makers but they don't have the data to make the decision with. And I'm sure you've been through that in your business ownership journey where, like, you felt overwhelmed, you felt lost, you felt like you didn't understand because you just didn't have the information. And I got the information like what's not as bad as I thought it was, and I actually can't make this decision pretty easy now because now I have the information to allow me to make the decision. So, like, profit plan is really focused on that. Like helping you, you know, maximize. You know we heavily focus on the profit first mindset. You know, helping you build reserves, helping you build a profit account, prepare for tax season not so much tax planning, but like okay, we're going to like learn to put money away throughout the year in a manageable way, to be like financially prepared and then working with CPAs to figure that out. But, like you know, marketing and financial services and CPAs, like it's a very great world. It's very hard to tell the district somebody who's good and someone who isn't, and that's kind of why, like I vetted, you know, madeleine and this ecosystem for close to two years before I was willing to like hook my cart to them to an extent. And you know, just like anybody, you know, we've gone through growing pains and we've had some client experiences better than others, but overall, you know, we have a very consistent and loyal client base of people that really appreciate the effort that goes in every month to help them get the information, understand the information, to make better business decisions. And really, you know, taking the fear out of finances right, because, like when you just don't know, you're just always scared. Like you don't, like I, like clients will be like I haven't looked at my bank account in months, you're an idiot. Like I, just I don't want to see it because I don't understand it, I don't know why it's what it is, and like that's that's. That's very difficult.

Very cool, Very cool. So, hey, as we wrap up this show, I always like to give every guest the opportunity to kind of share where people can go and follow and, you know, try to connect if they're, if they're interested in the coaching, if they're interested in or the consulting, if they're interested in maybe profit panda, but I also, you know. So I'd like for you to share that, but also share a little bit about the podcast and your YouTube channel, some amazing content on both of those platforms. Just want you to kind of share some of that.

We'll start with the content side. But if you go to MikeClaudiocom, there's the link to the YouTube channel, link to the podcast, link to the nonprofit link to, you know, the coaching stuff. But if you go to MikeClaudiocom, that's where, like most Mike Claudio stuff is. But like the YouTube has got, I don't know, close to 600 videos. The podcast is approaching 500 episodes, like I've been doing it consistently for you know, since 2019. And there's just a ton of content. Like it's cool, like we've been starting to repurpose some old stuff and it's cool to see, like the evolution of myself as a delivery, a deliverer of information over the years, because you know some old videos. I'm like, damn, I've come a long way from there, which is kind of neat to see the evolution. So you know, workwithwinratecom is where if you want to see the packages around the coaching and consulting side, profitpandacfocom if you're interested in more of that, bookkeeping, cfo services. But I mean, like I'm at the real Mike Claudio on Instagram, at Winrate Consulting on Instagram, like shoot me a DM is always kind of the easiest way to get to me directly. But if you want to learn more about what we have to offer, you know workwithwinratecom or winrateconsultingcom or two different landing pages and then profitpandaCFOcom. So if you've just got a MikeClaudiocom, that seems to be the easiest, you know. Center fold for everything.

Awesome, awesome. Well, mike, I want to thank you for coming on to the show. I know you're very busy. I even appreciate that I botched it right at the very beginning of trying to shoot this episode. So don't forget to hit your record button, people. But now I appreciate you coming back on to the show and dropping some knowledge. We've got everything dialed in. We've got it all recorded. So I'm looking forward to getting this episode out. But for those listening or watching, just know that if you want to try to find this episode, or if maybe you're listening to it on audio and you want to find the video, you can certainly go to YouTube. But if you go to the, if you go to lavahoppodcastcom, there's a little search bar. You can search for Mike. You'll be able to find his bio, links to his websites, links to his social media channels and in addition to that, you'll be able to see this episode and video form on YouTube and with that that's the rest of our show. Mike, thank you very much for taking time out of your schedule and I look forward to getting this one out.

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