The Operating System Behind America's Biggest Garage Door Company

The Home Service Expert Podcast

This episode features John Hardy, business coach at Garage Door Freedom (GDF), discussing the operational system that helped scale a major garage door company to $400M in revenue. He outlines the 'Freedom Framework'—a gr

Key takeaways

• Financial transparency is foundational for scaling

Transcript preview

What's the point of advertising or even getting into business if you don't know how to book the phone call? We get mad when a technician walks away with a zero, but why not when there's a CSR and a launch breaker they missed four calls? It's hard to compete if you're paying for marketing and if you don't have somebody that's sounding great on the phone. My team doesn't execute well, I've heard that. I come back with this, well who's on your team. The person I'm talking, the person I'm talking to the thing that makes the most sense which is you can't afford not to. All right welcome back to the home service expert today I got John Hardy with me he is a expert in business coaching the garage your industry operations growth strategy k-p-p-p-p-p-i tracking service and optimization technician training and vendor-by-or group management today's thesis is a-one now is gonna cross the four hundred a million mark and garage your freedom exists to share the system strategies and lessons that made that growth possible. companies don't have to figure it all out alone. In this spotlight episode, GDF business coach John Hardy walks through exactly what GDP is, how the coaching works, what the freedom framework looks like in practice, and shares real member success stories. Whether you're a garage or a company doing 500,000 or 5 million, this is a look inside the program that's helping owners across the industry achieve record-breaking years. John, it's good to have you brother. Good to be here. Thank you. and just how you got it. So the opportunity presented itself were kind of aligned with me for my professional and personal side which is really trying to find a way to meet people where they're at to achieve their goals whether it be personally or financially professionally and so this opportunity was something that I was doing my own deal as a business consultant have a lot of history in the ops world and was going back forth between Utah and Arizona and I have family here and I have family here and this presented itself to take a peek behind the curtain if you will with my brother being a big influence on my life that said hey this guy Tommy Mello is down there doing some some great things he's a move or a shaker at any rate getting an opportunity to align with meeting business owners to achieve their goals is really what peaked my interest and that's why I've been on board here yeah I know it's great to have you man you're a great addition to the team I am years ago I think it was Adam And almost everybody, even at least that they thought I was nuts. Why would we want to start training other garage door companies? But I realized that HVAC was training since the 70s. Right. These garage door, the IDA, great for the industry. But it really, to me, that's more of a technical training. It was like certification type stuff. They weren't talking about EBIT. They weren't talking about how to buy vans and appreciation. They weren't talking about, you're talking about, you're talking about, you helping companies grow. And I just remember getting attacked all over Facebook and all these other companies talking crap and I'm like we got to really raise the bar for this industry and that's how GDP and they thought we were crazy but then we've we've got over a hundred members and You know we just had vertical track right and we signed up a lot of people at vertical track and the people that come in They actually get it like the lights turn on I think the first vertical track was like five or six years ago when people were like get the right logos, pay people the right way, get service time. We were the first company on service site in the garage industry. So, you know, a lot of the teachings have been through our mistakes. Let's just talk about the Freedom Framework and walk us through exactly how we on board these clients and exactly where we find them where they are. So the framework is phenomenal and I think it's the premise of success really starting with the first one which is the financials. You know, there's a lot of business. You know, there's a lot of business, you know, there's a lot of business. tax or in some sort of trade and they found a way to do things better or different so they thought and they create this monster right this monster that they need to find out how to make this machine which is taking their financials and knowing where they're at and how to make scorecards against their measurable from a budgeting standpoint from hey a KPI to know you're indexing against your OJA and so really trying to find out where the business owners are at from the the starting of a new business business to one that's operating at a high level. We can find out where you're at and meet you there. Yeah, where do you think most people coming in? They always say leads, but really where are they struggling the most? That's a great question. And it comes down to a couple things. The first one that I find is really trying to find out how to navigate the daily operation to being very intentional with getting a result they're seeking. So operational soundness, KPI, scorecards, SOPs, those types of things. Math. Math. Math. Math. exactly trying to find a way to go and achieve the results they're seeking. Yeah I don't think most companies know gross profit they don't actually know the profit they're going for. They don't have audited financial so there's no chance of them ever getting a loan. They don't know accrual verse, you know, cash. Right. And there's all these things that go into this stuff and it sounds really complicated but when you've got a partner like GDF to walk you know a cruel and show you how to set up your service tight account, and go in there and you could pool are just insane. We've done it. We've been working with Service Titan now going on 10 years and the things that we've been able to do and manipulate and learn exactly how to get, for example, like John, the other John, is like really good at Service Titan as well, configurable payroll. Right. But that thing's really important. Spits out exactly what you should pay and it's actually accurate if it's set up correctly. So you talk about the biggest shift you see owners. make isn't tactical, it's realizing they actually can change. And being intentional with their time is the unlock. Talk to me about that. What does that shift look like when it happens? You know, when you're talking to business owners and really trying to get an understanding of what their business is, right? And my answer, or my question to them is, what is the fortress that your business stands for? What is the moat that you've built around your business and do you know your competition? And the reason why that's important is because you can't is because you can start to build can they articulate what their business stands for and can we help each other build a business that is able to grow around that. So the Freedom Framework, we want to talk about revenue. How do we drive top line revenue? Well kind of, this is going to be super redone, but you don't know what you don't know. If you don't know your financials and you want to drive top line, you could go bankrupt. You're not in business tomorrow if you can't say, hey, we do it with the healthy way to be very, and how do we slow down and take a very, very intentional look at being able to find you and build a plan that works together with the Freedom Framework? Yeah, no, it's definitely like I've seen companies that were barely scraping by actually making a ton of profit and they're actually like having fun again. I could go member after member that's like I wouldn't trade this for the world. I got more vehicles than I've ever had. I don't work in the business that work on the business. I get to pay the people more now. Now I give, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, I'm giving more PTO than I've ever given and all the different things that come with that and it's like a lot of the businesses I've seen for example one in Canada they've been doing this for like 40 years and now they're finally starting to make I think they're gonna make I mean it's millions and millions and millions of dollars of profit this year yeah and before they barely were scraping by paying themselves a salary but not taking any profit right right and I think I know the business you're referring to Tommy and what a great story I mean just somebody in both feet really immerse themselves in and really understanding the changes that need to be made and what a success story that is. Yeah, James with Tedford is actually and you know we could probably take a minute out of this podcast just we recorded what we did at the dinner at my house of him talking about this program and I think we should play that right now just because I love hearing these stories and the goal is to get hundreds and hundreds of companies into this. More importantly just, just, just, I don't care about the competition, charge less than us, but you don't need to be half as much as us. Like you can't do a spring job for $300 anymore. Right. Like you can't sell a door for two grand. And people brag about it. That's the problem. They're like, we are so much cheaper than you. But yet, they're pay their people, 1099. They drive used trucks, they drive used trucks, nothing wrong with a use truck. That's how I started. They're much better for the technology. They're truck that breaks down all the time we bought down Scrooge yours in Denver and the guy's number one thing were do we get new trucks that's all they cared about so these things really matter walk us through what happens when a new member joins what are the first 90 days look like so the first 90 days really is a snapshot into really looking at an overarching goal which is gonna be a one three year five plan right so the first 90 days is just kind of level setting with where they're at and then we build cadence around and then we build cadence around a with the 90 days and we do a touch base and at first it's a little more touch centric we're going to have a little more one-on-one that's going to be maybe weekly or bi-weekly. The problem we run into is we have an abundance of information at our discretion and so when we start feeding the information it's an execution level at that point. And so we build and map out a roadmap of how to go from here to here to