Tim Leary: Last month, we just closed out at a little over 83,000 and we started May of 2024. I still haven't, I definitely should not have gone and done the work, but um, I did. I partnered with my dad who had the handyman experience, which we quickly realized was a lot less than what people expect. You could literally spend 200, we spent $500 and gotten 30 leads TV mounting, but's, mind blowing two TVs. You're in and out in an hour 700 and 30 bucks. No Home Depot runs where we sit back at the end of a month and like, how are we doing this?

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Owner Ops podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray, and this episode I have Tim Leary joining us from Handy Handyman Services out in Salt Lake, Utah. Now this episode is super fun. It is the perfect episode for somebody who is looking to start a home service business.

Tim is on track to do a million bucks this year in handyman services. He's grown from zero to about 83 K per month, and he also shares in this episode what I could argue is maybe the best and easiest business model in home service to go start this week and make your first couple hundred bucks. So stick around for the full episode if you want to learn about that business model.

And if you wanna learn how Tim is building Handies Handyman services out in Salt Lake, Utah. Thanks again for listening. Let's jump into the episode. All right. Tim Leary with Handy’s Handyman Services. I'm excited to have you on. 

 Tim Leary: I'm excited to be here. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, the brand is sweet. 

 Tim Leary: Thank you. I have to give all the credit to my wife, who's the creative one? She came up with everything, the colors, the logo, the van wraps, and I think that's been a big part of our success so far. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, it looks sweet. It reminds me of a similar style to that. I don't remember what it's called. It's like pinks or pinkies. 

 Tim Leary: Yeah. Window washing or something pink. Yeah. Pink's window washing out of, I think they're based out of Texas. 

Austin Gray: Oh cool. Yeah. Yeah, it went with the retro vibe and then it's almost like you feel like you're going to a diner or something, wearing like the name tags on the shirts. 

 Tim Leary: Um, yeah, they've been a big inspiration for branding as well, and it's cool to see their success. I know they made a couple partnerships and have scaled franchise wise quite significantly over the last 12 months. 

Austin Gray: Cool. So where are you located? 

 Tim Leary: We're based out of Salt Lake City, Utah. Awesome. So I know you've had Tyler on with doing some stump grinding conversations and he and I have a mutual friend and we're connected prior to me knowing that he was on this podcast. So it was fun to listen to his last two episodes with you. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, Tyler's awesome. Cranks. 

 Tim Leary: It's pretty cool to see his willingness to go out and just. The humility aspect of it, which I think is a big part of our success as well. And so it's cool to see someone like him come from a successful background in sales, which is where I started, into home service, and little different than me be the one actually out doing the work. It's cool to see his grind and just his willingness to go out, try things, fail, try again next time and win. It's been fun to watch his journey. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. So whenever you started this, were you the one doing the handyman services or did you immediately go hire somebody and just focus on marketing and sales?

 Tim Leary: Yeah, so I sold real estate for nine years, and through that experience I had realized I never really had any reliability When it came to handyman. I was managing a team of 35 agents, so we were doing nearly a hundred transactions a month, and I would say 80% on the buyer side. Through that experience. All of your home inspections, you're trying to get quotes to use for negotiations and help your clients out and just could never find anyone reliable in handyman space.

My dad owned a lawn maintenance business for about 25 years. He was the typical blue collar, didn't run it the proper way, just built himself a job, which is a common theme. He was handy, I realized, I started calling him for all of my stuffs and I just started sending him off to my client's houses and they started loving the work that he was doing and that's where this all formulated.

We just decided, let's partner up together. So no, I was not doing any of the work. I still have a couple stories of me doing. Some of the work, which is I definitely should not have gone and done the work, but, um, I did. I had to, and I think that's the scrappiness of it. I partnered with my dad who had the handyman experience, which we quickly realized was a lot less than what people expect, so we had to hire pretty quick.

Austin Gray: I recently got back from launching a land clearing business down in Austin, and this last winter I launched a snow shoveling business alongside Bear Claw. In both businesses, I've implemented Jobber as a way for us to efficiently manage quoting job schedules and invoicing and even collecting online payment.

Why? Because it's worked so well for us in Bearclaw and it's saved us a ton of time and headache. So if you are looking for a software that can help you manage the back end of your business, look no further than Jobber, you can visit go dot get jobber.com/owner ops O-W-N-R-O-P-S. 

Austin Gray: And what do you mean by that? It was a lot less than what people expect. 

 Tim Leary: I think in my traditional understanding of what a handyman does, it's the neighbor down the street, the chuck and a truck who can come over and fix a sprinkler head or your door is squeaking. But when we started advertising, we started getting calls for, can you build a custom sauna in my backyard?

Can you rear my entire house? Can you replace all of my gutters? And a lot of the work that we were getting requested to do was outside of our. At least my dad's scope or what we originally thought. And so through that experience, we started learning about what jobs were profitable, what weren't, what should be in our wheelhouse as handyman, what shouldn't, because we did not want to be the typical handyman that got his general contractor license and started building houses.

The main mission is to provide a reliable, trustworthy service for the small stuff that you don't really know who to call. Uh, to get service for. So yeah, we started getting some bigger requests and started having to look at additional hires who had more skill so we could help serve those clients knowing that we were still within the realm of what a handyman service in our eyes should be.

Austin Gray: Yeah, absolutely. So I wanna dive into that and figure out how you navigated all of those requests. 'cause it sounds like you just immediately started to get demand. Before we do that, where currently are you at with revenue right now? 

Tim Leary: Last month we just closed out at a little over 83,000, and we started May of 2024. So, we're almost a year in eight days. 

Austin Gray: That is incredible. Hats off. It's pretty wild. 

 Tim Leary: We'd not expect it at all, but it's, yeah. Thank you. 

Austin Gray: What is that? That's pretty close. That's gotta be close to a million in annualized.

 Tim Leary: If we keep this, if we keep this trend up, we'll hit a little over a million this year.

Austin Gray: Sweet. That's awesome. 

 Tim Leary: Yeah, it's pretty crazy. We have a lot of imposter syndrome where we sit back and look at each other at the end of a month, and my team and I, and we're just like. God, this is, how are we doing this? But that's the fun part. I think that's what makes all enjoyable is the unexpected aspect of where we are, where we started, and having zero knowledge of the industry, having zero knowledge of running a business just like Tyler dove in headfirst and we're figuring it out every step of the way, every single day learning something new.

Austin Gray: Yeah. This is, you're obviously doing something right, because I've seen people bash the handyman business, and it's for the reasons that you just mentioned, right? It's so easy to get caught up in the do anything for everybody mindset. And I'm curious how you have handled all of that demand. It's like you're doing something right. You're at. 83 KA month. Mm-hmm. How did you get there? 

 Tim Leary: Yeah. Trial and error for sure. Learning through reading books and listening to podcasts. The story I like to share is there's a gentleman named Ken Goodrich in the HVAC plumbing electrical world, arguably one of the largest, most successful home service business entrepreneurs out there, and sold multiple businesses for over $350 million.

I had no idea who he was. There's that humility aspect. So I had no reason not to message him on Facebook when I started seeing him posting in some of the Facebook channels I'm a part of and got on a phone call. And so he's been a big inspiration. Somebody who's been able to help me with the basics, right?

Like what are someone at that level being willing to share? You need a Google page. You need to be doing SOPs. You need to read this book, the E-Myth, you need to. Just all of the basic stuff that I think everybody can benefit from. So that was our superpower initially was asking questions to people who had already been doing this, learning the absolute basics.

And then when we turned on Google LSA, when everything took off for us, which I think it's a blessing, but I also know that it could be a curse. 'cause you can really get caught up in that being your only marketing channel. So that's why we've really developed our brand and really focused on community interactions and service and things of that nature to try and grow the brand awareness.

So we got to 83 K by our average ticket's, about $775. So it's not some crazy average ticket, but it's how we've been able to provide a convenient solution to customers real estate experience was, I think, based on me being able to respond really quickly to people. Much quicker than competition. And so the old adage of, are you gonna answer your phone within less than a minute and get back to that client?

It's so simple, and it seems like that can't be the answer, but it truly is because I do ghost shopping all the time where I'll call another handyman, I'll call a landscape service, I'll call. I'll just Google the top ranked person and I don't get a response. And so when you know that's your competition and you can build a system around having automation to follow up with people during missed calls, which is so easy to do, then you're just gonna, you're gonna start winning and then you deliver on the service.

So standard operating procedures. The benefit of our business is my dad could be out doing the work while I was building standard operating procedures. I would ride with him in the truck and just be taking notes, what worked well, what didn't, and then build an SOP around that. And I think right now our superpower is our va Myla. She's amazing from the Philippines and every single time we hit a snag or we fail at something, I write a document, send it over to her, she builds an SOP, gets it added into our playbook. 

Austin Gray: Incredible. 

 Tim Leary: That's really been, that's been the key to this all is our willingness to say, let's try and build a deck. Oh, that didn't work. We got screwed. What could we do differently? Because that's a really profitable business model for us. What about fencing? What's going wrong when we do fence repairs? What's going wrong when we do drywall repairs? Um, and then lastly on that, I know I, I'm rambling, but lastly, the skill that we're adding, we're making sure that each new hire has a different.

Trade background because there's no training specifically for handyman. There's no HVAC school that you can go to for the handyman trade where you get your certificate, your license, and can go work for an HVAC company and know everything, right? And so we're trying to build a team of finished carpenter and then a drywall expert, and then a fencing expert, and then a general contractor who's done everything so that we can have a solid foundation and base for our apprentice program to train on tiling, drywall, but we have an expert in that field, and then they can all share their best practices for what they're best at, and we can now become a more well-rounded, well-oiled machine in terms of the skill as well. 

Austin Gray: What are you saying?

 Tim Leary: We're short staffed. We have four vans on the road right now. Normally in our industry, a van can do anywhere between 17 and $20,000 of revenue per month, and we're pushing about 25 to 28,000 per month per van. And so they're a little overworked, but the convenience aspect is what we revolve our business model around.

If we have an opening to build a deck, will take us about four days, depending. On the size of it, of course, but most decks on average will take us about four days with two of our crew. So that takes half of our labor away from any new client for the next four days. But our business model, we don't want to be booked out for more than three days, which I know sounds crazy, but we're gonna take market share in.

I feel like we could have in a year, because we're not booked out two months. We can come and mount your TV today, build your deck starting in four days from now. And that's just a big man. The people who just say, oh wow, four days, everybody else, I've gotten 10 bids. You're the highest, but you can get it done, and I need it done for this party that I'm having on Saturday.

Great. You guys win that Uber model, DoorDash, the convenience aspect of where the world's going today, if you can deliver on that. That's where you're gonna start to win. And so we're saying no to bathroom remodels. We say no to all plumbing, all electrical. It's just not something that we should do. And I think that's where handyman get a bad wrap is plumbers having to go back in and fix a plumbing mistake that a handyman did, or electricians doing the same thing.

So we really just stay in our wheelhouse of no renovations, no permits. We're not doing additions. We're not doing bathroom remodels, kitchen remodels. We're not doing big demo projects. We're doing fence repairs. Deck repairs, installation. So it's mainly maintenance and repairs instead of full on installations.

Austin Gray: Interesting. 

 Tim Leary: Yeah. 

Austin Gray: So for all the people bashing handyman business models, here we are, they're probably the same people talking about all the best businesses are based on repair services. So I think you're onto something here. 

 Tim Leary: We're trying, and I've heard all the bad things. I've heard every bad thing you can hear about. A handyman industry, and I'm aware of that. And so I try and make sure that we're doing it the right way because I think some of our biggest future partners are gonna be these massive HVAC and plumbing companies who walk into somebody's house, cut open their drywall, fix their plumbing, and say good luck.

Finding someone to do your drywall. We're out. 'cause they want to close the ticket and move on to the next job. We have any hour plumbing, heating and air conditioning here, and they do well over $200 million a year. Have over 200 vans on the road just in Utah. Imagine how many drywall patches we could do if we have that partnership right? And so we're trying to make sure that we're playing everything by the book. Because we don't wanna walk that line where those types of future partnerships are hating on us. We're trying to re standardize this industry. 

Austin Gray: Yeah, I love it man. I love the fact that you're out there just making this thing work. It's funny 'cause it's all the finance bros that just, oh, you gotta have the perfect business model and analyze the spreadsheets consistently. It's dude, these guys are out there doing it. So I love it. Hats off. To you for figuring out a way to make this handyman thing work specifically. Alright. We can go so many different ways with this, and I'm so intrigued by this business model. You're saying LSA and I see something on the back of your whiteboard there. It says it's about getting the most out of your leads before you need more leads. Talk to me about that. 

 Tim Leary: So we had horrible conversion ratio we had, and I'm from sales, so that was breaking my heart. And I quickly realized the model that we originally had was that the technician would go out on an estimate. And they would provide the estimate and then if the estimate was approved, they would go to Home Depot, get the materials, go back to the house and complete the work. Quickly realized I now have to teach four people who've never been in sales before, who've only been in blue collar, who mainly have never had interactions with clients because they were working under a GC or something like that.

Just doing the labor portion. Um, I had to teach 'em customer service. I had to teach 'em sales, I had to teach 'em efficiency and. Route optimization and it was just a mess. And so we had over a thousand leads, um, I think in the first three to four months, and we were converting probably at 25%. And so what I said is, I don't want to keep paying for all of these leads.

If we have a thousand people sitting in our database who we haven't converted on, those are, that's just, we paid for all of those leads. We need to do something with them. So we switched our model to hiring an estimator, reduced our LSA from, I think we were spending at that time way too much, probably like 15% of our revenue on LSA down to, I think we're at 5% now, because what we started doing was if I could focus on training one person.

On sales and then we can train our VA to do all of our follow up and then we can build, we use go high level. So if we could build a automated system for follow up through, go high level with my background in sales and follow up, I think that we've got a good trifecta instead of having the blue collar guy who's never had to sell anything in his life trying to sell jobs when he's afraid to charge people more than $50 an hour on the weekend himself, and we're charging.

Way more than that. So you're just losing because the people you're putting in front of your clients are not willing to sell. They don't believe in the price or they don't believe in the value or whatever it might be. And so we switched that model and reduced all of our lead spend by 75%, put all the estimates on one person.

That way we can only do, so we're doing six estimates a day and it reduced our, yeah, reduced our lead spend by about 10 grand a month. And then what we're doing is we have a follow-up system in place for all of the leads that we touch. So instead of doing six estimates a day, times four people doing all of those estimates on the road, we're now just doing six.

So instead of having 24 estimates a day that we're paying for converting at 25%, we're currently converting at like 55%. We only have six. So it gives us the opportunity and the flexibility to go after all the leads that we still have. And spend more time with those leads, then try and just get more, and you're gonna fall into that trap really quickly too, of.

Just keep increasing spend on LSA because if you're converting at 25% sales is a numbers game. We'll just get more leads in. I'm looking at my screen right now and we have of open estimates. That means those are the worst for me. Open means no. We didn't get a yes or a no. They're just sitting there. Over $557,000 of open estimates that we have sent.

We've met these people. We have sh shaken their hands. We've, they've experienced our service so far, and they're just sitting there open and I look at that and I die inside. So it's about doing what you can with those leads before feeling like you need to go and get more. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. There's two reasons why I'm sure you're dying inside. One is because you've already paid internally for those leads and the people to go meet with them. Mm-hmm. So you have all of your costs associated with that. And then two, it's just like you can see the dollar amount sitting there. 

 Tim Leary: Yeah. 

Austin Gray: Waiting to be close. What do you use to send your quotes? 

 Tim Leary: We have a pretty diverse tech stack. And really, we're only using House Call Pro for the, the invoicing aspect of it or the sending the quotes and stuff like that. 

Austin Gray: Stryker Digital specializes in SEO services specifically for local service businesses. Bodie and Andy, the two co-founders, have helped me get Bearclaw land services to the number one search result on Google inside my state for my specific search term. If you wanna learn more. Visit stryker digital.com. That's S-T-R-Y-K-E-R digital.com. 

Austin Gray: What do you use for field service scheduling. 

 Tim Leary: That's how it's called pro. It's basically our scheduling software and our invoicing is what we do through that. And then we do everything else through company cams, spreadsheets and QuickBooks and bill.com, things like that.

Austin Gray: Yeah, it sounds like we have a very similar tech stack as well. 'cause like we're doing go high level or it's build 12, which was my business coach, Les O'Hara's. White labeled product. Cool. So yeah, we have that for sales and marketing automation, and then jobber for field service and scheduling, which is your house golf pro. Then all of this is compiled together. Have you met Tanner Mullen with drip jobs? 

 Tim Leary: No, but I've, I think I follow him on something that sounds super familiar. 

Austin Gray: He's a cool guy. I just had him on last week episode will be probably published in a couple months, but he, so he built drip jobs. He's in the painting business and he was like, man, I was just tired. Tired of hacking all these things together. He needed a way to do basically, 'cause you and I both know, like the sales and automation from Go high level is awesome. It's been a game changer. For the follow ups. So he built that, paired it up with Jobber House Golf Pro. Yeah. I talked to him last week though.

I'm like, what do you have for field service app? He's, that's where we lack. I was like, okay. All right. So it's like there's no one stop. Perfect. All in solution yet. 

 Tim Leary: It's funny because my dad, he's 60, he has never done tech in his life, doesn't even know, sorry dad, love you. Doesn't even know how to use his phone correctly. He's always asking me for how do I do this? Oh my God, I've told you like a hundred times, which we get a kick out of. But he said, every time we add a new software, he keeps saying, man, can't there just be like one place that you go? And I'm like, I wish. I wish there was one place that you could go because that would be so much easier.

But right now it's called a tech stack for a reason. You know, there's multiple different techs that have to all communicate together to make one business model flow. But that's funny 'cause we've been trying to think of other things to implement as well. Build 'cause handyman is not built out. Um, there's a couple people that I know who are doing it.

At a really high level, but there's really no research you can do on it. There's no, everything's related to hvac, plumbing, electrical, landscaping, stuff like that. So it's hard to find a lot of information on it or what's gonna help. So we're just gonna build it. We're just gonna, if there's something that we need, we're gonna build it. If it works for us, it should work for other people. And then you have another business to run. Totally. 

Austin Gray: I think that's a really good move. One I'm interested in as well. I'm interested to hear, and we don't have to go too far off on this, but sounds like your head's going there too. Do you follow any of the vibe coding stuff? Have you seen any of that? 

 Tim Leary: Not super familiar, no. 

Austin Gray: The rate in which people are building specific software with AI right now is incredible. Look up Greg Eisenberg after this. Okay. He has a YouTube channel where he brings on like the latest and greatest people in AI and how they're using it. And there's this one guy, I can't remember his name, I should try to have him on, but they're calling it Vibe Coding, which is essentially like using AI agents to build all this software.

And something they've said, which I truly believe as well. Software I think is gonna be so niche specific, the future of software. So I could foresee if you go build the handyman solution, there is one perfectly built software for everything handyman related. And then if other people want to go build the handyman business, that's the software people use. I think we're still in that phase of software where people are using Dobber Housecall Pro. All these things that do things generally very well and go high level as well, but they don't do your business Perfect. Yeah. And I think that's where software is going. 

 Tim Leary: I completely agree. And it's about time I feel, because there's so many small, specific business models that can really excel. There's not the backing or the software or the tech or whatever it might be to support that specific business model. And so people, like in the handyman space, there's over, I think there's over 1.5 million registered LLCs for handyman in the nation. 95% of those have three or less employees and the rest have five or less employees.

And then you have the Ace Hardware franchises, then the bigger franchises. But each individual office, even of ACE Hardware, I think they do about 850,000 in total revenue. So there's no one really at scale. But I think a big part of it is because there's no one working on the business aspect in software or in these niche, very specific businesses that can help support growth for your service specifically.

'cause there are nuances, right? Everything we've learned from guys like you, you're not in the handyman business, but your business model, we can then tailor it to what we're doing. Or stump grinding, or hvac, plumbing, electrical. We can take all these bits and pieces, but like you said, if you don't have the ability to go out and do that because you're in the truck working or you're, you're out in the field doing that, you're gonna always be behind or be relying on jobber house call Pro ServiceTitan, which are more of the general types of service or software.

I think it's really interesting and that's what we're focused on. Someone said to me one time, there's billions and trillions of dollars out in the world starting a business. You don't have to go and get every one of those because that's such a big number that even a sliver of that pie is millions and millions and millions of dollars.

So that speaks to the handyman or stump grinding, or all of these more niche businesses that haven't really been built out. You don't have to go and build a software for everybody. You just have to build a software for your business. And then anyone who wants to run your business will use your software.

Austin Gray: That's right. Yeah. I love where your head's at. Let's dive back into the handyman business model When you're running Google, LSA, like what kind of ads are you running? What are people searching for? 

 Tim Leary: Um, so mostly it's handyman near me. That's a huge one and I think that's the biggest one that we run. We also do our most profitable jobs per month, so we'll change it and we will start to look into fencing.

Fencing is really big because the weather's finally picking back up, sprinkler repair, my dad just has a lot of experience in that and that's a pretty profitable, no one really knows how to fix a sprinkler. I think we're in the industry where a lot of people can do what we do. If they YouTubed it or wanted to spend the time to go out and figure it out.

When it comes to advertising, we try and stay away from those because we're gonna get those calls regardless, and we try and stay more a fence. Most people aren't gonna try and tackle replacing a panel on their fence. Most people aren't gonna try and tackle drywall repair. Most people aren't gonna try and tackle anything to do with swapping out a ceiling fan or something like that, or sprinklers.

So that's where we focus our money. And then the rest of it just comes naturally. We got a funny call the other day. My husband's in finance, I just don't want him up on a ladder. Can you come clean my gutters? Simple stuff like that we're doing as well. And then on the back of our vans, we have those simple stuff that people are more so not really thinking about, but they're like, oh, that squeak on my door is annoying.

And when they're sitting in traffic behind our van and it says, we fix squeaky doors, or we clean gutters, they're like, oh, that seems like I don't want to do that. I'll call these people. Awesome, awesome. 

Austin Gray: Have you found those specific keywords or those specific search terms pop up since you've started where you're like, oh, I didn't even think about that service, but people search for this and it's actually high gross margin.

 Tim Leary: TV mounting. 

Austin Gray: Oh really? 

 Tim Leary: Oh, it's like mind blowing how many TVs we mount. And in fact, I just found that there's some guy whose entire business model is mounting TVs salt, I think he's called like in Salt Lake, the Mount in lake. Yeah. He's down a little bit down or up north, maybe 45 minutes an hour up north.

But his whole business model is mounting TVs. That's all he does is mount TVs. And that's what really struck a chord is the fact that people are gonna hire us to come mount a tv. But it's because it's a tv, it's expensive and they don't wanna break it. And if you don't know what you're doing, it is so simple.

Again, you could YouTube it, but when there's an expense added to that of I just bought this $2,000 tv, they just don't even want to try. And so that is one that is obviously so profitable for us because we can get in and out no matter how big the TV is in 30 minutes or less. We've done hundreds of 'em. We can mount it on brick, we can mount it on stone, we can mount it on drywall, and it all for us is the same. We have everything we need on our van to do it. We don't have to go to Home Depot at all. So that's really profitable business model for us is mounting TVs.

Austin Gray: How much can you charge for that?

 Tim Leary: So for the smallest TV is about 315 bucks.

Austin Gray: Wow. 

 Tim Leary: So that's just like a 55 inch, let's say. Yeah, and that's per tv. If you're mounting two TVs, you're in and out in an hour, and your average ticket is 730 bucks. Home Depot runs same day service, and a lot of the times our estimator has the capabilities to do those small one to two hour jobs, so we leave enough room in their schedule to where we can provide them a quote.

Right. If you leave the property, you just lost X amount of conversion on that. Just the odds. And so we always try and do everything on the spot, get signatures on the spot, get approvals on the spot, get deposits on the spot, or get the work done on the spot. And people's eyes light up when you say, oh, I've got the tools, I can do it right now.

And they're like, oh my, like right now I gotta go back to work and I'll be done in 30 minutes. And I think that's when people really start to see the value and not time. You were only here for 30 minutes. They see it as, oh, wow, how cool that you were only here for 30 minutes. I got two TVs mounted. You're out the door, you're gone and I can watch TV tonight. 

Austin Gray: My friend who lives out in Provo, sells security systems every summer, just goes in door knocks, makes a ton of money. And he said his main thing is you just gotta same day em every Yeah. Oh yeah. You have the same day. 

 Tim Leary: We have one discount and it's an a spot approval discount.

That's, that's our only discount right now that we're running. And it's, if you approve right now. We will give you X percent off and we'll get you booked for the service in three days. It's like life changing. There's anything I could give advice on, it's don't send the estimate. Don't send an estimate without a conversation.

Go over it with them in person any chance that you can, because the second you say, I'll send it to you, or if they need to talk to their spouse or whoever, our whole phone, right when they first call, it's who's the decision maker? Both of them gonna be there. What's your decision making process look like so that our estimator is fully prepared to go in and same day? Those people? Yeah, we're trying to tee 'em up so that they can go in and literally just provide the estimate, build some rapport, offer this spot approval discount, and get an approval and move on. 

Austin Gray: You are building a really cool system. 

 Tim Leary: Thank you. 

Austin Gray: So one thing you did, which I thought was really interesting, actually before I jump into this, you're bidding on keywords like tv mounting, right? 

 Tim Leary: Yeah. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: So it's literally as simple as if somebody wanted to start a TV mounting business somewhere else in the us, they could literally say whatever Cincinnati TV mounting, do some Google business profile, and then go bid on keywords with Google Ads and LSA

 Tim Leary: I was just gonna say, if you wanna start a TV mounting business, get a name, get an LLC, get a Google Business profile, sign up for Google LSA. Click the one button that says TV mounting in Google, LSA. Put your budget and you're gonna get a lead tomorrow, 

Austin Gray: How much should people spend? 

 Tim Leary: The beauty of that is that you can basically fluctuate spend any day, and it's a pay after lead. So once you get the lead, then you pay for the lead instead of Google PPC or anything like that, where you're spending an allotment every month, regardless of the return on it, you're basically buying a lead after it comes in.

So right now we're doing a million dollars, or we're on pace to do a million dollars, and we are spending about a thousand to 1500 bucks a week on advertising. Obviously, if you're mounting TVs, you don't have to spend that much. We're bidding on a lot of different, um, services, but our average price, I don't know what yours is, but in a handyman space, is about 36 to $46 a lead right now.

Austin Gray: Wow. 

 Tim Leary: So our, our leads are very cheap. Which is I guess, in comparison to the other people I've been talking to in other industries. But yeah, you could spend, I would say it's based on weekly. So LSA is based on per week. If you put 200 bucks a week in, you're gonna make that back in a couple TV mounts.

Austin Gray: Absolutely. And if you put 200 bucks a week to start, you're gonna get a lead. 

 Tim Leary: Oh yeah, absolutely. And it actually tells you what the return is gonna be It, it basically says, for this spend, you're gonna get. An average of five to seven leads a week or, or something like that. But again, if they call, that's the thing, and you don't answer immediately.

They're calling the next person on Google. That's what LSA is. They're ripping through top to bottom. If you don't answer, you're really, we've had so many cases where before we had go high level and doing the missed call. Automations and stuff like that. You try and call 'em back seconds later and they're moved on, or they're just non-responsive at that point, so awesome. That's the important part. But yeah, you could literally spend 200, there's been days or weeks where we've spent $500 and gotten 30 leads. 

Austin Gray: Wow. Yeah. Okay. I think this is gonna happen. Somebody is gonna be listening to this and they're gonna start a TV mounting business, and so I can't wait. They're gonna have questions for you, so where can they reach out to you for that first person who starts this business?

 Tim Leary: Either X, which is, or Twitter. It's Tim Flynn, F-L-Y-N-N, Leary, L-E-A-R-Y. And then Instagram, it's just Tim Flynn underscore are the two places that I'm I frequent the most. 

Austin Gray: Okay, because this is how Ty started his stump grinding business. I think he heard it on either Nick's or Chris. Kerner podcast and then he literally just went and did it and now his business has taken off. And I have a feeling that same thing's gonna happen right here with TV mounting. So if that is you, and you correct me if I'm wrong, but literally sounds like the simplest business model in the whole world to go make money like this week right now. 

 Tim Leary: Oh yeah, absolutely. And I think what you said about the niche, not even software, but business models, right? Like stump grinding. I would've never thought of that. And then I see Tyler out doing it and I'm like, wow, this is, and it also humbled me because again, we're getting calls, can you do an addition? And it's so easy to look at the money and look at that ticket and say, oh man, we have the skill to do it, but it's gonna take our team off the road for X amount of days.

And you don't have to do that. And that's the common mistake with solo entrepreneurs or chuck in a trucks, is they see that big project and all of a sudden their business model, what they set out to do is gone because now they're gonna get addicted to those bigger tickets where they can leave their tools at someone's house for a month, know they're gonna get paid for a month.

But if you really focus on the convenience and really narrow down your scope of services, then you can become really good and efficient and really profitable in those. The ticket doesn't always lead to profitability if you're not good at it. And if you make all those mistakes along the way. But refining that, narrowing down your service offerings, now you can become really good at those things and train them really well and become really profitable in them.

 Hey, real quick, if you're looking for some general legal counsel in your service or trade business, or if you're looking for someone to review or button up some contracts that you have, reach out to Forrest at conus counsel. That's C-O-N-A-T-U-S-C-O-U-N-S-E l.com. Forrest has been great to work with over the years. He's always quick, fast to respond, and he's just been a great sounding board and someone who has provided some great advice over the years. That's Conatus Counsel. 

Austin Gray:  I can already see it now. The TV mounting guy is going to emerge. Where do you think he's gonna live in Salt Lake? 

 Tim Leary: That'd be fun to watch. That way I can meet him up for lunch. 

Austin Gray: Oh really? So like you, you would want somebody to start that in your market.  

Tim Leary: Yeah, I'm Asar said I kind of wanna start building in public and he's, he just was a little apprehensive about it 'cause he came from government work and very high up in the government world and it's all ush and you just can't conceptualize.

Why would you give away your secrets and why would you do one? It's elevating the standards so then we can charge more. And two, no one's gonna beat us. And if I know that, but also there's so much to go around, right? If our cost per lead goes up, great. Have at it. Because by that time, we're probably not gonna be spending money on leads.

We're gonna be, our brand is gonna be there, or whatever it is, right? But I've only gotten help from other people in my market, outside of my market, and there's no reason for me not to give back because I just know, bring it on, bring it like. I think we're the coolest handyman company that has ever come about, and I will stand by that no matter if you wanna start one down the street.

One of my good friends, close friends from business is down the street. He's trying to do what we're doing and we go to lunch like once a month and talk. And I've given him everything we have because again, look, I don't think I'm gonna make billions from Handies. I think I'm gonna make billions from. Uh, ideas that come from running this business.

As long as I can be open to those mentally and have a little bit of freedom in my day to think of problems that all handymen have, I'm gonna sell a software to those people. Whatever it might look like, that's where the real money's gonna come. Yeah. And the more handymen I can help, the more of 'em are gonna buy my service in the future.

Austin Gray: I love it. Some people, I think, have a hard time conceptualizing this concept, but there are people like yourself. Who see the bigger picture opportunities and if you take the mindset of just helping other people like you are, go create a better lifestyle for themselves, it's gonna come back around and mm-hmm. To your point, like maybe that is just handyman software, right? That's gonna be your deal. Or it's handyman consulting. And then there you go. 

 Tim Leary: You get the people. Our competition is chuck in a truck and those people can charge $50 an hour. So we have to be doing other things to elevate our standard or to elevate the value that we're providing to get people to pay for our service.

If I can help the people in my market start charging 150 to $200 an hour, we can then go charge $300 an hour. This industry is so fragmented, the handyman space, it is Chuck in a truck. 99% of the time you might get one or two other people with a magnet or a wrapped vehicle. Even Ace Hardware has a magnet on the side of your personal vehicle.

They don't provide vehicles or anything. If we can show up in a marked van and uniforms and charge what we charge right now, but we can get everybody else on board. So entrepreneurs to raise their standard, raise their prices, we're just gonna elevate ourselves even more. It took me a while, honestly, to get to this mindset because it was always hush and I don't want to give away secrets, but. It is what it is and people have done me so many times and given me so much information for free that I only feel right giving it back. 

Austin Gray: Yeah. Okay. So one thing that you did, which I find very interesting right now is you're very in tune with your marketing and sales processing. You said, we had these people in our business doing estimates, and then I realized that our conversion rate was 25%. If I heard you correctly, you went out and recruited a dedicated estimator and sales guy or gal, correct? 

 Tim Leary: Yeah, she's a girl and she's a badass. Awesome. Yeah. 

Austin Gray: And when you made that change, that was a risk, correct? Because you had to go recruit somebody and likely pay them a base plus commission or commission structure versus having someone who was already on your payroll doing that? 

 Tim Leary: Absolutely. There's a company called Hank Handyman out of Texas. Good friends of ours we're actually going out there to visit their shop for the first time, which will be fun. They're owned by a couple business partners, but big roofing company. Big hvac electrical company, so a lot of really smart people prior to us really starting hiring, we were in communication with them about their process. And at the time they were doing it similar to how we were, where you send everybody on their own to do estimates and things like that. And so we tried it that way, right?

What did we know? So we were like, screw it. If they're doing 10 million a year, like they're doing something right, let's do it. Uh, a big thing to know is that you can try those things, but you have to be in tune with what works for you as well. What works in your market, what works with your employees? And we have the humility to try it, but we were smart enough to track everything and realize this is not working for us pretty quickly.

So it wasn't just the conversion ratio, it was so many things, but the key was conversion ratio. And the other key was inaccurate. Estimates we're estimating based on how long a project's gonna take, which is a difficult task to figure out. And everyone's gonna be different. And so a TV mount for one person might be double the price and a TV mount for another person.

So there was really no standardization, nothing we could train, which was difficult. 'cause if you can't train it, you can't scale it. And then the third kind of the biggest thing for me is the amount of hours we were billing clients in comparison to how many we were working. We were billing 4.7 hours a day per technician, working eight hours a day.

We weren't making like any money in reality. And the biggest problem was that they're working eight hours and we're only billing 4.7 hours a day. So how do you change that? If someone could do an estimate and then we could backfill that with labor, and it's an eight hour job there, that labor is working eight hours and we're billing eight hours now it's starting to make sense.

So we didn't even go after this looking to go to a full eight hour workday. We said, can we just bill for six hours? And then we did the math and it increased our total revenue by thousands of dollars a day. I said, that's worth the risk because at any given time, we can go right back. We can literally flop right back to that model if we needed to.

And everybody on staff at that point had been doing estimates. They were comfortable doing estimates, so they all knew how in the event we needed to. But yeah, the risk was that now we're putting all of our eggs, all of our work into one basket. And if that person can't. Convert. We have no jobs. So that was the biggest risk.

Austin Gray: Absolutely. You're one of the ones out there doing it. And when I started this podcast, it was like, man, everybody's out there talking about the 25, $30 million businesses, the ones who have already like scaled. And I was in the zero to 1 million phase when I started this podcast. I'm like, there wasn't another show where it's like we just talk about the nitty gritty of that zero to one phase.

And so all this stuff that you're sharing, I know that there are gonna be plenty of people out there who this is going to help. That's the goal of this podcast. It's like we just wanna help people start local service-based businesses. So if that's you and you do wanna start, go back and listen to this full episode.

If you're joining us at the end, for whatever reason, because Tim just shared, Arguably the simplest and best way to go make money this week by hanging TVs and listeners. Our new text line number is 9 7 0 5 8 5 6 9 6 7. That's 9 7 0 5 8 5 OWNR. You can just text your questions if you have questions about getting your business started or if you're currently trying to figure out if you should hire a sales and estimator like did.

Then just text those questions in. We'll answer 'em. Live with the guest for that week and. Thanks again for listening to another episode. We publish episodes weekly on Fridays, and they're all about starting and growing local service-based businesses. We have people like Tim on every week, and then we'll send a weekly newsletter where we summarize what we talked about, take away the main learning lessons, and then share those insights with you in a newsletter on Saturday.

So if you haven't signed up for that newsletter yet, you can do so now. ownrops.com/newsletter. That's ownrops.com/newsletter. Thanks again for listening. Don't forget, work hard, do your best. Never settle for less.

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