Ep 22 - The Right Time, The Right Seat With Tom Gissler (President Of Restoration 1)

0:02 Welcome back to another episode of the MRM Podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brandon. Join us as we discuss business, life, and legacy. It's business time. Chris, how the hell are you? Ooh. Wasn't that more aggressive? That was a new kind of energy from your Enneagram 8. Yeah, no, I just... I wanted to come in strength and power. Yeah, come in hard and fast. Okay, great. I'm not going to touch that. We have... a really awesome guest. And for like the last couple episodes where we've had guests, we kind of half pretended that we hadn't already talked to them. But the way we do this thing is we meet with our guests and then we record the intro later.

0:43 That's right. We were totally lying, basically. We were kind of fooling everybody, maybe. At least ourselves. But today's guest was, I mean, every single guest we've had is really fun, but I think they're all different. And that's one of the fun things about doing this podcast. Our guest today is Tom Gisler. Tom is the president of Restoration One. And we were introduced to Tom from Rachel. And we listened to a podcast that Tom did earlier with her. And wow, did we have a good time with him today. Yeah, man. A gentleman and a scholar. Yeah. Yeah. And with the most approachable meaning. That was the theme.

1:23 Like, I don't want to give away, but... And a little cowboy too. It is. It's like, it's this down to earth, unapologetic leader. Honest. Oh, man. Yeah. Clearly has a path. Knows where he's headed. Big vision. Huge vision. Understands what role he plays in the vision. My wife says right size at the right time. Yeah. Oh man, this guy, I feel like in a lot of ways, he's the epitome. Yeah. For such a time as this, huh? Yeah. So I think all of you are going to really, really enjoy this. Probably for different reasons. People are going to latch on to different aspects of this conversation. I mean, we cover a lot of ground, which is kind of your size MO.

2:05 It is. And I think in the end, what you and I were left with is, wow, it's really cool to know a person like this. Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to hear more voices like this coming into the industry. Yeah, no kidding. This industry is just chock full of potential. There's so much stored energy on where it can go and what we can accomplish as operators, as business owners. And I think Tom really does a great job of leading from a slightly different perspective. and using a voice that I think is going to align with a lot of people in terms of how do we look at the future of our industry and not getting caught down in the technical, but just as leaders, visionary leaders, as visionary leaders, where are we going?

2:51 What kind of opportunities do we do? And how do we build ourselves up in such a way that we can stand, that we can do it, that we can stay in the fight? Guys, you're going to enjoy this. All right. Well, welcome to the show, Mr. Tom Gisler. We are super excited to have you, man. Yeah, me too. Excited to be here. I actually want to lead off... By actually recommending that people listen to another podcast episode of someone else that we really respect. So Rachel Stewart interviewed you, what was it, two, three weeks ago maybe? Yeah, I think it's been about that long. Yeah. On her podcast called Restore Your Power to Succeed. And I actually re-listened to that episode with you and her...

3:35 last night and this morning, it is a really good interview. So those of you who are listening to this, if you haven't listened to that interview, go check it out. You guys cover a lot of ground in it. There's a lot of stuff about your journey, the industry, but more importantly, I think part of your leadership journey. And it's really, really, really good. And there's some cultural stuff about the state of our industry and some unique things about Restoration One. We're gonna try to cover some new territory with you today and maybe double click on some of those things. but definitely recommend people check out that episode as well. Where do we want to get started, man? I know. We were kind of all over the place in prep to have you on the show. And I think as full disclaimer, Tom, I think Chris and I have created a story in our mind, obviously, with limited interaction with you from that interview.

4:24 And there's something a little rogue about you that I'm kind of catching a glimpse of that I'm digging. I think it's resonating a bit with me personally. I know Chris and I have mentioned it too. And so at some point, I think we want to start to hear... a little bit of those driving factors for you. But anyways, we're really excited to get to know you better for sure. I think the easy entry point for us here, one of the things that we've started asking our podcast guests is, what is the best, most useful book you've read so far this year? And your answer to that was, The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday. And I was not just a little bit excited when you said that because I follow the Daily Stoic.

5:06 I listen to that podcast a lot. I listen to his new weekend editions that are longer. And I've read All But Stillness is the Key. I've read most of his books. And I've also read quite a few of the books on his recommended list and some of his mentor, Robert Green, The 48 Laws and so forth. I'd love for you to unpack... what that book was for you. And I'm also just curious to see if there's any other enthusiasm or interest that that created for you in the area of Stoicism. You talked about a spiritual crisis or a crisis of faith that you went through. And I too, that's part of my story. And so I'm just curious where all of that connects. Yeah, so it really is directly related to my crisis of faith in the sense that for me, when I lost my faith, right off the rip, we alienate all of the believers.

5:57 So see you guys. So to the three remaining listeners, when I lost my faith. One of the byproducts that was hard about that was losing not only a community of people that I had relied on, but also sort of a central gravitational force inside by which to a lens by which to see the world, if you will. I had sort of seen events, good and bad in my life, through this matrix of God was in charge and there was obviously some better way or some brand vision or. were playing for my life. And suddenly I was left utterly alone. It wasn't long after that, that my first marriage collapsed and I ended up being a single father.

6:40 And, and so it was, it was a really hard time in my life later. And just through happenstance, it's not intelligence later. What I realized it's it many, many times, those hard things that happen in your life, even though at the time you're desperate to get out of it, all you want in the world is to get away from this difficulty and get back on a path, it was that hard event, that terrible event that was literally the conduit through which you achieved your later success. And I sort of began to notice that. And that pointed me through conversations with counselors and mentors and whatever to the concept of stoicism and then to the concept of amor fati and this idea that what is coming at you is really, it's the road you need to travel down to get to the greater iteration of yourself or whatever that you're trying to achieve.

7:35 And so as goofy as that sounds, maybe to some people. I decided to double down and really start to what would happen in my life if I approached every difficulty in that way. If I was able to bring that perception to it, what would happen in my life? And I'm completely imperfect at it. I'm not great. I'm not ready to write my own book on stoicism. But to the degree that I've been able to do that, there's been a direct correlation with success every single time. So I can't recommend the idea enough. And that book, I finally got around to reading and I'd read sort of like you had read bits and pieces of that philosophy before.

8:15 But that book really coalesced into an easy digest kind of way of seeing this element in my life that's been so important. We reread the book. And that was one of our objectives too, is we try to read the book before our guest comes on. And for me, it was a reread. I kind of... Books find us at certain times of our life, right? And sometimes we're ready for them. And then sometimes it's 10 years later, we're like, you know, somebody recommends it again. We're like, yeah, I probably should read that. Now's a good time. And I reread it. And one of the things that stood out, in fact, I screen captured part of it and sent it to Brandon that I really loved was... the ninja guy or the martial arts guy. Samurai. The samurai guy. Samurai, yeah, yeah. And he talks about the two ways, the two lenses that we can use, right?

8:59 The one where we are interpreting. So there's this interpretation lens where we're assigning meaning to everything that happens. This is either good or bad. And then there's the observational lens. And what I hear you saying is kind of referencing that. It's like the quote, bad things that happen in our life. are really only bad if we decide that they're bad. And if instead we just simply observe our circumstances, it gives us the mental margin to say, okay, what are my options for dealing with these circumstances? What can I do with them? What could I make out of this situation that I might otherwise call bad?

9:40 or horrible or terrible or woe is me. I love that, man. That is very inspiring to me too. I mean, just think about it. We literally work in an industry where we'll watch a television and there's a storm rolling in and everybody else in the room, maybe if you're the only restoration guy and there's like, oh my goodness, this is so terrible. Maybe it'll steer away or maybe it'll disperse or... whatever. And we see that for a variety of reasons, not all of them great. And we go, wow, what an opportunity. How am I going to run towards that? Well, it's no different. Hurricanes come in a variety of forms in our life, not all of them weather related.

10:21 And if you can instead say, what a great opportunity for restoration, then it absolutely changes the complexion of everything that happens to your life. And if you can get really good at it, you can carry it with you. My hope is all the way to the end. And that's my goal. I mean, so that's kind of where I'm at on it. So where's this coming into play for you? And we're going to probably touch on this in a couple of different ways. But how is this coming into play as the president of R1 and the way that you're shaping the trajectory of what that franchise? Is this a theme that you're drawing into part of your leadership? And is it at play here? Yeah. For sure. So Restoration One, oh man, guys, it's so weird.

11:03 I'm so crazy in love with the concept of Restoration One. And I don't remember what Rachel and I talked about on the podcast. So if I repeat myself, then you'll have to forgive me. But Restoration One is, I refer to it as a zebra in the horse barn. From a distance, it looks like everybody else. Okay. But you get up closer and the closer you get, you're like, there's something different. There's something different. That's different. And if we're looking at it through the lens we've been discussing, the obstacle is the way I arrived at Restoration One with the idea of you guys aren't on any programs like you're not on a single like you're not talking to anybody in the insurance community like you're not trying to roll out a pilot anywhere. That's the first thing we need to do.

11:44 And instead, everyone, including franchisees, were like, no, we don't want to do that at all. That's not we're not ready for that. We're not ruling it out necessarily. And if you just not, that's not something we're aiming for right now. And what they ran into was because of the way that they were created in the odd sort of accidental way that the entire company came together, they had found that. Through the obstacle of not being able to eat at the table with everybody else, they had found a brand new way to approach the market. A direct consumer seeing the homeowner or the business owner or the property owner as the customer. Now, let me explain that because everybody's going to go, yeah, of course they're the customer.

12:26 When you are programmed first and not people first. then your ultimate customer is that insurance company. And it's a slight change in the lens. It's just, it changes the refraction that much, but when it does, it puts your focus on that insurance company and the person standing right in front of you is somewhat of an impediment. It's a challenge to get through and around to get to the customer. Because we don't see it that way, our entire focus is right in front of us. It causes us to have this emphasis on safety, on an ethical way of doing business, a thoroughness that's agnostic of, is the insurance going to pay me for the air scrubber?

13:09 Or can I put this extra two fans in because I don't know if I'm going to get paid by the insurance? We don't worry about that. We do the right thing, try and justify it and document it. And do we have to argue with the occasional adjuster or whatever? Absolutely, we do. And do we win all of those? Absolutely, we do not. But it doesn't change our focus on absolutely doing the right thing for the person right in front of us. And that's a simple concept. So simple, in fact, that it seems goofy that it does like that can't be the driving force. It is absolutely the driving force where people first profit second and every other company in the space. And I'll say this boldly and let's get us all on stage and let's fight it out.

13:52 Combat is my love language. So I would I'm into it. Right. But. Every other company out there is program first, profit second. People fall in there somewhere, but people are something that we're just trying to get through to get to the money jar. And that ain't what we're about. So that's really where it is. Okay, well, you did it now. So now that you've let that cat out of the bag, we have a clear area that we're going to hang in for a while. Oh, boy. So part of leading up to this meeting with you, again, Chris and I had listened to the podcast with Rachel and you started to allude to and hint to, there's some things going on at R1 that are that, that they're customer centric, that they're focused on the client first.

14:35 And it's funny you say, it seems like it's that simple, right? But we all know in execution, it's hard. A lot of restoration contractors start that way. We even touch on this a little bit with Watley and Seth, but it's this idea that no contractor, for the most part, starts in this gig all beat up and jaded. They want to screw people over. They're not trying to fight anybody. But we get tired. We go out, we do a good job from our perspective for the client, and then we're trying to get paid and there's frustration. So anyways, where I'm going with this, Tom, is can you give us a little insight from 30,000 foot view What are you doing to equip your franchisees to actually execute on that?

15:19 To stay the line, to stay committed to that principle, even when they are going to inevitably hit some walls from time to time when it comes time to execute? Sure. So the first thing we're doing is we're not monolithic. There are a minority of franchisees who are walking a relatively traditional path, meaning they kind of grow up. They're here for a few years. Somebody goes, hey, you ought to get on fill in the blank program. And so they get on the program and they see an increase in work. Maybe they even see an increase in top line revenue. And the other franchisees start stepping around and going, hey, what are you doing over there? I notice you're growing. And so one of the things that we'll do for those franchisees, and we do it very publicly, is that we will publish to the network the profit margins of the program work versus the non-program work.

16:11 And what you'll notice in established programs, and I'm talking about super janky ones, I mean, like the big boys, the program work, you'll notice as high as a 33% haircut on that work. right? You just will. And there's no secret to that. That's intentional. I mean, there's so many different people eating off that. You got the insurance company that's demanding a concession, then a TPA that demands a concession. You know, it kind of gets cut. Like the cocaine coming out of Columbia is probably really good when it comes out of the jungle. And by the time it gets to the streets, it's half baking soda. That's the way it is to, well, that was probably a really bad example. But It's kind of where it's just this bad thing, right?

16:52 And so what we'll, then out of that, we have intentional conversations. And one of the things that I've instituted is that we have these summits. We just had one in Waco recently that was three days long. We drive radical transparency in the network. We've got programming that allows everybody else to see everybody else's P&L and balance sheets so that you can see what other people are doing in terms of labor and job costs and all that sort of thing so that we're able to compare apples to apples across the network. And we'll say, if I had fewer jobs, which you don't want, but if I had fewer jobs but was able to ethically charge what I could charge.

17:33 How do I compare to the guy that's got more jobs, but is able to charge less? And what you see time and time again is that the guy with slower jobs is actually a little above the guy that's working his butt off, right? So it just keeps us sort of looking at that over and over and over again to go, is it time? Is it the right way? Is this the right customer? And the answer so far has been no, it just has been from a company standpoint, from a 30,000 foot view. Now. There's no secrets there. You can't ask me about anything inside the company that I'll be going, oh, no, that's a trade secret. That's whatever. Here's what I've noticed over the course of my career. You can sit in a room and have a restoration guy get up and say, here is exactly what I have done to be successful.

18:17 Lay it all out. 90% of the people in that room will go home and do nothing about it. They want to institute one of those pieces. So I can literally give the entire show away. And there's not another restoration company that's going to follow my path. So there's no secrets here. How we're continuing to conquer that market is to emphasize sales and marketing at the ground level. The second you institute, what people tell you is, I'm going to bring in the program work and then I'm going to do what I was doing before and combined I'll be even better. What happens is you get that program work and through time management, resource management, whatever, you just start aiming towards that. And your natural growth in your own market begins to diminish over time.

19:00 So we're emphasizing sales and marketing. But even more than that, specifically, how do we do sales and marketing? And again, this is going to sound real first row, first Baptist kind of churchy kind of stuff. But I promise you it's true. We're hyper focused on building a community of partners within our group that we help them better their business. Let me stop. Not I'm going to help you better your business by being a great restoration. That's what I'm saying. If I want work from you, I'm going to find tangible ways to help you in your business, whether or not they're restoration related. I might pour money into leads for you online.

19:44 where we're marketing to a particular vertical and we'll bring in speakers and help from their industry into our at our expense so that we help them become better business people. Okay, what will they naturally do? They'll want us to be better business people. And there's an easy way for that to happen. Just give me leads. So we're not trying to manipulate and yada, yada. We got the best equipment. I mean, this industry is the weirdest industry in the world, man. We all buy our dehus and air movers from the same one or two dudes, right? So why in the world would anybody say I drive faster or I drive better or I drive?

20:24 Forget drying altogether. All we do as an industry at the best is bring order to chaos. And that has almost nothing to do with dehumidification, right? Let's stop talking about it. Let's stop putting it out there like it's something. Insurance companies ultimately don't care. The customer sure doesn't care. But, Stop talking about it. Just bring order to chaos. And if you want better business from people, make their business better. That's it. That's the secret sauce. We could pretty much just close up. Wow, that was so good. I love the fact that I think right now, Tom, you are saying a lot of things that most of us have been thinking for a long time.

21:05 I mean, the reality of it is, is that many of us over the last 10 years we already had the gut feeling that things weren't going in a positive direction for many of us. Things weren't working anymore. The things that always worked for the last 30 years are no longer working. They're not. And the priorities have been shifting in these weird ways that most of us can see. This is not why we got into it. This is not what motivates us. This isn't what we were building businesses on in the first place. But man, we are afraid to say it out loud. We're afraid to talk about it. I mean, you mentioned that at the end of the day, we all dry stuff good, right? It's kind of like that's the minimum standard.

21:47 If you're going to get paid for a service, you better do it well. But it's this relational activity that you're talking about. It's like, what are we using our drying platform for? What's the mission behind the field execution? And I just love the unapologetic perspective that you're bringing right now. I think it's encouraging for people. You're not saying anything that's derogatory or extremely negative, but they're just facts. Here's the reality of the situation we're currently playing in. What are we going to do with that? Well, and it's interesting you talking to about how if you're going to ask for referrals from somebody, make a contribution to their business, right? Invest in that relationship.

22:29 Every single one of us as operators has been watching the whole smiles and candy routine where we just drop in unexpectedly into agent offices and fill their candy jars and chat with their staff that is on their payroll. I've talked about this before. I spent eight years at State Farm, five of those years owning a State Farm agency. And it's interesting, back then, I didn't know anything about restoration. In fact, the only thing I knew about restoration, frankly, was that I had five staff on my team that were on my payroll. Every hour that that team was in my office, I was burning through roughly $100 an hour in payroll costs or more, right? And so when those restoration companies would come in and do the Canyon Smiles thing, I couldn't help as an agent but think, wait, these people have work to do.

23:15 We're trying to sell policies and service our clients. It really felt like an interruption. And what we discovered actually when we were operating was we would talk to insurance agency owners. They felt exactly the same way. They felt like we were taking from them. We were interrupting their business while we were asking for them to give us business. And just how antithetical that approach was and how self-sabotaging in some ways it was. Now, I think the reason why we've kept doing it right is because it kind of sort of works for the last 30 years. It's become a sales channel. So it's very refreshing to hear you guys not just talking about that problem, but trying to execute in a new way.

23:59 in a really radical creative way. Can you just speak into that a little bit more what you see franchises doing in their local markets? You mentioned a couple examples, but can you think of some fun stories that you've heard from franchises recently about how they're doing that? Sure, yeah, yeah. So, okay, from a sales and marketing perspective, You mentioned the kind of marketing that I love and I speak directly against it within my network, which is the concept of route marketing. My day gets laid out in a variety of stops and an X number of koozies or calendar strips on a keyboard. And somehow if I make these stops...

24:40 and I smile and I can maintain some sort of positivity through the course of my day, something magical will happen. It's akin to just some sort of Hogwarts-related spell where I'm saying something and I hope that business comes my way. There's absolutely no thought in it. It's a form of insanity in my mind. But if you look at the universe at the right angle, you'll see this sort of same flat sort of dots on a string way. But if you'll just turn it this way, you realize, oh, these things are all interrelated in these sometimes not so obvious gravitational ways and operate as a system. So one of the things that we do is rather than interrupting, let's take agents, for instance, they speak directly to your life.

25:26 Rather than interrupt their day and give them the pitch, which almost always involves something about drying or fire damage or eight ways to remove soot. Oh my God, I'm in the industry and I'm bored saying those words. Okay. What we do instead is try and speak to the agent saying, what are your problems? Okay. How do I find leads for selling insurance? How do I get my people better on the phone? Well, guess what? We want our people better on the phone too. So we're gonna bring speakers in to talk about how do I do things on the phone? How do I generate better leads online? How can I capture leads? How can I maybe buy leads, which I'm already doing and give them to you as a form of reciprocity?

26:11 And then more than anything else, And this is just a super simple example. If I'm going to invite people to an event, whether it's a golf game or at the happy hour or whatever else, I'm going to arrange the people that I'm inviting into this from industries that are complimentary. So if I've got a young agent that I want to give me business, then I'm also going to invite some mid to high end property managers from apartments that are demanding that they sell insurance. And I'm going to introduce these people and then I'm going to bring this guy and I'm going to I'm going to be a concierge and build this bespoke sort of community in which I'm in the middle. I'm the nucleus, but maybe there's business shooting all around me that benefits them.

26:55 And then I'm the gravitational pull. I will bring the good to me by putting the good out. And God, I know that makes me sound like I'm going to say, let's all do yoga and drop some acid. I promise you, I'm not. I'm just telling you that it works, right? Right. It's it is the right thing to do to say what's important to you. If I deliver that, you deliver what's important to me. Period. I love that. But that's ridiculous. So, OK, so one of the things I picked up on, Tom, we were kind of listening to some of your previous interviews and things like that was. you're not afraid to be open about and admit failures. Like, yeah, I tried this.

27:35 It was a hot mess. I tried this. It was a total dumpster fire. How does that come into play like that? You mentioned this word before, radical transparency. How does that come into play in the progress that you've made as an individual and then how teams see you that you're leading? Where does that come from? What does that look like in your role now as president of R1? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So first of all, failure managed appropriately. There's almost no such thing. It's almost mythical. I mean, we've learned, I learned the most valuable lessons that I could possibly learn from failure. And I've had epic ones. I mean, just gargantuan ones, but I am who I am as a result of those failures.

28:18 I wouldn't even be anywhere close to who I am without them. They were absolutely integral to, to my advancement. Um, So what happens over time is that you begin to develop calluses in the right area so that you're not as burned. I mean, I've always wanted to be a cook. I love food too much. And I'm a bit of a hedonist in that if I like something, I like a lot of it. And so cooking is one of those things. And I've always marveled at these line cooks that can just reach into a pan and turn a steak over with their hands and manipulate things. It's because they've been burned enough times that they've lost sensitivity in that area. And that's one of the things that I want to do in my life.

28:58 I want to continue to do battle with the dragons that are almost always made out of fear so that as I conquer one by one by one, it makes me less afraid to. of failing. And being less afraid of failing is a tremendous advantage toward winning. Because that hesitancy that, oh, I'm not sure what will the insurance company think? I'm not sure should I leave this relationship because maybe there'll never be another relationship or, you know, fill in the blank in your life. It's almost always lies. There's always better coming. But you've got to let go of this to grab the next. And that can look like failure.

29:40 But when how many times in your own lives, guys, can you think of instantly, probably one or two areas in which you thought, thank God that life pulled it out of my hand involuntarily because it opened my hand for what was next. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's all that failure is. And yeah, it's jarring at first. And there's this feeling of emptiness and this feeling of, oh, what's going to happen? But what's going to happen actually is the coolest thing in the world, man. Because unless you go through what's going to happen, nothing happens. So, okay. So I'm going to call you out, Tom. Good. Okay, man. So current president, R1, they're fast growing.

30:20 They're kicking butt. You guys as a team are developing something super special. It's easy now to look back and say, oh yeah, failures were the catalyst to my success. How do you get there? Right? How do you get there? What did that look like 10 years ago when some of these failures were happening? How were you facing those dragons then? And what's transpired? What's changed? What was influencing you to give you more confidence in those failures so that now you can look back and say, that's the tool? Oh, so let me talk about one of the darkest times in my life career-wise. Okay. So I went to work for a company. I mean, you tell me whether or not I should name names or whatever.

31:01 I'll name them. You can cut them out and bleep them. I went to work for a company called Ritech. Great. They completely different business model from anything I'd ever been a part of. Certainly different than where I am now. They were looking for a national sales director. that could encourage their field to sell more direct work because they were very, very program focused. I mean, they were literally the exact opposite of where I am now. They had doubled down on the program work. effectively their franchisees had become kind of de facto service centers. And they were looking for someone that could change that culture so that they could have the both and approach. And when I tell you that I failed, I mean, there was very little smell of success to what I did.

31:44 I mean, it came to the end of the year. My supervisor, the COO at the time, was just like, dude, get the hell out of here. I mean, that was, that sucked. You did nothing, right? I mean, at the end of the day, like I didn't move the needle at all. We might have gone in reverse in some way. I mean, my ideas didn't resonate at all. Many of those ideas that didn't resonate in Ritech are the exact same ideas that help us grow 50% in a down year, okay? It's easy to walk out of that and say, oh, the idea was bad. It's not me. It's not, oh, my goodness, right? It was, I had the wrong idea. It was the right idea in the wrong location. Okay, that's the deal.

32:26 What I'm looking for is the right location for my ideas. How can I be authentically me And if I'm uncomfortable or if I'm failing, I just haven't found the right seat on the bus. And that happens with employees. That happens all over the place. Is that what we regard as failure is often just being forced out of a seat that you weren't meant for and being forced to search for another seat. And maybe you sit in another wrong seat, another wrong seat. But then eventually you end up in the seat to go, oh, holy cow. Now, this is it. Right. This is the one. Now. I was so depressed after Ritek. I mean, the personalities of Orion that owns Ritek, man, he's just he's a force of nature, super like energetic guy.

33:09 I'm pretty sure maybe time is as ease these wounds, but I'm pretty sure that he actually literally hated me. I mean, we couldn't have been like any different. And so when I was let go, there was a lot of self-doubt. And that's what led to this idea of becoming a police officer. Like I literally thought to myself, is there something that I can do that's still missional, still allows me to feel like I'm going to work every day for some greater purpose, which is important to me, but is so different that I can at least prove to myself that I'm not a dumbass. Right. That I can learn new things, that I can achieve new skills. I can see the world in some new way. And there are a lot of ways in which becoming a police officer was also a failure.

33:54 I joined because I wanted to. I was sort of buying into this idea that policing was in crisis. They needed good people. I'm a good person. I'll inject myself into that scenario and it'll magically change because after all, it's me. That didn't happen. Policing was the same, probably a little worse in Atlanta from the day that I got there. But I'll tell you what did change me. It absolutely changed me. because I was able, A, to learn absolutely new things, but also learned, and here's the magic of policing. It actually makes police officers such a fantastic resource as an employee that most people don't think realize, at least the good ones, and there are good ones and there are bad ones, but in policing, you have microseconds to make a decision.

34:40 This is something that doesn't get talked about enough. I've got to decide to take action or not to take action. Okay. in just microseconds that makes all the difference in the world. So what you do is you pack your head full of knowledge and then you go out and you try and implement that knowledge and you learn, how do I trust my gut? How do I listen to my instinct and absolutely believe in my gut to do the right thing before I even engage my mind? Does that always work out? No. Sometimes it doesn't work out with tragic results, okay? Which is, One of the reasons why we're in the situation that we're in. But for me, pure blessing, pure luck.

35:20 I really learned to double down on this idea that in the core of who I am, I will make the right decision more than I'll make the wrong one. in the heat of battle, at the right time, I've got that within me. So that little three, four-year vacation in some brand new place that ultimately I left without having done what I wanted to do taught me inside that if I'm in the right location, if I'm hyper-focused on being in the right place at the right time, that when the decision needs to be made, I'll make the right decision more than I'll make the wrong one. And that trust that came directly from my experience in policing has been integral in the success we've seen so far at Restoration One.

36:08 All right, let's take a minute to recognize and thank our MitResto Mastery sponsor, Accelerate Restoration Software. And I'm fully aware by the way, that when I say those last two words, restoration software, that that instantly creates heartburn for some of you out there, right? Because we probably all fall into one of two camps when it comes to software. We've either cobbled together kind of a version of free website tools and spreadsheets just to make our business work Or we're in the camp where we've adopted one of these existing restoration platforms, you know, one that has all the bells and whistles and supposedly does it all. But we can't get our team to consistently adopt it and input information to it.

36:53 Yeah, and that's really where Accelerate has honed their focus. They've created a system that's simple, right? It's intuitive, and it focuses on the most mission-critical information, i.e., guys, your team will actually use it. Let's talk about sales, right? After years of leading sales and marketing teams, the biggest trick is getting them to consistently update notes about their interactions with referral partners and clients. And the essential piece there is there's got to be a mobile app experience. And in our experience, the solutions that were previously out there were just too cumbersome and tricky to use. Yeah. Imagine guys, how your business would change if your entire team was actually consistently using the system.

37:39 Do yourself a favor, go check these guys out at xlrestorationsoftware.com forward slash MRM and check out the special offers they're providing to MRM listeners. All right, let's talk about actionable insights. Owners, GMs, you can't be your business's expert on all things estimating. You might've been three years ago when you're writing sheets in the field, but the industry's always changing and so are the tools. If you're the smartest person in the room when it comes to Xactimate Matterport, how does that scale? You're the bottleneck. I know I'm preaching to the choir, but this is where Actual Insights comes in. They're a technical partner that can equip your team with the latest bleeding edge information and best practices and then update them with webinars and training resources when the game inevitably changes again.

38:28 For this reason, we recommend actual insights to all of our clients. Yeah, three of the kind of big things that stuck out to me when being introduced to AI and their team. First off is this consistently updated training. I mean, at the end of the day, these guys are the experts. They're out front all the time. They're constantly learning new trade secrets and ensuring that your team's got access to those things. A 3,700 plus page database of Xactimate templates. I don't know what else to say here other than... Don't reinvent the wheel. It's already available. Download it, copy it, use it, bam. Database of commonly missed items. I think this is huge. So many of us can change the numbers by just moving the needle a couple points and those commonly missed items can make all the difference in the world.

39:15 So go check them out at value.getinsights.org backslash F-C-G. I just love the idea here of a work in progress. I think that the challenge for so many of us is that we always see where we want to go. We have visions of where we want to land and we just struggle enjoying the journey. Because it feels like everything is in the way until we land at point Z. This is something my wife actually is very gifted in, is that she's just been so diligent in trying to teach me how to enjoy the journey. And as I've gotten older, I'm getting a little bit better at it.

39:55 And man, has it made my life far more enjoyable. But that's what I'm hearing you promote here is this idea of, yeah, we're going to have ups and downs, but there's so many opportunities for us to be adding in a positive way to the journey than necessarily allowing there to be negatives, right? To come from these situations. You talk about being at work in progress. And so I wanted to just hit you up on something with that is, How do you stay motivated while being a work in progress? You had mentioned before that you're a self-help guru. You love learning. You love growing and adapting, which I totally admire and love myself.

40:36 But sometimes the weight of always looking on the horizon and say, I can get better, I can get better, I can do better. You see people not handle being a work in progress in a very healthy way. It becomes more of a drag or a weight on their shoulders versus this motivating mantra. What do you see happening in that dynamic? How's that impact you? Man, oh, fellas. Now, this is the deep end of the pool for me, because here's where it manifests in a negative way in my life. If I'm not careful. If you came to me with a good idea, doesn't matter what it is, like here you present me, this is my idea for the future.

41:18 If I really like that idea, my response to it is here's how you can improve it, right? Wow, that's fantastic. If we tweaked this and added this, we could have a wider audience and blah, blah, blah, blah. What people often hear from me when I go, that's really cool, here's how we can improve it is, you failed, it wasn't good enough, right? And I've got to really concentrate on how I'm working impacting other people, skipping over the how do I stay motivated? Because I'm still spinning on that one. I'm not sure what it is. It's probably just insanity. But the harder part for me is how do I, in my motivation, not accidentally demotivate the people that are around me?

42:00 And this happens in my marriage. It happens in, I wasn't at Restoration One very long before my boss, the COO, Sherry Rose, who's just an absolutely brilliant person, especially from like a business process standpoint. She just knows how to set things up where they work and all that. She's in the right seat on the bus for sure. She had to come to my office and go, hey, listen, we appreciate you being a hard charger, but we're getting complaints from the staff that they've never worked so hard in their entire life and they're about to burn out. And it's just been like six weeks because I like pour so much energy into stuff. And it's so maniacal going after things that I'm, I can burn people out.

42:40 I can depress them. So I've got to sort of pump the brakes on that. I don't know where you guys are on personality tests, but my favorite is the Enneagram. It was introduced accidentally to me along the way, and I'm an eight. And eights are challengers. Yeah. Yeah. And we just thrive off that sort of combative, how do I make it better? How can we get past things? How do we keep going, keep going? It's just everything in my life. I just enjoy working. There's no part of me that looks forward to a retirement on a golf course or pickleball or some, you know, whatever situation. I want to be doing something that makes a difference up until the fact that I just collapse in the process of doing it.

43:24 I really don't know where that comes from. It's just innate. But it can be as much a curse as a blessing because you can find yourself standing alone in the field because everybody else has just sort of dropped off the wagon. So that in terms of work in progress, that's something I'm... constantly learning. And I'm hoping to get into a group of guys that are similar to me, that have conquered that in their own lives and can shape that. That's actually one of the things that I'm looking forward to right now is how can I get a group of people around me, I don't really even care even about industry necessarily, that are a similar person to me that can help me be a better person along those lines. Because work-life balance and that constant improvement received so well by everybody else.

44:13 You're in good company. Teddy Roosevelt, I heard an awesome quote. He said, I'd rather burn out than rust out. And I thought, boy, that is the language of the Enneagram 8, right? I'm a 7'8 with like an 8 wing, I guess they say. And Brandon's a full-on 8. And so that whole hard-charging, like exploration, take over the world, make an impact, change things is something pretty native to us too. One aspect I want to talk about here, and I'm curious about if you felt this and you've had to move through this, is I think as leaders... There's a lot of pressure to act as if.

44:53 To act as if we know exactly what to do. To act as if we have all these different skill sets and understanding and vision and everything else. There's just a lot of inherent pressure of sort of presenting ourselves in a certain way. If we're the owner of the company, a general manager, a president, a COO, or what have you... And I think what I'm really drawn to with you is now you seem to be very comfortable not being the smartest guy in the room, not necessarily being the most together. I mean, you've really shared your failures and you're talking openly about your shortcomings. You're not spending a ton of energy trying to be diplomatic with your language.

45:37 Did you just arrive there or has that been a process? Did you ever feel that pressure to sort of have it all together in front of your employees? Because what I found is it has been a huge cap on my leadership at earlier times in my career, trying to present this front and thinking that somehow I was fooling people. Right. But then recognizing later on that I was really diminishing my leadership by pretending or acting as if. What do you make of that? What's that? How's that been in your story? So I think it comes, it's again, it's a strategy developed to kind of save my life from the darkest times of my life. So if you go back to childhood, and I only know this after spending a lot of money and time and counseling trying to figure this out, and we touched on my childhood being sort of weird, especially looking back on it, it was weird at the time, it seemed totally normal.

46:29 But yeah. One of the things that I really need in my life is to be seen. And whether or not you end up liking me or disliking me, I need the experience of someone having seen me, having at least been confronted with the reality of who I was. And obviously, like every other human, prefer that you like or see value in that. But honestly, early in my life, I noticed that I was really, really good at being a chameleon. I was really good at the as if part, right? I was really excellent at being able to hide flaws and give answers that seem correct in the vaguest possible way and then taking credit if it went right or skirting out of it if it turned out to be wrong.

47:15 And what that did for me over time was even if I was surrounded with people, I felt absolutely alone because no one was seeing me. No one was really understanding who it was that I actually was or what it was that I was really trying to say because I was too busy putting on masks. So I made the decision. And this was again, it's related to. kind of childhood and abandonment issues and faith and losing the faith and having to arrive at a new identity after being a pastor and really probably going through the process of trying identities on and then finally realizing, oh, there's an identity in here that's uniquely my own. What is that?

47:56 And then being absolutely shocked in the best possible way that every single time I shared my authentic struggles, even with complete strangers. I found far more than not that those people had very similar, if not exact same struggles. And that all the way back to our first comments on the obstacle being the way that it was the struggles and our seeking to overcome them. That was the basis of our relationship going forward rather than the overcoming or the hiding of those struggles and being like the right kind of person. It really led to more genuine relationships in my life when we started from a point of weakness rather than strength.

48:40 Like, let me just say right off the rip what a dumpster fire I am. And then once you say that, people go, oh, my God, I am also a dumpster fire. And you're like, I know, isn't it great? But look what we're able to do. Wasn't it magical? And they go, yeah, I'm shocked every day that I'm able to even survive in the world because internally I'm just such a mess. And before long, you're able to kind of have this journey together where you help each other. The other thing I like, my closest friends are absolutely free to tell me when I'm screwing up. And in fact, I demand it. It's the old something's in my teeth deal. You know, don't be polite with me. Don't try and spare my feelings. Directly tell me you're screwing up. Because to me, that's love.

49:20 That's true care. And so I've just built a community around me over time of people who feel absolutely free to both tell me where I'm screwing up, but also tell me where I'm doing well. And when they tell me that I'm doing well, it means so much more when I know they'd also tell me where I'm screwing up. So I don't know if I answered the question, but that's at least getting close. That's so good. And you actually, it's such a good segue into this other curiosity that I had. What role does love play in leadership? What does that mean to you when I use that word? It's not a word that we talk about much in business. What does that mean to you? What role does love play?

50:01 You guys are asking really good questions. Let me say this. I think it's a mistake for people to draw hard lines between the work we do and the rest of our life. And they want to put their personal life in another silo and then maybe hobbies over here. And so we're constantly kind of opening and unlocking doors to walk into this area of our life versus the other. And I've just never been that person. I spend so much time at work. or thinking about work, that it would push out every other area of my life if I didn't allow myself to bring my total self into wherever I was, be it my family, be it friends, work associates.

50:51 So the first thing I think of when you think that is that probably a lot of people would be love has no place in work. Right. Work is about the policy manual. It's about the rules. It's about the profit motive and really leave your emotion out of it and just stick to the book. Right. That love is something that belongs somewhere else. And I could not disagree more because really you're batting around what makes R1 special. I don't consider a home restored if we didn't realize that the kid was planning a birthday party and now the birthday party is delayed and maybe won't even happen because the house is under reconstruction or whatever. If we're not aware of those facts and we don't actually work to solve that problem, then have we restored anything?

51:36 We put up new drywall maybe. Maybe the house is at a normal moisture point or whatever. But if we didn't put the door jam back in that had the heights written on it in the new kitchen, then did we restore anything? And that the source of those sort of problems comes from a place of love, comes from a place of at least recognizing that love exists in the space that we're trying to work in. And to the degree that we ignore that or don't realize that, we do an incomplete job. So that's part of the answer. And then the other answer is that love, at least for an eight, it's not always pleasant, that love can mean a variety of things from inside the company.

52:24 It can mean letting somebody go because you know there's not a right seat on the bus for them in your company and that you know because you love them. that after the shock and after the initial sort of, oh, my God, what am I going to do? They're going to land someplace and they're going to look back and it could be months later. You've got to be willing to bear the brunt of that disdain or that feeling of unfairness that they're going to look back, even if it's just in their heart of hearts and go, thank God they let me out of that situation where I was more miserable than I even knew because now I'm in this new spot. That also comes from a place of love. So yeah, it's such an interesting question.

53:05 I don't, it's, I think that would be kind of as far as I could get. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's crystal clear actually. And I think what I'm hearing when you say some of those things too, Tom, is that we have a misconception of love, of that term as immediately being adopted as some soft, gushy, ushy, inability to hold teams accountable, inability to rise to the occasion or overcome obstacles or whatever. And that's, it's just not truth. Um, yeah. We are just huge culture nerds. We've always believed that there's something special about not just creating a business, but creating a platform, a platform for influence and having positive impact on people, clients, external, internal.

53:47 And I think those things that you said about Love's role, where it's like, well, it's got to shape the way we're taking care of our client. It shapes what is a win of taking care of our those times where we have to hold the line and be aggressive about accountability because that is, as leaders, showing love to our downline. So I think if we could have pitched a better softball, I don't know, it landed well. So for me, it's super impactful and meaningful. I want to talk about R1 again, because a lot of the things you say have just piqued a lot of curiosity in Brandon and I. And so I'm curious what you would say about, is the responsibility of a franchisor to their franchisees.

54:32 What do you believe a franchise owes their franchisees in exchange for the fees, the royalty, etc.? What does it mean to support franchisees from your perspective as part of the franchisor? Wow, that really is something that we think about almost every single day. And so I don't know that we've arrived at the final answer. I'll give you a snapshot of where we are as long as you allow that it's a journey and we've not yet arrived. So that's number one. Moving into business, whether you're a pure entrepreneur or whether you're a franchise entrepreneur, which there are differences, When you work in the day-to-day kind of rat race that so many of our franchisees come out of, the trajectory is it starts off easy and it ends up hard.

55:23 When you enter into business, it starts hard and ends up easy if you've done everything correctly. So you're reversing it. So the first and primary obligation of a franchisor is to prepare someone for that initial shockwave of difficulty, which is often harder than the job they left because the job was hard, if that makes sense. So it's there to support that sort of initial realization that, holy moly, this is not going to be easy and standing beside them in that initial storm. But the issue with franchising is, and we have been so fortunate with this, is that we have an incredibly low churn rate.

56:09 Our franchisees just don't typically fail. And one of the reasons for that is that the role of a franchisor is very simply put in a 30,000-foot view. It's meant to make success as an entrepreneur more likely. That's it. You cannot guarantee it. You will have franchisees fail. You'll have guys that seem to have it all lined up and you think it's going to work and it doesn't. And you've got guys that you think, they don't have a prayer in the world. There's no way this guy going to make it. And he's ultimately super successful, but all you can do at the end of the day is make success more likely. Hopefully every day you're doing a little something to make it even more likely than the day before.

56:52 but you're just all franchising does is make it more likely. So you do that by trying to have the best systems, trying to have the best technology, et cetera. But I can tell you, and I don't want to bore you, but let's talk philosophically about a different approach that I take to franchising. So my initial very first job in franchising was ServPro, great company. I respect everything that ServPro is and does. I've got no problem with them at all. We're a different, entirely different kind of company. The traditional franchisor tries to become larger and larger and larger. I have a huge training department. I've got a products department. Maybe we even develop our own white labeled products and we've got our own color dehumidifiers and we've got all this.

57:40 There's a lot of ownership in that. I don't see the role of franchisor as being that. That's all pretty much window dressing. I think we all do essentially the same thing. What I see myself as a franchisor is really a super powered concierge. I'm going to go out into the marketplace and I'm going to find the very, very best that's out there in terms of technology, in terms of consulting, in terms of product. And I'm going to try and bring collective bargaining and at-scale buying power to reduce the cost to my franchisees. But I'm not going to invent something. I'm going to bring it in and add it in an open AI environment.

58:23 And plug it into my organization. And as long as that is that relation is symbiotic, then that piece can hang on. The second it's not, then we unplug and replug. So we've looked at, instead of saying we're going to teach for weeks on end in our own academy how to drive. We're not the absolute best dryers on the planet. I mean, that's not, we didn't invent drying. So we're going to go out and we're going to partner with Chuck DeWall Academy or REITs or somebody else and bring the drying that's already top shelf into our organization. And we're, instead of coming to our academy, you're going to go to that. And then if you want to, if you want to have consulting or have people, I'll have a lean staff of guys and I'm going to try and recruit top talent.

59:08 But I'm not going to ignore bringing outside consulting in and have that outside consulting be a part of my organization because you're going to bring outside pollen into my field and change my product so that it changes for the better. The more that I build walls around my silo, the more entropy happens, the more sort of inbred an organization becomes and blind to what's going on. in the world around and restoration benefits greatly from having a non siloed approach. So I'm going out and trying to find the best resources and bring them to bear on my network. rather than creating things that are white labeled within it. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure.

59:49 I want to be cognizant of time, but I got to ask you a leadership question. One of the things that we see happening, and I know you've experienced this too. In fact, probably with the rapid growth of R1, maybe there's times where you're experiencing it firsthand, but we see firms, we see contractors who, We do this inevitable internal promotion based on watching someone be skilled or have successes in a particular area of our business. So we take a lead complex, a large loss mitigation tech, and we see how successful they've been in the field. And we eventually move them up and make them a mitigation manager. Well, there's no accompaniment of advancement or proactive engagement on this leadership training, right?

1:00:32 Like helping them adjust their skill set for this new list of priorities that they have to execute on. And so we watch team members basically kind of get beat up and burn out because we didn't help them, right? We didn't increase their leadership competency to match the new areas of responsibility. Right. Where have you seen that come to play, either with your franchisees or within some of the experiences that you've had? And what do you give advice as far as what are two or three things we can do as leaders to do a better job of equipping these young men and women that are coming up in our ranks to take on these new areas of responsibility?

1:01:18 First of all, that's huge, okay? We're in a labor shortage and we need to, A, attract top talent. And we've got to keep top talent. I think it all goes down. And here's another buzzword that we could unpack for another hour. But you said you're culture nerds. I'm huge into the culture that we have in our businesses. And that if you can keep people in your organization for much longer than you normally would, not through pay or benefits, all those things are important, but through the culture you have. So I'm big into that. Short answer is that's an excellent question. And I don't know what we're currently doing about it. First of all, where I thought you might be going with that is that we often take people and we move them up.

1:02:01 I think it was Tom Peterson from a business perspective says that we just promote people until they're not useful anymore and then they stay there. Right. So we don't want to do that. We don't want to get a great guy and go, now you're going to be in management and he's not good at management, but that's where he stays sort of screwing everything up. Yeah. What we're doing currently right now is part of being a franchisee, the magic of the franchisee is what you're getting from the franchisor. OK, but that can see your network again in that route marketing. Like I've just got this many franchisees. If you turn it up on its side, you can see all the interconnectedness. The real power long term in being a franchisee is the combined knowledge of your network.

1:02:43 So part of what I'm doing is connecting manager to manager, office person to office person, so that they benefit from best practices across the spectrum of businesses, rather than just trying to what resources can I drip into your bucket and you just swim in that bucket. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So just for clarity, what I'm hearing you say is that let's get some extended dialogue happening so that a new MIT manager has someone they can look to or lean on and say, hey, you've been doing this for two years. Where do I focus my attention first? Or what do I have to learn here? Whatever the case may be. Yeah, that's kind of where we're focused right now.

1:03:25 I think long term... what we need to be able to do is to go outside of our organization and figure out, okay, how, what exists out there as a solution and how do I bring it in? I'm really hyper-focused on cross-pollinization. I love meeting with guys from other restoration companies. I like meeting people from other industries. I mean, when I'm selling, and I love sales, I still try to be plugged into some sales aspect because it's kind of where I came through and it's what I love the most. But I, I will often book time in someone's office that could potentially give me work. And we'll spend the entire time with me just quizzing them about how they handle their problems in their business and how do they manage these things and sort of collecting that or maybe even giving some of that advice in return.

1:04:10 And we never get around to restoration. But what happens is once the restoration does come up. It's always such a smoother transition, right? It's always just sort of an obvious thing we're going to talk about rather than something that we shoehorn into the time. So I would much rather have a much longer sales cycle, but end up coming out of it not with just a new account, but with new knowledge about everything that we're talking about. it's hard not to be a little enamored by a lot of the pieces that we've touched on. I mean, I know of course too, it's like we, we have conversations on concepts where they're kind of in their advanced stages, a lot of looking back and saying, this is what we've learned. But I think there's so much here for our listeners to hold onto is, there's this idea of we can still dream big.

1:04:55 We can still have really high expectations as business owners, as people who are producing profits and providing services in our industry. And I'm excited about that because for the last handful of years, I feel like the growing conversation has been... Oh, the weight of TPAs. Oh, the weight of the changing industry. Oh, it just does not seem like there's been a lot of motivating conversations happening. And so I think it's fun to me to have guests like you on the show to be like, no, we can be pumped. Yes, there's challenges right now. But there's so much for us to do and create and be motivated by and concepts like love and concepts like developing downline leaders.

1:05:40 These are all missions that are very worthwhile, highly rewarding. And this platform and this space that we're in right now is a place for all of it to be used. It can all happen right here. We don't have to leave to achieve it. It's fun. It feels like a fresh conversation, right? There's some really cool new emerging conversations that are happening in our industry. And I think today was one of those. It's been really, really fun to talk to you, Tom. Oh man, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. What a blessing to even get to meet you guys. And yeah, I mean, your facial hair alone makes you work. It's super cool. Well, you know, when you've lost it all on top, it's the final frontier, you know, plenty of it grows on the back and on the face.

1:06:26 It's like, all right, you just go with what you got, right? That's funny. The reality of it is, is that our experience with you has been really awesome, Tom. And we're very likely to try to chase you down again in the near future and get you back on the show and explore some areas we have yet to go. But again, man, thank you so much. We really appreciated your time. Thank you so much. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of the MRM podcast. And if you got something out of it, share it with a friend, hit subscribe, hit follow, leave us a five-star review. Thanks a lot.