Mental Fitness in Startup Success w/ Scott Jennings | Ep. 96

In this podcast episode, David and Gary speak with the CEO and Founder of Service RX, Scott Jennings. They discuss all things old toyotas, craigslist, outsourcing your contractors and they explore the role that fitness and wellness has in business success.

Links:

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About/dp/0887307280

https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-jennings-8591a234/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/servicerx/about/

https://gosrx.com/

https://inmatestoentrepreneurs.org/

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

David: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host. And I'm joined as always by Gary Voigt with Gary Boyd for your boy, I don't know. Little known fact that I'm going to expose you today. If you've ever seen the mascot for Dr. Squatch. That's scary. That's who they figured out. They wanted a very hairy individual to be their spokesperson. So what you're seeing there's not actually a black shirt now. That's just gearing.

Gary: 0:35

It's just matted down. cesta but it smells good. It smells like it does smell like the Millennium Falcon, right?

David: 0:44

I have I actually have a subscription, not a subscription. I have some of their soaps. And they are lovely. It's not sponsored. I just like their soap. And Gary looks very fuzzy today. So there's, there it is. You got the extra girth on the beard today. Very nice.

Gary: 0:58

It's getting grayer too. So you and your brother,

David: 1:01

it's gonna be beautiful. All right. More importantly, we are joined today by Scott Jennings, who is the CEO at service our x a wellness products service provider. Hello, Scott, how are you?

Scott: 1:13

Hey, guys, how are you all today? Thanks for having me.

David: 1:16

Yeah, glad. Glad to have you. So we have been talking about all sorts of things. And I want to dive, I want to dive straight into a question that is probably totally out of left field that a little bit inside baseball, we give everyone notes as to what we're going to talk about. And then I quickly ignore all of them. And so I'm totally coming out of left field here. But you work and what first off? In your words, what is service RX, because I'm gonna play off of that for just a second.

Scott: 1:46

It's simple. I mean, you can't get any more simple than what we do in service. Our X is a fitness equipment and hydro massage, maintenance and repair company. So think about it. All the places that there's fitness equipment, from your home, to your hotel, to your apartment community, to the gym, to a cruise ship to the military, those are the places that we go to maintain and repair fitness equipment.

David: 2:08

Okay, so I'm gonna play off of that for a second, we'll get back to your company and starting it and all of that in a bit. But I want to jump in and talk about fitness for a second. And because I think because fitness is obviously one of your things, clearly you're a fitness person, if you are in that industry. How is it when it comes to running a business or running a company? How important is fitness for anybody? Well,

Scott: 2:37

first, not everybody in our industry is fit. I would like to tell you that. Thank God, this is a small screen. Because I like to tell people, potato is a shape. And I'm in it. All right. Okay. I know this, and I'll speak to personal experience of recent. So I have been pushing for years and years and years not to do any field work whatsoever. Not to help out. Just like everybody else, we suffer through hiring issues. And so when you have a certain amount of preventive maintenance contracts that gotta get done and things like this, and you have not the manpower to get it done. Well, everybody who's available gets to go help. And so here recently, I am in office at desk, more, more and more, which is exactly what I want to be doing. That I have become the weakest I've ever been out of shape, for sure. And I have never felt this sluggish in my life. To the point it's like, okay, for the first time. In a long time, I need to go make sure that I actually have a exercise routine, whether that's going to the gym, going outside, for walks to do whatever it's got to change because I am I'm slowing down and it's not acceptable. Coffee, you know, I mean, I literally just made a cup before getting on here. And it's not doing the trick anymore. Right? So if we look at all the influencers online, they all say the same thing. Take care of yourself, take care of yourself physically, and it will pay dividends in every aspect of your life, especially your business. So I'll tell you it's super important. I I've physically moved heavy objects since I was 20 years old. I turned 50 this year. And that was office furniture for a long time. And then it's been the fitness equipment industry for a long time and then I may have done small things like landscaping and stuff like that where you're digging ditches so this is the first time I've ever really held down a seat for an extended period. And I'm struggling not to like, feel physically.

David: 5:09

So I think I bring it up not to put you on the spot by any stretch of the imagination. My my point in asking is, I mean, I'm getting older, I will be 45 this year. And I'm not as old as Gary, thankfully. But I am. There you go, I am getting up there. And I read a thing that said, every decade of your life, I think starting at 30, your body loses approximately 7% of your muscle mass. And so if you start adding those up, 40 5060 years old, those that 7% starts to get real ugly. And I remember my dad, my dad has built like I am, which is like a fire hydrant. And it's, he told me when he was 70, that he couldn't carry the groceries in, in one trip, which is sounds so silly, but that's like a thing for my old family is like, you know, we don't need more than one trip, those go. And we have, you know, the bags hanging off of all of our appendages. And he couldn't do that for the first time. And now he doesn't work out didn't do anything, it was just natural loosing of the string. And so that's kind of what became a thing for me is I didn't want to follow that path. But I think the reason I bring it up in the context of this podcast, is because I think health is often left behind in the business space. It's work hard, work a lot hours, get it done, whatever, right? When you're in your health, often, like you're saying, you're sitting down often, if you're running a startup, most likely, you're at a desk. And it suffers. And I think it's worth talking about in a way that says, hey, running a business shouldn't come at the detriment of your own health, because that's inadvertently going to affect your business.

Scott: 7:01

Oh, absolutely. So I would look at it this way. And I'm coming from the aspect of I've always had a very physical work environment, right. And I'm the weakest I've ever been. And it is very evident when I go help a technician in the field or whatever. I mean, because we're, we're, we may have to move. Okay, example being I was at what university I was at UNC last week, working with two newer Tech's who have never changed a treadmill belt on a Woodway treadmill, which is Woodway. treadmills has always been designed for athletes, right? So this belt is 100 pounds or more. It's it's heavy, right? To move a Woodway treadmill, it doesn't have rollers. And I found myself having a hard time squatting, grabbing part of it, while the other technician who is young and fit was grabbing the other end in helping him move. Right. And it's just, it just shows up. So also see a change in attitude. You know, we went through the last several years of grind, grind, grind, go, go go this mentality, and we're starting to see this flip people going, No, you know, that's fine if you're doing nine hours a day, but what are you taking care of you? You know, when are you taking care of you. And so the wellness space has been growing. Now here we have been pushing to take care of more of the wellness side and that being like we we are servicing a lot of new franchise called Hot works, where they're not new, but they're exploding right now. And they they have a bunch of saunas, and then we have other friends in the space. Like we're friends with the ownership of a forthcoming franchise that you're gonna see around your areas called sweat house. And then there's the another one called perspire, which are these, you know, dry heat saunas. And we were looking at, you know, like, we've started entering going to can we have a role to play, right? Because now besides the with the health industry, besides the physical side, now we have this wellness side of sauna cold plunge. We're talking more and more about nootropics we're talking about diet, if you're on if you're on YouTube a lot or even watching TV, you know, ag one athletic greens is consistently you know, has videos out and I've been taking Athletic Greens now for I get better, I'm getting closer to a year, and I feel 10 times better. You know,

David: 9:52

it's funny, it's funny you say that I actually I

Gary: 9:54

have friends looking into them. Yeah, so

Scott: 9:57

I found another product that hopefully arrives today. Tomorrow, that is like a third of the price. And it was rated to be just as good of a product. But it's American made, instead of think ag one is New Zealand or something like that. It doesn't and it's all organic versus ag one fully imitators is not. It doesn't have any filler, that kind of stuff. So, you know, but either way goes, like I travel, I go out of country in in August, and I'll get some ag one packs to go with me while I'm gone, you know, there is something to it, we have a lack of stuff. So wellness, for this very long answer to wellness is become extremely important to I think us as Americans, especially post pandemic, because we all had our tails handed to us, I don't know if I get COVID twice. Now, excuse me, I get COVID Once I got the shots, the shots kicked my tail. And then I got the flu here this past year, and I'd never get the flu. And it's just like, You know what, I'm getting older. And this sucks. Just take care of myself. Yeah, in rounds, when when COVID hit we, every one of our employees who are in the field really thought we would never get sick. Because a service technician that that works in a gym is living in everybody's swept. So they're exuding all of their, their sickness as they're working out. And so we're like we live in that we're never gonna get sick, you know, we get sick. That's okay. But we wellness has become super important to where this world where everything's going. We're just not looking at so much on the physical aspect. But we're also looking at the mental and the dietary aspects a little bit more so than before.

Gary: 11:52

I'm seeing a lot more attention being paid to not just the saunas, but the sweating and the cold plunge thing. Like, it seems like that's the new the new hotness is the ice bath. So it seems like there's a couple of companies coming up now with just like the refrigerated you know, water tanks, you just add a little bit of ice for use at the time where it's going to be freezing cold. And then you wind for three minutes to come out. And

Scott: 12:16

what most people don't understand they need a lot of maintenance. They need a lot of maintenance.

David: 12:22

A lot of tech buying them. What No,

Scott: 12:24

no, no, no, there's not. There's really not it is nothing more than just think about what your Jacuzzi is, is just a pump. It's a chiller and water and a filtration system that the Fitbit, what we've learned and why we are not in fact any go change my LinkedIn stuff, because we're not going to enter the cold plunge space is because the filters are just like you would use on your house. Right? The screw unchain. But as soon as they clog super fast, because it has to stay super pure, your body so much dirtier than the water that you're cleaning elsewhere. Right. And it affects the chiller. So what I learned going down the sweat house and talking with them, is they literally have to change their filters MOS every single day to every three days, you know, just just for business. It will exactly I mean, it's just like non stop, you know. And so what that told us is that we didn't have a place in the industry because that's like taking care, it's like taking care of a pool, essentially. You know, so if you're going to buy one, you need to look at as I hadn't have the maintenance of a pool, it might just be me that that means that each month each week, I'm probably going to be changing a filter, or every you know, two weeks I will be changing the filter, I will need to empty it because that water's got to circulate it will turn scummy because you're not putting chlorine and you're not putting salt in it. You're not putting distilled water in it. So if you're putting out of the tap water and and that has minerals and other stuff in it, that will turn to slime. So you got to look at it that way before you go diving and

David: 14:06

if Gary had one he'd have changed filters every couple of hours.

Gary: 14:10

Well, my matted down Dr. squatched chest hair would filter the waterfall

David: 14:20

Okay, Oh, that's gross. I have to sleep, then. No. Oh my gosh. Okay. So I want to back up please, please very far, far away from that. And so tell me how are you the founder of service RX? Are you just running it out of this? How did it work?

Scott: 14:37

No, I'm the founder. Back in 2020 10. Post, you know, 2008 apocalypse. The world sucks. I fully admit and it's I guess it's really a part of my story. I'm not scared to hide it. Sometimes we'll say it here. I mean, people know I I've been sober for 16 years. And so pre sober. I was a really good drug dealer until I wasn't a good drug dealer.

David: 15:08

That makes sense. I'm watching Breaking Bad right now. So,

Scott: 15:12

yeah, um, yeah. So I mean, I'd sell drugs and sell or something in some way, shape or form since I was 16 or 17 years old. And finally got caught in my late 30s. I was a full blown addict. Alcoholic was always able to sort of keep work, but had really reached the point at this point in time when I finally got busted that, um, that I knew I was going to die or something, it really gone overboard, right? Things have dramatically changed. That being that cocaine had entered my life. And at that point in time, and then it was really taking me down. And so anyhow, I got sober, I got incarcerated, because I got sober. I got sober through incarceration, okay, let's put it that way. I came home. And I learned what the second sentence is. Alright. So once you're once you have a second sentence, you're a felon, your whole world changes dramatically. You can't live the most apartment communities, a lot of jobs will no longer take you mobile step. Anyhow, I ended up in this industry simply because I'd been landscaping. I couldn't get a decent job. Someone calls me through Craigslist in 2020 10. It was it was it was September of 2010. I started with the company repairing as a contractor repairing home fitness equipment. By 2011. I had met my now wife, she had made the mistake of saying why don't you start your own business not knowing my entrepreneurial side the way I did. And I'm and here we are. I started with an 86 Toyota pickup truck, a bag of tools and 75 bucks. And we just finished franchise Development here at the beginning of the year. And we have two other franchises at this point in time, and hope to hopefully we'll add another at the end of the year. You're hell bent on world domination, and making service RX synonymous with the fitness equipment and wellness industry as roto rooter is to plumbing.

Gary: 17:20

Nice, nice. Well, congratulations on your sobriety.

Scott: 17:24

No, thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. So if anybody, if anybody thinks that it doesn't work? Well, you know, I'll keep my 16 years at this point in time.

David: 17:34

So, starting, so your story is obviously a lot more colorful than most of our current guests. But starting out, you still have the same problem. So you're in your 86 pickup truck, and a bag of tools. How did you find clients?

Scott: 17:49

So I tell people this all the time. In fact, I was just talking to some guy this weekend. And I do it still today, I believe in the saying keep it simple, stupid. And if you don't ask the answers, always no. So not knowing what I was doing at all. I started calling manufacturers and saying, Hi, I have been a service tech in the resident, you know, on the residential side for the last year. And I'm starting my own business. And I was wondering if there was an opportunity for me, it's my business to provide service work for you the manufacturer in some kind of that terms? And then I'd say, you know, and they go, Well, let's see. And I said, Look, first and foremost, I don't really know what I'm doing right now. So please talk to me like them, too. And here we are. I mean, I was literally that honest. And, you know, you just start stacking manufacturers at first getting warranty work. And then slowly but surely, you know, you start just you learn more and more. And that's the interesting too, is that I started a business when I didn't know what I was even doing yet in the industry. It was just out of desperation.

David: 18:57

So did you have an idea that you wanted to start a company? Are we I mean, I'm assuming at first you said desperation. You're just trying to fill your pockets, right? You're trying to pay your bills, and keep moving, right. So when did it switch from I need to fill my pockets to hey, I've got a business here. I could fill other people's pockets as well. When did that mind shift happen?

Scott: 19:23

It probably you know, really, that didn't probably really happen until well, okay. The first like hiring people is based on it's still the addictive personality of more more in a so that's really where the first contractor comes into play. How can I get more money and leverage someone else doing it? Right. And I played middleman. So I used to tell people that my first it's only my first several years for sure. It's like approach business like a drug deal. You know, how can I play middleman and in still get something out of it? I don't I know that back in maybe 2016 1718, somewhere in there. I started discussing franchising, but not really it was just more of a thought. And I looked into what does franchising cost to build? At that point in time, you know, I didn't have $50,000 to throw towards franchising. And sure as heck, I'm glad I didn't, because I sure as heck wasn't mature enough to understand what it was really going to take. So that's probably where the first thought came in. But it took all the way till 2022 for it to come to fruition.

David: 20:51

But you had employees and an office? And I'm assuming all of that locally, way before that?

Scott: 20:57

No, yeah, yeah. I mean, we've, so we are 100 built in the cloud. For warehousing, we use climate controlled storage. Because in our industry, there are so many different models of a treadmill, that you would literally have to drive around with a an auto parts store, if you're going to really carry a lot of parts. Now there are people who do carry parts, and they carry very specific parts. But those individuals often do very specific work for us. So only certain manufacturers. We work with them all. So I think we started turning people into employees in it 2013 or 14. And I think that really came from the fact that now you know, we finally got a bookkeeper who's working in the CPA firm, and they're like, look, you're treating 1099 employees, that people contractors, just like an employee, you're walking a line that you might need to figure out what you do, and it gets a bit in trouble. I don't want to do that, again. I want to be 100% aboveboard in my life. And that's when we turned around and started bringing contractors in as employees. And then you know, then that comes with, Oh, I gotta buy you a car or a vehicle, right? I gotta start doing this. It's got to start doing that. And so yeah, so I guess it was an evolution one step at a time. And it's usually done through hard knocks. So that

David: 22:49

brings up a good point, though, I think. A lot of people, misuse contractors, yes. And they should have been employees a long time beforehand. Even people who really no business, some people do it on purpose. Because in a lot of ways, it's cheaper to you don't have to buy those cars and stuff. But generally speaking from what it's correct me if I'm wrong, because you're probably more familiar with this. Generally speaking, if you're telling a contractor where to be what to do, how to do it, and even worse, if you're making them wear your shirt. They are now employees, whether you realize it or not. Yes. About right.

Scott: 23:32

Your credit. And that's more so if, if it just goes on month after month, after month after year after year, right. It's one thing if you have you know, Rudy Tooty, fresh and fruity drywall service, who is going to work for you while you have work. But as soon as you don't have work, they take off and they go find something else. Like you say, hey, let's just say you're, you know, you're in the room, you're in the home investment side of things, right? You know, and you can keep someone busy 80% of the time. So they're your guy that you go to, but you treat them like a business, they're still a 1099 business to you. And then they take off. Well, that's not the same as no if ands or buts, they only answer to you, then you've crossed the line. Right.

David: 24:27

And I think I think that's important to kind of put that in the back of your mind any business owners out there. You've got to keep that in mind. Because if you're dominating if even if you brought someone on as a freelancer, I've been reading about this some, if you bring someone on as a contractor, and now you're their only client, like in our case, if we hire a dev, and he is only hours for month and month and month and month, at some point, they're crossing a line whether you want them to or not. So you kind of have to figure that out, I mean, and again, that in our world, when we're all remote, no one's wearing uniforms and all of that it's not quite as cut and dry. But if we are dominating, and we're preventing them from getting other clients, you got to really think about that. And you don't want to get in trouble because you can get, I think if if you get audited, you can get in trouble for like a lot of back taxes and sorts of stuff that in this one, Uber, and all of them been fighting for years, but you just want to be careful when you're running your business, that you're not crossing that line, and then having to pay a bunch of fees, penalties and whatever's

Scott: 25:33

Yeah, definitely. And that's what they're doing with Uber. I mean, that's why all these laws are changing. They're trying to kill the gig economy in its own way. That's why, you know, now they're watching your deposits through Venmo, and Cash App and all that kind of stuff. Because the gig economy in its own way, shape or form has, has really changed the game when it comes to 1099, quote, unquote, right? You know, so you got to, you got to pay attention to what's going on, because they want they want their employment tax. They want their cut, you know, I mean, let's let's not let's be real, there's God. There's the IRS, you know, inspectors, people like that in government, and then there's your mother. And then there's the rest of us. And you don't want to mess with anything above you there. Right. You know, so. So don't mess with the IRS play aboveboard. And also to they really, it's really like, when you get into dollar amounts that start making sense, they could really care less probably, and it doesn't mean go out and do it, this isn't licensed to do it. But they could probably really care less if you're only making 200 $250,000 a year. But you know, suddenly you start getting three 400 Dots out$100,000 a year, and you're starting to pay someone a legitimate like income, and whatnot, and they go, What am I not getting out of this? And, you know, you get underneath the some of the IRS and it could be a bad day.

David: 27:08

Yeah, it gets ugly, pretty quick.

Gary: 27:09

I got a question. So you took on a lot of business enough to where you needed to hire contractors to help get that done. At what point did you need to start doing like marketing efforts to try to get even more clients to then accommodate the need for more for more contractors? And what were those marketing efforts?

Scott: 27:32

Marketing for us has been an interesting and super slow learning curve. I'm in such a niche. marketers do not know what to do with me. And here's why. Because if you need what I do, you're going to type in some very basic keywords, treadmill repair, elliptical repair, who services fitness equipment near me. And that's about it. And so if I do really good SEO work, and really good GMB page work, then I don't need to really advertise the same way that everybody else has been doing well,

Gary: 28:20

I mean, essentially, that's still advertising and marketing is just going directly optimizing the whole internet search part of it, you're not actually putting out like ad campaigns, postcards, and stuff like that. But yeah, so So is that what you've been doing? Yeah. So that's

Scott: 28:35

really what got us to where we are. And then now we're switching into especially because, you know, we have franchisees and now we're looking to go national. I've built a CRM and air table that's just about finished. And I'm working with the overseas developer, where what we'll start doing is we will probably start well, one we're learning to turn our the technicians into salespeople for marketing, so they're required, just like we started learning in the HVAC world and stuff like that, let's back up. We don't have upsell products, right? If I walk into your home as a plumber, HVAC appliance guy can usually find something to upsell, right? I don't have that in the fitness space, I have repair and maintenance. And that's about it. Now, if the tech is looking for a problem when they're in there, that can be an upsell. But you know, again, it's hit or miss. So we've turned our technicians into salespeople where they're required to go introduce our organization to a hotel and apartment community, somebody to five of them a week, right just stop in hand some literature, we have some giveaway things that we give them so that hopefully we stay in front of them. My next goal is to start geo targeting, where when they put that stuff into the CRM that they were there that we start geofencing that location and for the next 30 days, all they do is start six Surface RX in their social medias and go from there

Gary: 30:05

so highly targeted digital marketing.

Scott: 30:07

Exactly. Yeah, that's that's the ultimate goal moving forward as our finances for marketing grow, because it has been an extremely small budget for a long

Gary: 30:18

time. Do you guys also offer like service contracts, or like any kind of subscription based stuff for periods of time?

Scott: 30:27

Yeah, we do pit what we do pm agreements, we don't do contracts or reason why it's an agreement is for our customers, you have 30 days out, and we have a 30 day out. Alright, um, that way, if you like us, you'll keep us if you don't like us, well, you can let us go. And if we don't like you, we can let you go to. That being said, I've really been going this year going through and revising a lot of contracts. And B because of cost of operation raising pricing. And we have so many customers that are 789 10 years old. And we've never changed the way we do business, we're not locking you in, we're not threatening. So we do it that way. And so are for us agreements, or they can be monthly, depending on the organization, quarterly, or BI monthly, quarterly, or every six months, or we don't really mess with year stuff too much. That we have recently, and at times thrown around that idea of how can we take someone who's on a quarterly model and turn them into a monthly subscription to you know, stabilize our financial flow, so that you understand, you know, the fitness equipment, we're so niche that we don't operate like a lot of other people. And the reality is, this is I will fully admit, you know, I have been one of the immature not getting their act together business owners for a very long time until the last three or four years. And it starts to finally click right. And but then it was so physically busy, that it did not have time to get into office, and really work on systems and processes the way it needed to be until really the pandemic hit. That that's been it's been a saving grace for us in a lot of ways. It was It was the scariest and hardest thing in the world to do. I mean, we were bumping, we were finally bumping about a million dollars, like in 2019, we bumped right up to a million dollars. So I knew it was like the next year, we're going to break it. Right, finally, you know, and, um, and I think in 2020, we did like$222,000 or so. Yeah. COVID. Yeah, but you know, what we learned, we became better, we became stronger. And so we didn't have a marketing budget, we didn't have a lot of things. And so it really kicked off this whole growing up thing. And also to and what's really helped me put a lot of things in context here recently is I finally had the chance to listen to the E Myth which I listened to the E Myth revisited. And that gave me language to understand how to communicate what was going on. And then from the E Myth, I found someone who came out of the E Myth. Alan Alan Levy, Alan Levy. Anyhow, he owns seven power contractor. And he builds systems and processes for the the the trades industries that are based out of E Myth. And eat the E Myth gave me the opportunity to go, huh. You have the technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. Well, I realized I'm the technician in the entrepreneur, and I'm not a good manager, that my partner is the technician in the manager or the operator, right. And now that I'm out of field constantly, we can now communicate and build systems where before he couldn't, he could build systems. But he couldn't dream the next system, right? He was only building certain things that worked for him. And so we've actually exploded in the past year and a half on the quality of the business that we're building. And it was perfect timing with franchising, because we knew once we had the time to sit down, did things will change dramatically. And I know I know that that I learned this when I taught now that I have this language when I'm talking to a lot of business owners. I realize I'm talking to a technician or a manager or an entrepreneur, and they don't know how to feed off three and balance it out. So in the last six months, I've really been feeding my manager side in building tools. To make things faster, easier, yeah, I have for a long time worked with an organization called inmates to entrepreneurs. And so we're the oldest organization of our kind where we teach business one on one to those who are incarcerated, and those who are formerly incarcerated, or judicially challenged. And, and learning this bit of language as I go into a prison to talk, or as we've, you know, taught in various different forms on Zoom. It's really helped me teach the basics of business, because now I even understand myself better. You know? Well, that's a great

Gary: 35:44

segue. I was just gonna say you're teaching inmates and other people. The basics of business, one of the questions we ask every one of our guests is, what are the top three pieces of advice you have for any entrepreneur, new business or startup? So I'm assuming over the course of time, you've kind of come up with at least three or maybe more than three. But if you could break it down into your top three pieces of advice, what would you get?

Scott: 36:09

So top three pieces of advice that I think I've probably learned out of teaching for in for IDE. Focus, focus. So many people see the squirrel, you know, and they tried to do way too much. Brian Tracy has a wonderful talk. On YouTube, I can't remember the context in which he, which I wish I could remember the name of the video, but he talked about the long thing in the value of focus. Entrepreneurs, we have to make quick decisions and good decisions, right? More and our good decisions have to be they don't have to be right all the time. But it's so good that we're not tipping the canoe over. Right, repeatedly, is if you tip it over once you can usually survive, you tip it over more than once you start your business might be failing. So taking your time and focus on one idea, and only Chase one idea at a time. In a if you're going to introduce something into what's going on the business needs to get parallel with what's happening. Right. So let's use service RX. We are a fitness equipment maintenance and repair company. hydro massage calls us in 2015 and says hi we'd like you to fix our stuff. And we're like, oh, no, man, you know, I don't know. It's the best thing we ever did. Why? Because hydro massage is in every planet fitness. They're in chiropractor's office. They This is the same skill set that our Tech's already sort of have. You know, it gets us into Planet Fitness says it works parallel with what we already do. Right? What we didn't do, what where we have failed, oh, let's start a fitness equipment, parts business. That's a completely different animal, the way it works compared to repair. It sounds like it works. It does not work. There are two different things. So focus. Secondly, I'm going to go back to where we were just saying, no, no, what you are. I'm a technician. I'm a manager. I'm an entrepreneur, you got to learn to feed all three beasts inside of you. And, and be curious. Don't be arrogant and say, I know how to do this. Well, if it's not working very well, maybe you're not. Right. You also can't be scared to go try new things. Third, is I think integrity is everything in business. I get drugged on a regular basis by people who will come in and mostly salespeople actually say that. In the fitness equipment industry, most salespeople do not have a lot of integrity. When it comes to talking to us on the service side. Example being is I had one who he's a national dealer for manufacturer. And, I mean, he'd often said, you know, I can make people or break people. Okay, you know, so I kept him at a distance but kept him close enough so that he you know, if something went wrong, he couldn't hurt me. Finally, he comes in and he chose to He tells us to go he needs us to go over to an apartment community in Raleigh, North Carolina, and do XYZ. Okay. So at that point in time, he's hired us Then it goes back, there's no unit they're gonna pay you did you didn't say that. And they don't know that. Because if for me to flip over and go to our apartment community, I gotta have all my insurances to them. There's gotta be, there's all kinds of stuff that has to actually happen before he came to work for an apartment community. All they knew was that we got sent over by the salesperson to do a solid for them, and fix whatever was going on. It was just literally 150 bucks, was all it was, and he kept coming back and pushing and pushing and pushing as like to, you know, I'm not going to get in it too with this with this apartment community didn't ask us to come out. You did. And when we've said something to him, they're like, What are you talking about? In the park community had no clue. And that salesperson, we had to eventually tell him to go home. They recently just showed back up. And when we told them that we wouldn't work for him anymore, get lost. They were like, what, what do you mean? What do we do? You didn't have any integrity? Dude. You know, you were more than when I guess the point being is that the first time that we had a falling out, he wanted in that process to tell my staff what was going to happen. So his process was more important than my process. My processes Did you good business, which has a clear path, his processes, just because I told you, and it just wasn't fair. It wasn't fair to the partner community. It wasn't fair to my staff. He came in like a bully. And so we said get lost. You know it for all of his bragging, he's never hurt me. And in fact, I think I've probably done more damage to him because he lost me. And he keeps showing back up every few years. Can you do this? Can you do that? You know, so it is what it is. So focus. learning who you are learning things about yourself. Business definitely exposes your your, your good traits and all your weaknesses. And then having integrity and doing the next right thing. Super important.

Gary: 42:11

Three solid advice. So Scott, if anybody wants to learn more about you, or your company, service RX and wellness, how can they get a hold of you?

Scott: 42:21

Yep, so easiest way, obviously, you can always get hold of us through our website, which is go s r x.com. So GE o Sam, Roger X ray.com. For the franchise, it's franchising.go sr x.com. You can find me on LinkedIn, Scott Jennings and it'll say CEO at service RX. You can find us on Instagram at service RX, and that's proud. And then obviously, if you got work, we'd love to pick up your work. And you can always email us at service at go srx.com

Gary: 43:01

We will include those links inside the show notes of this episode. You could find those below. If you have any comments or questions. Yeah, ask if you have any comments or questions for us, or if AI has any comments or questions for us, you can reach out to us in the comment section below this video or email us at Hello at the big pixel dotnet or connect with us on any one of our social media platforms as well.

David: 43:28

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Scott for joining us. It's been a lot of fun.

Scott: 43:31

Yep, appreciate it, guys.