Profit & Grit with Tyler

From Pole and Brush to Profit with Dallin Huso

• Tyler Martin • Episode 7

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Dallin transformed a pool maintenance startup into a premium brand through strategic marketing, team-first culture, and systematic growth while maintaining work-life balance.

• Starting at 21 with just basic pool equipment and door-knocking for clients
• Reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad as the catalyst for entrepreneurial mindset
• Creating distinctive branding with Flamingo Pools to stand out from competitors
• Developing subscription-based pricing model with no long-term contracts
• Rejecting the concept of "slow seasons" through diversified service offerings
• Implementing performance-based compensation (80% base, 20% incentives)
• Building culture that prioritizes results over micromanagement
• Using three-interview process with personality assessments for hiring
• Maintaining omni-presence across all online platforms and review sites
• Setting target margins of 50% on repair services
• Building systems that allowed remote management from Hawaii

Check out Dallin's Instagram @Dallinthepoolguy for more free strategies you can implement in your business. 

🎙️ Profit & Grit by Tyler Martin
Real stories. Real strategy. Real results for service-based business owners.

🔗 Website: ProfitAndGrit.com
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Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think a lot of that just has to do with the culture that we have here. We don't micromanage our guys. We have a technician that he's incredible for us and they got rid of him at his last job because he wasn't starting at like 6 am every morning. And for me, I'm like what matters to me is that you're cleaning these pools and you're taking care of your customers and that they're happy with the work that you're doing. I don't care if you start at six or if you start at eight. For us, it's just about creating a culture where we're focusing on what's most important and taking care of our team, and they really appreciate that. So that's helped people be like yeah, I could go start on my own, but I'm so taken care of here that it's just not worth it.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Profit Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We'll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line, with lessons and grit that pay off big. Here's your host the blue-collar CFO.

Speaker 3:

Tyler Martin, today's guest, launched a pool business at 21 with nothing but a pole and a bucket. Then he turned it into a premium brand with standout marketing systems and a team first culture. If you're in the trades and you're trying to get off the truck, this is your roadmap. We're talking about how Dallin built Flamingo Pools from door knocking to remote ownership. Flamingo Pools from Door Knocking to Remote Ownership, plus how he tackles hiring, avoids slow season and uses pay-for-performance to grow without chaos. Hey, dallin, welcome to Profit Grit with Tyler. How's it going Good? Thanks for having me Excited to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to have you, man. So I'd love to start out just learning a little bit about you. Two things I'd love to learn what you do professionally, what type of business you own, and then number two would be maybe something personal about you that people aren't super aware of.

Speaker 1:

Cool, yeah, so I own a swimming pool maintenance and repair company, so that's my full-time job owner operator over here. And then something about me that I guess a lot of people don't know is I really love to cook. That's kind of been a recent thing of mine. Growing up I was terrible at it. My whole family made fun of me. I could never cook anything. But a couple of years ago I just caught on and bought like a Traeger, bought a Blackstone. I just, yeah, I love cooking, love baking. Anything in the kitchen really really gets me excited. Saj, do you have a favorite recipe or favorite thing you cook? Oh, I love doing new things all the time, so I'm always trying to experiment with layers. But if I had to pick a classic, probably reverse seared smoked ribeye it's hard to beat.

Speaker 3:

Oh, wow, yeah, yeah, so is reverse seared. Is that you do that in the smoker, in the Traeger?

Speaker 1:

You smoke it first, you bring it up to temp and then you put it on a cast iron and put like a sear on it to get a crust on both sides afterwards.

Speaker 3:

Wow, that sounds insane. That sounds really good. Okay, now we got to concentrate on business.

Speaker 1:

That's hard to do, but I'll try it.

Speaker 3:

Okay, I want to start it out. So you started Flamingo Pools. You were 21 years old. You had a pole, a net and a brush. Kind of walk me through those early days, like what was your mind, what was going through your mind when you're knocking on doors selling pool services, and at what point you kind of cross and go, wow, I've got something here. This may turn into something.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, Call it what you want. I kind of always had the mindset that it was going to turn into something. And you might call me crazy for like thinking that early on. But I was just like, yeah, I'm going to do this and I'm going to grow this business and I had all these goals of what I was going to do. And like, looking back I was like, oh wow, I can't believe I had like that much confidence in myself to do this. But I, yeah, I just always had that mindset. After I decided I wanted to start a business, that it would, it would be successful and I would hit those goals eventually. So that kind of kept me motivated. No-transcript, really have the knowledge of what else to do to get people at the time. So that was the start. It was fun, but I've learned a lot since then, for sure.

Speaker 3:

Well, even taking a step back. What made what made you? You made a comment where you said once I decided I wanted to go into business for myself. What triggered that? Is that common in your family? Is it just you got tired of working for places where your boss was a jerk? I mean? What kind of triggered that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it wasn't really common in my family. Like, growing up, it was always just the classic like go to school, get good grades, like figure out what you want to do, get a job, you know, retire after 40, 50 years, whatever it is. And my dad, actually he was like that in the corporate world his whole life and he read Rich Dad, poor Dad and that kind of like shifted his mindset on all that, and so he recommended that I read it, and for like probably a year or two years, he kept telling me I should read it. And I'm just I'm not a book guy. I'm still not. So I was like, no, I'm not going to read that, like I don't want to deal with that stuff.

Speaker 1:

I was working a job, I was going to college hating that, though, cause I'm just not a school guy either, sure, but I finally listened to the audio book. I can do audio books and podcasts. I realized and, yeah, I listened to that and it totally just like opened my mind to like what was like there's more to life than just this one option of going to school, going to college, getting this job, you know, working until you can retire, and I was like, oh wow, like I can do other things with my life and it just opened this like creative portion of my brain of like all these things I could do, and that's I was like, okay, I'm going to go start a business I need to figure out what I'm going to do.

Speaker 3:

But I'm going to start a business, I'm going to grow it and yeah, that's kind of what led meational change in your mindset. What was it that there's folks out in the audience may not know about it, it's a little bit of an older book, but Rich Dad, Poor Dad, was a major book. It talked you want to share, kind of what triggered for you I shouldn't be talking about it. I'd love to hear what kind of it led you down this path.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, it's funny because they and it's been a while since I read it. I'd love to reread it again, cause I know the base of it is like real estate. But I've, after talking to a lot of like business owners, they have the same story where, like this triggered them to start a business and it's yeah, it really just talks about like there's just different things you can do with your life. You don't have to like follow that corporate path and it's like I literally had no, it seems so simple own life by doing these things. Like, yeah, some people could do it with real estate. You know, with owning a business you can even do it in sales, but there's like so many more options than just the school route and that's just really what fired me up. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

True story. When I used to have prior business, I had quite a few employees, and two of my star employees started reading rich dad, poor dad, and about six months later they left to start their own business. And so now I was like always paranoid. If anybody's reading, it's like, oh man, they're going to be leaving soon Because it does what it does. And I don't remember it too well either. I read it many years ago, but I remember the part that drives. It is like okay, you can work at a job and get a W-2, but you're pretty much limited in your earnings. Or you could have some other vehicles, whether, like you said, real estate or your own business. And now you're working for yourself and you're earning for yourself and suddenly your ceiling of earnings is like unlimited theoretically. So yeah, it's a pretty exciting book. I mean it is funny because a lot of people think of him as a real estate guy, but a lot of it is just about empowering yourself to do your own thing, type of thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I need to put that on the red list for all my employees so I don't lose them.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, burn them. It's on the ban list. That's funny, hey. So just switching gears here, you'd name your company Pink Flamingo Pools, or actually Flamingo Pools, so not pink. The color is pink, yeah, flamingo pools. You know, normally when you think of pools, when I think of branding, I think of water. You know that's the traditional imagery. What made you decide to go down the path of having like this very distinctive branding, but isn't necessarily the traditional?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so I think it was beneficial because I wasn't, like you know, a quote unquote pool guy previously, and so I wanted to do something a little different and, like I started to do a little research and saw how similar a lot of these companies were. Like a lot of the names had something to do with water and you know, clear water, blue water, clean water, whatever it was like. Yeah, I need to like figure out how to differentiate myself not only the name but the colors to like every company. Their colors were blue, like light blue, dark blue, bright blue. It was all so similar so like I need to figure something out that's going to help me stick out. And so it was going through. A ton of different things Came across this idea of it's called brand association, where people see something and it might be subconscious but it like triggers you and your brand.

Speaker 1:

So it was like what's something that people see in their everyday life that could help them kind of think of me, and at the time they still are pretty popular, but like those flamingo floats, it kind of just like hit the scene and gotten super popular, like everyone had them in their pool and I was like it'd be so cool. If people are like out enjoying their pool, having a pool party, they see this flamingo float and because we're flamingo pools, like there's just this subconscious trigger of like flamingo pools is the reason that we're able to enjoy our pool and have this, you know, this pool party. And every time they look in the backyard and they see that float. Again, it might be just subconscious, but it just kind of helps them remind them of us and it's just like that. It's free branding, right. Like anyone buys that Flamingo float, it's a branding for us, since that's our logo. So that was kind of the idea behind it.

Speaker 3:

What a cool idea. I like it. It is very distinctive. I went to your kind of jumps out and it's interesting that you had the presence of mind that you're still very young. But at a young age you're starting a business that you knew you wanted to differentiate yourself. You know a lot of times people that takes many years to even realize that marketing perspective. So it's weird, did you? Were you an audio book type guy? You're just listening to all types of stuff or did it just click with you?

Speaker 1:

No, yeah, that's the funny thing, cause like like the word brand association I didn't know that at the time it was like the more I learned about, I'm like, oh, like I chose to do that I don't know why I did that it just like, and I've learned more like marketing is my skill when it comes to the business, like that's what's helped me the most, but it just that just made sense to me.

Speaker 3:

Like, oh yeah, a lot of people would never in a million years do that. And I mean, where did you get kind of the guts to even do that? I mean, have you had you been doing that previously? Or what pushed you, what motivated you even to get to that level?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it was just the motivation of, like I need to figure out how to get clients and I don't have any money to run ads, cause that's all I knew. I was like, well, I think you know marketing to me marketing at the time just meant running ads, like, well, I can't do that first and easiest thing that came to mind and it was just a thing like yeah, I know there's going to be sacrifice to have to grow this. I know it's, you know it's hard to knock, doors can be scary, but I just have to go, go do it and figure it out.

Speaker 3:

That's such a cool story, cause it's you. You make it sound pretty just. You went down that path. Now I want to talk about in doing research, about you. You talked about not really believing in slow seasons in the industry, which, obviously, depending on the area you're in, you're going to have some slow seasons or you're going to have to figure out ways around it. You are a little bit blessed in that Arizona probably has less of a thing, but what did you do to like deal with seasonal business challenges and how do you look at that? And did you look for other revenue opportunities? Or how do you? How do you mitigate it?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I think it's like it's a mindset thing, like I can tell myself, oh it's, it's going to be slow for six, eight months of the year. And if I have that mindset, I know that it will be slow and I'm just going to make excuses for every bad month that we have and I'm not going to push myself because I have this like belief that it's the slow season. But even if, like things quote, unquote, slow down, I chose to say, hey, we're not having slow seasons yet.

Speaker 1:

The rep, the, the monthly service might not be like as in demand as it is during the summertime, like what else can we do to supplement that? You know these other times of year and so, like you said, being in Arizona, pools aren't shut down for for the winter time, so that helps as well. But it's like, okay, people aren't swimming in their pools right now. So how can we educate our customers and tell them, hey, since your pool's down, like let's do these renovations, let's do these updates, let's drain your pool, do an acid wash, cause that can take a couple of days, a couple of weeks, and so let's take advantage of that so you don't have to do it during the summertime and waste some of your swimming season. So it was just about educating our customers, getting clear on that myself and just not making any excuses for being slow, so that even if things slightly quote unquote slow down, we don't have that mindset. So it's not as bad as it could be if we were thinking that way.

Speaker 3:

Got it? How does your pricing model work? And not in terms of dollar amounts, but I imagine you put people on a subscription base, or try to yeah, and do they make an annual agreement to you. Is it month to month? And then my second part of that question is do you have some metrics in your head where, like if I get 10 new accounts, I need another person to help me? Or how do you look at it from that standpoint in terms of growth?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we do subscription base. Subscription base it's month to month and we're proud of that because we we don't want to lock people into like a year long contract and then something goes wrong on either side. But we want people to be confident Like, hey, this is going to hold us accountable, cause you, you know that if we Slack and we turn your pool green like you're going to want to cancel or get out of this. So you're on month to month and you can be confident that we're going to obviously do our best to take care of your pool as good as we can every month so that you continue to work with us. So that's kind of like the idea behind that. And then, sorry, remind me what the second question was.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I was just saying like do you have some? Sorry, I tend to ask multiple questions at once. Do you have some metrics where, like, if I add 12 new accounts, that means I'm going to need another staff member to help me? Like, do you have any type of modeling or thought process in terms of, as you would, account accounts or how do you handle that?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no specifics, cause for me it's like different for every person, cause, like we have some technicians that can take, you know, 60 pools and some that can take 90 to a hundred pools in a week, and so I don't like to put a number on people, cause every person is kind of different in what they can handle. So we just kind of are always trying to stay in touch with our team and figure out how they're doing, if there's any sort of burnout happening, if they want more work, and then just every it's always a case by case scenario with each person. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3:

And how do you mitigate? You know there's a relatively easy entry, kind of like power washing. There's a relatively easy entry to the market if someone wants to get into it. Right, how do you mitigate, as you're bringing people on to make them feel like they're part of something, versus hey, I'm just going to go start my own shop now.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think a lot of that just has to do with the culture that we have here. We don't micromanage our guys. We have a technician that he's incredible for us and they got rid of him at his last job because he wasn't starting at like like 6am every morning, and for me I'm like what matters to me is that you're cleaning these pools and you're taking care of your customers and that they're happy with the work that you're doing. Like I don't care if you start at six or if you start at eight. Like I know different people have different things going on in their lives and need to do different things. Like for us, it's just about creating a culture where we're focusing on what's most important and taking care of our team and they really appreciate that and so that's helped people be like yeah, I could go start on my own, but like I'm so taken care of here that it's just not worth it, right?

Speaker 3:

That's such a common one and it kind of makes me laugh. Like companies will be like you got to start at six o'clock or you got to start at eight o'clock and you'll have this very good performer but they show up at eight, 10 or they show up at eight15. And it becomes a kind of a power struggle where if you don't show up at 8, there's not going to be a job and the eight o'clock person that wants to show up, when they want to show up, they're mad because they're feeling like they're being controlled and they end up leaving. And I feel like there's always a better solution to that. Obviously, if you have a poor performer and then they're also not able to show up and it's bleeding into when you're normally having staff meetings, there's all these exceptions, I get it, but generally most of the time it like has no impact at all to the business, exactly, yeah, it's interesting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So it's like, yeah, obviously, like if I have a set rule that you have to do this because, like whatever meetings or whatever, and like I need you to start a like, then we have an issue. But if it's not a set rule of mine and it's just me being like micromanaging and nitpicky, like it shouldn't matter really. What should matter most is that people are doing their job, and that's that's not just for technicians but, like for all our people. And that's why, like, I don't put our managers on hourly. It's all about it's salary and performance-based pay, cause I I don't care about the exact hours you're working, like what time you're working or if it takes you eight hours or nine hours or six hours to do this job, like. What matters to me is that the job is done and it's done correctly and that our customers are happy. So that's that's how I kind of approach all of that. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

When you say performance-based pay, do you have any markers in terms of like I want their base to be their salary to be 50%, but then their their performance side will be another 50% they can earn. Or is it like 80% of the salary and then 20% of his potential bonus earnings? How much of a ratio does that work?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's more 80% on like the actual base salary and that gives a lot of people more confidence, like coming in doesn't feel like a commission or more of a risk and it's more like, hey, this is like your typical salary that you could get anywhere else. But we're going to have these KPIs in place and if you overperform to what's you know, what's the norm, then you can make this much more essentially.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, okay, that's cool. That's I'm surprised, as I'm talking with you. A lot of things you have implemented in your business are relatively advanced type things, even like pay for performance. I imagine it was just on your own, or did you learn that through someone, or how do you come up with that?

Speaker 1:

when they go to do a job, and it started with the struggle of like cause, a lot of guys will pay hourly and I didn't want to do that because it was essentially punishing our guys for being efficient and getting their routes really dialed in and finishing their day like faster than possible. Then they're like clocking out at six hours and it's like, well, I just made less cause I did such a good job in my pools. And then you have other guys that are like taking their time slowly doing pools unnecessarily, like taking all these breaks in between stops just to make more money, and it's like, well, I'm not going to do the hourly rate. And then the paper pool.

Speaker 1:

The issue with that is people might speed through it like super fast. It's like I'm making this amount of money no matter what I do. So it's like I'm going to try to get this done in three and a half hours instead of six hours so I can make that money. And then they skip things. It was like, well, that's not working great either. So I was like what, if I can kind of combine the idea of not punishing people for going fast but making sure that you're going to get this money, no matter what if you do these things, but if you take the time and make sure everything looks good and the customers are happy, we'll pay you more on top of that. So that's kind of where that idea came from. I was like, okay, I'll put in on the time you're spending there and the customer reviews and the pool's not going green, and then you'll get bonuses on top of that for that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's such a big one too. You come up with some type of compensation plan. If you don't think things through, people will do exactly what the compensation plan basically says, and if it says, to fly through pools and do a half, not a very good job, that's what people do. Yep, yep, it's fascinating. Hey, regarding pricing, I want to talk a little bit about how your pricing has evolved with your business. And then, was there ever a point in your business where, like your pricing almost kind of threw your business off because it just wasn't priced right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah for sure. So I started off I was never like the cheapest guy in the world, because I think there is, you know, when there's perception right, if I'm charging $70, then I'm just looked at as like the low end guy and I attract like those sorts of customers as well, which I don't necessarily want. So I always wanted to be not at the bottom, but still competitive in my pricing. I think a mistake that a lot of people make now is like right, when they start their business, they want to be the premium guy and they want to charge like this premium, which obviously is great, but it's like ultimately the market determines what you can charge and if you're not, like I would rather take a job, especially just starting off, I would rather take a job making a little bit less rather than just sitting around because I got all these no's based on my pricing. So I'm glad that we started where we did and then, as we've kind of established ourselves as a brand, we've been able to raise our pricing where we are more of a premium price now, because we do have a dialed in route and we're obviously always looking to grow, but we've got our pricing in a spot where, yeah, it is premium, but like we have the value to back that up and to show for that and our, our that's on the service side and the repairs.

Speaker 1:

It really used to be based off again like what everyone else was charging, and just figure that out and be right around there, maybe a little bit lower and then, you know, in the future a little bit higher. But as we've grown, like that really hurt us, cause I had no idea what my margins were on each item and if you have, like you know, employees and that bottom line, it can really hurt. If you're only hitting 20% margins on certain items, you think, oh, I made this profit, but then once you start hiring managers and that sort of stuff, it it really digs into that. So now everything's based off of a calculator and we plug all our jobs in and we have a margin that we're trying to hit on each job and so that way it doesn't hurt us in the end of at the end of the day. And so, yeah, we, we've definitely evolved there when it comes to our pricing models.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, do you mind sharing what you try to target in terms of, like a margin? Yeah, we try to hit 50% margins on all of our repairs. Okay. Yeah, that's pretty standard. Yeah, that's good. Good, hey, I love home service business. I think they're so cool and we need them, and they obviously improve our enjoyment of our homes. Having said that, performing services to homeowners can be a little challenging. I'm just curious do you have any stories in terms of some real difficult situations, people in terms of serving the home community?

Speaker 1:

Oh man, yeah, it's a I'm trying to think back, cause I haven't serviced a full cell for a couple of years, but yeah, we've definitely had some crazy customers that the craziest ones are like the ones that seem super happy with you one day and then, like the next day, we get an email saying like they're going to threaten to do us because of, like this, this miss, little misunderstanding, it wasn't even. It was neither person's fault, it was just a misunderstanding. And it's like whoa, you just wrote us like a five-star review last week. What happened?

Speaker 1:

So that's always crazy when people like flip a switch, like that and I was just talking, wrote this great review, was super happy with him and then all of a sudden she's like yelling out of the next week like Whoa, what's going on here? So, yeah, you just you never know with people sometimes, but for the most part, like our customers are great and we I think our pricing also helps us like attract the customers that we're wanting where before, when we first got started, it was more about like take whatever we can get, which obviously got to do as a new business. Right, yeah, I'm happy with where we're at right now, where we seem to attract pretty good customers and don't really have any crazy situations these days.

Speaker 3:

You know there is a lot of commentary around 80-20 rule. You know, the 20% of the customers that pay you most of your revenue tend to be the easiest customers to deal with. The ones have the less complaints. Yeah, and I think there is something to that. I really, I definitely do, I think. So it's fun to hear you say you're attracting the right people, because that means your marketing you're really dialed in on too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I know we for sure have a strong understanding of like who our target audience is and like how we can reach those people.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so reviews are obviously important when we're talking local businesses. What do you do to drive reviews and get awareness online?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we do a ton of things to get awareness online. We try to be as omnipresent as possible on every different platform, whether it's social platforms, review platforms, and I'm always big on because I know people will be like oh, I don't really like Yelp, so I'm not listed on there. It's like, well, I don't care what I like, I care what my customers like, right. So if I go all in on Instagram because that's my favorite platform, but then someone is like, oh well, I'm going to go check them out on Facebook and they don't see me there, it's like I just lost a potential customer there. So we just try to be as present as possible on every platform. We can review platforms, website stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

But yeah, in terms of our review strategy as well, we're always pushing reviews with customers. We'll have incentives if they leave us a review. We have automations through our CRM that when a job is completed, it'll ask them if they were happy with service, and so it'll guide them to leave us a review. We'll call them as well after a job just to make sure everything went well, see if they have any other issues and, if not, again we'll ask in person for a review and then we'll incentivize people to like leave a review on all three platforms, because we're trying to grow on Google, yelp and Facebook with our reviews, so we'll like we'll send people a box of cookies if they take the time to leave it on all three platforms.

Speaker 3:

That's very cool. What CRM do you guys use? Go High Level. Oh, go High Level. Okay, yeah, I didn't know that one. And are there any tools that you guys use that not necessarily unique to your industry, but that are home service type tools that you get a lot of value out of?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I would say, through GoHighLevel, I've built out a lot of automations myself there. Yeah, yeah, I hired an assistant to kind of help me with that. I was like I need all this, this and this, and so that really helps us a lot. A lot of pool guys specifically don't have a CRM for the backend of things, which is like crazy to me how to do it without it. But like we use it to track all of our our marketing efforts, like where our leads are coming from, all of our sales. We have a lot of automations in there. So, like the review one we love, with that one as well, like if they leave a review, then there's like a two day delay and then it'll trying to get them scheduled. So we have that in place as well. A lot of forms through there, a lot of tracking, reporting. It really helps us out.

Speaker 3:

Wow, it sounds like you've really customized that. That's where Go High Level gets to a whole other level for lack of better words Because if you just use it out of the package it's like, eh, but when you start adding all that automation and start doing maybe lead gen forms, all that other stuff, it's a whole other level in terms of what you can get out of it. That's cool. Interestingly enough, it's cool as a home service business. That's the tool you're using, because there's a lot of these Jobber is one, housecall Pro is another. There's a lot of these that are kind of made for the home service business. It's nice you made one that kind of fits for your business, cause I'm sure you've customized it that fits exactly how you want it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and jobber and like home certain I can't remember the other one. You said House call pro. I think it is yeah, house call. Yeah, we've, we've looked into both of those. I actually use jobber for a little bit. They high level has like a lot of capabilities there. So, yeah, we just built it out and we actually share it with a lot of other home service guys too, because there's just not much on the market that does it. So we've got like a snapshot we've built that really is built specifically for home service guys.

Speaker 3:

Wow, that's really cool. I wanted to talk about mistakes and embracing them, because they happen. Have you ever had a mistake that kind of makes you cringe as you're on your journey of growing and running a business?

Speaker 1:

Oh too many. We might be here for a couple hours if we go over all of them. Yeah, I think probably my biggest mistakes was like hiring the wrong people. That's definitely like hurt my business the most I can think of oh, we could have been this much further on if we would have not made this particular hire or made this other hire. And then I always try to have a growth mindset but, like with that, there's been times where I was afraid to hire like a particular manager because of how much it would have cost me to do that and in the end it like hurt me so much more and I'll look back. I'll be like, oh, that was nothing like what I could have paid him in return for what he would have provided for the business. So that's something that still stings to think about sometimes. What did you?

Speaker 3:

do in terms of helping you hire the right people, like, did you change something in your process or what is it now where you're a little more confident in terms of who you hire?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, two things. Number one is just like the confidence in myself. So, being like a young business owner, there was always like this weird thing Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was them, sometimes it was both. Like hiring an older person, it's like, who's this 21, 22 year old, like trying to tell me what to do? And a lot of times it was probably in my head.

Speaker 1:

But there were certain situations where people have a certain amount of experience and they think they can come in and like kind of tell me what to do, in a sense. So I kind of backed off from hiring those sorts of people Cause I just I didn't have the confidence at 21, 22 years old to like totally tell these people what to do. So I would sometimes hire people that you know weren't as confident either or weren't going to, you know, have that dominant personality and so that that kind of hurt. But the in general we've learned a lot about hiring and how to like you can't I don't think you can ever totally avoid you know a bad hire here and there like it's going to happen. But we've found out a lot of things that we can do to kind of, yeah, avoid some red flags. I can touch on that a little bit, if you'd like me to.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I wouldn't mind knowing I know it'd be helpful to the audience that it was just made up of home service business owners.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. So we we have a pretty rigorous hiring process. We have three interviews with people Wow, yeah, we want to give as many opportunities and the hiring process for people to like show us who they really are. And so, with those three interviews, like if they bail on one of them or miscommunicate on one of them or like show up late, that's if they're going to do that for an interview, like that's typically how they're going to be for us as well. So like that gives us an idea. We always make sure that at least one of those is in person, cause, like one of the biggest things for me is like just getting like a vibe for who this person is and how they're going to interact with other people. And I won't even go to the in-person interview with like a list of questions. It's more about just having a conversation with them, and it's like if they can't hold a conversation or they're like rude or short, and it's like this is how my customer is going to experience them as well. So like that's a big thing for me too.

Speaker 1:

One of my favorite things that we do now is we send out personality tests to people. I really like this for two reasons. Number one is people are always going to tell you, like, what you want to hear in an interview and you'll find out like, oh, he told me this, this and this, but I was like absolutely nothing to do with who he really is. But with the personality tests it's a little harder, you about them. So it does give us, like, some good insights on these people and we might even see like, oh, he has this skill and this skill. Like, but you hot, you applied for this job. You'd be actually really good in the sales role, this other role. So give us insight there. But what we really love about it is we'll give it, we'll tell them that we need them to take this test and we'll ask them when, when they can get it back to us by.

Speaker 1:

And if they don't get it back to us by when they said they would, then we immediately cut them off from the interview process, because that just shows a lack of integrity. And so it's like, if they're going to do that for us now, that's exactly how they're going to be working for us as well. And so there's one time where we had this really good candidate who did that and he didn't get it back to us and I broke my rule and I reminded him and then he took it and he ended up being like exactly that type of person for the business and I regret it so much. Like, yeah, I'm never doing that again.

Speaker 1:

So it sucks sometimes because you'll have this really good person like, yeah, I'll get it back to you. And we never tell them like, get it back to us by then. We want them to tell us when it'll be, and so they'll be like yeah, we'll get it back to you then. And if they don't do that, it's like, yeah, this is how they're going to be when they work for us. So it's just creating those opportunities for people to show us who they really are throughout the interview process.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a big one. What tests?

Speaker 1:

do you use We've used a couple different ones in the past 16 personalities, okay. This is one we really like, the DISC assessment as well.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, disc, yeah, that's probably our favorite, what I like about DISC and it honestly took me many years to kind of click on this. I like DISC, how, if you really get into it and you start to understand different sections and then you start to think about, well, I know he's a D or I know whatever your personality is, so this is the way I'm going to try to communicate with them, and it really does work if you take it to that deep of a level in terms of interacting better with people, for sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, enneagram is one that we use as well. And we've kind of built out like a cheat sheet, based off what their results are like, what they would be good at, what they wouldn't be good at, what they're going to kind of struggle with.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's good. I love two things that really resonated with me. I love the fact that you take time in your case it's three interviews that you take time to really get to know the person, because I feel like one of the biggest flaws in small business is we interview someone one time we get all excited because they say all the things we love for them to say. They say them exactly right and in fact sometimes if you're a bad interviewer, you're the one talking the whole time and you even like them more because you heard yourself talk. And then you hire them and they're horrible and you never really had a chance to see what they were all about, because everybody can fake it in one interview.

Speaker 3:

And then the other thing that I really like that you said is that accountability of getting the test done based on their date, not the timeline that you've given them, the timeline that they've given you, because that's important, that's their word, that's what they're going to do with clients. If they're going to tell a client, hey, I'll have this done next week, and they don't follow through with you, you sure is right, they're not going to follow through on your clients. Yep, yep, yeah. So that's good stuff, really good stuff. Okay, hey, this is where I want to wrap up. If you can, I'd love to get from you maybe two or three entrepreneurial tips, your own wisdom that you've learned from your journey. It can be stuff we've already talked about, but I'd love to just kind of hear what comes top of mind for the folks out there that are trying to grow and scale their business and get to the next level.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think one is kind of we talked about marketing.

Speaker 1:

I'm really lucky where I love marketing and I feel like it's kind of where I have like some natural skill as well, and so I think for a lot of business owners, like marketing is the first thing that goes on the back burner when you get busy. Or it's like, oh, someone called out sick or someone quit. Like I'll go take care of all this, and marketing is the thing that you don't have time for. But it's been like the biggest reason for us being able to grow as a company and establish ourselves as like a brand and being able to charge what we want to charge and you don't have to spend a ton of money to be successful in marketing. Like, yeah, now we run Facebook ads, now we're on Google ads, but like in the beginning and still now, like a lot of our marketing is is organic strategies and I don't think people are aware of like how many organic things that you can do out there to get business and get clients and just to build your brand and build the awareness. So that would be my. My number one tip is like try to grow your business where you have the time and ability to focus on marketing and make it a priority Like don't like make that as important as anything else on your schedule. Don't take advantage. Yeah, take advantage of that.

Speaker 1:

Another thing is have like a really strong. It's cliche, it's cheesy, but like have a strong, why for what you're doing? It's important for two reasons. Number one is like sometimes owning a business sucks and yeah, there's hard days, there's burnout and stuff that happens Like and if you don't have a strong reason like, you won't make it through and you will give up because it's like, why am I doing this? And so you have to be so clear on on what that is, cause it's it's the only reason that I'm, yeah when I'm at and that I've I've pushed through some of those days and some of those yeah Weeks and months even because of having that. But I think it also helps create clarity on like how and where to grow your business, cause what I've learned is like every business owner has a different idea of like where they're trying to grow their business.

Speaker 1:

Like some people are super happy with, hey, I just want like a guy in the field and I want to like go out and help them here and there. I love being in the field, um, and that's good for me and like, hey, that's totally cool, but like for me, I, I want to be out of the field completely. I just want to be involved in marketing. I don't want to deal with like the operations and stuff, so like the decisions that I have to make are totally different than someone else. If you're not clear on that, it's a nightmare. But if and it's like well, that's because I'm trying to get to this point, it's like I have to go through these growing pains to get there, but if I don't really have clarity on what that is, then I'm just going to give up on that. Yeah, it's not worth hiring these people because it's why am I doing this? Right? But because I have that clarity on what my like a team Cause I, I have bigger goals and that's what I'm shooting for. So having a strong why is something that I've seen a lot of people struggle with, like not having that, and but it's on the flip side, like the people that have grown the most and talking to them, like they are very clear on what their why is and what their big goals are and that's what's really pushed them through. Yeah, if it's too personal. Just feel free to say so.

Speaker 1:

Do you mind sharing what is your?

Speaker 1:

Why?

Speaker 1:

Like what drives you?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for me, like time is what I value more than anything else in the world.

Speaker 1:

So I just want the flexibility to spend time with my family, spend time on my hobbies and just like to work when I want and where I want. Like I don't want to have to like, yeah, I show up at the office at nine when I want to be like if I've got something else going on in the morning. And as my kids get older and they have like things going on, I want to be able to take them to school. I'm going to go to their events. I never want work to be a reason that I can't do those things. And if we want to take a vacation, go out of town for a week, like I want to be able to open up my laptop and get some stuff done from there and not be like stuck at a desk all day. And that's why I've chosen to grow the business and put so much time and effort into growing and scaling so fast that I've taken less money and less profits for the business, but ultimately it's helped me reach my goal of having that freedom of my time.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's a good one. I think a lot of us can relate to that too that have gone out on our own. And then you mentioned on the marketing side. You said, hey, there are some things that actually you could do, that are free or strategically don't cost a lot of money, that people may not know about anything. Come to mind of what those things are that maybe people might be able to apply to their business yeah, there's so many things like.

Speaker 1:

I love going in depth on all of them and I'll say check out my instagram too, because I'm always my personal account. I'm always sharing like free strategies that people can implement. But social media itself is a huge thing. Like it's free to post on social media. It's crazy that not not enough people are taking advantage of that, just pulling out their camera, either filming themselves or filming themselves at a job site, and just showing what they're doing. You have the opportunity to potentially like reach thousands of people for free every time you post and, yeah, there's just not enough people taking advantage of that. We kind of touched on it. But just like setting up your online presence as many places as possible, having the Omni presence online. That helps with your SEO as well. And then networking is another huge one for me like going to networking events, making sure people know who you are, not just online but in person. Having power partners that can refer you is probably one of the biggest things that helped us grow early on, and there's like, yeah, there's a whole conversation on that process.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I got it. What's your Instagram handle? It's Dallin, the pool guy, dallin. Okay, I'll put that in the show notes. I have it. I think I have it in your what you filled out anyway, but I'll make sure I put that so people know. Now one thing before I wrap up yeah, do you actually you mentioned? Are there people out there? They want to reach out to you? Do you help them at all?

Speaker 1:

I do. Yeah, no, I've had a lot of people over the years. So just a quick backstory as well, if you have a couple of minutes, sure, but again, like my goal was always I want the time, the flexibility, and about two years into the business right, I wasn't the biggest, biggest in the world we actually ended up moving to Hawaii for a little bit. So I was living in Hawaii and kind of running the business back home. Wow, and that was kind of what triggered people like starting to reach out to me, being like hey, like how'd you grow the business, what'd you do to, you know, get out of the field so fast? And so it just started like sharing tips and advice with people here and there.

Speaker 1:

So, and it's kind of just built up over the past couple of years and as I've continued to grow myself out of the business and mostly just stay on the marketing side, my time is freed up and I started realizing like how much time I was spending like taking free calls from people.

Speaker 1:

But I love doing. I was like this is like my favorite thing to do is is help people talk about the things that I wish I would have known like right away, right. So last year I was like, yeah, I'm going to make this a little bit more of a thing. So, yeah, I do work with a group of small business owners that are kind of in those beginning stages and really looking to grow, and so that's what that Instagram page was kind of inspired by is just to kind of a platform for that, and so, yeah, I help people out and I give them, you know, a free snapshot of go high level that helps with a lot of automation, to help with a lot of organization, reporting, marketing and sales as well. So, if you can always reach out to me and we can have a conversation about that, for sure, Okay, good stuff.

Speaker 3:

So just to recap here, your main website is azflamingopoolscom. Azflamingopoolscom. Dallin the pool guy, I think, is what you said, is your Instagram handle. I'll put both those in the show notes. I think you also had something else that I'll add. If I'm remembering from the intake form, I'll put in the show notes at ProfitAndGritcom. Profitandgritcom Dallin, you're awesome man. You're fun to listen to. I love to hear how you've evolved into this business, dude, but you're also serving your why in terms of doing it on your terms. That's awesome. If people wanted to reach out to you, it sounds like Instagram Is that the best place to go, or is there any where else?

Speaker 1:

Instagram, yeah, yeah, that's the best place to shoot me a DM. Love to have a conversation. Jump on a call, awesome.

Speaker 3:

Cool man. I can't thank you enough for being on here. You're fun to talk to and hope I get to talk to you again in the future.

Speaker 1:

Hey, thank you so much. It was great being here.

Speaker 3:

Awesome, wow, what a great episode. That was Dallin Husso, so he's a guy who's built a premium brand from the pool deck up. My big takeaway when you treat marketing like a muscle, pricing like math and people like partners, you really do build something real. If you know someone in the trades dreaming of something bigger, share this episode. And don't forget to follow Profit Grit, where we keep it honest, tactical and all about building from the field up. And, last but not least, if you think you need some help in terms of growth or strategy for your business, head on over to fixcfocom. That's F-I-X-C-F-O dot com. You can book a free intro meeting and I'd love to talk with you. Take care.

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Tyler Martin

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