Patrick Baldwin: You've got generations of entrepreneurship in your family. You've got alpha males. Even your wife, you call her alpha male. I don't know if she appreciates that but she'll take it.
Brett Madden: She would. She’d kicked my ass and yours.
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Patrick Baldwin: Mr. Garber.
Seth Garber: Yes, sir.
Patrick Baldwin: Welcome back to The Boardroom. Seth Garber, it's great to see you. Paul's got his own fair share of excuses for why he can't be here. He's got a lot of people coming in and off the island down there entertaining some clients, some past clients, and some acquirers. They're having a good old time. Your excuse was better. You had Hurricane Ian blow through Tampa and your whole state. Thank you for making it, sir. I don't know how you made it.
I'm looking at you and our phone calls on Tuesday night, Wednesday, and Thursday, it's like, “Let me know if I can do anything for you.” That's what you say. That's how you operate. That's how you are at your core. Your character shines through. You called and you’re like, “I made it back to my house.” I’m like, “How'd you make it back to your house?” “I had to make it back to my house. I'm already helping my neighbors.” I’m like, “What do you mean you're already helping your neighbors?” You’re like, “My house looks good enough. It was fine. I'm going to go help my neighbors.” Mad props.
Seth Garber: It's been a stressful week. Fortunately, our family made it through well. My heart goes out to the guys that are further south from us. We've had a lot of clients on our consulting side who have called in with some real challenges. My heart goes out to them. Fortunately, we were there and it worked out okay for our family. We made it here. As we fired up this episode, all I could think about was when Paul's generator went out when he was dealing with Fiona. He ended up making it too. It's a big thing we have to do for the industry. We made it.
Patrick Baldwin: This is awesome. Here we are. Brett Madden. I got to have a one-on-one with Brett Madden. I've had one maybe 30-minute call with him before we recorded. We’re starting to get to know each other. I like the guy. There's so much good stuff in here. I'm excited we're able to share this.
Seth Garber: The one thing that people will take away is he refers to himself as an alpha male but the reality is his level of humility, as it relates to learning, to me was special. I hope in ten years and I'm the same age as him that I can be Brett Madden.
Patrick Baldwin: The same thing except it will be eleven for me. Here we go, making fun of our guests, and having a great time here in The Boardroom Buzz. Seth, what do you say we step in The Boardroom with Brett Madden?
Seth Garber: Let's do this, Patrick.
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Patrick Baldwin: Brett Madden, welcome to The Boardroom Buzz.
Brett Madden: I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
Patrick Baldwin: You've sold your pest control business. You've got a lot going on. We're going to get into this. You've got a lot to share. I’ve been looking forward to this. Thanks for making this happen.
Brett Madden: We've been trying. A lot going on, multiple directions on multiple fronts. I'm a firm believer in always moving forward, for sure. It's always done well by me.
Patrick Baldwin: speaking of moving forward, let's go ahead and get this one out of the way. Is it true, you're an attorney? What is this Esquire thing?
Brett Madden: I am an attorney. Jumping around a little bit. I wasn't too good in high school. I was more of that problem child. It was one of those things where I got through high school, worked at the family business, and had multiple jobs. In addition to working at the family business, I was working at a gas station and the gas station got robbed. It was one of those things that I was like, “I got to make some changes here.”
I went back. I had to go to community college because I wasn't the best high school student. I got a bachelor’s. I continued to work with the family business and kept at it. When I graduated college, it was one of those things, “What's next?’ As a little bit of an aside, during that transition period between high school and college, I was doing a lot of commercial night restaurants at the time.
I started in pest control when I was 12 years old. I remember being on a termite rig drilling and trenching when I was 12. I was doing commercial night services when I was a 16-year-old. I was doing these restaurants and I kept seeing these guys pull these boxes out from behind the bar and give people cigars and I'm like, “That's cool. What is that?” It's intriguing to me.
I wind up developing one of the first Lucite humidors because I'm like, “How cool would this be if you put these clear boxes on the bar? You would increase your cigar sales instrumentally as opposed to people not seeing it and not being afraid to ask for a cigar.” It's pretty cool. You and I've talked about this offline, I'm a little more of a risk-taker.
I had this cool idea. I went and had a drawing done and a computer rendering of this Lucite plastic humidor. I took a full-page ad out in a Cigar Aficionado magazine. At the time, I got the magazine. It was $20,000 or $30,000 ad. It was crazy. My father's like, “What the hell is this?” I’m like, “We're going to start making humidors.” He's like, “Do you have any?” I'm like, “Not yet.” He goes, “You spent all this money and you took an ad out.” I didn't even have one product at a time.
Fast forward a little bit and we wound up getting crushed in our sales. I took all those orders, went and found a plastics distributor, and said, “I got all these orders. I need you to start making this right now. We need to start shipping them out.” We were selling those Lucite humidors for a good amount of time. It was one of those things, looking back, even preparing for today, it was cool some of the things that I had been able to take from that pest control life and apply to other businesses.
Patrick Baldwin: That is incredible. That's awesome. That's gutsy.
Brett Madden: It was crazy. I'll never forget the look on his face. I showed him the ad and I'm like, “What do you think of the ad?” He goes, “That's cool. What are you going to do?” I'm like, “We're going to hopefully sell the heck out of this thing and we're going to then go find someone to make it and ship it.” We had distributor agreements with other companies that we were selling these things to. I don't know what happened. I decided to go to law school. Everyone was like, “Did you sell the business?” I'm like, “No. I stopped shipping and decided to go to law school.”
I remember everyone was like, “You can't go to law school. You're not that smart.” I was like, “I'm going to go to law school.” I wind up graduating from Seton Hall Law School. I clerked for the Governor's council. I clerked for the former Commissioner of Labor in the state. I loved practicing. I did land use and development.
It was funny that when I graduated after my clerkships, the law firm I went to was a large practice. The reason why he hired me was because of the cigar thing. That was on my resume and he was fascinated by this. he was looking for more people that were not lawyers but entrepreneurs to be able to grow and sell. Unfortunately, most lawyers tend to not be business people per se. I enjoyed the practice.
Part of that transition for me was I was never home. I was working 80 and 90 hours a week. I enjoyed it but I was never home. At the time, Jake was about 3 years old. I missed so much of that time. Looking back for a second, at that time, my father had called me and said, “I'm thinking about selling the business.”
I was already established, practicing, and doing my own thing at the time. I'm an only child. He felt, “Let me call you.” This is part of my life. I've been doing it since I was 12 years old on and off. At least going through the motions, he had to ask me, “Do you want to buy the business? Do you want to be back involved in it?” He was 100% expecting I'd say no and I said yes. I started back up and came back to the family business.
I'm a big proponent of learning how to sell over the phone and communicate and being able to control your inflection and tonality. I'm sure you even do it in the podcast. Those are all important points. We used to have landlines and my father used to make me record every sales call I had. You have this little suction cup and you'd put it to the back of your headset and you'd plug it into this small tape recorder. He'd make me record every phone call. At night, when I drove home, he’d make me listen to how terrible I was and how bad I was on the phone. It's something as small as that. Looking back, that shaped me today and learn.
I remember sitting in sales meetings and he would say, “Not a word. I don't care if you know the answer, not a word.” I'm like, “I want to talk.” It's such an important thing that many people miss. It's not listening and developing that skill to listen. I have a standard saying with everybody, I'm always the dumbest person in the room. I’m the last person to speak. I like to listen and observe.
Patrick Baldwin: Congratulations, for once, you're not the dumbest person in the room because it's you and me. Your dad was a real entrepreneur.
Brett Madden: He was.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm thinking about the cigar thing. Your dad is recording phone calls at least and starting the business. You’re a cigar aficionado and taking out a $20,000 ad. Your son is with this t-shirt thing.
Brett Madden: Even my oldest son is the same. He has different things that he does as far as online sales. My wife makes vintage jewelry. She has her own shop. It's fun. We call our house the shark pit because everybody's always snapping at each other. Everybody has a certain dominance in the household. I don’t want to say all of us are alpha males. We have a French Bulldog and he's an alpha male too.
From an early age, both my parents instilled it in me. I’m always about ultimate risk. Take the risk and bet on yourself. This way, you only have yourself to blame if something doesn't work or fails. I'm a big proponent of betting on yourself and taking a risk and trying something. I'm a firm believer in sweat equity and grinding it out. Go after it and be passionate about what you'd like to do. When we were going back in different stages, I wind up coming back to the fold. We had started getting these calls for this bird control stuff.
Patrick Baldwin: You've got generations of entrepreneurship in your family. You've got alpha males. Even your wife, you call her alpha male. I don't know if she appreciates that but she'll take it.
Brett Madden: She would. She'd kick my ass and yours.
Patrick Baldwin: In a previous episode, we briefly talked about responsibility and entitlement. I want to ask you in terms of employees. You walk in and it's a clear mindset difference between an abundance mindset and a victim mindset. To me, it’s how I distinguish them. I hear this abundance mindset, entrepreneur, and risk-taking. You take responsibility for the things that happen around you.
If you place the ad and not a single humidor order came in, you would have said, “That's on me.” The same thing. I've seen it in our pest control business down here more than entitlement habits. Not with all the technicians but it happens. That's my route. Those are my customers. That's my commission. How do you balance that, especially being such a domineering alpha male of a business owner?
Brett Madden: I disassociate myself from that because it's important. I don't like anybody to ever call me boss. That's been one of my pet peeves. There's nothing I wouldn't ask somebody to do that I haven't already done myself, to be honest. I wouldn't say to you, “I want you to go do X or Y,” if I haven't already done X or Y. I'm a big proponent of having techs come into the office and learn and see what it's like to deal with the daily operations of phone calls, schedules, people screaming, this that, and the other thing.
Also, it's important for the CSRs in the office staff to go out and go do a clean out and go do these things and have their schedule adjusted. It's 4:30 and you think you're going home and then you have a service added on that's two hours out of your way to go do something that you were already there this morning in the same area.
The technician is like, “Why am I going back? I was already here this morning.” There is such a divide between admin in the field and office in the field and sales and operations. The salespeople don't care about what it is. They want to sell it and it's about them and that's what they're trained to do. Operation is training to get the stuff done but it's merging that gap between the two that eliminates that entitlement piece, at least from the office side of things.
On a larger scale, as a society, we have a big problem with entitlement. There's a large generational gap among people that feel that they should be entitled to things. They’re not working, getting their hands dirty, and doing certain things. That is truly a big problem. If I had an answer for that, we wouldn't be on this call.
Patrick Baldwin: I hear you. We're here to solve all the world's problems.
Brett Madden: It's hard. I've always taken pride no matter what I did if I'm cutting my own lawn or whatever I'm doing. It's taking pride in your workmanship and being able to see things through. You can see the difference between certain people. Certain people have that trait and other people have more of an entitlement trait. For those people, it's more about, “What's in it for me?” It’s not, “What's in it for the greater good?”
As my kids were younger, I did a lot of youth sports coaching. I've always tried to say to everybody, “If you benefit the program, everybody will benefit. If you benefit one kid or one thing, the program is going to fail.” I've always tried to keep myself in check and look at the big picture because I'll get some type of ancillary benefit from the whole organization succeeding as opposed to benefiting myself.
Patrick Baldwin: With current employees, I can see where a technician is saying, “This is my customer, my route, and my territory.” You're like, “That's my customer, my route, and my territory as well. In fact, it's my risk, my marketing, and my overhead. It's mine even more.” Did you ever find yourself having to balance that conversation and balance that out?
Brett Madden: Yeah. I've been pretty transparent over the years. It’s like, “This is what gas costs. This is what insurance costs. This is what this costs.” What a lot of people don't realize always is they see the bottom line number but they don't see how much goes out. E-ZPass tolls, gas tolls, this or that, and all the other bottom line expenses like insurance, health care, rent, and this and that.
It’s more about identifying the right people to make sure you have a good culture. This is hard now but we've always tried to hire based on quality and not based on necessity. When you hire out of necessity is when you give up some of your standards and that's when you have some of the problems creep in that you're talking about.
Patrick Baldwin: When you say out of quality and not a necessity, you'd be ahead and you might even hire more than what you have a capacity for.
Brett Madden: Correct. There are people that I've hired that we didn't have a need for but impressed me so much that I knew they had the skillset and the mindset that blew me away. We took a chance, we hired them, and some of those people are still with us today.
Patrick Baldwin: It’s pre-necessity. You're ahead of it.
Brett Madden: It's one of those things, you know it when you see it and it's hard to put your finger on it. It's hard now, especially with the labor force and the way it is now. It's challenging, for sure.
Patrick Baldwin: With this entrepreneurial mindset, this risk-taking that runs through your veins and your dad instilled in you. When you were hiring employees, were you looking for those similar traits, or were you looking for a balance of someone that would follow like a good Bravo to follow the Alpha?
Brett Madden: My advice has always been, and I say this to all my managers, if you're looking at a person on a 1 to 10 scale, I'm looking for a 7. I'm not looking for a ten because a ten is going to be like me, an extreme risk taker, and has all the skills to do what we do. If you hire a ten and you teach them the ropes, they're going to go out and start their own business.
You probably know this better than I do. If I had $1 for everybody who started their own business that left my business, it's tremendous. That's a common theme in pest control, they go, they learn, and they start their own business. I always try to look for those people that were close to that 7 and 8 mark but not too passed it. You then start dipping below the 4 or 5, then you got some issues.
Patrick Baldwin: “You should go apply over there.”
Brett Madden: I've always tried to look for that 6 to 7, 6 to 8 mark when we're hiring and that's the advice I've always given my staff. You have to be cognizant of that because it's what happens. You're dealing with people trying to steal your customers and that becomes challenging.
Patrick Baldwin: This is not your first foray into pest control. You worked for your dad. You bought the business from your dad. At some point, you had No Fly Zone, is that right? You had a bird business?
Brett Madden: Correct. When we came back after I left the practice law, we were getting a lot of requests for this bird business type of stuff. We started doing it and learned about it. I grew to love that industry, a high-risk and high-reward type of thing. It grew rapidly that we had to start a new company called No Fly Zone. We were doing bird control across the country. We wind up eventually selling that business to Orkin. It was sidelined for a couple of years from or non-compete and then I wind up coming back to it with a new company called Aviaway Bird Control.
With Aviaway, we surpassed where we were in the past with No Fly Zone. We do a lot of work with PCOs and pest control companies. Me being one of them, bird control was such a niche business that it allowed me an opportunity to solve someone's problem or pain point that another pest control provider couldn't solve. I would go in and solve it, “By the way, do you need pest control?” We wouldn't wind up getting the pest control as well. It was one of those things.
Being on the outside perspective, I always tried to go to PCOs. We work with a lot of PCOs under their own brand name to do their bird work so they can offer our services underneath their name. They can avoid having other people come in and snipe their work. It's one of those things and it's taken me 30 years in that business and I'm still learning different things. It's a unique business. I'm a proponent that it should be standalone and not lumped in with wildlife like it typically is. Everybody loves the revenue but no one wants to do the work.
Patrick Baldwin: Such as life.
Brett Madden: Everybody fights over the revenues but I'm like, “Do you realize that we have people rappelling off the 40-story building? Did you realize that we had to have a 130-foot stick boom here in Manhattan?” No one knows. I love that business because it's so different on the day-to-day. Everything is challenging. You’re not doing the same thing. Some of the larger companies fail with bird control. They try to make it a reoccurring revenue model and it's not. They try to force that bird control into some type of revenue model and it's not. It stands alone on its own.
Patrick Baldwin: Being the risk taker you are, you've mentioned that there was a job or RFP or something happened. You were called into to do a proposal somewhere. You said it was such a crazy Spider-Man-esque setup that everyone else said, “I'm out of here.” You're the last man standing.
Brett Madden: We get those calls all the time. We get calls for stuff that no one wants to deal with whether we have to engineer something, we need to bring a repelling team in, we need to fabricate something, or we need to do something. I've pulled up on different job sites and I look up and I'm like, “This is going to be a doozy.”
That's where I say it's risk versus reward. In all my years of doing this, we messed up a lot in the beginning. We lost thousands upon thousands of dollars screwing stuff up. Like everything else, my mindset and my being taught me and allowed me. That industry serves my personality because it is such a risk versus reward type of thing. To me, it's more about the thrill of the chase of doing these crazy jobs that people look at and they're like, “What are you thinking?”
Patrick Baldwin: You're being humble. I'm going to start questioning your alpha male and I'm going to get your wife on here. You did bird work over a vat of sulfuric acid or something like that.
Brett Madden: There were different goldmine operations that we requested to put stuff over. We've repelled off buildings. You name it. If you think of it, if there's a crazy set, we're the people they call because there aren’t many jobs that we were turned down, to be honest.
Patrick Baldwin: You're crazy. This is a question I feel like I can ask. You're being polite and respectful and I appreciate it. You had a non-compete with No Fly Zone. You sold it to Orkin. How long did that stick around?
Brett Madden: I had a five-year non-compete.
Patrick Baldwin: How long was Orkin able to continue to operate No Fly Zone?
Brett Madden: They operated it for about 2 to 3 years before it was no longer.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm not doing this to throw stones at Orkin. The point that came up is what happens when if No Fly Zone is built around you? It was a learning moment for you. No Fly Zone was around you. Even looking in the rearview mirror as Orkin wasn't able to sustain the growth of the business that you had in place there, how did you then turn around and, after your non-compete, re-approach pest control?
Brett Madden: I like to think that had to do with me not being involved in the day-to-day for the bird control. At that particular time too, Orkin was going through some transitions in terms of other acquisitions so they may have folded some things in. As far as my brand, it was no longer than a short period of time. Looking at that when we restarted with Aviaway, it was one of those things where I took those lessons in terms of, “Where are we going to go? How are we going to approach this with a subcontract model and with a self-performing model?”
I had no intention of getting fully back into where we were like we are today. I said to myself, “I miss it but I also don't miss the stress. I don't miss all the uber-craziness from all the different things that were going on.” We were so good at what we did that it resonated again. It was one of those things that, as we started doing things again, spiraled out of control. Now we're looking at buying wildlife companies. Now we're doing a lot of different things.
Our footprint has grown so vast over these past 2 or 3 years that allowed us to focus on going back after a national footprint, national account work, and being more selective with what we do. I call it feeding the machine. You get to a point where the business you're always shoveling coal to burn hot and you're taking jobs that you’re not necessarily should be taking. That was one of the things that we tried to avoid.
I assembled a great team and lessons learned. The team I have now is exceptional and I couldn't do it without them to be honest with you because they are truly the fabric and glue that keep everything running without me, which is an important lesson that I learned. This thing needs to sustain and stand without you. If you're not there and it fails, what do you have?
Patrick Baldwin: The macroeconomy aside, all things being equal to when you previously sold No Fly Zone and now it sold Alliance Pest. They’re two different businesses and two different types of businesses. It sounds like there was a lesson that you were able to take away from No Fly Zone and say, “Alliance needs to become less dependent on Brett Madden day-to-day.”
Brett Madden: That was one of the things too that was part of my personal pain point and stress. I was the most important person for both organizations from the pest side of things and the bird side of things. As I stepped away from No Fly Zone and started analyzing the pest side of things, we made a lot of significant changes to empower people and change our management structure and culture so that it wasn't based on me.
I spent a lot of time working with our sales team, transitioning accounts over, and they would always go through me directly and things of that nature to nurture them and help them grow in terms of, “What do you need for me to help you succeed so that this isn't customer dependent on me?” To me, sales is in my blood. That's what I love to do. It's not about the dollar amount. It's all about the thrill of the chase. That's what gets my adrenaline going.
To me, it was one of the things where I needed people to be better than me and to succeed. I couldn't be the number one salesperson anymore. That was a weird transition for me. Being that alpha, I need to be number one. I need to sell the most. I need to say, “I shouldn't be doing this because it's a bad thing to be this way in terms of other people's success and growth.”
Patrick Baldwin: You have a lot of six-figure sales under your belt, especially with the bird work. You celebrate the victory of each sale. Do you get all jazzed up and ring the bell on these $500 a-year recurring business jobs? It’s like, “Mrs. Jones bought pest control?”
Brett Madden: Especially with my kids, they’re like, “What did you sell today?” I sold an account for $500,000 and then the next day, I might not sell anything and I get upset about it. To me, it's more about the adrenaline of selling and the process and that's the benefit of doing what we do and learning it from an operational standpoint.
Before I ever sold any bird work, I did it all myself. It wasn't like I learned it from a book or the internet. I went and did it myself for a long period of time. That allowed me to have a full understanding of the trade and what we go through. A lot of people look at the bird side and they're like, “We can glue bird spikes down. We can go do this or that.” They'll then get to me and they'll ask me a question. They're like, “I didn't realize it was all these other things involved.” That's where part of the risk comes in. High-risk but high reward.
Patrick Baldwin: In terms of building out the sales system at Alliance, I know that was instilled in you. Were you recording calls? Did you have sales scripts? How did you scale that?
Brett Madden: What do you mean? As far as the pest side of things?
Patrick Baldwin: Yeah.
Brett Madden: It was more in the service offerings and trying to focus more so on vertical markets as opposed to being good at everything. We looked at certain vertical markets, either education, retail, or food services. We try to dominate a market. We try to learn everything about that market and who the players were. How can we become number one in that market and what do we need to do? We would assemble a team and focus and dig our heels in on that market and develop sales offerings that solve the pain points of these people in these markets.
Pest control is such a low bar. You've already probably blown 30 people out of the water by calling people back or answering the phone. Trying to identify these vertical markets and addressing these pain points allowed us some great growth and scalable opportunity to be those power players in these markets, even against the larger strategics to be honest.
Patrick Baldwin: Didn’t you say something about Inbound sales in building a system there?
Brett Madden: In terms of the pest side of things?
Patrick Baldwin: Right. You all did residential pest control, right?
Brett Madden: Yeah. On our residential, one thing that we changed is we gave you a flat price for everything. We don't care what it is exclusive of let's say bedbugs, wildlife, or live animals. Quite frankly, it's all the same stuff. Nowadays, it’s such a broad-spectrum chemical base. If you're there for ants, bees, or whatever else, what difference does it make? You're doing an outside preventative service. We tried to go with a simple model, “It’s one price. We'll cover anything, whatever you got.” We’re trying to keep it simple. That allowed us to generate a lot of residential growth in that market.
Patrick Baldwin: What does that sound like when someone calls Alliance? Is it different than the next guy?
Brett Madden: I like to think it is. It's funny, I listened to Jared’s podcasts and some of the things that he did and some of his home services and I'm like, “Wow.” I was impressed by some of the things that he did. We do have call scripts. I try to remind everybody that we deal with people's problems. It's a tough concept to grasp with. People are calling us because they have a problem with something. You're already in that mindset. You have to be empathetic. You have to be able to absorb what their problem is. If you're not listening to what the people are telling you their pain point is, you're not going to be able to sell it.
A lot of these disciplines as far as listening, empathy, tonality, reflection, and all these different skills that I've learned through the years tie into that. I always tried to distill that to different people in terms of, “You got to remember they're calling you, they have a problem. They're going to be angry. There's going to be an issue. They've got bedbugs, roaches, ants, mosquitos, and whatever it is. Otherwise, if they did have a problem, they wouldn't need us. If they don't need us, we don't have a job.”
It's getting through that barrier of realizing that people are calling you because they have an issue with something. It’s not that they’re like, “I love you.” That doesn't happen. We have to create a low footprint but deliver on what the customer expects and hit those pain points and try to fly below the radar screen.
Patrick Baldwin: Teaching your office staff to answer those inbound calls, is there one emotion or adjective you would say, “We need to nail this on every call.”
Brett Madden: It's empathy. If you're monotone, “Yes and no,” and you're not listening, you need to be able to absorb. It's funny because I had this conversation with somebody about empathy. Not everybody has it. Some people are good at it naturally and other people can turn it on but other people don't have it. They're binary and cut and dry to the point.
Especially with residential customers, you need that level of emotion to be able to absorb and take away. They want to know that you fully understand what they're dealing with and what the problem is and that you're going to solve it. At least in our market, there are 30 other pest control companies on the same block as us. It's insane. They're always undercutting and they're always dropping their price and they're always doing this stuff.
If you can take that first touch point contact with the customer and establish that relationship and then continue to hand that deliverable on to the service staff and everything else, that's critical. To me, it all comes down to listening. If you sit and listen to what the customer has to say, they will tell you what they want. They're not going to come out and tell you directly, “I've got this problem. This is what I'm willing to pay.”
I refer to it as static. They're going to cloak their message in static. Beat around the bush. They're not going to tell you exactly. It's our job to uncover through listening to figure out what that is. When we're ready to deliver our service offering, we deliver on what they've already said. If you're not listening, you're not going to make the sale. I don't refer to it as a sale. You're providing a viable solution to this customer that has a need. If you're not delivering that, someone else out there is going to.
Patrick Baldwin: That doesn't sound alpha male-esque. You soften the sale.
Brett Madden: I got to close the deal.
Patrick Baldwin: Empathy was top of mind. That's the emotion I think about in sales. Is there a number two for you? If they master empathy, is there a number two?
Brett Madden: To me, part of it is working on your tonality and inflection. Your number one skill, as any type of person, should be to listen. There are many different things and mixed messages that if you're not listening, you will miss it. My wife says it to me all the time. She'll be talking and I'm not listening. Two minutes later, she'll say, “What did I say?”
Patrick Baldwin: Busted.
Brett Madden: It's one of those things where if you're not triggered or you're not dialed in to listen, you want to get yourself in trouble. Salespeople can do that. The phones are ringing, they're doing the schedule, and they're doing different things. That part of it is trying to bifurcate that out and block everything out. Turn your emotion off.
I always try to tell everybody that regardless of what your emotions are, your political affiliations, or whatever, your job is to listen to this person and figure out what they need to give them the right solution to solve their problem. You got to turn your own biases off. We all have biases and we all have different things that we think and feel. When you're in that driver's seat and you're taking that phone call or that sales call, you got to be dialed into that customer, especially with phone sales.
To me, there's no more powerful feeling than to be able to close something over the phone that you have not met someone face to face. That is the hardest thing to do. By far, hands down, it's easier to close a deal face-to-face. You get the eyeball rolling or the, “It's this. I see you.” It's those things that, in person, it's easy to read but on the phone, if you're not dialed in, it’s super hard.
Patrick Baldwin: In a world of distractions. To confess, after we finish this, I need to go and talk to my wife. Today, it was back-to-back. It was a workout, Zoom, texting, and to go have lunch with her. I was behind on email where all the notifications have come in. At lunch, I should have been talking and focused on her. I feel like I'm playing catch-up.
Brett Madden: As I was telling you, preparing for this, I put my phone on Do Not Disturb. I took it off. It was 18 missed calls, 60 emails, and text messages. I told everybody, “I need about two hours of alone time to get my thoughts straight.” It was one of those things. I was listening to Jared and he was talking about their prep for the podcast. He's like, “Prep? There was no prep. I sat down and we winged it.”
Patrick Baldwin: I should’ve warned you. I should’ve just set this up.
Brett Madden: If the Mex is involved.
Patrick Baldwin: He's involved.
Brett Madden: There's plenty of planning and preparation that needs to be done.
Patrick Baldwin: I've got the list from the Mex for you. We haven't gotten there yet. Taking it back to sales and this world of distraction, if I'm on the phone with a customer and then someone's texting me here on my cell phone, and then I've got the service manager over my shoulder waiting to schedule a service or a retreat and then the phone's ringing behind you, how do you keep them focused? The only job you have right now is to talk to the person on the phone.
Brett Madden: I know you know Jay Keating from Thompson St. PestCo. It was one of those things where we've had a lot of meetings with him. He had a great analogy as far as handing the baton off to the next person and managing those deliverables from each person and honing that down. It's one of those things where it is super difficult but identifying what those key components are from that inbound call, what they do, what they say, where it goes, and then where that then gets transitioned to that baton gets passed off to the service in the operational standpoint. That’s a critical component.
Patrick Baldwin: Are you telling me you listened to Jared’s episode but not Jay’s? Is that what I heard?
Brett Madden: I listened to Jay’s as well. I listened to a lot of the podcasts.
Patrick Baldwin: Trying to get you in trouble here.
Brett Madden: Come on.
Patrick Baldwin: Question number one for Brett. You're locked down in the pandemic and Brett Madden gets bored. Is it true you're not only an attorney, business owner, and entrepreneur? You went and became an author, is that true?
Brett Madden: Yeah. Two things. My son was looking at some videos, either Grant Cardone or one of these other real estate guys. I was fascinated by how they're able to scale and sell these webinars for thousands of dollars that are repeating everything else. I said, “I don't understand.” I went and bought every program. I bought everything. I listened to everything. When I'm done with it all, I'm scratching my head. I'm like, “I do this every day. I don't understand. What am I doing wrong? I need to have a webinar or I need to have something. I need to do something.”
My oldest son, Jake, was like, “Why don't you write your own book if you're so good at it?” I'm like, “Game on.” I wind up writing a sales book distilling down what I've done in terms of all my years of training. It was the same thing. It's some core principles in terms of that. A part of that sales piece is we're working on a new digital marketing platform called Egnyter. We're trying to anticipate the customer's needs before they go to the internet. It's something that we're almost getting done with beta testing.
There's got to be a better way in the pest control digital marketing platform. All these different companies are paying $80 or $90 a click for Google. Those leads are going to nine different people. What that's doing is driving down the price that each one of those guys is doing their service offerings for. A lot of people are getting richer with different companies that are selling their leads. I'm like, “That's hurting us.” We're all doing the same thing, like, “We need more pay per click,” or, “We need more of this and more of that.”
We've been working on a way that is pretty powerful. Our cost per acquisition from a customer is minimal. It's a timing-based program that I'm excited about. I've talked to Paul about it as well. Hopefully, I'll get the opportunity to come back on here once we launched this thing because it's going to be pretty powerful. Looking at those niche markets and trying to be a disruptor, why are we always doing the same thing? Sometimes there's got to be a better way.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it. You're definitely coming back. Also, during the pandemic, you decided it's not only time to write a book but it's time to sell the business.
Brett Madden: My father passed away at the beginning of the pandemic. It was one of those things where he started the business. I had some thoughts of selling it but it was one of the things that I could never do when he was still alive. When he passed away, I looked into moving in another direction. Growing up in the family business, I was ready for that change. For me, it was one of those things. I didn't want to go the strategic route. I wanted more of a partner that I can link up with that would take care of our team members and bring our company to the next level.
I had some experience selling No Fly Zone. I have a lot of experience dealing with large strategics on a number of fronts over the years. That was a big fear of mine but I was like, “I need to figure this out here because I care about my employees, about my team, and everything else.” I Was figuring out how to bring our company to the next level. I started exploring the private equity side. Thompson St. focused on investing in leaders that are foundry-led middle market businesses. They've acquired 150 companies in various markets and managed over $3 billion a year.
I felt like looking through that equity side of things with Thomson St. It would increase or accelerate our growth both organically and in complimentary acquisitions. Even in a short period of time, we've been under their wing. How much I've learned from the different strategic units and different members? There's stuff that I thought I knew that I didn't and bouncing these ideas off. Learning from them has been a tremendous asset for me as well.
I felt that they would give us the best position to continue to expand the business and support a strong future for the existing team by wanting to grow because that's what they want to do, they want to keep growing and raise the bar. For me, that equity route was where I focused. The transition has been great. PestCo truly cares about the staff and growing the brand. They're always looking to improve the customer user experience as well.
I know it's crazy, we have our weekly meetings. They’re like, “What can we do better? What do you need from us?” It's refreshing that they're always looking to improve on things at various stages and not just bottom-line revenue stuff. I never would have met Jared and been able to talk to him about collaborative things and learn different sales perspectives and how people do things a little bit differently.
It is more of a think tank. Everybody's guarded in the pest control world. No one wants to share information or they think they got a holy grail of a secret. It's weird but here, it's an open source. It’s like, “What do you think about this?” You get fifteen different answers. It’s like, “Wow.” To me, that was a good fit for us. Especially after he passed away, I was personally ready for a change.
Patrick Baldwin: You said you've learned something already. You've learned a lot being a part of Thompson St. Is there one thing that you can share that won't get you fired?
Brett Madden: From a sales perspective, there are different units that do different methods of selling that are on another whole level. I don't think I can get into specifics but some of the processes that they've done and learned. It'd be the equivalent of me taking someone through the back-end framework of how we do bird work. It's such a unique perspective.
There's one unit in particular. They have a certain sales platform that they use in APIs and all these crazy different inner workings. How they do it is absolutely tremendous. I called them and I said, “Can you take me through this?” Not only did he take me through it but he sent me an account and plugged me in with his main guy. Cool stuff like that is intriguing to me and is going to improve the overall customer experience but also it's gonna help us grow.
Patrick Baldwin: I'm going to go back and rewind a little bit because before you decided to sell to private equity, based on your previous experience of you buying the business from your dad, you have two sons that are both entrepreneurs, did you consider selling?
Brett Madden: I didn't even consider either one of them. My kids, I can't even tell you, if they have to kill a spider, it's a ten-alarm fire. I got to say as much as I've enjoyed growing up in pest control and as much freedom it's allowed me, I wanted to break the cycle. You got to remember, family business. My mother worked there. My aunt worked there and she still does. It's tough. You bring your work home with you. It's one of those things and that's it, you eat, live, and breathe it. To me, that's what growing up was.
It wasn’t at all good, not bad by any means. My parents probably didn't want me to go to law school and do all these different things. When you're out there and you're doing these things and you realize, “I'm working 90 hours.” There is a quality of life issue that always creeps in on certain things that are extremely important. As a general whole, people devalue their time. To me, time is the most precious commodity we have. For me, it allowed me to still maintain my level where I was but it allowed me some flexibility to do what I wanted and grow.
Patrick Baldwin: That's important. The time thing is critical. The older I get, the more that resonates with me and I’m reminded about it.
Brett Madden: My stated goal is to live to 100. I'm 50 so I'm halfway there. It's a pretty sobering thought.
Patrick Baldwin: I thought you were 51?
Brett Madden: 51 this November 2022.
Patrick Baldwin: I thought you were already rewinding the clock.
Brett Madden: If I had a time machine, trust me, I'd be invested in that real quick.
Patrick Baldwin: Why don't you go and put an ad out for the time machine, sell some, and then figure it out?
Brett Madden: I could tell you stories.
Patrick Baldwin: What was the process like? You've narrowed it down to Thompson St. I don't even know, as you had conversations with Paul, if it was like, “We're not even considering strategics.” What did that sound like to you?
Brett Madden: As a complete aside, I have to give my plug to Potomac. I need to thank the whole Potomac team and all their hard work and dedication to my project. At times, it was a hard process given that I'm letting go a part of my life. In all seriousness with Franco, and I would say this to anybody, uber-intelligent and understands the landscape of things and always brought a softer side to things. To disarm everybody in these different meetings and different stuff, he would always be breaking everybody's chops about things.
That personality in an M&A setting was phenomenal because it got everybody to chill out a little bit and relax. Everybody took a breath and then he would say something else. In a sense, it was refreshing. I've got a warped sense of humor so it was awesome. I was like, “This is awesome. I love it.” If we're not cutting on each other, we got a problem. I always tell people, “If I stop breaking your chops, you have an issue. Otherwise, bring it on.”
Say what you will, he's always had my back. I always joke with him, he's my would-be through the whole process. If I was upset about something, I'd call and he walked me off the ledge or he would do this or he would do that. He put up with my insanity for a good period of time. I was able to have complete confidence throughout the process from start to finish from Potomac’s entire team. I can't speak volumes of what they did and how they went through it.
They took us through their process and met with everybody. It was one of those things that I felt in my heart of hearts that the equity side was the way to go. They're growing at such a rapid rate, it is unprecedented. It's crazy. They're going to continue to go on that path. To be on that flywheel with them as they're continuing to grow, differently than a strategic will look at what we have, possibly strip out what they want and re-consolidate and make more money.
From that perspective, having some of the experiences that I had on the path shaped my decision. To me, that's where I felt part of that team and part of that unit of growth. This is 100% legit. If a unit has something they want to contribute or say, they listen. They do listen and they do look for us for guidance on different things and input and things of that nature. There are some intelligent people on these teams that are way smarter than me.
Patrick Baldwin: As your role changed, are you still overseeing Alliance?
Brett Madden: Correct. I'm still there. My role hasn't changed. If anything, I'm trying to do more mentoring and more global picturing if you will. Nothing's changed. Everything's remained the same. I’ve been trying to do more focusing on filling holes and mentoring different team members.
Patrick Baldwin: Have you lost anyone on your team yet?
Brett Madden: We've had a couple of transitional bumps but all the core players are still there. With any type of change, you're going to get some uncertainty with things.
Patrick Baldwin: You're still leading Alliance. There are some extra people there in your executive realm of Jay and Jared and all that. On the front lines of things with your salespeople, your technicians, and your office staff, how has that impacted them?
Brett Madden: It hasn't even been a blip as far as that goes.
Patrick Baldwin: What would cause them?
Brett Madden: Nothing. It's a weird time with the market and the labor force.
Patrick Baldwin: Was it more coincidental?
Brett Madden: Yeah. There are a lot of competitors out there that are offering crazy numbers as far as labor rates and things of that nature. All our core team remains and there's no change. I have the best team out there. They are exceptional at what they do. I'd like to think that I trained them well and mentored them well. I joke, like, “If you don't teach someone how to fish, what good is it if I do all the catching of the fish?” You got to teach people and you got to spend the time. It's making that investment in people and time that will pay dividends later. That's an important concept.
I've never been big at micromanaging people. My philosophy is if you've got a problem and if you come into my office, there are only two things that I request when you come to my office, you better have a pad and it better be a solution that you're telling me to the problem. Otherwise, I'm going to ask you to leave the office. If you come to my office and you don't have a pad and pen, I'm asking you to leave. If you don't have a solution, I'm asking you to leave.
For example, if I have a problem with X, you better have a pad and pen and you better say, “This is the problem. This is what I think we should do. I want to make sure that I'm on the right path.” Boom, set, and go. If you can look at and manage people's thought processes in terms of learning how they think, you can then allow people to grow and take responsibility and ownership of their decisions.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it. They're coming in with pen and paper. It's almost a physical emblem or sign that they're ready to learn, listen, and annotate what they're about to take in. Come in with a proposed solution, that's what you're saying. It’s like, “Here's what I'm proposing.” What happens then in this management style if their solution is not the best solution? It’s like, “There's a better way of doing things.”
Brett Madden: A couple of things. To me, it's all about fact patterns. What we do is all fact-pattern-based. You see a fact pattern and you come up with a solution. The quicker I can identify those fact patterns for people and they see the same thing replicate, they don't need to come to talk to me all the time, “I've seen this fact pattern. This is what we did. I can make this now and do this.”
My thinking is you come to me and I don't think it's the right fact pattern, I may let you fail, to be honest with you. I've done that in the past. I'll let people make decisions that I might think are not the best. I may not tell you, “You're an idiot. That's a terrible decision.” I may say, “Okay.” I want them to read my body language and say, “You run with it and report back to me whenever.”
They'll report back to me and they'll say, “This didn't happen,” or, “This didn't work for this different reason.” I'll give the correction action that I would have done at that point. Now I'm hoping it's a teachable moment for them to be able to say, “This fact pattern, I applied this resolution and this was the result. It didn't work out exactly how I wanted it.” I'm hoping that by learning how they think, I can mold them on how I think and how I would address issues.
Patrick Baldwin: “Brett, I did what we talked about last time and it didn't work.” Your response is like, “I knew it wouldn’t work.”
Brett Madden: I try my hardest not to be like, “I told you so.” I can't stress it enough. I try to do it with my kids. I don't micromanage, I am not a firm believer. If I have to micromanage you, I'm also doing it myself. Getting back to any earlier points, as a society, we've come to accept a lesser standard of quality work.
We're always fixing other people's problems. To me, it's draining because you spend 40%, 50%, or 60% of your day fixing other people's problems. If you would just do your job, you wouldn't have to do that and you'd be so much more optimized. I don't mean to sound binary in terms of, if you see the fact pattern, you recognize the fact pattern, and you know what we applied, you're able to move on. That might be my legal training because everything we did legally is based on fact patterns, hypotheticals, and things of that nature.
By learning how people think, you can allow them to take responsibility for their decisions. People should be allowed to make mistakes. Also, we're at a point in society where kids aren't allowed to make mistakes anymore. You need to make those mistakes and learn. Hopefully, they're not too costly. you're able to get corrective action. One of my rules is I'm okay if you make a mistake, just don’t make it twice.
Patrick Baldwin: I don't remember where it was but almost at the beginning of it, the book started with a story of the dad celebrating. Every day the kids will come home from school, “What did you do wrong today?” They would celebrate it. It's mind-blowing. It's a different way of thinking.
Brett Madden: This is going to sound oaky. Every day, I still try to reflect on my day in terms of how I could have managed something better. How could I have done better? Did I handle the conversation wrong? Did I say something wrong? Did I snap at somebody? Did I not give somebody the time that they deserved?
I try to pick a couple of those points in my day. Every day, I come up with something. Every day, it's like, “I should have said this,” or, “I shouldn't have said that,” or, “I should have spent more time here.” It can be at home or work, whatever. It’s that personal reflection, you need that. Otherwise, you get stuck in a rut and you do the same thing and there's no room for personal growth. It sounds oaky but I do it every day.
Patrick Baldwin: Not at all. I love it. I love the ability, on The Buzz, to speak one on one. Other owners like you are vulnerable with their businesses and your management styles. I was even asking you about sales scripts. I want to piece this together. You don't like micromanaging. You have people come in with a pad and pen with their proposed solution. Now I'm going to go all the way back to sales. I'm thinking about Inbound sales. Did you have a sales script or did you rely on the person's character and ability to handle each call?
Brett Madden: It's one of those things when you have done it for a long period of time early on, things become scripted in terms of what you're doing. You need to have a path in terms of, “Mrs. Jones, how can I help you today?” We already know what she's going to say before she even asked the question. When they call in, they're going to be like, “I'm having a problem with X,” or, “Do you guys take care of Y? How much does it cost to do this? How fast can you get someone here to take care of that?” “I'm trying to get more information about this.” You can distill it down to probably 4 or 5 questions.
For me, it's about getting them on that track to be like, “Is it okay if I ask you a few questions so I can better serve you?” You always want to ask for that permission to start the conversation. We tend to complicate things, “How'd you hear about us?” We're trying to figure out the marketing or figuring out how they heard about us. Anytime I was in that position, I would always try to ask a general open-ended question.
My goal is to get the potential customer designed to start having a conversation and tell me what's going on. The most important thing is to let them talk. Do your job and listen at that point. Don't try to interrupt. Even if you know the answer, no one cares that you know the answer. What they care about is that you're listening and you're empathetic about what's going on. You let them go through it and you let them talk about it.
As you're listening, you're already figuring out where to move that pattern if you will as far as, “Am I going left? Am I going right in my conversation? Do you have any pest control things? Do you have kids? Do you have pets? Do you have a basement? Do you have a slab?” As you do it for a certain long period of time, to me, it comes naturally. It's one of those things where you don't have a script.
That allows you to build your position and you're able to verbally restate the prospect’s specific problem and recapture that. By the point you've done all that, you got them realizing their pain points, you got them understanding what's going on, you know all the buzzes, and then you give the solution. It's like, “Why wouldn't you want to buy this for me because I gave you a solution to all your pain points?”
Patrick Baldwin: I hear you. What’s funny is you identified as non-binary and I asked you a binary question if you had a script or not. I’m sorry.
Brett Madden: It's so tough for me because doing it for as long as I have. This comes from my parents, I've always been taught the six Ps, proper planning prevents piss poor performance. The more you're prepared, chance favors the prepared. If I'm on a call and I'm listening and I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I should keep the train on the tracks. When I'm not listening and I'm queued out, the train falls off the tracks. You're not making a sale.
Patrick Baldwin: Speaking of the six P, and I need to fact-check you on this one, you are the most prepared client ever in doing due diligence. What do you mean by that?
Brett Madden: It's funny because you can fact-check that with Franco. Even for our podcast, I tried to have a full understanding and be able to be cerebral in terms of when we're on a call. It's probably a part of my legal training because when you're doing different work, you're in front of a judge, or you're in front of different things, you have to be able to shift gears quickly and have a great recall of information to be able to provide coherent answers. It comes down to listening, all the due diligence stuff, and all these different things. That was some stressful stuff. I'd like to think I was the most prepared unless the Mex is blowing some bias smoke up my way.
Patrick Baldwin: If it was smoke, we know what kind it was. What do you mean as far as when you were the most prepared? You're saying that you do what was going to be asked on every call and you came in ready.
Brett Madden: I try to anticipate where the calls would be going and what the questions would be in terms of being able to provide a coherent answer to providing a meaningful answer, especially in those due diligence periods to have a full understanding of things. As the owner, you don't know everything. You know a lot but there's a lot of minutia detail that you don't know.
Patrick Baldwin: give me an example where most of us like myself would have blown smoke and you're like, “XYZ, here's how we do it.”
Brett Madden: Even getting as granular as different service offerings or different things of that nature allowed me to re-dig back in and go through some different fundamental things in the data pack. There were things that I learned. As we went through certain aspects of it and you see things graphically or numerically, it's like, “Okay.” It was things that I didn't even realize that even took me by surprise.
Patrick Baldwin: Tell me what's next. You sold Alliance. You’re still there with Thompson St. Capital Partners. You're still the “boss” like you like to be called.
Brett Madden: No. It’s funny, people are like, “The Boss.” I'm like, “When I say that's a hot button and you come in my office and call me the boss, you got problems.”
Patrick Baldwin: I wonder if the sales guy comes into your office and is like “What's up, boss?” You’re like, “Just go.”
Brett Madden: It's one of those things that's always been a pet peeve to me. I don't like being looked at as a boss. I don't like being treated like a boss. I never liked it. I don't like that feeling of someone thinking they're superior in some way, shape, or form. It takes a team, it does. Without the team, nothing gets accomplished. To have that good culture and that symbiotic flow of everything is not a boss-type of mentality, at least in my world. It's not my thing.
Patrick Baldwin: You're still operating Aviaway.
Brett Madden: I'm still running Aviaway Bird Control.
Patrick Baldwin: Is that part of Thomson St. or not?
Brett Madden: No. Anything related to birds was carved out and that's all under my domain under Aviaway. We're continuing to grow that brand. I encourage any of your readers to reach out and learn more about how they can grow the bird business with us.
Patrick Baldwin: Explain that to me. Your business model with Aviaway is different.
Brett Madden: We do a lot of different things. We do national accounts. We do general contractors. We do anything related to birds. One of our asides is we do a lot of work with PCSOs. You got to remember, the PCOs are the frontline people that are in the accounts. They see the birds and they see certain things. Their technicians see it. We've developed referral programs. We have three different models where we can come in and do all the work for them, handle the billing, the front-end work, and the back-end work and give them a percentage.
In some cases, we would wear their shirts, come in on unmarked vehicles, and it looks like it's their brand 100%. All we do is we come in, we do the job, we get out, they build, and they do everything. We've got other PCO network relationships whereby we will do everything. We'll bid the work. We'll do all the drafting, planning, and engineering. We'll bill it and we'll say, “We're partnering with this company.” We'll keep it and set it that way.
There are other ones that will train to do bird work. In my core thinking, I'm okay training pest control or doing some of the things that we do because I know they'll never be able to handle some of these larger crazier projects. Those are the ones that I want. I have no problem helping PCOs and working with them, “Do you want to learn how to do this? Fine, we'll teach you how to do it.”
There have been several occasions where I've sent the foreman out and we've helped somebody install something and taught them what to do. We do a lot of continuing education credits with the birds as well to work that learning platform piece of things. It's a great industry. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who think they can do it but shouldn't do it.
Patrick Baldwin: Don't judge me. What about the distribution part of that? Is that part of the model?
Brett Madden: We do distribute some products. We make some products. There are certain things that we do as far as that. It shows a lot of different facets that we're continuing to work on to broaden that model in terms of the overall industry. It's a great industry. I don't like the fact that we're lumped in with the wildlife in terms of that because it is such a different model and it's not a reoccurring revenue model. Unfortunately, that's where it gets lumped in.
Patrick Baldwin: You dispelled the rumors. There are a lot of bird products. I feel judged because you're like, “It's done for everyone.” There I was selling pest control for the last couple of years. It's problem-solving. It's different. No one else is doing it. I enjoyed it. Are there different methods of deterring birds that you would say steer away from?
Brett Madden: Distilling it down to its essential principles. Anytime birds have nested in a given area, you cannot use bird deterrent products. What is a bird deterrent product? Bird spikes, bird wire, bird gel, sound units, and all these different things.
Patrick Baldwin: Lasers.
Brett Madden: You cannot use these things because what winds up happening is when the birds have nested and they know, “This is my home,” you have to make an architectural modification to the building substrate or whatever you're working on. That's either going to be a physical alteration. It's going to be installing bird netting. It's going to be installing some other type of device to create a 45-degree angle.
There are different devices whereby when you permanently exclude by making an architectural modification, the birds can't go there any longer. I see it probably ten times a week, “We installed bird spikes and now we have all these nestings in the spikes.” I'm like, “Great.” You used a bird spike for a sparrow and the sparrow was like, “Thank you for putting these little spiky things up so I can put my nesting material in.” we see it all the time.
The internet is a powerful thing where they’re like, “How do you solve this problem? Put bird spikes.” You then start getting into the minutia, especially with bird netting. That is a skillset on its own. Whether it's a 200,000-square-foot net job or a 5,000-square-foot net job, it is a whole different level of workmanship and quality. What substrate are you going into? You’re going into brick. You're going into steel. You’re going into pre-stressed concrete. Are you using a powder-actuated gun? Are you drilling? There are many variables but not everybody understands them and they go and do it.
We get those calls probably half a dozen times a week, “We took this project on and we messed up. We need some help.” That happens. I'm glad we're in a position to be able to assist because that allows me a good opportunity to develop a relationship with these PCSOs or general contractors. Now when they get a job, I help them out of a bind. They're all going to come back to me. It's fostering and developing that relationship that allows us to scale and grow that business.
Patrick Baldwin: I love it, especially the part where you said you won't poach the PCO’s client. Thank you.
Brett Madden: That's the important thing from the PCO. For the PCOs that we work with, they fully understand when you're in these plants and you're in these ag centers and this other stuff, if you can't solve the customer's problem, the customer is going to reach out to a larger company. A larger company is going to say, “We can take care of that. By the way, can we get on your RFP list to get the bid?” Guess what? Now the twenty-year relationship that you had with the manager or somebody else is out the window. It happens all the time.
If we can help them solidify those relationships and stay in the driver's seat, I want them to continue growing their reoccurring revenue and just come to me for the birds. This is my opinion. Most of the manufacturers have never installed bird. They've never done it before. It's hard for me to take, with a grain of salt, what you're teaching if you've never done it. There's a powerful component.
Also, the manufacturers are biased in terms of, “We're training you on X because I sell X.” To me, that's the wrong way to approach what we do. You have to look at it, how do you solve a customer's problem? To me, the training I would like to do as a module is more like, “These are the basics.” You got to know when you're in too deep.
You got to know, “If I do this any longer, I'm going to mess this out.” Now I'm messing up my pest control account. Now I have the potential of losing the reoccurring revenue. Now I have an issue. It's knowing that barometer. Many PCSOs think, “I can do anything.” That's their minds. It's a mindset. There's viable learning that can be done through that PCO channel that should be there.
Patrick Baldwin: I hear you loud and clear. Brett, this has been wonderful. I have a few things in closing. One, I don't know how or why. Forgive me, the Mex says that your mom is hot.
Brett Madden: My mom, everybody mistakes her for my sister. My mother is very beautiful. She did have me when she was young so she's not that old. I can see Franco saying that.
Patrick Baldwin: I have very much sanitized this question offline. I can show you what he told me.
Brett Madden: She'd give him a run for his money, don't worry.
Patrick Baldwin: Send her down to San Juan. They'll have a good old time.
Brett Madden: Trust me, I don't know if she'd come back.
Patrick Baldwin: He’d probably keep her. There are different closing gifts. Somehow this came up and I forgot what it was. I bought the Mex Tyrannosaurus Mex t-shirt. He has Mexican socks or something. You did a shirt for him, right?
Brett Madden: I did. This was one of those things. We'd always joke. Every time I’d call him, he’d ask me, “Who's your favorite Mexican?” He had some other choice things he would ask me, what his favorite thing is. I'm like, “Okay.” This was one of those things. I went to our graphics team. It was awkward because I said, “I want something. Who's your favorite Mexican?” I'm trying to be funny. I'm trying to hit a certain button and everybody's looking at me like, “What are we working on? I don't understand what you're asking me.” I'm like, “Trust me. It’s got to be funny. It’s got to be flowing.”
Patrick Baldwin: The Mex has four shirts. There's the Las Palmas polo that the caller wrote years ago. There's a Peloton shirt that he wears but he doesn't ever wear it on the Peloton. Tyrannosaurus Mex and now what? Who's your favorite Mexican?
Brett Madden: Who's your favorite Mexican? It had a little cactus with a sombrero on it and the whole nine yards.
Patrick Baldwin: That’s awesome.
Brett Madden: We had some creativity in that one, for sure.
Patrick Baldwin: Brett, this was awesome. I enjoyed it. Sorry, Paul couldn't make it. He employed everything to avoid us.
Brett Madden: I appreciate the opportunity. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to be on here again.
Patrick Baldwin: I want to bring you back and talk more about Egnyter once that's launched.
Brett Madden: That's getting close. That's super exciting. We're always trying to push the envelope a little bit. It was funny because, with the technology, I'll never forget I was at an event and this guy was talking about something and it triggered a thought. The next day, I tracked this guy down and he’s like, “How did you write all this down and develop all this?” I’m like, “I haven't slept yet.” One of those light bulb moments went off my head and I'm like, “Can we do this and this?” I have a whole wire diagram laid out and the whole nine yards. Unfortunately, it's a curse, my brain never shuts off.
Patrick Baldwin: Mad scientist.
Brett Madden: I love it. We got a short period of time here on this earth, we might as well make the best that we can while we're here.
Patrick Baldwin: Brett, thanks again for joining us in The Boardroom. I look forward to meeting you in person and bringing you back here again.
Brett Madden: You got it. I appreciate the opportunity.
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Patrick Baldwin: You mentioned alpha male earlier. I want to ask you about that. Hypothetically, let's dive right in. He scored these alpha males on a scale of 1 to 10 how alpha they were. That's a new scale. He could probably publish that and make a lot of money. Not from a branding perspective but I want to ask you internally, what happens if someone does that like Brett or Patrick? They hire a whole bunch of alpha, 9s and 10s, and they put them in business together from CSR, technicians, salespeople, executive staff, admin staff, and everyone as alpha male or female. What happens to that business internally?
Seth Garber: The question is that as you hire all these different people and everyone says, “I'm an alpha male.” Does the pecking order start? To Brett's point, do we start this whole idea of we're ranking now? We're all alpha males. Number 1 through number 10 and number 10 wins, it creates a lot of chaos honestly. Historically, we've seen sales teams get built that are full of let's call alpha personalities. I've watched some bloodbaths take place. I can tell you some great stories. I've watched bloodbaths take place inside offices. It creates catastrophe and chaos.
Patrick Baldwin: Don't tease me, Seth Garber. Tell me. Give me a story.
Seth Garber: One good one. Outside of the pest industry, I was running a tech company. We had a sales team that was full of let's call alphas. I was the CRO at the time. We played this game and whoever was the lowest on the totem pole had a sign put up in their office that was the squid sign. It was a picture of a squid. They got called squid all week. Our team was a bunch of A players.
One time, it got taken a little too far. I was in a town and I get a phone call from the director of sales saying, “When you come home, you're firing everybody.” I said, “There's no way.” I was traveling. I come walking into the office and one of the sales reps goes, “We need to talk before I get fired.” That was the conversation.
What took place while I was gone is this little squid competition going higher and higher to where one of the sales reps brought a dead squid into the office and put it on the guy's desk. The guy hated it. It smelled all weekend when he came into the office. It went crazy. a fistfight ensued. It took a couple of guys. One guy got beat up pretty good. At the end of the day, I walked into this after a long trip speaking at a conference. I probably have a couple more if I think about it. That's what happened in a sales organization one time.
Patrick Baldwin: There's danger in hiring too many alpha males.
Seth Garber: There is.
Patrick Baldwin: It doesn't make sense to target sevens. It was 6, 7, or 8 on the alpha scale where there's some good bit of follower and compliance and then there's still a good bit of drive.
Seth Garber: To an extent. The question is, is somebody self-identifying themselves as an alpha? Alternatively, is it the fact that they're lining up in that role within the organization and that they have that actual personality? At the end of the day, the 7s, 8s, or 9s are probably the people you want in your sales organization and probably the person you want in charge of your operations. Ultimately, maybe the person that you want leading your CSR team. It probably makes the most logical sense from my perspective.
Patrick Baldwin: As soon as Brett said his dad recorded phone calls, I'm like, “That's something Seth would do.” Do you teach your consulting clients to record calls and follow-up? What does that look like in your world?
Seth Garber: As he made that mention, I had tingling go down my spine and my hair stood up because I remember back at the beginning of the sales days, way before we had all these great and sophisticated CRMs and all this stuff. I remember, when I was in sales, a sales leader handing me a stack of index cards and a telephone book and saying, “You need to record these calls.” Stick it with these stupid suction cups with a record of the back of my phone. I almost started thinking about how easy sales reps have it today. Of course, we want everyone to record calls. We reviewed thousands of them and all kinds of stuff.
Patrick Baldwin: Have you adopted AI technology or sentiment technology that reviews the calls? They can pick up on those emotions. We talked about empathy or confidence.
Seth Garber: We've looked at a lot of those technologies over the years. We used one of them that would identify where coaching opportunities could take place. Honestly, I still felt like spending the time to listen to those calls still created the greatest coaching opportunities. in today's world, maybe they've gotten better. I haven't looked at one in a couple of years now. Our experience back when we had big sales teams was the fact that we wanted our managers to listen. We wanted them to identify it and put it within our sales process. Arguably, I bet they've gotten good. I'd like to dive into them at some point again.
Patrick Baldwin: It's hard not to like a guy that, at a young age, build a Lucite humidor box. This guy is a legend. Let's stick in the office. We're talking about recording phone calls. I want to ask you this. I find myself on my phone a lot or distracted by my phone or picking it up all the time. It's a vice or flaw. Whatever it is, I have it. Now, that's different. I’m paying someone, a salesperson or a CSR, to sit there, be attentive on the phone, solve customer problems, sell in pest control, etc. What happens when that phone is nearby at their desk distracting them and keeping them from doing other work? How do you manage that?
Seth Garber: You're going to put me out there like this on this one.
Patrick Baldwin: Pretty much. That's why you're here. Like the hurricane wasn't enough. I’ll take you out, Seth.
Seth Garber: It's been a long time since I was a frontline manager. Here's the thing, I would always take a step back and want to manage the things that greatly affected the business versus making broad-based decisions. I've got some of our clients across the country who have had no phone on sales the floor policy. I've got other ones that say get the job done and everywhere in between. If the results are there and they hit the specific KPIs that we're looking for, I could care less as long as that customer has a great experience.
If I dive way in and I said, “What's the perfect policy?” The perfect policy would be what I call the 50 minutes on and 10 minutes off policy, which is how we build inside sales teams. We want them deadly focused for 50 minutes and then we'll have them take a break for 10 minutes. They can do whatever they want. We want them to be deadly focused again for another 50 minutes. That seems to be a good way to do it.
There are other methodologies for your higher functioning salespeople where people would say 25 minutes on and 5 minutes and allow these people to take care of some of their personal stuff. Those methodologies work the best today. I've always been the person and I'm sure you are the same, Mr. Fat Pat, that could sit there for hours on end and stay laser-focused.
Patrick Baldwin: Look at you pulling up like a double Pomodoro or single Pomodoro time management practice.
Seth Garber: Somebody told me that a long time ago and I always thought that was a good methodology back in the day.
Patrick Baldwin: Welcome to The Boardroom Buzz. It’s where you learn random bits of knowledge. Egnyter technology. You're big into sales velocity tools. You’re a little bit familiar with big clips. Are you picking up on what Brett's putting down there?
Seth Garber: I was. The thing is I don't know how they're handling their datasets. I'm sure what they've designed is probably something pretty impactful. He hit the nail on the head. In today's world, everyone in our industry chases that silver bullet. How do I spend on an ad? Silver bullet. Get a new lead. I’m not sure what datasets they're using or how they're doing it. We've seen lots of technology do those things.
I'm interested to see his use cases. I'm interested to see if the same use cases apply in multiple markets across the country or if it's something they're using in the Northeast. I'm incredibly familiar with the different technologies that accomplish the things that he's talking about. One example is we know who our ideal customer is, which is typically a female buyer, 25 to 60, and there are subsets inside of that.
One of the datasets that we use to look at a lot and we still do today is people who have a tendency to shop at certain stores. Does that same person have a tendency to buy pest control during specific seasons? The answer is yes. If people shop at certain stores and they have a certain spend buying, they will have a greater propensity to buy pest control. If he has those datasets, he's going to probably win this game, which is exciting.
Patrick Baldwin: That's fancy. I've not thought about tying in where women buy clothing or stuff into buying pest control. That is interesting. The pen and paper is the thing that blew me away. As a salesperson doing outside sales, it’s pen and paper all the time ready to take notes. I've heard that it's polite to ask before you take notes on stuff. This is an outward sign of me listening. I'm coming prepared. Pen in hand and paper in hand.
Also, I'm bringing a proposed solution. That's how Bobby and I operate. That was the philosophy, not the pen and paper part, which I love. If you're going to come bring a problem, bring a proposed solution. That went outward. We did a lot of WDIs. There was even a point we got into helping with conducive conditions. these real estate agents would have fewer hurdles to clear to get to close.
It became almost a catch-22. It’s hard to deal with. With real estate agents, for some of them, it became a problem because they thought, “You writing up more conducive conditions so that you can make more revenue.” That was not the end result. Sure, making money is great and all that stuff but we want to make a better experience for you. Doing clearing conducive conditions, our philosophy was that if we bring a problem to your attention, we want to bring the potential solution to that problem. It was even external. I love that.
Seth Garber: It was great. If he dove in, I bet he would even take it a step further and probably talk about the preparation that they go into prior to some of these meetings in understanding the type of structures they’re looking at or the type of customer they're going at. It‘s more like the pre-call planning methodology. I bet he does all that cool stuff.
Patrick Baldwin: If he doesn't?
Seth Garber: He should. I'm sure he does. He's world-class at what he does, it's obvious. Patrick, one of the things that I thought was interesting, and I would argue it's one of my belief systems. He had talked about handing off the baton between sales and operations and how that all takes place. I was curious when you guys were building your company back in the day, how did you guys think about the transfer from your sales to operations? Is that something you guys put a lot of thought into?
Patrick Baldwin: That's a good one, Seth. Thanks for the curveball. Sales and service are what it looked like to us. It got to a point, even in the office, we had dedicated admin staff for sales and dedicated admin staff for service. Them being together in the room all day helped a lot of things to keep those departments connected. It is easy fingerpointing, “You sold that too low. You didn't give me enough time. You over-promised. Whatever you promised, you didn't communicate.” A lot needs to go into those methods.
At the end of the day, the thing that came down to was having well-articulated notes or comments. When the technician saw the work order, he knew exactly what was going on. Everything had to go on a service agreement. Recurring jobs, inside sales, and outside sales, everything had to go there. It was consistent. They would have a copy of the service agreement.
Here's one thing that passed the baton. This is something that we did and loved. I would imagine most phone systems could do this. We had almost a receptionist role, the first answer. If she wasn't available, someone else would catch it. If no one was on the phone, she was the first to answer. She would feel that and then she would figure out if that goes to sales or service. I prefer this over an IVR, press 1 for sales and 2 for service. I've talked about this like that robot.
She would answer and then she would figure out, “Is this an existing customer or not?” Where do they need to go? If it went to sales, she would get that girl on the phone for sales and put the customer on hold, “Is it okay if I put you on hold real quick? Suzy is the best one to get you taken care of for this problem.” Put them on hold, pick up the phone with Suzy, “I've got Mrs. Jones on the phone. So you know, it sounds like she has some fire ants in her yard, maybe some fleas, or spiders.”
Whatever the concern or whatever tangible things she's gotten out of that conversation, then she would go, “I'm ready for her. Pass her back.” The receptionist was to go back to Mrs. Jones, “Mrs. Jones, I now have Suzy on the line with you. Suzy, this is Mrs. Jones. Mrs. Jones, just so you know, I talked to Suzy about your spiders, ants, and fleet problem. You all got it from here.” “We'll take it.” The receptionist will hang up and go to the next. That's passing the baton in a different way.
I don't like it when I get passed from department to department as a consumer. This has nothing to do with pest control. wherever it is, you're expecting some level of service. You already have a problem and then that problem begins to accelerate and compound as you have to repeat yourself to different people. You're like, “I want to tell you my problem once. Sure, you can clarify my problem. If you don't understand it, dig deeper. I don't want to have to restate it over and over.” Our customers loved it.
Seth Garber: It's interesting. It eliminates that big concept that we've spoken about before. It creates more and more stress for the consumer versus making less stress and an easier transaction. That's pretty powerful stuff. One of the things that Brett brought up, which is one of the strongest statements about growth and being able to get to scale and ultimately, for him, followed a lot of additional passions, was how he talked about the disassociation from the self to the business and get himself out of the day-to-day.
Lots of companies talk about it all the time but the reality is few heads of companies ever do it effectively. I will tell you that the companies that were fortunate enough to support that grow the fastest and get into the millions and millions of dollars from the hundreds of thousands are the ones that can do this most effectively and for the CEO to learn what his responsibility is. Have you experienced the same thing, Patrick? have you seen that a lot within companies as well?
Patrick Baldwin: As far as dissociating the owner from the business, it makes sense. That's how they can multiply themselves and continue to surround themselves with more people and move up to higher-value roles in the business. We hear work on your business and not work in your business. The other one it made me think of was John Warrilow’s Built to Sell. That was a book that, years ago, Bobby and I both read. It changed how we went through different things, even how we refer to our customers as customers. That owner needs to get out of the day-to-day. Do it sooner than later. Bite the bullet. Do it. That sounds so easy but just do it.
Seth Garber: Make it happen.
Patrick Baldwin: Seth, thanks again for joining me, especially in Paul's absence. He left us hanging on this one. Thanks for helping out with Brett Madden’s episode.
Seth Garber: 100%. I couldn't have enjoyed it more. Thank you.
Patrick Baldwin: I hope everyone's okay down there in your neck of the woods. Have a great week.
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Brett Madden
Egnyter
Built to Sell
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