He Went From a Window Tint Shop to a $400M Company (His One Hiring Rule)

**Dustin Sims** (0:00)
Tommy, I just need somebody who gives a s***.
Serving the customer has to be the North Star. If you've got some departments that are worried about their paycheck, and some departments that are worried about their titles, we all need to be worried about serving the customer. And that allows us to all pull in the same direction. A good employee that gives a s*** will bend over backwards to take care of the customer. They're gonna do all the right things.

**Tommy Mello** (0:20)
All right, guys, welcome back to The Home Service Expert. Today is going to be a great interview with Dustin Sims. He's our VP of Operations.
He's an expert in operations at scale, customer service strategy, dispatch optimization, systems integration, AI and customer service, hiring for integrity, team development, career growth, and internal promotion. This episode's thesis is Dustin went from running a window tint shop to a VP of Operations at a $400 million garage door company, A1 Garage Door Service, in under five years. Today pulls back the curtain on how A1 actually runs and what most owners get wrong about customer service and why the best teams aren't built with incentives. You know, I would say incentives are a good topic, but Dustin, it's a pleasure to have you on today. It's gonna be fun. You and I have become really good friends. I was just at your daughter's graduation on Friday.

**Dustin Sims** (1:17)
You were.

**Tommy Mello** (1:18)
It's exciting.

**Dustin Sims** (1:18)
Yeah, we enjoyed the time with you.

**Tommy Mello** (1:21)
I enjoy all the time with you guys. We're like, great friends now.
You spent eight years running a window tinting shop, and then you joined A1 with zero garage door experience. Within five years, you've been promoted three times to VP of Operations. How did that happen?

**Dustin Sims** (1:38)
You know, I sometimes wonder myself. It's happened so fast.
Sometimes I'll sit and wonder, how did I get here? You know, and, you know, I think if you just break it down to one thing, it's that I hate to lose.

**Tommy Mello** (1:57)
You're competitive as hell.

**Dustin Sims** (1:57)
I'm competitive. And if you give me enough time, I'll figure anything out just because I, that's how my heart beats. I just need to solve problems.
And I care a lot, you know, I can't help it, but every business that I've ever worked for, I kind of look at it as if this were my business, what would I want to happen?

**Tommy Mello** (2:20)
Yeah. Yeah, you, you know, how does the window tinting translate into what you do today?

**Dustin Sims** (2:28)
Yeah, it's hard to make that leap, but I can tell you everything that I've ever done translates into what I've, what I'm doing today. Yeah. You know, that, that business in particular, you know, I was, I was running the business as a general manager, so I was involved in everything. You know, I had to know how the marketing affected how the phone rang and the different types of leads and the quality of leads and the customers and how to sell. I sold, I sold a lot during that, during that time.
Also learned a lot about customer service. I became a black belt in customer service and escalations. You know, part of what we did was we, we tended people's cars and as soon as you touch somebody's baby, you can run into some major escalation issues. You leave a drop of water on a door jam or whatever happens, there's, there's a lot of customer service that goes into that.

**Tommy Mello** (3:17)
Was there higher end cars and how big was that business?

**Dustin Sims** (3:22)
I think that business was about half of what we did. And yeah, we did a lot of high end cars. Okay. You know, we had Bentley's and we had NFL player cars come through.
There were high expectations when somebody spends that kind of money on a car, there are high expectations for the, for the product that you, that you put out.

**Tommy Mello** (3:39)
Yeah.
I just want to go completely off track and ask a weird question because you were in the company before private equity and we ran hard, but we put these pieces together. We've got really systematic with numbers and set bigger budgets, hired better, stronger meetings, faster top grading. And it wears, it wears me out. It probably wears everybody out to have to run. But there's pension funds and firefighters and a lot of people hate private equity. And it's a grind, but I would say we're better for it. How do you really feel overall? I mean, the budgets, stretch budgets and whatnot, but it's not like we're like, let's go take advantage of grandma this week. It's like, how do we get more leads?