The Operating System Behind America's Biggest Garage Door Company

**Tommy Mello** (0:13)
If you don't have somebody that's sounding great on the phone.

**Jon Hartey** (0:16)
My team doesn't execute well, I've heard that. I come back with this, well, who's on your team? The person I'm talking to is also on that team, right?

**Tommy Mello** (0:22)
Nobody got into business to work harder and do all the work and work beyond call seven days a week and never take a real vacation.

**Jon Hartey** (0:29)
You're saying to me the thing that makes the most sense, which is you can't afford not to.

**Tommy Mello** (0:33)
All right, welcome back to The Home Service Expert. Today, I got Jon Hartey with me. He is an expert in business coaching, the garage door industry operations, growth strategy, KPI tracking, service and optimization technician training, and vendor buyer group management. Today's thesis is A1 now is going to cross the $400 million mark and garage door freedom exists to share the system strategies and lessons that made that growth possible. So other garage door companies don't have to figure it all out alone. In this spotlight episode, GDF business coach Jon Hartey walks through exactly what GDF is, how the coaching works, what the freedom framework looks like in practice and shares real members success stories. Whether you're a garage door company doing $500,000 or $5 million, this is a look inside the program that's helping owners across the industry achieve record breaking years.
Jon, it's good to have you, brother.

**Jon Hartey** (1:24)
Good to be here. Thank you, Tommy.

**Tommy Mello** (1:26)
Yeah, thank you. So let's just talk a little bit about GDF and just how you got started.

**Jon Hartey** (1:31)
You got it. So the opportunity presented itself were kind of aligned with me for my professional and personal side, which is really trying to find a way to meet people where they're at to achieve their goals, whether it be personally or financially, professionally. And so this opportunity was something that I was doing my own deal as a business consultant, have a lot of history in the ops world, and was going back and forth between Utah and Arizona and have family here. And this presented itself to take a peek behind the curtain, if you will, with my brother being a big influence in my life that said, hey, this guy Tommy Mello is down there doing some great things. He's a mover, a shaker. At any rate, getting an opportunity to align with meeting business owners to achieve their goals is really what piqued my interest. And that's where I've been on board here.

**Tommy Mello** (2:20)
Yeah, I know. It's great to have you, man. You're a great addition to the team.
Years and years ago, I think it was Adam, Luke, Brian, almost everybody, even Elisa, they thought I was nuts. Why would we want to start training other garage door companies? But I realized that HVAC was training since the 70s.

**Jon Hartey** (2:41)
Right.

**Tommy Mello** (2:42)
These garage door, the IDA, great for the industry. But it really, to me, that's more of a technical training. It was like certification type stuff. They weren't talking about EBITDA. They weren't talking about multiples. They weren't talking about how to buy vans and appreciation. They weren't talking about, you know, just helping companies grow.
And I just remember getting attacked all over Facebook and all these other companies talking crap. And I'm like, we got to really raise the bar for this industry. And that's how GDF, and they thought we were crazy, but then we've, we've got over a hundred members. And, you know, we just had Vertical Track. And we signed up a lot of people at Vertical Track. And the people that come in, they actually get it. Like the lights turn on. I think the first Vertical Track was like five or six years ago. And people were like, this actually makes a lot of sense. Like get the right logos, pay people the right way, get service. We were the first company on the service side of the garage door industry.
So, you know, a lot of the teachings have been through our mistakes. Let's just talk about the Freedom Framework and walk us through exactly how we onboard these clients and exactly where we find them, where they are.

**Jon Hartey** (3:51)
So, the framework is phenomenal and I think is the premise of success, really starting with the first one, which is the financials. You know, there's a lot of business owners that were taxed or in some sort of trade and they found a way to do things better or different, so they thought, and they create this monster, right? This monster that they need to find out how to make this machine, which is taking their financials and knowing where they're at and how to make scorecards against their measurables from a budgeting standpoint, from, hey, a KPI to know your indexing against your OJA, and so really trying to find out where the business owners are at from the starting of a new business to one that's operating at a high level. We can find out where you're at and meet you there.