The Smartest Home Service Owners in the Country Are All Doing This One Thing

**Jim Leslie** (0:00)
A company that's a million dollars a year, they think they have it all figured out. They're giving advice right across the room as a guy who's just kind of quiet, humble, listening, who I know is doing 50, 80 million dollars a year, and they're trying to convince him he's wrong. There's a direct correlation between your results and the speed of implementation. Most of you who think you're quick implementers will say, oh, that's great, I'm gonna put that on the calendar to talk about at the next meeting, you know, next Monday or next week or something. Tommy would already be texting, saying, get this done before I get home. Somebody comes to me with a problem that they've been struggling with for three months, six months, nine months, a year. You look at it right at it and it's like, well, hey, just do this, this and this.
Like, well, wait, it's that easy.

**Tommy Mello** (0:39)
All right, welcome back to The Home Service Expert. Today, I got my man, Jim Leslie, in the house. He is the CIO at Home Service Freedom. He's an expert in scaling home service brands, marketing and operations. Technology integration, membership and community building, strategic partnerships and investor advisory.
He worked with me at A1 as a CTO slash CMO. We built A1 Garage Door into a 400 plus million dollar company. Home Service Freedom exists to give every single home service owner across the land the same system, strategies and community that made that growth possible. In this spotlight episode, HSF CEO Jim Leslie, my former CMO and CTO at A1, walks through what HSF actually is, how it works and who it's for and shares real number of success stories with real numbers. Whether you're doing 500K or 50 million, this is a look inside the membership that's helping home service companies across every trade grow faster, operate smarter and build businesses worth owning. Jim, glad to have you.
I'm good, man. It's good to have you in town. It's like the good old days.

**Jim Leslie** (1:42)
Right. We got the band back together.

**Tommy Mello** (1:45)
I love hanging out. Just we're working on so many cool things, the stuff you just showed me. Blew my mind, actually, when it comes to some of the stuff you're building just to make sure HSF members are successful.
To walk us through a little bit about this whole thing coming together where HSF, where we're at today and where you see it going.

**Jim Leslie** (2:10)
Yeah.
It's grown massively even over the last 12 months and really become a growth engine for our members. It's started as a best practice community, now it's evolved into so much more. We have services, we're training people's teams, sales coaching, frontline coaching, leadership coaching, helping them work on their operations. It's not just an owner comes in and learns what to do, we're standing side by side, helping them implement stuff in their business.

**Tommy Mello** (2:42)
What do you think, you've been traveling not only to give on different events, but you've been traveling to do a lot of shops. What are some of the low-hanging fruit you see right off the bat that you're like, man, we could really help this company?

**Jim Leslie** (2:56)
You know, it's the basics. I mean, stuff you talk about all the time, right? But booking rate is like the number one. Nine times out of ten when somebody says, this marketing channel isn't working for me or, you know, hey, my PPC costs are up or whatever.
You dig into it, you look through the whole funnel and they're dropping calls like crazy. I do a lot of work with direct mail campaigns.
I'm thinking of a company in mind where they're like, oh, it's just the mail is too expensive, it doesn't work for us. Start auditing their calls and the people on the front line are literally turning customers away because they don't understand the promotion, they don't understand the offer. In one case, somebody on the front line literally said, hey, we're not the cheapest option, let me give you some other names. That's a training issue. And so much of why we got into the front line, coaching aspects of things is because that's the last step in your marketing, right? You spend all this money, you run these campaigns, you do testing, tracking, attribution, and now somebody answers the phone. And if they don't have it together, you know.

**Tommy Mello** (4:04)
I mean, look, I've talked to Luke several times. I think we're a world class. And this has been a while since you've been back here. But at the time, we were at 89%, so we're missing 11%.