Zero To A Hundred – Episode 13: Scaling To Eight Figures And Beyond With Jeff Gervais

Hey Accelerators! 🚀 You don’t want to miss this one. Jeff Gervais, founder, business coach, and serial entrepreneur, shares how he built, scaled, and sold his company for $15 million. With over 20 years of experience in the game, Jeff opens up about his journey—from creating a killer company culture to mastering goal-setting and marketing that makes you stand out in any industry.💡

🔹What’s on the Menu:

• How to scale your business from the ground up to eight figures. 💼
• Key strategies to build a thriving company culture. 🏆
• The importance of setting goals and measuring success to fuel growth. 📈

🔥Why Tune In?

• Jeff shares his tried-and-true methods that helped him turn a $300,000 monthly business into a $15 million exit. Whether you’re just starting out or ready to take your business to the next level, this episode is packed with valuable insights for entrepreneurs and business owners.

💬 Gem from Jeff: “Don’t be afraid to pivot and evolve—success comes from constant adaptation.”

📞Get in Touch with Jeff:

📧 Reach out to Jeff at excelyourrevenue.com for a free business consultation and insights on scaling your business.

Don’t miss out—hit that subscribe button and let’s take your business from zero to a hundred! 💥

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

Scaling To Eight Figures And Beyond With Jeff Gervais

Accelerators, in this episode, I have the privilege of introducing Jeff Gervais. He is a Founder, Business Coach, and serial entrepreneur. He has built, scaled, and sold a company for $15 million and has been in the entrepreneurial game for over twenty years. He’s going to drop some bombs and share some insights with us that you only get from being out there in the field on a daily basis. The topics we will cover will range from how to measure success, creating scalable operations, and being super creative in your marketing to help you stand out from the crowded field that you might be in.

For those of you who do not know me, I am the Founder of BoxFi. We are a business growth solution through payment processing. I am excited to share the network I have built over 25 years as an entrepreneur to help you grow your business and become more profitable. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s accelerate together.

—

Jeff, thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

Culture, Vision, And Mission

We’re going to talk about some very interesting topics as you are a highly successful entrepreneur who has exited an eight-figure business that you built yourself with your brother. You’re going to shed some light on how to build a business like that, how to create an awesome culture around that business, and then be valuable enough where somebody goes, “I want to buy you.” Can you talk to us first about how you build a company and really create principles around growth so you actually do have a product that you can sell one day?

When I was first starting out, I originally didn’t have a vision to grow a $15 million large company. I was just putting my tool belt on, went to work, and got sick of the grind every day. As you mentioned, I joined up with my brother. As we started to grow, the important thing was to build a good culture, build a good customer base, and set the example across the industry that we are going to be the key player, and we will be the competition to come. That was the principle we wanted to instill in people, that we were a great company, and you wanted to, A) work for us, and B) you wanted to use us.

Did you do that, first and foremost yourself, building that reputation? Whatever that culture you built, you also passed that on to your salespeople and your technicians. I think one of the things that’s really important with entrepreneurs and the audience who reads the show, we all go through this, is making sure that everyone’s interests are aligned. How did you get people on the same page that you were on to create that great culture in the company?

The most important thing is to make your team buy into what your vision and your mission are. At the beginning of every meeting, you state your mission, vision, and drive it into your sales team, management team, and field team. You’re holding weekly, daily meetings, having huddles, and you set goals, and you drive the goals home with your vision and your mission in mind so you don’t lose your key principles of what you are trying to build.

You don’t ever lose sight of good customer relations or employee relations as you grow and things start to get out of control and you put other procedures in place. You always keep your vision and your mission in line with the growth of the company. Money will come if you focus on the vision and mission. Setting goals is probably one of the most important things in business you learn.

Goal-Setting Process

Let’s talk about your goal-setting process. What did you do when you were in the initial phases of, “I’ve got something that’s growing?” This is before you even decided that this is a company we can sell. How did you set those goals, and then once they were set, how did you make sure that they were executed?

In the beginning, I didn’t have much of a business background until I educated myself fully in it. Honestly, in the beginning, it was goals of just like, “It’d be great to do $300,000 a month.” You’d hit that, and you’d be like, “We did $300,000 a month. Let’s try to set $500,000 a month,” but really no drive behind it or knowing why you’re trying to go for that. However, as you start to become more educated in business, you set truck goals for every truck. For every installed truck I had, $1.5 million was the target if they ran at full efficiency. Every service truck was $520,000 targeted. As you grow your fleet in a service-based industry, every truck should be a targeted revenue goal, and that’s how you start building budgets. You then transfer that over to your team for sales goals and so on and so forth.

Your vehicles, your equipment for the company, was actually something that you said, “This equipment can produce X.” If you own a farm and you have combines on the farm, you are trying to figure out how much crop each one of those can yield because it translates to dollars. You basically did the same thing with the trucks that you had and the technicians operating those trucks.

I broke it down into daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. My team was always aware of the daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly goals. We beat that into them every day. We had daily huddles, weekly huddles, and monthly huddles, and everyone always knew the goal and the drive. Nowadays, you can create fancy charts where you have your goal here, and your revenue is tracking the goal, so they can see with their eyes how that works. With training and stuff, you realize that visual numbers and stuff, saying a number to you means something, but if you actually type the number in or visually see it, it regurgitates differently in your brain than if you just say it to someone.

Sales Team And Technicians

How did you align your sales team with your technicians? I think this is poignant because I spoke to one of my board members, and she sits on the board of a private equity fund. Funnily enough, they’re doing a lot of roll-ups of plumbing companies and roofing companies, but like the second-repair type, not roof installers but those who do the repairs, those who do the plumbing repairs.

It’s become a big thing, the whole idea of guys with trucks or persons with trucks in the marketplace, because it’s very difficult for AI to replace a hammer and a nail on top of a roof or under a sink. How did you align that sales team? We’ve got to get this number of customers, with the technicians saying, “Okay, once the customers come in, we have to make sure that we do the job, do it well, so they’re satisfied.” How did you create the synergy between those two opposing people in your business?

You figure out a way to tie all departments together. I ran an HVAC plumbing company, so I’m going to give an example in that industry. You call me to fix your furnace. My service tech goes out, and my service tech identifies an issue with the furnace. If it’s a certain age, they kick it over to the sales team, or you have a selling tech that will actually sell the product with the help of the salesperson. They’re tied together, and they’re synchronized together.

I believe in selling techs. I think it’s a very smart method. There are big corporations that run this type of stuff, and they feel that they should take it over to the sales guy, but then you lose the warm lead. They have time to think about it. In sales, whether it’s service or a comfort advisor or whoever you send out, or whatever you call that position, a warm lead is so important nowadays, especially with the world tightening up, that you take advantage of that instantly. You don’t let them think about it, and you try to install and do it right away, tying all that together.

Would you consider that an upsell?

Yes.

This is so fascinating to me, especially for the audience, because we’re always looking at ways of elevating our business based on what’s in front of us. It’s not just about spending more money. It’s being more resourceful. It sounds like your ability to be resourceful with what you consider a selling tech allowed you to step up your game and actually drive more revenue because somebody said, “I’m here, you have this problem, you should also be doing X, Y, and Z.” How did you create those specific benchmarks for your business?

At first, we were doing just sales, comfort advisors or salespersons going out and selling, and then we realized through just testing with certain techs that the dirty tech that’s already in a home, entrusted by the customer, actually had a way higher close ratio than a kicked lead, we call it. A kicked lead is when a service tech kicks a lead over to a comfort advisor. We realized being in a home, having people actually going down and looking at that object, saying, “This is what’s broken with it and this is the cost to fix it.”

Always do honest sales. We never believed in dishonest sales. That’s part of our vision and our mission. Say, “This is to fix it, this is to swap it, this is the savings you could maybe get from swapping it because this is a fifteen-year-old piece of equipment.” Educating people on why swapping might be a better choice and putting $1,200 into a 15-year-old piece of equipment is not dishonest sales. It falls in line with our morals.

Incentives

Let’s talk about how you transitioned. By the way, it could have been from the beginning, but from the conversation, I believe you’re alluding to the fact that it wasn’t from the beginning. It’s something you developed over time. How do you incentivize those techs to become selling techs? Do they get a certain percentage if they actually sell an upgrade? What did you do to get your team excited about taking the service to the next level?

Yeah, so we incentivized on two things with the service tech. We incentivized on revenue and profit-driven out of a vehicle. We set that $ 520,000-a-year goal, as I mentioned earlier, which equates to about $2,000 per working day. If they hit the $2,000 per working day, we would give them an incentive on that. On top of that, we would say, if you upsell, we gave 2% of the gross income of that job sold. If the furnace sold for $20,000, we would give 2% for that furnace condenser’s upsell. We incentivized them in both areas, for revenue and for sales. It wasn’t dishonest to say, “We’re only incentivizing you on sales. We don’t care about the fix.” The tech made out both ways. It aligns with our vision and our mission of being honest and good people.

How did you have your selling techs? You’ve got your sales team. I just think this is super fascinating. Did you start to minimize your sales team? Did you keep the same sales team, and maybe they had a different structure, especially if your techs were having such success doing these upgrades or upsells?

No. The strategic strategy there is I actually increased my sales team. We went after a thing called marketed leads. Marketed leads are when you’re personally calling in because you want a boiler upgrade. You want your cast iron basement fixed. We would up our advertising and marketing leads to keep those sales guys busy. I incentivized them to help out the service tech. The service tech wasn’t drowning. They get a certain percentage to help out the service tech if the job is sold.

The reason I did that is I believe in a path of business in life. Everyone goes right. If I go left, how do I make this just a little different to overcome the competition and stuff? That’s what makes you a $1 million business to a $15 million business, to a $20 million, a $100 million, or a $1 billion business, always thinking outside of the box. What can I do different that no one else is doing? That’s the way my brain always goes. It’s the way I always think no matter where I am in life.

There is a great book called The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday. It speaks to exactly what you were talking about in terms of if there’s an obstacle in the road. Instead of trying to go around it or going where everybody else is going, figure out how you overcome that particular obstacle because that’s what elevates your business.

I’ll make a parallel to what we do on the payment processing side. One of the biggest challenges for the restaurant owners that we work with is chargebacks, and beyond the ones that we work with, the restaurant owners in the industry as a whole. We actually put together a chargeback insurance program for these restaurant owners, which actually created insurance for them, depending on the level that they sign up for and where their chargebacks are covered. They lose so much in chargebacks on a monthly basis, on an annual basis, so it could become a huge scale.

Brand Awareness

Setting something up like that, instead of going, “They’re chargebacks. There’s nothing you can do about them,” means facing them head-on and figuring out a solution that solves the problem for your customer. From these incentives that you created, from the opportunities that you’ve given your technicians to become sales technicians, from what you did with your sales team to help them work together, how did you start to drive more business as you just touched on the marketing side of the business that was a little bit outside of the box and really made you stand out as a business owner and a service provider from everybody else in the market?

Honestly, marketing is probably one of my favorite parts of the business, marketing and sales. I get very passionate about this subject. I always look at what is the competition doing? What can we do differently? I strongly believe in brand awareness over paid ads and stuff like that. My paid ad budget was always only like 5% to 10% of my marketing budget. I always stuck to 5% to 8% of my total income for my marketing budget. From that, we did TV commercials, billboards, mailers, handing out flyers, yard signs, sporting event sponsorships, being in grocery store flyers, golf course flyers, everywhere you went.

I believe in the McDonald’s model. You might not get immediate results from that, but when the weather pattern changes or whatever your business industry is, and someone needs to search for you, you want them to think of your name first. That’s the way I’ve always marketed, and that’s the way I’ve always pitched my business. I’ve been very successful at that. I also marketed ideas that my sales team and service team can use as tools. I’ll tell you my favorite promotion.

Jordan’s Furniture. Everyone knows Jordan’s Furniture in the area. They did the Red Sox win the World Series. I recreated that idea of if it became over 95 degrees on Labor Day, from Memorial Day to Labor Day, any install, we would give to the customer for free. We actually bought an insurance plan for this, and we sold double what we would have sold because everyone had the idea of like, “If it hits 95 degrees, I get my HVAC system or a boiler system for free.” Our marketing and our sales that year, our marketing dollars could be lower because our sales close ratio was so much higher, if that makes sense.

That absolutely makes sense. The question is, how many furnaces or HVAC systems did you have to give away for free?

We didn’t give any. It didn’t hit. Honestly, it was a $50,000 insurance plan. The cost of the insurance plan to the $8 to $10 million we sold in sales, I wanted it to hit because what good advertisement would that be? “Gervais gave away $10 million of HVAC equipment.” You know what I mean? “Gervais came and did it.”

Insurance Plan

What’s really great about that, and this is something I hope the readers are keying into, is figuring out within your industry, within your product or service type, ways that you can create guarantees, ways that you could have giveaways, but also protect yourself. You’re not going to just do it willy-nilly and not look at the downside risk. The fact that you were able to put that insurance plan in place is really unique. Can you talk a little bit more about how you structured that and what type of insurance provider would provide a plan on something like that?

I forgot the name of the insurance plan because this was years ago, but I called probably 2 or 3 insurance providers and everyone was like, “I can’t do that.” Finally, I found someone who said, “Yeah, we’ve actually done that for someone before.” You could set limits. The colder the temperature got, so 90 degrees was probably like $200,000. Ninety-five degrees historically didn’t hit much, so it was a cheaper plan.

We originally were going to do 100 degrees, and then we looked at historical data and we were like, “No one’s going to buy into 100 degrees. Ninety-five degrees might be doable,” or whatever we said at the time. You pick one location. We picked an airport that was on a hill where it was naturally cooler. We advertised the Worcester Airport thermometer reading as what we’re going off of. You can’t be on your phone app in your yard doing whatever. That was all in the contract. We were smart and strategic about how we rolled it out so no one could try to take advantage of it. We had absolutely zero false claims. No one went in because it was spelled out in their contracts.

You see a billboard, and it says, just to make sure I understand this correctly, “If it goes above 90 degrees, we’ll install a new HVAC system for you or a new unit for free.”

Yes, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. If it’s sold between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it didn’t even have to be installed. Just a deposit was given.

They actually had to contract with you during that time. From what you had typically been doing between Memorial Day and Labor Day, how many units did you sell? When you implemented this, how many units did you sell that year?

Our sales literally doubled. I think we did $3 million the year before, and we did like $6 to $8 million. I don’t know the exact number, but when we looked at the data, we were like, “That was really successful.” After that, we started becoming more focused on selling the company. We were still doing promotions, but we didn’t do anything that crazy because we didn’t want to go into a contract like that being up for sale and trying to sell the company because someone else might not want to take that risk on.

Working On The Business

Let’s talk about as your company continued to grow, and this is really important for business owners who might potentially look at selling their company. How did you manage your team and people effectively when you now had to start working on the business and not so much in the business?

You set up strong measuring metrics to manage your team, good KPI reporting, and again, holding meetings and always being in touch with your staff. I was always more of a micromanager, which I’ve learned to let go of over the years. I was always really involved and direct with my team. As I started maturing as a manager, I realized I needed to let my management team do more and just jump in once in a while to pull them back. Just being involved, and if you’re not involved, having key metrics to measure their performance.

You said that you were a micromanager in the beginning, and you’ve had to learn to let go of that. Who did you have to become as a leader in the business to build such a successful operation?

You have to learn to let certain things go because as you’re building your job task changes dramatically. You have a bigger engine to keep fueled so you’re constantly worrying about bringing in work, marketing, new procedures of new management team because as your field staff grows, your management staff has to grow. Now you have a warehouse, you have delivery drivers, you have all this stuff. It’s just constantly evolving. Your new job task becomes like how to keep the company from collapsing in on itself. You’re always constantly thinking of how to make things better.

Let’s talk about building that company out and making sure that you have policies and procedures in place where you can scale, and then the process you do on a daily basis becomes replicable. How did you build that out? I think that’s one of the biggest challenges when you’re a business owner and you have your hand in everything, being able to say, “All right, this is something that completely runs outside of me.” How do you put those policies and procedures in place?

The real answer to that is there’s no magic bullet to that for certain companies. I realized from talking to multiple owners and stuff like that, it’s what works for you. You may go through 4 or 5 procedures before you find the right one. The thing is understanding that you’re not going to be perfect the right time. You’re going to have to pivot. You’re going to have to change your company. We’ve gone through 5 or 6 install procedures until we found one that actually worked, where we were profitable. It’s the same thing with service, the same thing with sales.

You just have to evolve, and you can’t just give up. Most people don’t succeed in business because those procedures aren’t working. People don’t buy in, and they just get frustrated. They’re like, “I just can’t make it work,” versus trying to always constantly evolve and be an entrepreneur and think, “How do I change this? How do I make this succeed?” Not accepting defeat. There’s no real good answer to that, besides you’re just going to keep evolving with the change.

What is the biggest pivot that you had to make in your business that really changed everything so you could get on the right track for growth?

What really accelerated us was our sales to marketing, to service tech procedure, to drive more revenue in and drop our marketing dollars down a little bit to put more money to the bottom line. As you start thinking of selling, in the beginning, yes, you want to drive up your income because income drives in a higher EBITDA number, a higher multiple, but then the other part of that is driving up that profit number. If you drive up that profit number, it also gives you a higher EBITDA multiple. Just try to combine everything together, and as you grow your company, your goals will change.

Selling Your Business

Let’s talk a bit about whether you are in the seat of an owner who has a relatively strong business and is looking to take their business to the next level so they could potentially sell. What would you advise them to focus on? What are some of the biggest pitfalls that they’re going to face when they’re trying to take it to the next level?

I would educate myself on the industry in a sense of what are people looking for. Are people looking for a good customer base? Are people looking for a real profitable company? Are people looking for just high income to a company, just high sales volume, or are they looking for a mix of everything? I would see what the market is looking to buy, and then you might need to get some free valuations. You can call them and reach out to people and tell people, “I’m for sale.” That’s probably the best trick I can give people. Just go out and don’t be ashamed to tell people you’re for sale.

You sign an NDA so no one knows. You don’t tell your team, and you will get free valuations of your company. From that, you will actually get free advice. It took us two years on the market to two deals that were at the end of the rope, like within a month of closing, and they fell through because of one thing or another. We learned something different about each one of those sales on what to change with the company. We said, “We’re not quite ready yet. We need to get here.”

Knowing that about your industry, not being afraid to at least approach someone and say, “Yeah, give me my company value.” They’ll be honest with you and say, “You need to change this to do this,” or “Maybe you are already good.” That’s probably the best advice I can give. Don’t be shy to reach out and just get free valuations of your company.

One of the ways that you can actually get to that next step is going to the market, saying that you’re for sale, getting free valuations from potential buyers, signing that NDA, and then letting that buyer tell you exactly what they’re looking for. That can inform you of the changes that you may need to make in your company if you’re not ready to sell at that particular moment.

The good thing with that is you might go through the sales process, come to the end of the month before you’re going to close, it falls apart, but you’re going to know exactly why the deal fell apart. You then have to go and fix that because if you don’t fix it, then you’re not going to be able to sell it to someone else. It’s just part of the process. It’s not a loss. It’s a gain because you have this inside, intimate information that it’s very difficult to get out of people until you get them on the hot seat, and the hot seat is writing that check.

The hardest part about that is if a deal falls through, you need to stay motivated. You need to stay with your team. You might want to take a day to just be in your room and scream or something like that because you’re frustrated. You thought you were getting a payout or whatever. Every single time that happened to me, my next offer was more money. I went from a 7-figure offer to an 8-figure offer that we walked away very happy with. Looking back, I truly believe everything in this universe happens for a reason. It’s what keeps me driven. It’s what keeps me going. If you don’t stop and stay motivated, the next thing will work out better for you.

When you’re looking to sell, should you be talking with more than one buyer in the marketplace?

Absolutely. I think you should go out to 2 or 3, unless you get the honey pot deal and you’re like, “I am so happy with this deal.” You don’t get greedy in life. That’s another moral I have. If you’re happy and you set a goal and you get that goal and you think it’s a good fit for you, go for it.

Deal Process

Let’s go into what your deal process is because a lot of our audience are seasoned professionals, seasoned business owners, and might actually be looking to sell. That’s why we deal with and have these types of conversations, so we can educate them on what their options are. Once you got in the trenches and you were at the final stages with the buyer who purchased the company, how did you negotiate a strong deal that closed?

As I mentioned before, we had two deals fall through. We had multiple LOI offers, which is a letter of intent. That’s the pre-step to selling. We had 2 or 3 letters of intent. We went through them, and we honestly didn’t pick the highest dollar amount, as silly as that sounds. We had an offer for $3 million more of a potential earn-out, and we actually took one for $3 million less just because we felt like that company would be a better fit for our culture, our team. I didn’t let my mission and my vision even stray me from the sale of my company where I said, “My team got me to where I am, and I recognize that,” and I made sure they were taken care of in the sales process.

When you’re in that sales process, how do you set up your team to transition over to the next ownership? For you, they’re actually buying physical bodies, not just the trucks. Your people, to your point, are what keep your business going. How do you create the best opportunity for your team where they go, “Yeah, we’re happy to move and go to this next group and continue doing the successful work we’ve been doing?”

With me, on the first one that fell through, I was very vocal about wanting to sell, and I realized that was sending a bad message to my team. When it fell through, we said we decided not to do that. On my final one, I told no one. Literally, my wife was the only one outside of my network that knew we were selling and my brother’s wife. It got announced the day it sold. Part of the way we held the culture together is we said we’re contracting for two years to make sure the glue stays together. We’ve bought into the business, though. We’re still here. I still have another year left in my contract, but that’s the way we rolled it out. We’re still here. We’re still in with you guys. That allowed us to still have a voice and fight for the team. That’s why we did that, and that did work.

Working With New Partners

A lot of times, when you’re a business owner and you are selling and you have a successful sale, you do have a couple or a few trailing years where you stay on with the business. How do you work with your new partners in tandem, where you’re still fulfilling what you’ve done to create the success that you’ve created, but you’re also abiding by what their expectations are to take that company to the next level?

That’s probably one of the hardest things about selling your business and still being on board. As you mentioned, I talked about all these creative things I did and all this stuff I did because I was an entrepreneur, or I am an entrepreneur. Honestly, they have the money, they bought you, and they don’t really care too much about your opinion, in a very nice way, certain people.

They do, but they don’t. They have more businesses that they’ve already combining you with you and they just want you to fall in line and do their procedures. You have to recognize that your new job is to push the company in the direction they want so that you can have your team buy into that because, again, you don’t want your team to not buy into what your mission was when selling the company.

Cost Estimation

You’ve sold your company successfully. You’ve got another year left, but I know you, as an entrepreneur, like me, are always doing something fun. What else are you working on right now that you’re really enthusiastic about?

With the procedures and everything in my company, besides the marketing, the thing that accelerated us the most was knowing our break evens, knowing how to estimate properly, and just knowing the costs of the business. That is honestly something that cost me probably millions of dollars in errors over the years, just losing money on jobs, losing money, and just feeling like, “Why am I losing money? What’s going on?”

Getting a strong education and educating myself on how to read a profit and loss, how to read a balance sheet, and combine that into how to get a break-even and then build profits. I am doing coaching with a select few clients to help them build that up and show them how to look at that properly to change a company with certain metrics that I measure on profit and losses, like labor, material, and so on and so forth. With that being said, I created software that’s being launched that automatically calculates everything for you. It will actually tell you to seal this driveway, roof this house, and put this furnace in.

This is your break even on that job. Don’t go lower than this. This is just adjusted profit margins. In slower times, you can go lower, but you’re still above your break-even cost on a job. In better times, you can go a little higher and make a little more profit. If someone talks you down, you have the ability to know, “Okay, I can go this low,” not just guessing, because a lot of contractors out there, smaller contractors under about $5 million, $3 million, operate out of bank accounts.

They truly don’t know the numbers. They don’t even know what they’re estimating. They’re just out there, and that’s not a shot at the smaller people. It’s just reality. If you went to them and you had someone do work for you, I would say, “What’s your break even on this job?” Most people aren’t going to be able to tell you that, or some people don’t even know what a break-even is. We go a step further with a program. It gives you a monthly break-even, yearly break-even. It gives your team and you a real goal to drive to, and you could set a profit margin on that. I’m very passionate about that. I put a ton of money into the software, and there’s nothing on the market like it. I’m excited to release that.

It sounds like to me that this estimating project that you’re doing and what you’re bringing to market is going to add a lot of value, and it could be used in a lot of different industries, especially when you’ve got the hammer-and-nail persons with truck businesses because they have limited resources. They can be project-to-project at a time. If they can actually streamline it, it would be major.

I’m going to level you up a little bit more even so, Jeff. If you could take and package a product like that and go to the private equity funds who are going and buying all of the roofing companies, the plumbing companies, the HVAC companies, and sell them that product that helps them streamline their operations and create more profitability. That’s actually a brilliant product.

Thank you. I appreciate that. The other good thing about this is, in business, you have roller coasters. You have really good months, really bad months. You have break-even years, you have down years, you have up years. With knowing your numbers, and knowing your industry, and knowing how to track your company properly, you don’t have to really be as afraid of downtime.

If you’re a $15 million company, you can look at your overhead and say, “My break even is this. We’re doing this. We’re under right now.” You can appropriately cut your costs, and it doesn’t always even have to be staff. You can know now, “I need to cut this much cost based off of the revenue we’re doing.” When you’re coming into hotter times, you can actually adjust your company and not worry about going out of business. You could still support your family and your employees’ families.

That is actually really interesting because you put the business owner in the driver’s seat, and knowing your numbers is one of the key things you focus on throughout the episode, which I’ve realized later in my career is tantamount to success. Especially even if you’re just making a lot of money and you’re doing quite well, if you don’t know where every penny is going and have measurables, you can’t create that replicable business model. Those are one of the things that really set you apart. Knowing your numbers and measuring those numbers and your outputs are some of the most important things you can do for your business.

You mentioned that with credit card fees and stuff, saving at 1% or 2% on your bottom line is straight money in your pocket, your company’s pocket. You could maybe take bonuses on, or you can put in the growth of your company, or give part of that to your employees. That’s part of building culture, doing Christmas parties, doing whatever, gatherings, team-building exercises. That’s the whole part of building a company and making it successful. When people are getting poached by other companies, they’re like, “No, I’m staying with you. You just took my family to Florida,” or whatever you do for them.

That’s actually a really important point. This is something that I deal with directly, mostly, sometimes indirectly, and that is understanding the impact of those little costs and fees and how they can increase or decrease your margin. We’re talking about margin. I ultimately don’t care if somebody has a hundred-million-dollar business. If you’re only bringing in $5 million a year and have a 5% margin, that’s not a great business model. To run a $100 million business, you’ve got to do a lot of work, and you could do a lot less running a $20 million business with a 25% margin and still make that $5 million.

It’s looking at every single one of your expenses, how you can renegotiate terms, how you can reduce them, how you could eliminate them potentially at 1%, 2%, or 3% on a $100 million in gross revenue. That can put an additional $1 million to $3 million in your pocket on an annual basis without having to increase your revenue. There are a lot of ways that you can be super creative. I love, Jeff, that you focus so much on the numbers because a lot of business owners aren’t really getting that granular.

Even if your focus is hyper-growth and you’re putting more money into marketing and in the growth of your company with vehicles and tools and stuff like that, you eventually have to turn that faucet off for hyper-growth and focus on profits because your company’s length of sustained so long doing that trajectory and not leveling out on the bottom line. You just have to be careful with that.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

As an entrepreneur, because you truly are the definition of an entrepreneur, how do you curtail your entrepreneurial spirit and sometimes put that to the side to say, “All right, now we just have to focus on the business and the day-to-day,” and kind of temper those creative juices? As business owners and entrepreneurs, we’re always like, “What’s next? What can we do to grow?” How do you silo that and just focus on the business mentally?

I set a goal and a plan, and when I hit that goal, a plan of spending on growth, and I hit that number of revenues that I want to achieve at that point, immediately my eye will switch off and switch gears to focus on our profits and stuff like that. Being goal-driven on everything you do in business is so important. You can have a goal of just selling 2 jobs a month or 2 jobs a week or whatever your business model is.

Set a small goal and then have a longer-term goal and a longer-term goal on that, and just don’t give up until you achieve the small goal. Once you hit that, you’ll get satisfaction, and you’ll keep having motivation to move forward. Always set that goal and just go forward with that, and your goal could change. Your goal is going to pivot as you hit certain tiers, like, “Okay, now I’m focusing on this. It’s not this anymore.” Just doing that, no matter what it is in your business or your industry.

Before we get into the rapid-fire section, let’s talk about the future of entrepreneurship. Let’s look 5 or 10 years down the road. Where are you seeing the opportunities in the marketplace for someone who is an existing business owner to level up and build a more profitable business?

I always look for recession-proof things. I think the medical field, the payment field, the HVAC field, software B2B businesses, and certain ones are great. What I would say to look out for now has nothing to do with this show is I truly think we’re going to have a little bit more of a market correction. If you’re smart and you’re holding some cash and you’re just a little more patient for another year or so, I feel like there’s going to be huge opportunity in that industry. I’m personally holding back and waiting.

I don’t want it to happen to the world, but if it does happen, I’m prepared for it. I’m selling properties as the tops are coming down. Just getting ready, always thinking of how do you change or how do you adapt to what may come. If it doesn’t come, at least you’re prepared for everything. I would say recession-proof investments are great.

I would have to agree with you. Recession-proof investments are key in the market. That is dealing with things that are essential services, the guys and gals with trucks, the B2B services, and a lot of the software services that are servicing other bigger platforms. Those are the businesses where you’re seeing a lot of growth. They’re also the businesses where your private equity funds, hedge funds, and bigger investors are looking at buying and scaling, bringing them under one umbrella and then growing those businesses even more. That is sage wisdom, my friend.

Don’t forget, when the world dips, and if you’re preparing for that, the rich people look forward to that because they capitalize and make more money. Always follow the money is what I say. Warren Buffett just sold however many billions of dollars of stock. Maybe a storm isn’t coming, but he’s preparing for something. It makes you think, “Someone smarter than me is thinking something. Maybe I should start thinking like that.” Always just being aware of where the world is and what’s going on is very important as an entrepreneur or in anything in life, not being blinded.

Rapid-Fire Section

We’re going to do our rapid-fire section. This is quick and easy answers and just fun to break up the monotony, and then we’ll wrap up, and you’ll tell everybody where they can connect with you. Rapid fire, coffee or tea?

Coffee.

Dog or cat?

Dog.

If it is a zombie apocalypse and you must leave your house and you’ve got to protect your family, what is the one weapon that you’re going to grab to take with you?

My AR-15.

I got a sword.

A sword or an AR-15. I have a lot of them.

I would take the flamethrower because I think when you light them on fire, the zombies can’t do anything. I guess they could be walking at you all on fire. Anyway, I digress. What is a must-read book for the entrepreneurs out there who are reading?

Honestly, it’s an oldie, but a goodie. Rich Dad, Poor Dad is very good. It’s very good morals, especially if you’re not an entrepreneur yet. If you read the book and you listen to the message of the book or listen to the audible, it’s a great message.

Dead or alive, if there was any individual that you could have dinner with tonight, who would it be?

Probably Elon Musk.

If you’re a small business owner who is doing $10 million in sales on an annual basis and I walked through your front door, I hand you a $300,000 check, how would you advise that small business owner to invest that $300,000 free money into their business to grow their profits 2X in 12 months?

First off, I would listen to see if the team is requesting anything. I feel software nowadays is very important. Investing in technology that can set you above the level with automatic KPIs and stuff like that. I would say some software investment would be very important. The other thing I would do is increase our marketing budget immediately and put some of that towards marketing to try to drive in more calls with our procedures that you have strong.

What is the biggest obstacle you had to overcome in your business or life to build the success you have built?

Put your pride aside and realize you’re not always right. There are hard times that come with running a business, and it’s okay to have a bad day or a few bad days in a row and just know that better days are around the corner. Just honestly, as you grow in life and you grow your wealth, you realize your mental health is so very important. That would be the best advice I can give people.

Episode Wrap-up

Jeff Gervais, please tell the audience how they can connect with you.

The immediate way to connect with me would be to go to ExcelYourRevenue.com. You can book a call with me on Calendly if you hit consult now or whatever. I give free half-hour sessions to just talk about whatever you want in business. I’m doing that for free until the software launches. Feel free to contact me, and I’ll help you with your businesses.

Jeff, thank you for joining us.

Thank you very much for having me.

Important Links

• Jeff Gervais
• The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad

About Jeff Gervais

Founder | Business Coach | Serial Entrepreneur

I owned and scaled a Mechanical Company to a $15 million, that was in the residential & commercial service industry. I have been through multiple financial trainings and strategic training programs. Also having 20 years of experience of running and owning a large company is something that can’t be taught in a classroom. By using creative business practices and having procedures in place we were successful to grow our company to 15 Million even in down times. I am dedicated to give other companies the same success no matter what industry.