The Butler Project

I recently interviewed Dan, the 30-year-old owner of a multi million dollar home services company. After listening to my interview with him several times, what I come away with is awe for his belief in himself and his ability to power through and get the job done.

Home services you wonder? What the heck are home services? Well, in the interest of protecting Dan’s privacy (and, no, that’s not his real name), I’ve elected to refer to his company as a “home service company.” You could put his service in the same category as carpet cleaning, lawn care, window washing, you know, the things we hire people to come to our homes and take care of on a regular basis.

Dan got started in college, selling home service accounts door to door during the summers. In one summer he sold 530 accounts, top in the company at that point and made “something like 150 thousand.” Yes, that’s 150 THOUSAND DOLLARS, in one summer, while in college.

Dan: I wanted to make over 200 thousand the next year, and I wanted to do something different, something where I could say, “You know what, I gave my heart and soul to this and that’s what made it fun for me.” I was so bored with it; I’d done it for so long. I was naturally good at [sales], but I’d never really put in all the hours; I’d never worked that hard. I was always good enough or better than everybody else but, for my own self, for Dan . . . I’d never really tried to push myself to the limit . . . I wanted to do something ridiculous.

So, the next year Dan set a goal to sell 1000 accounts in one summer.

Mark: I have a good friend, he’s actually one of the owners of the company I work for; he sold [home services]. He had one month where he sold 200 accounts, and that was this astonishing event, I mean, nobody does that. You did 903 in a summer?

Dan:You know it’s really hard; I did a little bit over 200 [a month] for four months.

Mark: If I can ask, what are the commissions on 900 accounts?

Dan: (Laughing) You know, back then it wasn’t as much as it is now. But it was enough. 15% of the contract, so it was ah . . now it would roughly be . . . 200 bucks a sale.

Mark: (doing some quick calculations) umm . . . that’s $180,000.

Dan: And I also was a team leader, and my team put on over 4000 accounts and I think I made a 5 percent override off of that.

Mark: 5% override off how many accounts?

Dan: 4150

Mark: With a 400 dollar contract value?

Dan: Right

Mark: (a lot more mental calculations . . . .carry the one . . . .stall a minute) So that’s 1.6 million? Wait, what’s 4000 times 400? I think it’s 1.6 million. You’re 5% on that would be, umm. . . would be about 80 grand.

So, apparently he made his goal of 200 thousand that summer. And, apparently he was hooked on home services, because after college he started his own company, and today it’s worth millions of dollars.

I asked Dan if he ever specifically decided to achieve financial success or if it was just something that sort of happened.

Dan: I think I knew for a long time . . .I tried to study why I am the way I am. [Just previous to starting my business] I told people “I can be a millionaire if I want within this next year or several years.” Most people told me, “Yeah that’s the plan.” or “I hope that goes well for you.” And I remember just thinking man, you guys just don’t know me that well, and I thought that was sad that people don’t know what my abilities are.

When I was young, my dad was a CEO, so I was lucky to have a guy that set a role model, you know, a really good role model. My dad was probably in the top 1% of income in the nation, but he had some rocky times. It was feast or famine . . . we had a huge ridiculous house, it’s probably worth 4-5 million dollars now . . . tennis court, just huge massive property . . we had a lot of nice cars but my parents were a little more economical when it came to cars. But he was the president of [a company] and he basically fixed it up, and then they sold it out from underneath him . . .it was during the recession, (I think back in ‘91) and it was just really tough. We were in a smaller town . . . there was just nowhere to work there. He had to go to [bigger cities] and he would literally travel back and forth every week. Five days out of the week he would spend his time in an apartment.

I think that’s where I got a lot of my work ethic. I saw what my dad was willing to do in order to support us. I said, “Yeah, I can do that if worse comes to worse; there’s always a way. At the same time, it scared me to death because I had my mom telling us you know, “We might lose the house this next month, and we just don’t have the money for that right now.” And I just hated that. I thought, you know, “This sucks.”

I don’t want to put my kids through that. And . . . I was probably a horrible kid. I was cruel to my parents and made some pretty horrible comments to them at the time, saying, “I’m not going to put my kids through this.” But, you never know. That’s why I pushed as hard as I did. My number one goal when I got out of college was to become a millionaire as fast as I could, so I didn’t have to work. If I sold my company today. . . for [millions of dollars] and put it in the bank, I could live off interest for the rest of my life if I choose to.

Once you get that safety and security, you realize too, it’s not the money. The money is not the thing that you like, it’s the chase. It’s the chase of the money. It’s building something and providing jobs and changing peoples’ lives, that’s the fun thing. And you eventually get over the money thing.

So, that’s the Reader’s Digest version of Dan’s story. You can see he was motivated and he got the job done, but it wasn’t always easy for him. In my next post, I’ll show you some of the obstacles Dan ran up against, some of the obstacles he purposely avoided, and the attribute he claims is the most important in his rise to financial success.

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