The Butler Project

Another excerpt from Mark’s interview with Jim, multi-millionaire pest control company owner:

Jim: So the first [pest control] company I was with before I was an entrepreneur, I rose up in that company because of my results which were specifically sales related and management related and human resource related . . . I didn’t even want to stay in the industry but I was successful, so they’d offer me a lot of money to come back, and so I did.

The turning point year for me was: I was a regional manager with this company and there [were] three other regional managers. We all had the same amount of employees; we all supervised three different offices. I had no experienced employees in my region, none, and everyone else did have experienced employees . . . I was specifically assigned to three offices who had failed the year before, the other people did not have such offices.

I came up with a new paradigm of “Hey, I think this is where we’re failing as a company. I think this should be done this way.” I did my own research to figure out how I thought things should be done. I don’t want to go off on a tangent and be specific as to what that was, but it was a lot of things.

When I told the owners of the company what my plan was [to improve my region], they said, we think that that’s really outlandish, and we’ll put you on a short string, but we don’t want anyone else doing that, so keep it to yourself.

Well, within a month of the summer I had . . . outproduced any other region by over 85%! And I had zero employees quit, everyone else had a minimum of 30% of their employees in their region quit. And by the middle of the summer, I was put in charge of the whole company!

But it’s because I was thinking outside the box . I would say that the behavior when you continually think outside the box and exceed what other people are going to do, that you just start going to fast and you end up being thrust into doing your own thing because you get ahead of the curve a little bit and you think, “I’m just going to go start my own thing because it’s inevitable.”

Mark: And if I’m not mistaken . . . I personally know the owner of the company you’re talking about, and are they not now pursuing your same business model?

Jim: Yeah, yeah, they are.

Mark: (laughing) So . . .

Jim: I presented to them 12 years ago, and said, “Either do this or I’m going to leave, resign next week.” And they rejected the model and I resigned the next week.

Then they came back and said, “Okay, we’ll give you all this equity and all this money to stay and we’ll do your business model.”

And I said, “I’ve already made an agreement with someone else; if you’d have said that a week ago, we would have done it, but I’ve already made an agreement.”

And they said, “Well, did you sign a contract?”

And I said, “Well, I did something more powerful than that, I gave my word, and had a meeting of the minds . . . So we’re going to stick with the commitments that we’ve made. And I gave YOU a commitment last week that if you didn’t do it, I was going to resign next week, and that week’s past, and I resigned.”

Jim was one of Mark’s longest interviews; he gave so much good stuff. Yesterday and today’s post give you just a little idea of the importance Jim places on commitment and discipline.

Think about your own level of commitment:

• Do you consider giving your word to be more powerful than signing a contract?
• Have you been assigned tasks where it seemed the odds were stacked against you?
• What was your reaction?
• What was your outcome?

Later this week I’ll tell you about how Jim took those three failing pest control offices and turned them into the best selling region in the United States; the guy is crazy!

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