Josh Schiffman on Door-to-Door Sales, Callbacks and the Culture Behind Sage Pest Control

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey there and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. My name is Dan Leibrandt and today I'm with Josh Schiffman, the owner of Sage Pest Control, an eight figure pest control company that's built on culture, strategy and world-class leadership. Now, Josh isn't your average business owner. His resume is packed with everything from most creative salesman and top manager of the year to self-proclaimed best dad award. He's been the guy who won best hustle over results. The number one first year salesman in Chicago, and even the closest to beating the state champions award. From selling alarms door to door to leading one of the fastest growing pest control companies in the country, Josh has built a legacy around sales mastery, people development, and having fun along the way. Today we're diving into how he's built Sage into an eight figure operation, the systems behind his sales and leadership success. And the mindset that's kept him winning both in business and in life. Now without further ado, Josh, welcome to the show.

01:00 Josh Schiffman

Hey, thanks Dan. What a kind intro. Man, that makes me feel like a million dollars already.

01:06 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, man, no, I think you have to elevate yourself more, but believe in yourself. I think you were saying that you don't like to boast about yourself, you don't like to talk about your accolades, but you've done so much, man. And even just listening to you before the call, I was like, wow, you are an incredible speaker, it's like just, even being in your presence feels really good for some reason.

01:30 Josh Schiffman

That's so nice. Thank you. Would like to actually, I'm going to show my kids this afterwards and say, hey, people think it's cool to be by dad. So thank you. That's nice.

01:38 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, of course man. So I want to dive into your background. Talk to me about how you originally got into pest control and before that you mentioned you were in door to door and you had a mission. Just give me kind of a consensus of your background and how you got to where you're at or even just in the pest control industry.

01:59 Josh Schiffman

Yeah, so actually just by happenstance my grandpa Donald Ashdown was an entomologist. He actually was a professor in college his whole life. So and I didn't really connect those two pieces. So that didn't have anything to do with pest control. I want to give him a shout out. He is in heaven waiting to greet me with a hug, but he was awesome. And when he found out that I started doing pest control, he had to go get all of his like old school B&Gs. He sent them to my mom and my mom says, grandpa, so excited to give this to you. And they were all kind of garbage and like old stuff, but that was kind of funny. That's not how I got into it. I'll get back to the history. I just want to give my grandpa a shout out. So I served a mission for my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The most incredible experience of my life up to that point in my life. For those that don't know, we go out for two years and we tell people about Jesus every day. We don't work. We pay for the entire thing ourselves and we usually go away from home. I was called to the Santa Rosa, California mission in Northern California. It covers the North Bay all along the coast up to the Oregon border. And in my accolades, when you're asking me about it, that's where I received the largest rejection award. Cause over, over two years, I think I got rejected more than anyone else.

03:22 Josh Schiffman

But that, that kind of started me in well, that actually I would say refined my skills. Somebody once asked me where I knew I liked sales and I think it was way back when I was even younger. My sisters played softball in high school and for fundraisers they had to sell these chocolate bunnies. I think they were like $2. And I like to talk to people. I grew up in a small rural town in central Utah and there was a junior college there and this gave me two opportunities to go out and do something fun and creative. And then I also got to talk to really cute college girls. And that's, I found that I could connect with them because they're like, Oh, this boy is so cute. Like we should do, you know, buy stuff from him. Um, but what I also learned is that if I S I only had to give my sisters $2. So I sold them for $2 and 25 cents and I was able to keep a quarter and that was my video game expense. And so I like my sisters had to have, they had to sell 10 each. And so I remember my second year I asked him, like, can you get more chocolate bunnies? Cause I wanted to keep making money. So that was kind of my intro into probably sales. But anyways, fast forward 19 to 21, I served a mission in Northern California. I got home and I was ready to move on to life. Had kind of my focus. I was going to school for business finance. I was going to be a financial advisor. And there were some guys out there in really fancy cars. Remember this the first time in my life I'd ever seen a Cadillac Escalade on 23 inch rims that wasn't on MTV. And another guy had a Hummer that was lifted and looked really cool. And they were handing out these flyers to say, hey, this is an informational meeting. Come and get pizza. And my number one goal, I had no interest in what they were talking about, but I was in college and I liked pizza.

05:20 Josh Schiffman

And so I convinced my buddies, let's go to this meeting. They're going to get free pizza. They say it's all you can eat. So let's just go there. We'll grab a couple of boxes and then we'll bounce. When we got there, they kind of corralled us all in. And then they had these guys that like stood by the door. So we had to listen to the message. And so I remember listening to them and they explained what they were doing. And it just, blew my mind. They told me that these people had made all this money. And then I actually had met. Or I knew one person that had gone out the year before, he was a mission companion of mine. He went to Arizona and sold pest control, not alarms. This is what they were recruiting for, is alarms. But I remember he had told me he had made like $18,000. And when I heard that, it like broke my brain. In fact, I remember even like, this sounds so silly, but I remember asking like, so like, what do do now? Are you, are you like retired? Like, what do you do with the rest of your 18 grand? I just couldn't comprehend that. And so anyways, we kind of went on this journey. I asked the guy that was recruiting if I could drive his Escalade down the main street of my hometown. And so we jumped in the car and he answered some questions. And I remember thinking in my brain, I think I could do this. Josh from the little town, hillbilly countryville can do this. Anyway, so I went out for my first summer. I'd gotten married and I think my wife had some doubts. In me because this was all commissioned, there wasn't any base. My father-in-law told me not to do it, my dad told me not to do it. And I still remember driving in our little Nissan Sentra with, it was like this because we were packed to hill, driving out to Chicago, Illinois that first summer. And I remember sitting in like, we were coming through Denver and I remember looking over at my wife and she said, are you sure you can do this? Because we had like $200 in our bank account and I knew that if I failed, that I would have to ask my father-in-law or my dad for money. And at that point, neither one of them had that money. And I remember that was like a gut check for me. And I knew that I didn't know how good I was going to be at sales, but I knew that I could work hard. And that was a principle that was just evolved throughout my whole life. And I felt like that it's a numbers game for me. And the very first several weeks was really, really hard for me. I remember my buddies texting me, they're like, hey, Josh.

07:46 Josh Schiffman

Let's go get a Frosty at Wendy's. And I'm like, wow, that sounds really good. I haven't got any sales yet. Like, you don't got a sale yet? And I'm like, And I was really one of the only ones that was married at the time. I felt this weight. Anyways, it was really, really hard. And there was contemplation almost every day. I'm not good enough. I should go home. And I realized I wasn't having success. And a lot of it was I didn't feel comfortable with how I was pitching the people. Didn't feel comfortable because it was unnatural for me. And this is where I really discovered that there's a lot of different ways that you can be successful at something. And just because Dan does it one way and Dan makes it look so good doesn't mean that Josh can do it Dan's way and be successful. But Josh might be able to take something Dan has and be a little bit better than Josh was. And so for me, I felt like I wanted to just be myself. And I remember telling my manager, hey, I want to try it this way. And he's like, Josh, don't try to reinvent the wheel. We have this proven success to do it this way. And all of these guys have come out and they've been successful. And I told them, well, I'm going to try it. I got nothing else to lose. I'm ready to go home. So anyways, I tried it. I changed up my pitch. And I was me. I was. Fun, happy Josh. I joked around. That's part of my personality. I like to connect with people. I like to be close. I like to fist bump. I like to hug. And so that's just who I am. And as I did that, it was naturally easier for me. And I had a better experience talking to people at the doors. One of the other roadblocks that happens with alarms is that people have to qualify. So they can say yes all they want. But unlike pest control, they have to have a credit score that matches to be able to get an alarm system. And so that was a little bit of hurdle. Had people say yes all the time, but then they wouldn't qualify for it. So then I just had to lick my wounds and go to the next door.

09:57 Josh Schiffman

But I finally had a breakthrough that very first day that I did that I sold two and I had never even sold two before. And I felt like a million dollars. I'm like, my gosh, this is amazing. And I started consistently selling over and over and you know, I remember even the remarks in the office like, Josh finally learned how to sell. Let's give it up for Josh. Yay. And it's like, OK, OK, guys, you're making me feel real stupid. But I still remember driving out West Chicago, heading out to the South side of Chicago and getting after it. And anyways, I ended up doing well enough that first year. You know, I had a goal in mind. I told my wife if we can make $8,000 that summer, that will have been sufficient because combined her and I would have made like $3,500 each, offset some of the costs and the gas and stuff. We would have probably broken even and it would have been an experience for me that I had never even thought about having. Anyways, we ended up making about $35,000 that first summer and that was an incredible experience. My wife and I were able to go to school full-time. I took 23 semester credits both semesters I was back. And cause I just wanted to front load all of that energy to get and again, this was a, this was a stepping stone for me to get into my professional career where I was going to make big boy money, you know? And so, I went back the next year and I remember even earlier on in my life, I had this goal. Like if I could make a hundred thousand dollars in one year, I will have arrived. I will take care of my kids. I'll probably drive like a Mercedes or a BMW. My house will probably be a castle and we'll be able to.

11:35 Josh Schiffman

We'll probably go on all these things because like the mindset that I had was fixed by my parents. My parents were both educators, combined income. They didn't even make a hundred thousand dollars. And so that next summer we made a hundred thousand dollars and that blew my mind. Like, my gosh, this is amazing. Like I was transformed. And so I got into it. The recruiting was always really hard for me. It was hard because I, you know, meeting with people and I could talk to them. I kind of knew that they weren't going to be good. And I didn't want them to come out and sacrifice and move out just because I was trying to sell them some idea so that would help me. And so I think I struggled early on in the recruiting aspect that way. I had a lot of years, almost a decade of success with alarms. I had a lot of cool opportunities. I was a manager. I was a regional manager. I was at the towards my exit, asked me, the company I worked for, they had me on a special project where they wanted me to open up 100 year-round knocking year-round offices across the country. And so we started with 14. And I traveled around to all of those offices and trained the guys. So up to that point, I trained thousands of door-to-door salesmen. To date, I've probably trained over 3,000 door-to-door salesmen on the doors, in the meetings, in role plays, all of that stuff.

13:03 Josh Schiffman

Anyways, had a great experience. There's a shelf life for door to door for us. We had three kids. The kind of the thing that broke my heart was my oldest son's like looked at me when we were getting ready to pack up and move for our last summer. We were headed out to Fresno, California and he's like, dad, do we have to move? Like, I want to be with my friends. And I just like, that was hard because we just, we moved and I thought. This is such a good experience for you. Could get friends out there, right? Like Memphis, Tennessee, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Northern California, Central California. And so I thought it was cool, but I also can appreciate his desire to want to feel secure and like a foundation was there. And so that was my final year. Prior to that, I met my now business partner, Brandon Grover, who is one of the most incredible people you can ever meet. He's been a blessing for me in my life. But prior to that summer, I remember him was getting ready to start a pest control company. And he'd asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. I'm like, absolutely not. Pest control is for guys that can't sell alarms. I'm not going to lower myself to come and do pest control. This is beneath me, right? That was my ego speaking that I was fed. I was totally drunk on the alarm Kool-Aid all day long. So anyways, we started Sage Pest Control. I actually was not an owner initially. I came out, I was in a different project. I was doing a construction software project with my wife's uncle. And we had a really cool experience where we had another company that wanted to come in and buy it. It was a really quick transaction. And I thought, maybe this is a time when I'm going to get rich. This is a really cool thing. But it was around that time where real estate and new builds was dropping. And it was just.

14:52 Josh Schiffman

Kind of weird scenario, but I had a summer that I, they didn't want us to add any additional clients on our software. And so, I told Brandon, I'm like, well, I'll come out and knock for you. Cause I felt like I could help him with something that I've been doing for a really long time, but I didn't want to train anybody. And I didn't want to drive a car to take people out. Cause I felt like that was a waste of my time. So I bought a little Vespa scooter here in Utah. And I drove out to my area by myself. I knocked the doors and I was able to drive home and be home when I wanted to be. And pest control was so easy. It was so fun. People were interested in what I had to say. I didn't get the harsh nose like I got with alarms. People were, even if they had a contract with another company or something else, they saw value in it. And so I had lots of great conversations. I felt like I was happy and recharged even when I heard no. And I was able to be really, really successful. I knocked for a couple of months and sold several hundred accounts. I think we did, I did a little over 400 in like two and a half months. And that was, that was really, really cool experience for me. And so I told Brandon at that point, I think I want to be a part of this. To me, it wasn't what I was doing. It was who I was doing it with. And he and I had became really, really close. Our wives had become really, really close. Still great friends to this day, even though we don't live next to each other like we did then. And we've raised our family for the most part. But really, he has four girls, one boy. I have four boys, one girl. We used to joke, if society had a big bomb that blew up, our families could bring back civilization. But yeah, on our team, we've...

16:36 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, that's hilarious.

16:40 Josh Schiffman

Kind of put some pieces. Have an incredible Chief Services Officer. He's a great friend of mine. He's been there since day one. He worked with my business partner on another project and he's absolutely incredible. And along the way, we kind of built some pieces. We became pretty big here in Utah, but we realized this was a hard place for us to recruit door-to-door salesmen, which is our method of growth at the time. And we didn't love the winters. It was kind of hard to figure out how to sell the customer, to come out and do services when there's three feet of snow outside. We just, we didn't love it. So we felt like we needed to relocate. And that's what took us out to North Carolina. So we opened up North Carolina and Charlotte in 2012, opened up Raleigh in 2015, opened up Greensboro in 2018 and opened up Virginia Beach, this January.

17:27 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, incredible. What a great story. And I wanna dive into door to door a little bit, because I mean, you've trained over 3000 guys, you've seen some major success yourself. So first off, I want to ask kind of just generally, what is like the number one thing people need to know? Let's say someone is getting into door to door. What do they need to know? Is there like one thing of, well, you have to have this...

17:31 Josh Schiffman

You...

17:57 Dan Leibrandt

Kind of certain mindset or you have to do these kind of neighborhoods. What is like the one thing if there is one?

19:09 Josh Schiffman

You know, I think all of those things play a part, a small part. The very first thing I want to do is I want to find somebody that is okay with rejection. I think a lot of times companies find very successful door-to-door salesmen in Utah and Idaho and Arizona, which I would say predominantly most of the door-to-door salesmen that have had a lot of success are those that had a missionary experience. Because when you think about it, two years of their life, they were trying to sell something that was even more difficult than getting money for. And so they heard no and they became accustomed to be like, okay, that's fine. Whereas somebody else, like for instance, I remember when I was recruiting, I would think if a kid hit was a top athlete and just like think in your mind for a minute, you think of like the six foot three, 2 % body fat, blonde hair, blue eyes, chiseled jaw, Jake Sheldon. No, I'm not describing myself.

20:16 Dan Leibrandt

Haha...

20:17 Josh Schiffman

He's always joking with me. So that's a shout out him. Anyways, you have this like Adonis, right? And you're like, he's amazing. He's going to be good. He has all the confidence. He's had success in everything that he's done. Those guys have broken more times that I've seen than been successful. And I think the reason why is because throughout their whole life they had been successful. They'd done so well. They were on all the sports teams. Had parents that were really supportive and they hadn't ever gone through that grind of failure. And for me personally, we talked about this briefly at the beginning. Those are the things that I celebrate. Hard as we don't, I mean, as hard as it is to talk about our failures and our lessons that we've learned, a lot of times we wanna talk about all the good things that have happened to us. And for me, I think some of the biggest building of my character and my resilience and my sheer grit is because I've failed so many times in my life.

21:13 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

21:14 Josh Schiffman

Like I was sucked in times in all aspects, right? But even when I've sucked, I've gone back up and tried again. And so for me, that would be probably the number one thing. I've talked to a lot of different companies, not just an alarms and helped companies build their door to door program. And I'm happy to talk to people through that process. And because people want to build their own, which is a lot cheaper than hiring third party. Get that. But there's some, some advantages and disadvantages to that. And especially if you've never done that before, it's really hard to seek it out and really find somebody that even wants to go door to door. Cause that, that's kind of a scary thing for a lot of people where I have to knock on the door and they're like, okay, I could probably do that if you're going to pay me all of this money that you're telling me. And they'll go do it for one or two days. And like, that sucked. I would rather put. You know, needles in my, underneath my fingernails, then do that ever again. And so for me, I would look for the people that work, that have worked hard. And through the interview process, I would talk about what are some things in your life that you've failed at and what changed? Like, how did you come out of it? And so those are the things that I would look for. The second thing is, that I would look for is somebody that's driven, somebody that's really, really hungry. And this kind of goes back to that very first thing that I talked about is that if you find somebody that's had a lot of failures in life and they want more, they're willing to do more to get it. And they're okay with some of that failure. They understand it already and so they can grind through it. The other thing too is I think some of the training that's come out, I was talking to somebody on my way to the gym today.

23:00 Josh Schiffman

In fact, if he's listening, shout out to you. I'm not going to tell you your name. But we were talking about this as far as door to door goes. And I think that door to door has kind of lost some of the art that it once had. I described it as like the telephone game, right? Like I'm going to whisper something to you, and then you're going to whisper to the next guy. 10 people down the row, they're going to say it back to me. And I'm like, what? What is that? We didn't even see that. Right? It like changed. I think the principle is still there, but I think that there's some art. That's been lost because they're so focused on results. And so there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of hard closes. And unfortunately, we see that online, right? Like we hate door-to-door salesmen. They're pushy. They're aggressive. They lie. They cheat. They steal. They murder. They plunder. Blah, blah. I mean, not to that extreme at the end. But that's how people express door-to-door. Whereas there's some out there that still do good things by it. And they're kind. And they're observant. And they're willing to be like, OK. That's fine. Say, and to me, all of that as it comes into the interaction at the doors, like what is the interaction? How are you greeting the customer? And for me, those are some of the things that I watched and I observed. And it's even interesting because I think it's something that you have to continue to work on and get better. That was my goal as I went through it. Every single year, with the exception of one year, I always beat my previous personal sales record. Every single year. I required that of myself because I wanted to be a better today than I was yesterday. I want to be better tomorrow than I was today. That was just something that I've always just ingrained into myself, beat it in myself. And with the door to door, it's the very same thing. And because the goal is a sell, they look at if I don't get sales, then I failed. And that's not true. For me, it used to be, you know, we take guys that weren't getting sales like, Hey, just get a name. I want you to get five first names of homeowners. And then they were like, hey, I got first names. Like, hey, tell me how you did it. Walk me through that. And then they got little pieces of information. Something else that I think is lost is a lot of people don't ever get contact information to call back. If somebody says they're not interested, they just say, OK, have a great day. And then they bounce. And there's for sure some justification. There's some guys that are really big dogs and door to door that can have a great argument with.

25:25 Josh Schiffman

Don't waste time in getting contacts. For me, I love the connection. And so I always connected. I always got people's contact information. I think this is one of the reasons why Elon Musk has bought all the companies that he did. He wants people's information. And I think the information is the new oil. It's the new gold. What can I do with that information? And to kind of give you in reference to that, my very first year selling pest control, because in alarms, I didn't keep that information. Most of the people's information that I had.

25:40 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

25:53 Josh Schiffman

Were people that didn't qualify with the credit score. So it didn't make any sense for me to call them back and try to sell them services. With Pest Control, it did because they didn't have any of those roadblocks. But there was lots of people I talked to that had services and they had contracts. They had a technician they absolutely loved. They were getting all the results that they wanted. They didn't see any value or any need to change at that point. So I just said, hey, no sweat. Can I ask you this though? What if, could I be like on deck? And if they didn't know what that was, I'd explain baseball a little bit. I just, like, if anything ever happened to your pest control, your guy, because it sounds like John is doing an incredible job. But if something happened to John, would you, would you just consider giving us a shot? And everybody was going to say, I mean, there's very, very few times I have had people say no before, but very few times would people say that. And I just grabbed their contact information. So transition from year one, I finished my two, two and a half months of knocking. Had a very very successful summer knocking pest control. We were recruiting for the next year. I had this list This is before technology by the way, so all your lazy bums that have technology I had literally like this is my this is not this is my son's book. This is just for reference Okay, so I have this page of like all of these names and contacts in paper And I would use a specific color highlighter of what month I needed to call them and so I would go through that list. In March, before we even started knocking, I sold 74 people that were callbacks that I personally had contact with on the doors the previous summer. They weren't yet...

27:22 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

27:37 Josh Schiffman

Ready to buy yet. So anyways, message to all you PCOs that are thinking long term. If they say no, get a contact. Store it up. That's information. Check back with them. It doesn't hurt. It doesn't take much time. Even if it's just you throw it. Mean, there's so much technology now throw it in automation and check back with them. But for us, something that I feel like we did really, really well inside our business with the door to door program is, all of our guys, we recruited a specific type of individual that fit our culture, that fit the personalities of me and my business partner. And, we train them in a specific way to be respectful and to be kind and to be aware. And to make sure that the contact that they had wasn't so negative that people would not consider using us in the future. And our guys sold well. We had lots and lots of contacts and feedback to reach back to people. So anyways, I may have gotten a little bit of a squirrel moment there. Did I answer your question? Okay.

28:40 Dan Leibrandt

No, no, that was awesome. That was like a mini masterclass on door to door. I've got six points there just to recap for people watching or listening. You have to, it has to be someone good with rejection or maybe they can be trained to be good with rejection.

28:58 Dan Leibrandt

They have to be hungry. The training has gotten better. That's a key. So you wanna make sure you have great training. Implementing small wins. So like you said, just even some of the smaller nuances of just, hey, can you get a name or can you get a contact or just maybe just houses knocked total? Also follow-ups, like you said, I found that really interesting that you closed a lot more people the next year. I feel like very few people are taking advantage of that. And then also that the last thing you mentioned was culture fit. All those are great. That was like, that was a really good consensus of everything people need to know in door to door. And kind of a follow-up question to that would be... For you personally, and throughout your career, you've gone through so much hardship, and you've also helped other people go through hardship, what is your key then to resilience? How do you get through those hard moments of, you know, there's just been tons of doors and no one's saying yes, or really hard moment in the company with an employee or even with your family? How do you get through tough moments?

29:57 Josh Schiffman

That's a great question. And for me personally, I try to remove myself from that space for just a minute. Whatever that looks like. So if I'm on a street and I'm having a really, really hard time and I'm like, I'm just getting frustrated in my mind and I have that message in my mind like, Josh, you suck. You should do something else. You're terrible. Like seriously, you're like the worst salesman ever. Like you're supposed to be leading these people. You're awful. Right? Like I hear those messages internally and I know what the source of that is. And so what I have to do is I have to take a break and maybe that's go back to my car. Maybe it's go over and you know, lot of, a lot of times in my, in my older years of knocking, would always have my manager drop me off in an area. Cause I knew that my, um, the car when it was hot was like the Ring. Right. So it was like, Josh, come to my car. Right. So I knew it's right. So it's like the Gollum approach where they're like,...

30:55 Dan Leibrandt

Ha It's hilarious.

31:02 Josh Schiffman

Need you to turn on the air conditioner because it's miserable right so I knew the draw there so I knew that if I got dropped off that I wouldn't have that sure I didn't have the ability to go and do something really quickly, but I also that took away an excuse for me and Because we have lots of lots of excuses, but in those moments if I had my car. I'd go and sit in the car Clear my mind petition to my maker and just say hey, can you help me here? And then I would just think about like, okay, get back to the basics. This was also something that's really fascinating. This thought just came to my mind. I feel like when I was out training individuals, I sold better than I was selling by myself. And sometimes people think people that are walking with you, they drag you down. And that could be true. There's for sure some slow walkers out there. But what I noticed about that is that when somebody's with me, I'm more aware of all of the small things, the choreography that takes place into the production of selling on the door. And I was always aware of that because I'm training the person that's next to me. And so as I went through that process, I noticed that I was just doing all of the basic things. So anyways, okay, back into my car, sitting there, clearing my mind, saying my prayer, thinking about it. I would go back through and I would visualize myself having a perfect door. What does that look like?

32:33 Josh Schiffman

Because I've had lots of those. I've had so many of those. And recognize who I want to do. And then I would skip a few houses. And then I would say, OK, this is going to be different. And if there was something I was doing specifically, like sometimes you get in a neighborhood and you're like, yeah, I'm in the Cambridge neighborhood, whatever it is called. And you have like, there's a certain mood. There's people. Like-minded people, like behavior people kind of congregate together. And so these neighborhoods all kind of ooze the same type of personality, I think. And so I would think, could I do something different? And for me, I said briefly, I find a lot of comfort in humor and I also feel like that breaks ice. And so I would try to do something funny just to like break the ice. Like I'm human, you're human. Sure, I am annoying. I just knock on your door. Let's walk through this. The other thing too that I would do is, like I have a rock star wife. There was times when I'd call her, I'm like, Jen, okay, I need a pump up because I suck right now. Like I don't even know why you married me. I am failing at the doors today. And she would usually say, Josh, shut up, just go to work. You've got kids, you've got responsibility, right? And she would remind me of some of those things.

33:47 Dan Leibrandt

He...

33:53 Josh Schiffman

So if that helps the other thing too is sometimes there's like there's some power and change and so if I'm really struggling with a with a specific type of neighborhood I might just go and jump across the street or just change an area To me that has to be like my last-ditch effort because I have this I still have enough of pride that I feel like I can go into any neighborhood and sell people Even if it's been knocked 500 times I still have enough confidence that I feel like I can go into those areas and sell. But in some cases, I just need change it up, just switch up the neighborhood. And so that's helped me.

34:33 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. Yeah, no, it sounds like specifically at the beginning of your door knocking career, you really kind of like your first point, you had no way out, you had no excuses, you had a wife dependent on you had to make it work. So I feel like that kind of no way out mentality, whether you force yourself into that or whether that's just the situation you were put in, that's really powerful to kind of be resilient. Just because you have no choice other than to be resilient.

35:05 Josh Schiffman

Yeah, something that actually just came to my mind is a quote that my dad would made me memorize. I remember, I don't know if any of you guys listening had like a specific job that you had to do, but I had to clean the garage. And I hated cleaning the garage. I used to like push everything into the corners and sweep it out where my parents would park their car. And I remember my dad would come over and move something from the corner and he'd see that little section of dirt and leaves and stuff that were all congregated in some spider webs. And he'd say, you know how you can tell a job is done well? I'm like, yes, dad. And he's like, by its corners. We'd say it together, right? By its corners. And then he made me memorize this. Once a job has begun, never leave until it's done. Be the labor great or small, do it well or not at all.

35:55 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

35:56 Josh Schiffman

And so for me, I am a man of commitment. And so those that are watching, if you don't If you're not married and you don't feel like you have that somebody that's there, you committed to something. Finish it out. See it through. Let the consequences come. If you suck, let us suck and finish it out. And more times than not, we're closer to success than we think. And I see too many guys go home or quit or stop too early. And sometimes it feels like the way is there. Today, feel like we should have less excuses about succeeding because we have so many online resources, especially in our pest control industry. We have so many good individuals that are willing to help, willing to bounce ideas off. And sometimes it takes 15, 20 minutes to see. There's actually this video that circles around. You've probably seen it, the little ant that's trapped in a little circle. It can't get out. And it's the imaginary wall, right? And some of us have that imaginary wall and that might even be in where we're at. Maybe we're a salesman, we're under a certain threshold of revenue and we're trying to break through and we just feel like, it doesn't matter what I do. I'm never going to break through this. I'm just replacing customer. This one canceled, this one sold. So I'm net zero. But I think that analogy is really, really good because talking to somebody that has stepped over that line, can share some insight and understands like, hey, Dan, you're only like two steps away, dude. Like just go, come see what's around the corner, right? And it could be, in fact, just a quick little story. Had a young kid that went out and sold pest control in the Midwest. He was really, really struggling, but this was a close family friend. And so I asked him, I said, hey, call me.

37:35 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm, yeah.

37:57 Josh Schiffman

Have the phone on speaker while I'm hearing your door approach and I'll listen for the next couple of doors and then after every door we're gonna step back and we're gonna talk. And he had been at knocking doors for like six weeks and it was really, and I think people that have had a lot of success, there's a ton of guys that are like old dogs like myself that are pioneers and just old dudes, like we're like the walkers, right? Of the pest control industry. That have had some experience and we can close our eyes. Like I can still, if I heard somebody's pitch, I'd be like, okay, I can tell why you're not being successful. And so we took some time to break it down. And what was cool is he was in that moment where he was just trapped and he was frustrated. And I think it's easy to just stay in this woe is me, I'm trapped. I think when you're in that part of resilience is to reaching out, being vulnerable, telling people that maybe you're not as cool as good as you thought you were and asking for help. And I think that's more brave and shows more character than just keeping it in and accepting as it is now. And he was willing to do that. And we changed it and he ended up being the top salesman of that company. And he just really took off. And it was just small little tweaks. That's all it was. It was just small little tweaks. Just one or two steps, a little different.

39:19 Dan Leibrandt

Wow, no, that was so powerful. That really resonated with me of whatever you're doing, you have to commit to it, you have to finish it, even if you suck, just embrace the suck, do a really good job. And also you're closer than you think. I feel like this is the case with almost everyone, no matter what they're doing, it seems like the mission they're striving for, because everyone's striving towards something. And it feels so far off because maybe they've never done it before, they've never done it like this. But yeah, it's... They're actually really close. They just don't know because they've never done it, but someone like you or whatever, someone that's done it before, and just be like, hey, you're actually just like two steps away. You're actually really, really close. So I think that's a great lesson too, no matter what it is in business. It could be doors or anything even in life. And then I also wanted to, I want to make sure to dive into Sage and the growth of your pest control company. I know you mentioned it at the beginning, but tell me exactly how you got started and what were the first few years like.

40:21 Josh Schiffman

So we got started. We were here in Utah. My business partner, Brandon, he had actually worked for Orkin his very first year in 1997, I think. That year could be off. It might have been 96. But he was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And he went out and had sold. His background was construction. His dad was a general contractor. And that's what he was planning on doing. He knew how to swing a hammer. He's an extremely hard worker. Brilliant business mind. He went out with some buddies and sold in Albuquerque, New Mexico and did really, really well. And then he met the owners that were starting up Preventive Pest Control and he was actually Preventive Pest Control's very first employee and kind of helped build their whole program. And then he went off and started another project, a satellite dish company. And when I was in doing alarms, I knew of his business because they were like, they were like the Vivint of door to door because they had all these guys that were having all kinds of success. I still remember seeing some of their managers that were driving Aston Martins and Bentleys and I'm like, what do these guys do? So, I lose you for a Anyways, so we knocked doors here in Utah. Was him and me and Dan, who's our Chief Services Officer. He was treating the homes behind us and we just went everywhere that we possibly could and we were bootstrapping. Mean, we financed the whole.

41:48 Josh Schiffman

Built and when you're have door to door salesman that's a really expensive way to grow and so and that was a big problem for gosh all almost the first you know five to ten years was this debt or this amount of money that we had to come up with to pay for the door to door sales guys and the growth that was there and so but we just slowly built part of the recruiting process that was kind of my responsibility was to go out and recruit and to train the sales guys. That was my role inside the business. So I was traveling to all kinds of college campuses here in Utah and Idaho and taking people to lunch. I still remember going to Rexburg like twice a week, which is like a four hour drive one way. And I had this table, table number seven at Applebee's in Rexburg, Idaho. So if you're there and you go to table seven, just know that I spent a lot of hours at that table talking to people about coming out and selling for us. But along the way we met some really, really awesome people that helped us build our business. As I was preparing for this, I figured that you'd probably ask about that history. That term, my cup runeth over. I feel that about all of the people that have worked inside our organization. I feel like the luckiest person to be able to interact with all of the people that came in. They were smarter than me, they were brighter than me, they were harder workers. Amazing people and we got to build that together and the people that we currently have now, I wouldn't trade them for anybody. Our executive team and our leadership team are just incredible individuals. Along the way, just like with any company, have your pain points and there was a time, we dissolved our door-to-door program in 2019, Brandon and I looked at each other and thought we figured it out because we're like, okay, 2019, gonna, we want to transition door to door is really expensive. We need to figure out other types of marketing. We just started getting into online marketing and seeing some results there. But then 2020 hit and we had COVID and we thought, oh, we read the wind. Door to door is gonna be terrible now. And it was like the best two years of sales just cause people wanted to talk to people. We just can't, still joke.

44:04 Dan Leibrandt

He...

44:13 Josh Schiffman

We missed that one. Anyways, but we've tried to piece things together. We had to learn how to bring in customers outside of door-to-door since then. Just like any other business, we're moving pieces together and there were times in the years that we got that we got complacent because we were building so much and it was so expensive that there were times that Brandon and I wanted to slow down a little bit and take a little bit of a reward and pay ourselves finally. We had years that we just took our foot off the gas for a little bit and enjoyed the profit that came from it. It's like, oh man, remind ourselves. And that's maybe something that I just put a plug in there that as you're building a business, make sure that you reward yourself. You don't have to like throw a hundred dollar bills and be like, hey, honey, let's go on this lavish vacation, but make sure that you have certain milestones that you're going for. And when you're there, celebrate. I think it's so hard because when we get to those milestones, maybe my milestones like a hundred customers and I get to a hundred and then I go on social media, which I think is a destruction for all of our confidence. Right. And everybody, this guy has 10 million customers. Holy crap. I suck. I'm celebrating a hundred. Right. And so for me, it was always like, I was even in my head about that. Right. Like those milestones, like, we finally got to a million dollars in revenue. We finally got to three million dollars in revenue. We finally got to five million dollars in revenue.

45:26 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I know.

45:40 Josh Schiffman

That's a big deal. I mean, when you look at the PCT Top 100, sure, those guys are big. They have other resources. They have other tools. They've done it a different way, and that's OK. But that's why I think it's good for you as an individual or business, whether you're selling, whether you're a business, whether you're trying to have the best service, like pick a milestone and hit it, and then celebrate that. And then say, OK, what's next? Like, let's figure out what's next. And I think that's a healthy way to grow a business. And also put that milestone out there a ways that makes it feel like, gosh, I don't know if we're going to hit this. Cause those are, those are the ones that are, are really rewarding, but don't forget to reward yourself. Cause we did that for lots of years. We didn't ever like reward ourselves. And so it made the grind like harder and you know, seeing peers and other people, like there was times where I saw some of my friends that didn't do sales and I stepped away from. Being a door-to-door salesman, not being an owner, making a lot of money, having a really, really nice lifestyle with my wife, and doing really anything that we wanted to do into ownership and being back in poverty, and watching, feeding everybody else their porridge before I got, you know, look at the pot and see that there's nothing left for me or my business partner. And so, you know, whatever that might be, you know, great or small, like set a milestone and then, and do it that way. So anyways, hopefully that helps.

47:12 Dan Leibrandt

How have you been rewarding yourself? Like is it a vacation for you or is it parties? What do you do?

47:19 Josh Schiffman

So a lot of little other things. I'll tell you this. One of the things that's most memorable, my wife every summer used to make me this little poster. You've all seen those poster boards, right? That you, the kids are asking, the teenagers are asking people to dances now with. She'd make that poster board and she'd have a certain amount of cutouts. It was like 15 or 20 or 30 cutouts. And every single time I reached a milestone, I got to peek behind that and see what was behind the door. And so sometimes it was... Sometimes it was like my favorite candy bar. Sometimes it was my favorite dinner that she'd make Sometimes it was a brand new pair of shoes We tried to put in two or three pairs of shoes during the summer because I would when I was out knocking I would wear through shoes I think I'd go through three pairs of shoes every summer and so For me, there was just little things that I really enjoyed right As we got bigger, you know, we rewarded ourselves with trips or like a car for me. I'm not into items like I like to win things for my wife. And so a lot of those celebratory things, if it was like a new car for me, it was really like a new car for my wife. Because I enjoyed the emotional exchange that I got when I gave things away. I even noticed this with me when I was younger. Like when I earned money and my friends would go out to dinner, whatever, I'd pay. I'd pick up the check. Because to me, that was rewarding. Like I was never really attached to money as like, this is so good to have it.

48:45 Josh Schiffman

I've never had that problem of, you when it came to business, like where should we invest our money? I'd be like, here, just have it all. Like I don't need it. I want to share and express that because I love all of this stuff that happens with it. Not to say that I don't like success and I don't want to get paid so that I can take my family on trips, but I mean, like today, like those are things that I'm shooting for, taking my family on trips, taking my... Family on fun little activities, whether that's over a weekend, whether it's a week-long cruise. Yeah, so those are some of the things that I like to celebrate.

49:25 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. I also wanted to ask you, and this is general, you could take this wherever you want, but do you have any regrets throughout your journey? I mean, you kind of mentioned the celebrating it milestones. Is there anything else you wish you would have done differently across your journey?

49:43 Josh Schiffman

Yes, yes. Early on, like in my door-to-door alarm experience, I feel like I was greedier than I needed to be. I was in, I think there's a couple of different mindsets. You have scarcity and you have abundance. And for a lot of years, probably because I didn't come from a lot and I worried about security and safety. And this is funny because I mentioned I didn't care about the money, but I think when I got married and I had dependents, that maybe changed just a little bit. But I kind of got stuck in this rut of feeling like everything that I earned I had to keep. And I was unwilling to try to find a win-win deal, whether it's with a door-to-door guy that I'm trying to recruit. For example, and those of you that are listening, if you are recruiting guys, you might have John who wants a higher commission. I would always say, this is my threshold. I won't go above it. So if John just needed a little bit more, I would turn John down just because I didn't feel comfortable to do that, even though John might be incredible. And to me, I think the older that I've gotten, the more abundant mindset that I've been. Even fill this way with like information, you know, like some of us have these like cool little secrets that we've got to hold for ourselves. We don't want anybody else to be successful. So It's gonna take away from us somehow But I wish that earlier on I would have been I would have given more like I would have given better deals I would have built I would have saved the guy that I really liked working with but because another company or another individual was offering more I just said I can't do that and what I noticed is there was there's a handful of people that I watched that were willing to do that and at the end of the day they became bigger and maybe even more like a more abundant and earnings than I did. And not to say that you need to have that mindset, but I also think that they experienced more joy along the way. Brandon used to always tell me this as we were kind of growing. Said, and this is one of the reasons that kind of locked me into working with him for so many years.

52:17 Josh Schiffman

Was that he always said if you push and get people to where they want to go and have them reach their goals, you'll be that much closer or have already achieved yours. And so for me, even in fact, I was on a call the other day with another company and they were asking about, I think they may have even posted in the Facebook group, but they were asking about hiring employees. And for me, I'm a big advocate of identifying what an employee's goal is. Like what's their goal? If they don't have a goal, let's figure out a goal. And like, let's say somebody wants to come in as a technician and, you know, they want to make $25 an hour and your current rate you can pay is $18 an hour. Rather than saying, I can't pay you that, map out and show them how he can make $25 an hour. That might be something different than just being a technician and that's okay. But show him how it's possible at your business and then let him provide the details. And work that math backwards. I feel like too many people, and I've even been guilty of this. It's like along that way, like, you can't do that. Well, what if John came in and what if I did pay? Maybe I didn't make anything on John, but what does that bring the culture? And what I also noticed is when you have pay setters or guys that are really big deals, even though you might not make much on what they bring into the table, they could be a really big asset. For everybody else and everybody else's performance might increase and might be better because they're just there. And so for me, it's trying to also get these employees is tie those types of things into things that you want to see inside your culture. Like what do you want to do? What's your brand? Like when people see you, what do you want them to notice about you? I still remember in...

54:14 Josh Schiffman

When I was playing sports, we, in our basketball team, we walked into the gym a certain way. Whether people made fun of us or not, we walked into the gym a certain way, because our coach told us, this is how we do it. And I'm like, this is so dumb. But we walked in together. We didn't walk in separately. Back then, we had mini discs and CD players and tape decks. And we'd have the cord plugged into the really big headphones. And sometimes you'd think, I mean, you see a lot of athletes now that do that and they like walk in and they have their own swagger, right? They're all part of their own team, but we, couldn't do that. We walked in the same way. We all wore the same thing. We wore that. Had the same team shoes. Had the same warmups. We had the same backpacks and we did that. And it was to me, I think it's so cool to see that there's a cadence and a brand that came with that. And it helped level all of these people, even though there were better players on our team.

55:08 Josh Schiffman

We were a team together and I think the more you can do that inside the business and create that culture, because we're all individuals, we all have different wants and goals, but you can hone some of those things in and say, hey, I am willing to pay more, but this is what I would need from you. Do you think you could provide that? And you might find yourself some really important people.

55:29 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, interesting how you found that even on a youth basketball team looking back. I feel like that's a really good insight and some really good pattern recognition to look back and see, hey, we actually did that on our basketball team a while ago too. Then as it relates to your company, what is your guys' culture and how do you stand out? How is your culture different from other pest control companies?

55:56 Josh Schiffman

You know, that's an awesome question. I'm glad that you asked that. For us, we really want to be like an asset to the communities that we serve. And so we have what's called the Sage Shield. And we have four things that we focus on. We try to talk about these things. And we try to do activities inside our business that people know. When they work for Sage, we represent these things. And that when you put on a Sage jersey or a Sage work shirt, you're not representing yourself anymore. You're representing us. And this is who we are. And so we have build, we have serve, we have character, and we have courage. And so throughout maybe some of those things, to kind of give you an idea, build. We really want to make sure that our employees are always learning and that they're building the best version of themselves. And so we do things every single year with our different leadership team. Have like a company goal of certain things. Instance, earlier, you know, earlier you talked about getting your steps in. We have times when we say, Hey, everybody on our team does 10,000 steps a day. That's really easy to do as a technician. But you know, for our CSRs and for our inside sales guys, that requires some things. And it's fun to see like, hey, Dan, can you take the phones? Gotta go get a thousand steps. And then you see people out there kinda like walking really fast outside the office. But what's cool is they come back in like, hey, boom, fist bump, your turn. Those types of things happen. We have a standing book incentive. So my business partner and I, we've had a lot of books that have transformed who we are. Dan, that is part of our executive team, our Chief Services Officer, Derek and Anika, who's also on our executive team. They all also have different...

57:53 Josh Schiffman

Experiences in life and different books that have really made a powerful impact on them. And so we have several books that employees can read. And what we ask them to do is read the book, write a couple of paragraphs of what you personally got out of it. And one thing that you want to change about your life that you got from that book. Not what we want you to change, but what you got out of it. And for sure, there are some entertaining things like because sometimes we read something and it has nothing to do with the book. We're like, hey, I just want to be a better dad. Well, that book was about pushups. Did a book about pushups inspire you to be a better dad, right? But that's the way that I think building who we are works. And so when they do that book and they do have and they do do that report, they we give them we have Sage Cash or Sage Rewards. So we have a little app. They can claim it and then they write their little paragraph and they submit it. And then they can submit those for gift cards, Sage swag. We have some really cool swag that, cool is relative. I think it's really cool. I've designed most of the swag at Sage. So I think it's really awesome. No, also on purpose, we design cool swag that we give to our employees on a regular basis, a quarterly basis so that they can be proud. Where that they can feel comfortable going out and representing our business there. We also have, in fact, I have it right here, we have an achievement journal that we do. This is also part of building. So you can see right here, the Sage achievement journal. Inside there, I'll just show you a blank one here, but we have two different spots. And so what we asked them to do on this side right here, it's the date.

59:46 Josh Schiffman

And then we have, what's your objective for today or this week? And they write that down. So like every single week, they'll write down their specific objective for that week. And that's tailored to what they do inside the business. We don't even care if it's like personal life. Like maybe their objective is, I want to do four pull-ups on the pull-up bar. If they have like a health minded goal, we're okay with that. But what's your objective for the week? And then underneath that, it has a couple of lines for a plan. So we want you to outline what is your plan to hit your objective. And then underneath that, it has strengths. I don't think we do this enough. I don't think that we list our strengths and our superpowers. And this is that part of breaking through and getting away. Like if I said, Dan, what are your weaknesses? You could probably talk to me for, well, maybe not. You don't have many weaknesses, right, Dan? You told me you didn't have many weaknesses. No. But if somebody asks us what's our weaknesses, we could list them on for hours, right? Like how much time do you have?

1:00:35 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, come on.

1:00:44 Josh Schiffman

But if somebody says, what are your strengths? We're like, I don't know. But for us, we ask, what is your strengths? Write these down. And maybe it's the same thing, but what makes this unique about you and how you can use those strengths to take care of your objective? And then line number four is one line on purpose. What do you want to improve from what you've done last week or in your life or whatever? What's one thing that you want to improve?

1:01:12 Josh Schiffman

And then every day we ask them to evaluate themselves on a scale from one to five with motivation, concentration, confidence, and decision making. And then over here, the blank sheet, we ask them to write three things that they're grateful for to express gratitude. I think that that is a really, really healthy thing to do. So that's another example of what we do inside our culture for the building aspect. Another thing that we really, really focus on is service. For us, I... I want people to be the best version of themselves, whether they, this is just a stepping stone in their professional life or whether they're with us forever. Have, we have technicians that have been with us for 10 plus years now, which is absolutely incredible. And I think all of these small things have made a big difference in their life. And one of them is the way that we service or serve our communities. Every year we try to do a big event in every single one of our branches. To serve the communities that we do. As an example, one of our customers has a daughter that had a really bad health problem. And so we organized this event to raise money for awareness for it, as well as raise money for her. And so we paid for a live band, we paid for four different food trucks to come, and we paid for all of the food, we paid for the bounce houses, we had all these games, we had all of our employees and their families come. We had it to our customers in that branch. They came and it was just a great, great time. And we were able to raise a bunch of money for this cute little girl. And it had a positive impact for our employees. We also have, and this is kind of hard because when you're going out and you're serving somebody, there's a immediate benefit that you get inside yourself because you've looked outside yourself and you've blessed somebody else's life. And I think that there's a power above ourselves that gives you a little pat on the head and say, good job. So it's a little bit hard when you talk about that. Sometimes that might take away that experience. But it blows my mind. And this is why I say, I feel like we are so lucky in our employee department. Because all of the time, we have technicians that have pulled over and saved people's lives from car wrecks.

1:03:36 Josh Schiffman

We have technicians that have saved little kids from running out in the road because they jetted out of the front door and they were out servicing and there was a car running and we've had a technician go and, you know, grab the kid and saved his life. We've had technicians that, that have been in the area where they saw somebody that wasn't even our customer that had lost their dog. And so they called him to the office and say, Hey, I've got a block of like 20 minutes. I'm going to go help this person find their animal. Cause they're, they're, they're struggling right now. That animal was part of their family. I'm going go help them. Find these people. And so for us, we part of our reward system that we have is we encourage people to go out and serve in their community that might be picking up trash at the park. And so every single week, we have meetings with our small little groups in our offices, and we talk about some of those wins. And we celebrate those things. And what we've done is we've been doing this for years now. But what it does is it breeds and it feeds really good things and we're noticing that almost all of our employees are performing service for their churches, for their communities, for their families in ways that they never really thought that they could and sharing those things, those examples in the meetings every week spawns new ideas of how to serve other people. And it could be even as simple as like writing a thank you note. That's an act of service. I can send Dan, I could send you a text message, say, hey, thanks. It was really cool talking to you today. But if you got a handwritten thank you note in the mail and you got it, that's going to feel a little different. That feels like I took time out of it was more powerful than just a text message. We also have a, yeah, there's a million different things. We have customer matching where we have certain.

1:05:25 Josh Schiffman

Charities that we give money to and we give our customers options to match those things. Character is another thing. We try to describe what it means as far as character and we do different activities in how to build character and what that looks like. Then courage is the last part of our shield. Talking about having confidence and standing up. One question that we ask our employees all the time is what's one thing that you think we should be doing that we aren't? And why. And we invite all of our employees to answer that. The first Wednesday of every month, we have our entire company. So all branches, all employees are on a Zoom meeting every single first Wednesday of the month. And we talk about the health of the business. We celebrate people that have done some really cool things. We have certain MVPs from departments, and it's not necessarily led just by numbers. It's led by things of character, things of courage, right? But part of courage is standing up. Like I might see my fellow employees or even my manager do something that isn't conducive or isn't aligned with what our goals and our vision is. And it takes courage to say, you're my manager and you're an example. I don't want this to come across as offensive, but I just wanted to share like you doing that takes us away from our vision. That's a hard thing to do because you might feel like you're going to have repercussions or consequences from it. But what it's done is it's developed relationships within our business where I feel like they're really, really healthy and people feel like they can be honest and transparent and we kind of grow as a group. And so being able to have courage, this is also like when we're doing role plays, we remind people of courage, right? Like it's hard to get up in front of people and like do a role play back and forth because it's not really a real situation and we don't like to be in front of people. That's embarrassing if we screw up.

1:07:22 Josh Schiffman

But I think it's so valuable to have courage because that helps us be better individuals. And we should all have courage to share and to develop and to grow. And I think when we get into those little uncomfortable situations and we get through it and we realize, I'm still breathing. I'm still alive. OK. I'm a little bit better now than I was five minutes ago. Right? It's all part of that stuff. So for us, those are a few of the things that we do as far as culture. Culture goes. We have a President's Club trip every single year. In fact, here in January, we're going to be taking 40 people on a cruise to celebrate the year that we had and to celebrate them and their efforts and their spouses and the things that they did at home to help support them to be a part of our Sage family.

1:08:12 Dan Leibrandt

Wow, I swear, I can't believe this is your second podcast appearance because that was another masterclass. You had another one in door to door. This was a masterclass in culture. I feel like, I don't know, maybe people know a little bit more about door to door or other lead generation strategies, but many companies don't get culture right. So that right there, everything you said there, I think people need to listen back, really just listen back to the whole show.

1:08:22 Josh Schiffman

That's funny.

1:08:40 Dan Leibrandt

Listen to that in particular because that was gold. Loved what you were talking about with the workbook, with the different strengths. You might have one thing that you're gonna get better at this week, maybe one weakness that you can improve upon, different action items around that. It seems like every company should have their own workbook. And then also something that I really took away from that is that it's not just about me and it's not just about building the company, but it's about building people and building community. So, ultimately, because I haven't built like a major successful, majorly successful company like you, but I can still understand that actually when you do it kind of on the opposite end like you have of building people and community rather than focusing on building the company, that's actually how you build the best company, right?

1:09:33 Josh Schiffman

I think so. I...

1:09:35 Dan Leibrandt

Haha.

1:09:35 Josh Schiffman

Think so. Mean, really, you know, at the end of the day, I think that when you build people, they will help you be successful. Very similar to what I talked about, you help people get to where they want to be. And it's cool because I think people, as they've gone through like their professional journeys, they might not have ever seen themselves. In fact, one of the one of our well, I shouldn't say one of them. We have so many great employees, but one in particular. Was a beauty pageant queen. She was studying to be a dental hygienist. And she came in and she was phenomenal. She worked on inside cells. And when I talked to her briefly about, she was a family friend of mine. And I said, you really should come in and work for us. You would be incredible on the phones and selling. And she's like, no. Sales are slimy, dirty people, right?

1:10:25 Josh Schiffman

But what was cool is she came in and she discovered something that she had never, ever known before. She was incredible. And I remember when she still had that goal of going through dental hygienist school, she finished that and her ultimate goal was to be a mom, which she is now. That's amazing. We were just simply a stepping stone. But when I see her, when she messages me, she thinks, man, I loved working there. That was a part of my life, a chapter of my life that will have blessed my life forevermore. And to me, outside of like, I think we will be successful. We will make lots and lots of money. But that's not the most important thing that I believe in this life. For me, it's about building people and connections. Because when I die, I can't take anything of that, any of that with me. But I have a lot of experiences and I have a lot of connections and I have a lot of friends. And for me, that makes me the richest man that I believe, right? I have a family, I have a wife that loves me, I have kids that I feel like are rock stars and that they love me, and I have this other tribe and this community inside my business and even outside of my business. And so for me, more than what my bank account shows or my assets or what my net worth is, I feel like I'm one of the richest people around and alive because I believe in that more than anything else. And as a Byproduct of that naturally, I've had a lot of opportunities in my life that others haven't because my focus hasn't been what do I gain out of it financially or what do I get monetarily from doing it.

1:12:10 Dan Leibrandt

Amen. Now I've realized that recently myself too, that there's so many ways to be, I guess you could say rich or wealthy. Everyone thinks it's just money, but you know, if you only have money, if you're only wealthy in money, you're actually broke because it's about your friends, your family, your experiences, your learning. Actually, I want to jump back to this. I want to make sure I ask you this. You were saying that books have been super impactful and you recommend books to people in your company. What have been the most impactful books for you?

1:12:40 Josh Schiffman

Man that is a loaded question. I You know to answer that I would say I would would ask people like what? What they're working on because I think that there's certain books that are are better for certain phases of your life You know one of the one of the most simple ones that That I think is good for anybody that's like involved in sales or in change, like Who Moved My Cheese is a really easy read. And I think that's a great book with mindset. My business partner and I, we had a really active door-to-door program, we did this thing called Financial Friday. And with the amount of money that our door-to-door sales guys were making, we wanted to make sure that we gave them enough education and information so that they could take that money and use it as a tool. Not just go and blow it on cars and vacations. And I remember one guy that came out and worked for me from Des Moines, Iowa. He made like 140 grand with this one year. And he like sponsored all of the booze nights at his college when he got back. And come February, March, he had blown it all on beer.

1:13:59 Dan Leibrandt

No!

1:14:01 Josh Schiffman

And I'm like, dude, that's so much money. Right? And so, but ever since we started, we just felt like there's experiences that we've had or others have had. And so we want to at least deliver the information and whatever comes from it, comes from it. We've had lots of guys that have made lots of money and have become millionaires that have come through our, our, our program because of some of those principles. And so, you know, like Richest Man in Babylon is a great book. That is an excellent book. Rich Dad Poor Dad is an excellent book. And so those are are reads that are often quoted in really business. For me, I love like if I'm an owner, one of the one of the things that we followed for years was Four Disciplines of Execution. I think that's such a powerful book in cadence and reporting. That's how we ran our business for years. And we've evolved a little bit from that, but we still use the same reporting system. I think that's kind of a lost art because once you focus on it and you report on it, that you get an immediate increase. Your behavior will change inside the business when somebody has to report on a certain metric, right? It gets better. And so that was an awesome book. For me, I've kind of been on this health journey for a couple of years because I want to be an old guy that can open a can of pickles or a bottle of pickles and pick up my grandkids and go to all of their events. And so I am trying to take care of my physical body in a way. And there's a book from Peter Attia, Outlive. My business partner recommended that to me. And that was an incredible book for me because it helped me understand and measure the things about my physical body that I wasn't measuring or thinking about before. And it took away a lot of frustration that I had because I came into a roadblock that was a plateau and I was there forever. And I just like banged my head against that wall. And until I read that, was like, I just need to look at this differently. And then I stepped to the side of the wall moved forward. I'm like, this is amazing, right? And so I think Brené Brown is an incredible book. Her book about vulnerability, that really changed the way that I interact with people and trying to be super vulnerable. And so there's a gazillion books, but we those are a few to name but I for that it would be what is something of interest because I think that if I gave you a book and you had no interest in your life at that time in it you're probably not going to get much out of it you'd be like yeah that was cool throw it to the side right but if before I wouldn't be like hey what books you read like in fact last week I had a kid at the gym asked me you look like a reader and I'm like well no I'm more of like an Audible guy but what's going on? Like, where did that come from? Do I look like a nerd or something? Am I like a weird, like, was reading, because I was not reading a book when he asked me. But he's like, hey, what's some good books that you'd read? And I'm like, well, I've got 100. But let me ask you this. What are your goals right now? Like, what's your vision? Like, what do you want to work on? Like, do you have something? And he named like four or five different things. I'm like, OK, which one of those is the most important to you? And he shared.

1:17:23 Josh Schiffman

You know, his fitness at that point, he's at the gym. So I shared that Outlive book and I talked to him about how I read the health of my body off of my blood work now. I go get my blood work and it tells me exactly what my body's doing. And I've had better results doing that than anything else in my entire life. And so that was a connection. So for me, I think books are great if you have a purpose for it. I'm not a guy that will just pick up some book. In fact, my wife teases me all the time. She's like, you should, you should read like some non or some fiction books and things that are enjoyable. Don't enjoy those. I like personal development. Like things that are going to make me like business books. And they might be boring to somebody else, but I want my brain to break and be like, my gosh, I haven't thought about this before. Anyways. And the good word, I'm always got to put a plug in there. The good word is always the book you should start out with every single day. If you haven't started, do it.

1:17:57 Dan Leibrandt

Same.

1:18:17 Dan Leibrandt

Yes, sir, I agree. Okay, sweet. Okay, so there's a lot of different books to read. You've read many of them, but I think that's actually a really good point that it's relevant to where you're at at life and what you're looking for. Because I've actually faced that with myself of maybe everyone recommends a certain kind of book. I'm just like, I'm just not really digging this right now. But it's because I'm not striving for that, maybe that particular topic. My mind's really on something else. So I kind of always find myself obsessed with something. So if I'm not obsessed with that, it's gonna be hard to read the book. That's really good. And the last thing I wanted to ask you, Josh, as we begin to wrap up here is what is your message for pest control owners out there, business owners, whoever, maybe that might even be your kids. What is your message for everyone out there? What do you wanna tell them? What do you think they need to know?

1:18:52 Josh Schiffman

Yep, I concur.

1:19:08 Josh Schiffman

Stay off of social media as much as you can. First and foremost, I think that it can be pretty destructive. And I think that the need of comparison is so unhealthy. I think that if I was to send a message to anybody is to compete against yourself. Try to do that. Try to block out the world and what it is. Try to have a goal in mind of what you're shooting for and compete against yourself. You can ask for tips and tricks and all of those things from people that have maybe gone ahead of what it is. And take those compliments or not compliments, but those ideas as a blessing and try to use those. Just know that every level of success that you will always have, somebody will have done it better. And you don't like don't. Wreck yourself and your dreams and your desire and your fire because you didn't hit their mark. Because they could be building something completely different. Don't let their mark be your mark. Figure out what you want and then set it out. I think too often we overestimate what we can do in one year and underestimate what we can do in five.

1:20:28 Josh Schiffman

And so just compete against yourself. Be better today than you were yesterday and have that on your mind and I think that you'll hit the goals that you want and you'll get to where you need to be. And don't worry about what everybody else was, because there's always going to be a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk or somebody that like had that one conversation with that one person that made everything happen. They're multi gazillionaire, right? They just read about that article with the three guys that are in high school that are billionaires. And I'm like, well, that's pretty awesome. Right. So if I compare myself to them, I'm like, well, I'm a big failure in life. Right. So. Just compare yourself against yourself, compete, go out, do good. Find yourself in service of others. And I think that you'll find that in a blessing in itself to help offset the really bad days. That's not necessarily going to help you grow your business. But if you are mindful and service oriented and you're going towards your goals and your goals are your focus, I think that you'll like what the end, the finish line is or the next chapter. Or the next mile looks like for you.

1:21:39 Dan Leibrandt

Amen. So compete against yourself. Doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. Someone else has probably done it better, but just do your thing, stay in your lane and just be better than yesterday. So thank you so much for coming on Josh. This has been a great show. I really appreciate your time. I know how valuable it is and where can people find you? Maybe I know you said don't go on social media, but where can people find you on social media or connect with you?

1:22:03 Josh Schiffman

They can connect with me on Facebook. I'm there on Facebook. I'm on LinkedIn. My email address that I use for this type of stuff is [email address removed]. Tribos in Hebrew [Tribos is a Greek word] is a path well-worn from repeated use. And so for me, that's what I think business is. I don't think that there's any idea that I have or anybody else has that hasn't been had before. And so as long as you can get on the right trail and just do that trail, you're probably going to get there. So.

1:22:41 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome. And anything else you'd like to plug or promote?

1:22:44 Josh Schiffman

No, go out and have an awesome day. You guys are all super awesome. Continue to be awesome. Continue to have a good day. Bless the lives of those around you. Thank your wife for letting you work, or your husband for letting you work, or your future husband or future wife. That's all I've got.

1:23:00 Dan Leibrandt

Yes, sir. Well, thanks again so much for coming on Josh. This has been great. Yeah, no, it's been really great meeting you and spending some time with you here today.

1:23:07 Josh Schiffman

OK, awesome. Thanks, Dan. Nice to meet you, see you.

1:23:09 Dan Leibrandt

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