Foreign.

You're listening to the Master Passive Income Podcast Network.

Are you feeling stuck in today's economy?

Tired of the 9 to 5 grind?

Ready to take control over your time and money?

Welcome to the Successfully Unemployed Podcast.

My name is Roger Wesley and I'm your host.

Here I interview successful entrepreneurs and business owners who've left the traditional job world behind to design a life on their own terms.

Let's reach a point to where money becomes irrelevant, where you work on your time, not your boss's.

One proven path to that freedom is investing in real estate and building passive income.

That's what I'm working on right now.

It's the same strategy that's created wealth for countless others.

If you're ready to get started, visit master passiveincome.com to grab your free real estate investing course.

It's the exact resource I'm using and.

It'Ll show you how to take your.

First steps toward financial freedom.

Welcome to the Successfully Unemployed show.

The the place where ordinary people become extraordinary.

This is your community of entrepreneurs, business owners, and side hustle experts who will show you how to retire early, become financial independent, and live the dream life.

And now, here's your host, Roger Wesley.

Hey there, friend Roger Wesley, your host of the Successfully Unemployed Podcast.

And today I want to read something with you that I just learned.

Success does not depend upon superior intelligence, special skill, former education, luck, et cetera.

The world is saturated with intelligent, highly educated, extraordinarily skilled people who experience ongoing frustration because of their lack of success.

Millions of others spend their lives working hard, long hours, only to die broke.

Success is a matter of understanding and religiously practicing specific, simple habits that always lead to success.

And the reason why I share that ahead of this episode is because today we're gonna have an absolutely amaz amazing opportunity to hear from a business mogul.

This gentleman is well known within his niche and he's accomplished some absolutely amazing things that I know you would like to accomplish.

$10,000 months, $20,000 months, $30,000 months and up.

I share with you that although you may not have his specific business model, you are able to take the mindset, you're able to take some of the things that he's done in his business, and you can likely implement it in yours.

I know that after I interviewed this gentleman, I started implementing immediately some of the things that he shared with me.

And I know the reason why you're listening to this podcast is so that you can learn from other successful people that have done it, that have went before you I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you want to improve, you want to grow.

This is not the podcast for people that don't want to change, that don't want to go out and make their family's future better.

This is not the show for people that want to be complacent.

You are an action taker and you are here to hear some of the top notch, best business advice and success on how you too can become successfully unemployed.

And I just want to encourage you, don't stop, keep going.

No matter what you do, continue to persevere.

Because this is what I know we can't always see what that path is going to look like.

But this is what I do know.

As long as we persevere, as long as we keep pressing toward the end, then we will find that success if we continue to be diligent in our pursuit.

And that's been my story.

Going from homeless to homeowner in six years, finding and marrying a wife in 19 days, and having such phenomenal children.

I'll tell you one thing that I heard recently.

Success doesn't happen overnight, and neither does a great family.

So I know that you're going to be blessed by this absolutely phenomenal episode.

Let's tune in and see how we too can learn how to have success in business and how to multiply our income by adding value to other people.

Let's get into the show.

All right.

Well, I'm Roger Wesley, the host of Successfully Unemployed.

And here we have a gentleman, Mr.

Robert Atlas.

He is an absolutely amazing gentleman, and we are blessed to have him on the show today because he has a lot of value and a lot of experience to share with us today and is absolutely exciting to be here with you today.

Robert, how are you doing today?

Great.

Thanks for having me.

So tell us a little about your entrepreneurial journey.

Yeah, you got it.

So I guess I'll start from the beginning.

Born and raised in New Jersey.

Moved to Las Vegas when I was 19.

Okay.

Started a company there when I was 21 years old, a carpet cleaning company called Atlas Brothers Carpet Care, with the idea to get my brothers involved.

And I did that for about 12 years, successfully.

Made a lot of mistakes, ups and downs, starting a company at a very young age.

And that was quite the ride, you know, moving, leaving all my relationships, my family from New Jersey moving to Las Vegas, had an uncle there at the time that was driving a limousine for Caesar's palace, and he let me crash on his couch for a while to get my gig going.

And I started a.

A carpet cleaning company, funny story, couple years into carpet cleaning at a bar called Doc and Eddie's.

Way back in the day, a pool bar.

I met a gentleman named Michael.

And Michael, Michael was a carpet installer by day and a male stripper at night.

Get out of here.

Serious story.

And I was, I used to box.

And I was still wrestling at the time.

Greco Roman open freestyle wrestling, traveling around the southwest.

Back then wrestling, working, but then just kind of on weekends because I had a passion for it.

And Michael's like, oh, man, you, you need to, you're in good shape, you're a decent looking guy.

You should come out and get into the stripping industry.

I'm like, thanks, but no thanks, Michael.

But Michael was a carpet installer by day.

And we were servicing a lot of apartment communities, like cleaning the carpets when people moved in and out.

And very often there was damage in the carpet I didn't know how to fix, like cigarette burns and tears in the carpet.

And Michael, being a carpet installer, said, hey, can this stuff be fixed?

And he's like, oh, absolutely.

And I said, well, would you mind possibly one day in a vacant apartment?

Would you come by and I'll pay you for your time.

Come by and teach me how to do that.

So he came by a couple, did it a couple times.

He came by, showed me how to fix the carpet.

And about a week later, Michael's like, listen, I'm going to get into stripping full time.

Do you want to buy my carpet repair tools?

And I was like, sure.

And so I learned carpet repair from a stripper in Las Vegas.

Wow.

Yeah.

Magic Mike.

Pretty magic.

The original, the original Magic Mike.

And I did, I did that business for about 12 years.

We had three trucks on the road at the time.

We were successful.

But I made a lot of mistakes as a young business owner, wannabe entrepreneur.

And I really believe there's a big difference between business ownership and entrepreneurialship.

A lot of folks buy themselves a job and start their own company and then become a slave to the company.

And I had done that my first time around.

About 12 years later, I got invited to a non denomination Christian church by a woman that I had met was managing one of the apartment communities.

And she invited me for a few weeks.

I never showed up.

Finally one Sunday I showed up and I saw something really different at this church that I had grown up going to a church that was just different.

And so I got really involved, became a Christian.

Wow.

And became a born again Christian.

Left my faith that I Grew up in that, was more traditional and got really involved in church.

And I found myself at work thinking about wanting to help other people all the time and to teach people this treasure that I had found, this new truth that I had found.

And so got really involved in the church.

Did a summer internship at UNLV in Las Vegas pastoring, and then decided to go into the ministry full time.

Actually got asked by the lead pastor in the church and sold my company to my brother who was involved with me.

I owned it, but I ended up selling it to him and went into the ministry and did full time ministry for 17 years in Las Vegas.

Moved for about a year to Reno, planted a church, worked on the campus at UNR up in Reno, Nevada, and then ended up moving back to Vegas.

And then in 1998, my wife and I, my wife dad was ill and so we ended up deciding to move to Phoenix, to Tempe.

And we had become the campus minister at ASU and so lived in Tempe, spent a lot of time at the campus there, playing volleyball with the students, doing Bible studies, just creating family and relationships and did that for 17 years and then always had that entrepreneurial, like in the back of my mind, that itch.

Yeah.

And I believe that's why I really loved ministry, because and planning churches specifically and starting new ministries like a chemical recovery ministry.

People that were really, you know, involved in drugs or alcohol and because I came from that background and be able to help people navigate through that and, you know, get off drugs and alcohol and get on Jesus basically, and that type of thing.

So did the business for about 12 years, went into the ministry, did full time ministry, traveled all around the world.

I've been fortunate to go to places like Africa and the Philippines and Canada and Mexico, leadership retreat, serving that type of thing.

That was pretty amazing.

You know, this blue collar kid from New Jersey traveling around the world.

Wow.

Pretty exciting and a lot of fun.

Absolutely.

And I attributed that to, you know, God working and moving in my life.

Met my wife in the church, got married in the church.

And then about 15 and a half, 16 years ago, back in end of 2009, beginning of 2010, my wife and I moved on from our full time role.

Some different things that happened, that it was time for us to move on.

And so we moved on.

And I was, I'm 58 now, so I think 15 years ago, you know, in my 40s, like, what next?

Absolutely.

What am I going to do for a career?

Right.

So I started, had to get a resume together.

Right.

And begin to look for, quote, unquote, a real job.

And in the meantime, I remembered that I had some carpet repair tools in my garage, a bucket of tools that had never sold.

And believe me, we had a lot of opportunities to sell those tools.

We had yard sales for foreign missions, like multiple yard sales a year, you know, to raise money for foreign missions.

And I just, for some reason held on to those tools.

Every once in a while, one of the members in the church would have a tear in their carpet and I'd fix it for them for free and they'd cook me a nice dinner, throw me some cash, that kind of thing.

But it was just, you know, very seldom I did that because we were so busy doing ministry.

And so basically I was dressing up in a suit, looking for a real job, quote, unquote, and interviewing back in the beginning of 2010, and we got caught in the whole real estate bubble, really.

I had, yeah, I had owned, me and a few friends, 14 homes, new homes that we had bought with a long term strategy, right, for retirement.

Because the ministry didn't give you the best retirement plan necessarily.

Monetarily, our needs were met and we were blessed.

But so basically we had gone through that real estate bubble, had lost some of our homes because of everything that was going on 2009, 2010.

And even this home that we're sitting in right now came about that close to being having to forfeit and give it up.

Wow.

Yeah.

Pretty amazing.

By the grace of God, we saved our home.

And a year and a half ago, I paid it off.

So, which is kind of exciting, no mortgage and have some rental properties that I held on to and that it purchased since then.

And so I put a craigslist ad up, you know, carpet repair, I can repair your carpet instead of you replacing it.

And as I was dressing up looking for a sales management type job because that's my skill set, and long story short, the phone started ringing off the hook from a Craigslist text ad saying that I can, you know, repair your carpet.

And it was a shot in the dark, you know, like, how much carpet is there that can be repaired, you know?

Right.

Well, I learned that it was a real niche industry and I knew the carpet cleaning, carpet repair industry, because I had done it for 12 years.

And the equipment that you need to purchase to be an effective carpet cleaning company in person, it's expensive equipment, like my rigs right now, my carpet cleaning vans, we have three of them.

They're $130,000 a piece.

They're like the best money can buy.

Just about biggest, baddest, you know, steam cleaning machines bolted inside a van.

And so I didn't want to do that because it's expensive and I didn't have the money honestly at the time.

We went through a real challenge back in the end of 2009, 2010, and just having to reinvent myself starting from scratch.

And so that little Craigslist ad, I still had the Excel sheet from when I started my business.

I documented every job, every phone number, address, cost of what the job was.

And I started documented that on a, on a, on an Excel sheet.

And I think my first month, if I remember right, again, it's you know, 14 years ago.

I think my first month I did something like 2500.

Then we went to like 4000, then to 8000.

In four months I was up to $16,000.

Wow.

Gluing carpet together like dogs get locked in a room, the door shuts, slam, slam shut, and the dog or cat digs at the carpet at the bottom of the doorway.

Wow.

And you know, carpet's expensive to replace, you know, the whole home.

And so people were finding me on Craigslist.

And at that time, you know, I didn't know anything about the, you know, the Internet except for doing my own Google search to find a restaurant.

I knew to look for reviews, right, do a little research before you're going to go out to a restaurant, a hotel.

But I didn't know how that whole thing worked.

And I began to read a few books about Google and the art of getting five star reviews.

And my brother in law at the time dabbled in building websites.

He didn't do it full time.

He was a full time real estate photographer.

And he said, oh, I could help build your website, you know, it won't cost you anything.

I know you guys are going through a difficult time in transition.

So he built me my first website, ArizonaCarpetRepair.com and I stopped looking for a real job, quote unquote, and just focused my energy on Arizona Carpet Repair.

And about a year into it and learning how the Internet worked, I changed my URL.

My company name was Arizona Carpet Repair LLC.

But then begin to buy different URLs, website addresses and then begin to build websites, you know, on those URLs.

And my main one became phoenixcarpetrepair.com okay, so we, we built that and then I realized that I was saying no to a lot of people when we were in their homes repairing their carpet.

They're like, hey, do you clean carpet?

I was like, no, we don't do that.

I really don't have a care.

But after so many customers ask, you know, you realize you're leaving a bunch of money on the table.

Absolutely.

And so I bought my first used carpet cleaning machine at that time.

It was on a trailer.

Great piece of equipment, but bolted into a trailer.

And I don't like the trailer setup.

So I bought my first van, used van, put the machine in the van and fully wrapped the truck.

Really nice.

Spent like $3,000 on a full wrap on a vehicle and then just began to learn about branding and marketing my services.

Wow.

And just kind of realized that we had something here, this little niche business.

I'll never forget.

I went to a B and I.

Meeting and what's, what's B and I?

Business Network meeting?

Basically.

So basically, you know, a bunch of different industries will meet at a restaurant and do like a breakfast or a lunch and you'll have like 30 seconds to stand up and give a pitch for your company.

And then everyone in that business meeting gives referrals out to each other.

I'll never forget the guy that was leading the meeting.

He drove a Corvette.

Sharp looking guy, well put together and drove the sweet Corvette.

And I remember standing up, giving my little 30 second pitch about carpet repair and he kind of was looking at me like scratching his head like, carpet repair, like, is that, that's a business?

And he didn't mean to do it, but it was almost belittling in a sense, like, wow.

You know, he's maybe curious and maybe it was my own insecurity, you know, just like, yeah, this is a business and I'm doing it and it's really growing.

And we started doing carpet cleaning.

Then we started doing rug like wool rug pickup and delivery and cleaning wool rugs like high end rugs.

Wow.

And learning.

There's, you know, a little niche there.

People that have a lot of tile here in Arizona will often have rugs in their rooms because tile is kind of loud and echoey if your whole home is tiled.

So then they'll place area rugs.

Some of these area rugs can be twenty thousand dollar rugs.

I mean you can buy a five hundred rug from Home Depot or Pottery Barn or you can get a 20, 25, $30,000 rug from, you know, overseas.

And so kind of added that to our business.

And basically as I was driving around in the beginning, you know, my Jeep Wrangler is my personal vehicle.

A couple magnets slapped on the side.

Vistaprint.com Right.

Business cars, like 999, like 250 car with the generic tool belt.

You know, I mean, that's how I started.

And I just began to, you know, put forth the effort and time and ran my business out of my home.

And then a couple years later hired my first employee and then I got a second truck and kind of divide and conquered with him.

And then soon after that, I just decided one of my neighbors that lives on my.

Lived on my block at the time.

He was a handyman.

And he's like, hey, you know, I see you just started this business.

It seems like it's growing faster than mine.

You want to get an office and get our business, you know, out of our homes.

And I'm like, yeah, I've been thinking about that.

So we found a commercial building where we kind of split the costs.

There's kind of a lobby when you walked in, and then two separate offices and then a warehouse in the back.

And we kind of split everything down the middle.

And we made an operating agreement and decided that whoever grew quicker would kind of buy the other person out of the rental portion of the building.

Wow.

And my business just started really taking off.

And so I ended up talking with him and we decided that he, that he could stay at the building, take over all the payments and run it and I'd get another place.

And he's like, hey, you're growing faster.

You stay, I'll move.

And took on the building myself and began to get a couple more trucks and then hired my first office manager because I was like the Bluetooth in answering the phone, doing the jobs, you know, wow.

Wearing a bunch of hats.

And read the book the E.

Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.

Wow.

Which was an awesome, life changing book for me to develop systems.

Right.

And.

And not do everything yourself.

Absolutely.

Most entrepreneurs, and I'll.

I'll start off with saying that about me.

They don't like paperwork.

Right.

You can say that again.

They like the dream.

They like, you know, being out there, but they don't like, you know, crunching at the desk.

And.

And that's me.

I'm an outdoors kind of person.

I like to be out with people out in the field, meeting new people, new challenges of the job.

And I didn't like, you know, answering the phones, but I knew that if I relinquish that responsibility that I'm the owner and I'm answering the phone and I'm the guy going to show up to do the work.

So my booking ratio was at 80%.

I mean, I track every single job and still to this day now we use a CRM, a customer relationship management system to do so.

Mr.

Let me stop you because you are, I mean, what you've given us just now has been a masterclass in the last episode minutes.

So let me ask you this.

When you first got your start, in the very beginning.

Yeah.

You know, what was your job background?

What type of, you know, traditional job did you have?

Did you have any W2 jobs before you started your business?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I, I was the milk boy in my hometown.

Oh, wow.

In New Jersey.

10 years old.

Wow.

And literally three days a week I would get up 4:30 in the morning, meet my boss, this old Italian guy, looked like the penguin from the Batman movie, smoked a cigar and kind of wobbled around.

At 10 years.

At 10 years old.

Wow.

And he, he hired me because the guy Billy that was working kind of moved on to another job.

And Monday, Wednesday and Fridays I would get up at 4:30, I'd meet him at 5 and I'd work three hours from 5:00am till 8:00 in the morning delivering milk, Literally running up to people's doorstep with a half gallon of milk, a quarter orange juice and a quarter, half and a half.

And I did that Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

So that was my first job.

Wow.

At 10 years old.

I don't even know if that's illegal.

Well, I come from a single mom, four boys, and I was smart enough to realize that my mom could only afford so much.

So my mom can only afford certain types of clothing that I didn't like at that time.

And so I realized, listen, if I wanted something, I had to work for it and earn it.

I was 13 years old and I worked for another job that I worked was a summer job working for the government.

And it was called ceda if I'm not mistaken.

But we would work and we would strip and wax floors in our grammar school and elementary school.

So the summer the school would be shut down and we would work for the head janitor of the school and we'd paint all the classrooms, we'd strip and wax all the floors.

And so I remember one summer, I've always been the guy that see the bike or the car in the showroom and like dreamed to get it.

Yeah.

And then do what it would take to get that bike, car, whatever from my first pair of roller skates, they were in the window with black leather boots with flames on the side.

And they were like 90 bucks at the time.

You know, I wanted those Roller skates.

And I worked to get them and went in that store and bought those roller skates.

I did that.

My first pair of roller skates, My first BMX bike.

My mom couldn't afford the taste bike that I wanted.

Absolutely.

So I worked all summer and bought that bike all the way up to cars and trucks that I had bought.

Set a goal in my mind.

Mine.

And so back to your question.

W2 jobs from 10 years old I worked.

And I don't think that first job was a W2 job, but it was, you know, a job three hours a day, three days a week, $4 an hour plus tips, back in the day.

And, and then I went from working that summer, the summer jobs to when I was 17, 16, 17 in high school, I worked for like a shop.

Right.

Where you bag groceries and then got off on some other entrepreneurial road that were a little bit out of the ordinary.

The whole party life set in as a young single guy living in New Jersey doing things that I probably shouldn't have been doing back then.

Not shouldn't have, not.

Maybe I should have.

Right.

For sure.

Right.

But that's just kind of where my life had led.

So, Yeah, I worked W2 jobs.

My ministry job was a W2 job for 17 years.

Wow.

Where, you know, time for money.

Right.

Although if you edit up the hours that I worked in my ministry job, I probably made less than my $4 an hour job for the amount of time that I put in.

Right.

Absolutely.

It was, it was, it was labor love.

I felt called to do it.

It was a seven day a week type thing.

And I've always had a hard time turning off work.

Like if I like what I'm doing and I'm passionate about, I'm going to give my all to it.

So I've always been that way.

From a little boy working for that bicycle, those roller skates, that first car or truck.

I've always been that way.

So, yeah.

So, you know, and realize that it's a time for money type thing that I'm never going to be ultra successful or make the kind of money that some people dream to make.

Locking in eight hours, nine hours a day.

Absolutely.

Which led me to starting, you know, my first business actually when I moved to.

When I moved to Las Vegas from New Jersey, I was going to join the Navy and I went down to the recruiter's office and me and the recruiter kind of got into it a little bit.

He was, you know, pretty rigid guy.

And I'm a young Italian from New Jersey and like people telling me what to do.

And I knew that, you know, joining the military, obviously I'd have to submit to that.

I was willing to do that.

But me and this guy just didn't hit off real well.

Maybe I had a bad day, he had a bad day that day.

And I realized to join the Navy, I needed a high school diploma.

And at the time, when I was 17 years old, I got thrown out of school.

I got asked to leave.

One of the reasons was, to be honest, I didn't like school much.

I like sports, I like the wrestling, I like boxing, those types of things.

But I didn't like the structure of school.

Sitting in a desk, someone lecturing me what I should do.

I'm more of a hands on type learner.

So I had a hard time in school.

And at the time I was 17 and I was, I went to a vocational school.

Okay.

And my vocation that I was going to do was carpentry.

So, you know, freshman year you go through this exploratory to decide which trade you're going to take.

I decided to take carpentry.

And one day right after lunch, one of my friends, his name was Michael Good, he, he asked me to go out back.

There was a smoking area at school, like a designated smoking there.

I wasn't a smoker.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

Back in the day.

At school.

At school.

Wow.

Designated smoking area.

I just want to take a quick break and share something really important with you.

I have a mission statement to help millions of people to create financial independence.

One of the best ways to do that is by investing in real estate.

I'm working on doing that right now and I know for a fact that you can too.

If you're getting anything from this episode, two things I would ask, please share it with someone else.

Other people need to know how they too can become successfully unemployed through real estate and by building businesses.

Number two, I want to help you invest in real estate.

I'm using this absolutely amazing course and I got started for free.

Get the real estate investing course right now by texting the word rental.

R E N T A L to 33777.

I'll literally make sure you get this for free.

It will show you how to find the right area of the country to invest in and how to build the business around investing first.

I'm always interviewing really successful entrepreneurs, really successful business owners, and this is what I know.

You can borrow the mind of someone else by having a conversation with them, either through a podcast or by listening to them or by reading their book.

Please take a moment right now and go to masterpassiveincome.com freecourse and I will make sure you get that course so that normal everyday people can own real estate and that they too can be financially independent.

Let's get back to the show.

So he said, hey, I want to go have a cigarette before carpentry begins after lunch.

Do you want to come?

And I never went out there because I didn't smoke.

I've never been a smoker.

Right.

And so I went out with him.

We're sitting and lo and behold, they were retarring the roof.

And the roof of the school that I went to was multiple stories tall.

Well, a 40 foot aluminum ladder fell off the school roof and hit 11 of us.

And I was one of the 11 that got hit.

And I put up my arms because the 40 foot aluminum ladder fell off the school roof, bounced off the bleachers and came right toward us.

I put up my wrist to block from hitting my face and fractured both my wrists.

Wow.

And so I ended up suing at 17 years old by myself.

Went down, found a local lawyer and said, hey, this is what happened.

It really messed with my wrestling career.

And that was really my focus, joining the Navy.

I was hoping to wrestle for the Navy.

Wow.

That was my dream.

Yeah, it was.

And so that kind of got, you know, derailed a little bit.

I ended up suing the high school and then they were.

Weren't happy with me because I was.

Now there's a lawsuit against the high school.

So I think that played into a little bit of where I was at in my life at the time.

And so I dropped out of high school, ended up moving to Las Vegas when I was 19, worked for a janitorial carpet cleaning company for about a year and then ended up starting my own.

Ended up becoming a Christian at 25.

And at 25 went and got my GED and then went to college at UNLV.

Wow.

And that's kind of how my journey kind of progressed from there.

So I kind of took a detour around the traditional way.

Yes.

High school, college, career.

And, you know, I look, you look back at your life and you see kind of God orchestrating and moving and doing things.

You know, the old saying, hindsight's always 2020 when you look back.

But which led me to, you know, my company and the companies that I run now here in Phoenix, locally now.

I'm hearing so many success principles through everything that you shared.

And I'm really thinking that it's going to add a lot of value to the people listening here.

Let's take it back to when you were in Las Vegas and you had just, you know, you had worked that job for a year, you know, and right before you had met the stripper, right?

The gentleman, Right.

So what was going through your brain when you met him?

What were you thinking as you were thinking that, hey, you know, I'm not sure if I want to continue to work for this company another year.

Right.

What can I do now?

What was going through your brain?

What was your thought process as you walked into that situation?

Yeah, yeah, great question.

So I think, you know, meeting Michael and I was still, you know, I moved to Vegas when I was 19.

And the whole reason I moved to Vegas was to straighten up my life because I was going down some wrong paths in New Jersey.

All my old friends goofing off, partying, you know, girls and having fun and all that.

And I knew that I needed to make a change.

I consciously knew that I needed to make a change, that I did not want to stay there.

Some things happened that kind of forced that issue.

And I remember one day going over my mom's.

I had moved out when I was 17.

I lived on my own, rented a place with another buddy of mine.

And we were having, you know, a lot of fun.

Young, you know, and to move to Vegas.

I sat down with my mom and said, look, Mom, I'm going down the wrong road here.

If I don't leave New Jersey, either I'm going to go to jail or.

Or.

Or I'm gonna be hurt.

It's not gonna be good.

So she called up my uncle, who was driving limousines in Vegas for Caesar's palace, and said, hey, Robert's, you know, at this crossroad, what would you think?

Can he move out, stay with you a little bit till he gets on his feet?

And that's what I did.

I moved to Vegas, met Michael and started this company and just had a dream, you know, to build the biggest, baddest carpet cleaning, carpet repair company in Las Vegas, right?

To have employees, to become rich, you know, and be able to do and pursue the things I really enjoyed in life.

My passions at the time, you know, I was a fisherman growing up in New Jersey.

I wrestled.

When I first had, you know, moved to Vegas, I continued my wrestling career, so got into some of those things.

I got into racing, jet skis and quads.

Oh, wow.

So I had some passions along those lines.

But the goal was, you know, make money, have a Good time at this time.

Started my business 20, 21, right.

In that age bracket.

Still young.

A lot of pretty girls in Las Vegas.

And so I kind of pursued those things with always the mindset of, yeah, I just want to grow this company.

I had a lot of pride in the company and, and wanting it to grow and to do well.

Right.

I tell people, you know, before becoming a Christian at 25, so I had 19 moving to Vegas and 25 becoming a Christian, I became an expert in, I don't know, having children.

If you ever saw the toy of the round and the square pegs that.

You put them in the round hole.

Square peg.

I was always trying to put the round peg in the square hole and hammer it in there.

Right.

Make it fit.

Right.

So it was one of those things to where, you know, I, I was trying to do the right thing.

I knew telling Michael that I didn't want to go down that path that he was going down.

I knew that, you know, I, I'd live that way, you know, that promiscuous life and, and making mistakes and just running after money.

And then I became a Christian and found out, you know, how to put the round peg in the round hole.

Right.

And, and, and getting, you know, a relationship with Christ and beginning to read my Bible and pray and.

And things just started really falling into place and, and then being asked to do an internship and becoming a full time.

Going back to school and becoming a full time pastor and.

Wow.

And really just serving and helping people and making a difference.

I mean, I had a huge impact on.

One of my brothers became a Christian.

My mom and my dad, stepdad became Christians, my grandmother, and we all grew up in a certain faith.

And, you know, to leave that faith, like something was wrong with you.

Almost, right?

Absolutely.

I made a decision as an adult at 25 years old that how I was living wasn't adding up to what I was studying for myself in my Bible.

So I began to make changes.

Wow, that's wonderful.

And kind of that, you know, led one thing to the other, sold the business, you know, became a pastor, moved here to Phoenix to Tempe, to be.

To work on campus with college kids.

You know, these college kids leave home for the first time.

Woo.

You know, college, Right, Right.

So to try to direct them in a positive way and encourage them, you know, not to go too crazy.

Right.

To kind of get it on straight.

And that was really rewarding for me.

And then I was asked, you know, a couple of years after doing that, to lead a church in The East Valley, the Mesa Tempe area, congregation of a little over 600 members.

And then years later, I was asked to plant a church, to come out to Goodyear, where we're at now, to plant a church out here.

We started, you know, from scratch, planted like a satellite version of the church, and had a lot of success, you know, great, great impact, you know, helping people learn about Christ from what the Bible teaches, doing marriages, funerals, and everything in between.

Wow.

So it was really rewarding traveling around the world, doing foreign missions work.

Now, Mr.

Alice, we were chatting a little bit before offline, but, you know, I've been calling you Mr.

Atlas.

I should have changed your name to the Most Interesting man in the World.

There's so much stuff we were chatting about offline that we didn't even get the chance to cover here in this.

In this podcast.

I mean, just amazing things that you've shared so far.

I mean, from.

From the gentleman in Las Vegas, from how strong your faith was and how it's affected you in business and in life.

And, you know, I have another question for you.

Let me ask you.

How has your faith shaped your business life?

How has it shaped your progression, becoming successfully unemployed and now running your own business and being extremely successful with that?

Yeah.

I think one of the passages in Colossians, it talks about, whatever you do, do it with all your heart as serving the Lord.

I've always had this drive, whatever I do, to give all my heart to it, like, be passionate about it.

If you're going to be a garbage man, be the best garbage man there is.

Right.

Whatever you do, give your heart.

And so getting out of the ministry was really difficult for my wife and I and our family.

We went through a very challenging time.

We were really.

We were really hurt from some of the stuff we went through, so we kind of retreated, kind of pulled back a little bit in our faith, kind of did our own thing spiritually for a while.

And quite Honestly, the last 15 years, there have been some dark times.

You know, running after the entrepreneurial dream and being successful and making money and traveling.

I've been able to do all of that very successfully and yet not have Christ as the center of my life.

Wow.

And so recently, the last eight months, seven months, I've made some decisions to just refocus and kind of come out of the foxhole, if you will, from being shot at and hurt, to really exercising my faith again and really beginning to walk with the Lord again on a daily basis and really surrender my business.

Absolutely.

And my Life.

Back to the Lord.

Recommitting, if you will.

Back to the Lord.

And it's been, it's been phenomenal on so many levels.

Challenging.

Facing some real challenges as we sit here.

I've been out of.

I've been to my office twice in the last 31 days.

Okay, hold on.

Last 31 days, you've been to your office twice?

And what's this office?

This is for your carpet business.

For my carpet.

Phoenix Carpet Repair.

I actually run two companies from that location.

I run Phoenix Carpet Repair and Cleaning, which is its own llc, its own industry with multiple trucks servicing the valley.

Have two full time girls in my office answering my phones, doing marketing strategies that I have taught them.

They answer my phones, they book the jobs.

Kim, she's been with me going on 11 years.

11 years?

Yeah.

Same employee.

Same employee.

Bethany's been with me.

Just crossed over the eight year mark.

Wow.

Brandon, one of my carpet repair and cleaning techs, great family man, hard worker.

He's been with me going on nine years.

So just creating, you know, I want to say family, but you know, sometimes you can, there can be lines we can cross with employees and I've learned from making mistakes in my first business where to draw those lines, create a great culture, a family like atmosphere.

But when we're at work, it's work.

Absolutely.

We're there to work and we're really focused on the business.

And then I started a company about four years ago called Phoenix Water Damage.

Now we're doing water restoration jobs.

Much larger ticket sales.

Ticket jobs like people like it floods in Arizona.

And most flood work come from.

Comes from appliances, really.

When you think about how many million homes there are in the metro Phoenix area.

Well, every home has a toilet, every sink and every toilet has a supply line.

That's a failure point.

It's a, it's a metal line about 12 inches and they fail because of the hard water.

Every sink has two supply lines, hot and cold water.

Really?

Every refrigerator, Most refrigerators have an ice maker.

Major failure point in your home.

It's a plastic line and they get brittle and they break.

And that's pressurized water.

You have water heaters.

Our systems, all of those things fail.

It's not if, it's when, really.

And when they fail, they usually cause a mess.

And so we go in with very high end thermal imaging cameras where we can see the water inside the walls and, you know, develop a dry plan to get their home dry and get it put back together as if it never happened.

Wow.

And so pretty Neat.

The carpet repair business kind of gave birth to Phoenix water damage.

And one of the most exciting things that I love sharing about and talking about as far as in my entrepreneurial journey, I realized as I bought a home and then slowly bought 14 homes with friends, I didn't own them all myself.

We had some partnerships, and I realized, wow, if I can buy one home, we can buy two homes, three homes, and, and have a retirement plan.

Well, in the same way, while I was driving around here in Phoenix and I started, you know, Arizona Carpet Repair, which led to Phoenix Carpet Repair, I went online and did some research and bought URLs, like web addresses.

Really?

Tell me more.

Yeah, so what I did was, is I, I did some research and found cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe that had a million in population or more.

Right.

And so what I would do is I would buy that URL.

So, for instance, I own lasvegascarpetrepair.com here in the States.

Denver Carpet Repair, New Jersey Carpet Repair, Baltimore Carpet Repair, Maryland Carpet Repair, Albuquerque, New Mexico Carpet Repair, Tucson Carpet Repair.

And what I began to do is I had a friend of mine who was a pastor, he was in Dallas, and he called me one day, and I was calling him once a week to share the good news about my business.

Because making that transition from being a pastor for so many years and transferring that gift set to a secular job had its challenges.

Right.

I never put together a resume before in my life.

Now I had to put a resume together right before I started my business, start looking for a real job right back in the beginning.

So I, I, I began to buy these URLs.

I own hundreds of them now.

Get out of here.

Yeah.

And, and in the carpet repair, because there's a lot of carpet cleaning companies, but there are not a lot of carpet repair companies.

Wow.

And so I realized, and I heard this before, I didn't come up with this saying, but the riches are in the niches.

And realized if I focus on the carpet repair, where a lot of people aren't doing that and the bigger the population, people love their animals.

I'm a dog lover.

I have a dog, which I want you to meet him before you leave.

Yeah, absolutely.

Rocco.

He's totally cool.

Get out of here.

Yeah.

Wow.

He's a blue pit bull.

He's awesome.

Oh, my goodness.

My sister has a pit bull.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm a big believer.

Love the breed.

Had them my whole life.

Okay.

It's the only breed I've had.

Yeah.

He's my Sixth dog in my life.

Get out of here.

Yeah.

Wow.

So Rocco, Rocco, Rocco, the blue nose.

But he has his own Instagram page.

Oh, my goodness.

He's the famous Total.

So just realizing how the Internet worked, right?

And Facebook, and realizing how Facebook kind of connects people.

So a friend of mine from Dallas, Ed Doss, his name's Ed.

He's a good personal friend of mine.

We served here in the ministry together.

He got out of the ministry for different reasons too, and moved on and went into the secular world.

And he had a couple of jobs.

And he called me up one day and he's like, I see all your pictures you're posting on Facebook.

You know, a big hole in the carpet, now it's repaired, right?

A big bump in the carpet.

Now it's tight and smooth.

The carpet was dirty, now it's clean.

He said, is that something you can teach me?

I said, absolutely.

So I said, actually, let's pick a week time you can stay in my home.

Because I knew Ed, your friends.

And he ended up coming here, staying with me in my home for about a week.

And I started looking on Craigslist for used carpet repair tools.

I bought a whole set of tools for him.

He came, got him trained.

While he was here being trained, we were building DallasCarpetRepair.com the website.

Wow.

And so he started training on a Monday.

And this happens with all the locations that I have been able to get up and running.

How many locations is that now?

32.

32.

Wow.

32 nationally, one in Canada.

Wow.

Calvary Carpet Repair and Cleaning.

Funny story.

I was training a guy from Chicago to start Chicago Carpet Repair.

We went to a home in Scottsdale and I introduced myself and I introduced Carl, who was an employee of someone that ran a carpet cleaning company.

And now they want to add carpet repair to their business model.

And introduced Carl to the homeowner in Scottsdale and told him, yeah, he's here training and he's kind of shadowing me and learning this industry.

And his boss sent him here and paid for him to come out and paid for the lack of better word, franchise fee to get started.

And he said, man, this would be an excellent business for my soon to be son in law who lives in Calgary.

He'll be here next week.

Do you mind if I give him your number?

Can you guys meet for a coffee?

He does remodeling in Calgary.

Really?

And this could be right up his alley.

A week later, we met at Starbucks.

Two weeks later, he flew back to Calgary, came back down and I trained him and we got Calgary carpet repair and cleaning up and running.

Wow.

So it's been just amazing, you know, to, you know, there's an old saying, you know, feed a man a fish, you feed him for a day.

Teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Well, it's been really rewarding that coaching, mentoring, discipling model, teaching someone how to do something.

It's really kind of scratched that itch for me for pastoring and mentoring.

Now I'm able to really affect someone's life, teach them a skill that they'll use possibly for the rest of their life and how to make serious money.

I mean, when I'm out in the field doing carpet repair, I don't make less than 2, $300 an hour when I'm working.

Wow.

So there's really good money to be made.

Not a lot of people do it.

Wow.

Where carpet cleaning is a very saturated industry, you could get a guy with a rug doctor from Safeway that.

Right.

You know, buys it using.

He's a carpet cleaner.

Right.

And then you can get a guy that has $130,000 rig like I have now that sends their technicians to school to get a certification for carpet repair or carpet cleaning and do it that way.

You know, the old school way of just hard work and learning in industry, hey, I'm a believer in that.

I've done it, of course.

But then getting some education under your belt and certifications and you know, knowledge is power, of course.

And so as you begin to learn, you build confidence and knowledge and then you're able to sell some of these other services.

When we're in a customer's home now, we can point out that we can clean their rugs, we can clean their tile and grout, we can clean their, their hardwood, we can leave water tags.

We created these little red water tags that have our Phoenix water damage information on them.

And every home that we go in to do a carpet repair, carpet cleaning job for, my technicians put one water tag for Phoenix water damage on their water heater.

Because there's a shutoff valve at the top of the water heater.

Tanked or tankless, there's a shutoff valve.

If you have a leak in your home, that's either going to go to the water heater or you're going to go to your water spigot out front, which goes from the main, from the street to your home and shut the water valve off.

Because you have this running water in your home, of course.

And so that's where people go.

A year and a half ago, June, I did my personally, my biggest water damage job.

It was a seven million dollar house that flooded for two weeks.

Wow.

The lawyer and his wife, Chuck and Maria, amazing couple that we've become friends.

They've taken me out to dinner personally to thank me for the work that I did in their home.

We, you know, it was like a $1.3 million job.

My company, in eight days made $145,000.

That is amazing.

From setting up drying equipment.

And so when you set up this drying equipment, you set it up, you make sure it's all running properly, you take photographs and then you go home and that equipment runs.

So as that equipment's running while I'm home sleeping, we're making money.

Wow.

And it's not a, it's a need.

Right.

When someone's home floods and there's water inside the walls, those walls need to be cut to release the moisture.

The two by fours and the sill plate and, and all the framing is wet.

Now.

There's drywall covering that you can't get air in there to dry that.

And so we've kind of progressed into this water.

Now I'm doing some training.

Not only training, carpet repair guys nationally, now I'm starting to train water damage guys nationally and start water damage businesses.

So it's been really rewarding.

I'll tell you a quick story.

There was a young guy, he contacted me off a podcast.

Okay.

And I've had multiple guys find me from podcasts and interviews that I've done that have reached out to me and said, hey, I'm interested.

Tell me more about this business model.

It's something I might be able to do.

And this, this gentleman, his name's David, he's in Orange County.

Okay.

Amazing area.

Arguably one of the most beautiful areas in the United States.

Wow.

Big time money.

Newport Beach, Laguna Beach.

He'll call me regularly, but we talk three, four times a week.

David and I, we've become good friends.

A year after I trained him, he took me to Cancun for a week vacation.

Paid for the whole ticket just to thank me for teaching him this trade that he's, you know, he's making a thousand fifteen hundred dollars a day and growing his business there.

And I've been just to mentor him and be a friend and, and teach him all the mistakes that I've made.

So he doesn't make them.

But it's been, it's been just amazing.

Earlier I had mentioned that I had been to my office twice in 31, in 31 days.

And that's really cool.

I had, I had to have some spinal surgery.

I had a nerve issue in my left leg where I had a cyst that grew so they had to remove the cyst.

I'm a mountain biker.

I love the mountain bike.

I mountain bike two, three times a week, 50, 60 miles a week on the regular for the last nine years.

Love the sport.

It's like therapy to me to get out in the hills with friends and, and, and ride bikes and, and I, last Thursday I'd stopped by just to say hi to my staff because I had my sutures removed and it was my first time out of the house in like three weeks from being home, healing and that type of thing.

But, you know, developing systems and people and believing in people and paying for education and being, just believing in them and lifting them up.

We've created, you know, just a great team.

We're not perfect, we're far from perfect.

But we work really hard at what we do.

And I'm really proud to say I mentioned earlier, you know, we have over 5,000 five star reviews in 14 years.

Wow.

Over the Internet.

All across the Internet.

Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Angie's List, front page of Google.

Wow.

I got 5 star review from one of my texts yesterday because I get the email when they come in, of course.

And you know, while I'm gone, they're still getting five stars.

Star reviews.

Wow.

So it's, it's really encouraging that I'm able to, you know, obviously not be at work.

And I miss working.

Absolutely.

Honestly, I, I, I enjoy working because working involves people and I, I really enjoy meeting new.

I've been in the owner of the sun, so it's a new owner now.

But Starver's house, I've been in his home repairing his carpet.

I've been in very famous people from people that are, you know, living in ten $12 million homes on top of Camelback Mountain, overlooking the city, Paradise Valley to, you know, hundred, maybe they're two, $300,000 condos now with the price of home and.

Yeah.

And everything in between.

But it all comes back to people and then, you know, doing what you say you're going to do, showing up when you say you're going to show up and you know, not bait and switching people.

Honesty, integrity, hard work.

The work we do is labor.

It's not easy.

It's not for everybody.

I mean, I've had people contact me and want to start the business and have them do A ride along for a day with me and realize that this is not for them and that's fine.

I would never want to talk someone into doing it.

Of course.

Got to be a win win and a fit.

But the beautiful thing about my non franchise business that I've built with 32 locations is it's not stringent like a franchise.

It's called an area exclusive business opportunity with done for you, marketing and coaching.

Wow.

So tell me more about that.

Yeah.

So how did you.

Okay, so this has been phenomenal.

I'm going to go back and watch this podcast myself so I can get all the gold nuggets.

But you know, with this concept that you're talking about here, can you walk us back through that?

You know where it sounds like you're about to go into some of the details that created that success.

Success.

But can you explain to me more about how that works?

Yeah.

So number one, I really believe that in business, like lots of people want to start a business and lots of folks buy themselves a job.

Okay.

And I really believe that just my opinion, okay.

That business ownership isn't necessarily entrepreneurship.

And I have nothing against a business owner.

Right.

I have nothing against a one man operation, working hard, you know, taking some time off when he wants to.

Normally outside of my surgery that I just had, I usually travel at least once a month or more.

So I travel around the United States.

I do.

If you've ever heard of the Ronald McDonald Houses, I have, they're usually next to hospitals and children that have like brain surgery, like serious death defying surgeries.

Their families, it's a non profit and their family gets to live there, travel to that hospital where that specific surgery is going to happen and they get to live there with their children as their child goes through these surgery surgeries and procedures.

And a friend of mine started it years ago, he's from the Carson Valley area, northern Nevada.

He put this thing together where he would pull carpet cleaning entrepreneur, water restoration guys, carpet repair, carpet cleaning companies, tile cleaning companies from all over the United States.

Business owners that could get away from their, the daily grind of their business and travel and meet for three, four days and volunteer.

And we clean from top to bottom, the whole Ronald McDonald House.

So it's a great way to kind of give back and make a difference.

Like we're not paid to do that.

We're spending our own money to travel there, stay in a hotel, hotel and all that.

But we donate and it's really cool because they're all business owners and then we get we get to have like this mini trade show, if you will.

Yes.

And go out to dinner with people.

Maybe some guys are owner operators, one truck owner operator to a guy that runs three, four trucks like me.

And you get to sit down over dinners, breakfasts and lunches after the Ronald McDonald house cleaning.

Not only do you get to rub elbows and get out there and do the work and actually hands on, serve cleaning all their tile and grout, all their carpet, cleaning all their walls and vents and air ducts and all that type of stuff and donate that.

So we travel around the United States about two to four times a year doing that at those Ronald McDonald houses made it challenging.

When Covid hit, we had to stop.

And then we met at churches and cleaned the church for free and had like a trade show because Ronald McDonald Houses didn't want, you know, people from all over the United States coming in with COVID and all that going on.

But now it started back up after Covid, which is really, really exciting.

And so that's been awesome to be able to travel around as a business owner, take time off and give back in that way, not only to the Ronald McDonald House, but then have breakfast, lunch and dinners with other business owners, entrepreneurs, and rub elbows with people you see on Facebook and send a message to.

But now we're in person and we're like you and I right here, sitting down, talking and just dreaming together and coming up with ideas, of course, finding out what's working for them in marketing, that type of stuff.

And Facebook has been amazing.

It's a free platform and I've been able to post a lot on there and find people that would be interested in and doing what I do.

And then, you know, again, the Internet, like if it wasn't for Google, I'd be a 2, 3, 4 truck operation just here in Phoenix.

Wow.

So Internet really helped you expand your business?

Oh, yeah, 100%.

Oh my goodness.

Facebook, the whole Internet, but Facebook primarily.

And what I do, not only do we build the website for like DallasCarpetRepair.com not only do we build the website, have a phone number that records every phone call for training purposes, but we, we do the marketing, the, the, the marketing strategies to get the phone to ring.

So for instance, Ed, he started training on a Monday.

Funny story, he started training on a Monday.

And I tell these guys, hey, when you're training, we're in customer's homes, you can't be on your phone, you know, put it on vibrate.

And when we jump in the truck, you can call back who you need to call back.

Well, Ed on a Saturday, he's there on a Monday, that Saturday gets a call for a job back in Dallas.

So he's not even done with his training.

He never held a carpet knife in his hand before, ever in his life.

He's not in this industry, didn't come from this industry.

I'm teaching him in a week's time.

Like I'm talking 15 hour days.

I mean, we're, we're out in the field doing this work hands on.

He's, he's shadowing me.

And then we're going back to my warehouse.

I have a full warehouse where I have an area set up to learn carpet repair.

So we're out from 8 in the morning till 5, 6 o'clock doing jobs, real jobs and real customers, homes.

He's watching me model, getting five star reviews.

And I become pretty good at getting a five star review before even leaving the home.

Wow.

Which is pretty exciting when, when someone's so happy that they're not only willing to pay you for the work that you did, but possibly tip you then also write a five star review for you.

Absolutely.

Ed gets a call back in Dallas to do his first carpet stretching job on Monday.

So he's all excited, right?

He steps out, he takes the call, he books the job and we, we get done with the job we're working on, we get in the truck and we talk through it and this is what you're gonna need.

And, and when these guys come for training, they also get all the tools to bring back to their perspective respective state.

Wow.

And I have these tools measured because I've learned the only airline that allows you two bags to fly free is Southwest Airlines.

So we, we literally had the tools way under £50.

So they're not charged extra money to get them on the plane to bring them back to their state that they're coming from.

Right.

Unless they drive in.

And how did I learn that?

Well, the first second guy I trained flew Delta and he had to pay extra money for his bags.

Right.

So.

So you live and you learn.

Of course.

Of course.

So Ed books this job Monday morning.

I tell him he flies out on Sunday back home.

I say, hey, Monday morning when you get to the job, I'll be expecting a call if you need any help.

He's gonna go do a real job, you know, So I don't know this till later, but I wait about an hour, hour and a half.

I don't hear from Ed, so I text him, hey, is Everything going good with the job?

He doesn't answer.

I text him back and I'm, you know, I don't give up.

I'm gonna keep pushing through till I get through.

He's my friend, you know, I could bother him.

Yeah.

Anyway, he finally texted me back.

He says, I'm mad at you.

I can't talk to you right now.

So that's a green light for me now to call him.

Of course I call him.

I go, what do you mean you mad at me?

What did I do?

He's like, I'm in the hospital.

What?

You're in the hospital?

What happened?

He goes, bro, you're never going to believe what happened.

I go, no, go ahead, tell me.

He goes, I pull up to.

I give the guy a 30 minute courtesy call like you taught me to do.

I pull up to the house, there's these big iron gates.

It's like a quarter mile driveway up to this multi, multi, million dollar house.

I'm greeted out front by a butler.

He walks in, he's thinking, it's a famous football player.

Baseball player.

Right.

Dallas.

Right.

He goes into the home and he doesn't want to ask whose home it is.

That's unprofessional.

The butler takes him in with his tools.

They go up this big round spiral staircase.

There's a big oil painting on the wall.

It's Ross Perot's house.

Wow.

He ran for president years ago.

Wow.

Ross Perot, Wow.

Of course.

Yeah.

So he goes into the master bedroom.

We can't stretch carpet with furniture, so they have all the furniture removed.

And he's stretching carpet and the drapes were hanging down.

And he went to cut the carpet and trim it.

And he didn't move the drapes away.

I didn't teach him how to hang the drapes up and get them out of the way so you can work.

So he put his left hand under the drapes and he cut and he filleted his whole hand wide open.

First job.

First job.

He lays like 13, 17 stitches.

He has to run off the carpet because his hand's bleeding.

A couple drops of carpet get on the tile, right?

You learn that in this industry if you cut yourself, get off the carpet.

And basically he's at the hospital getting stitched up.

He had to call his competitor to come finish the job.

So he called the competitor.

The guy went there, finished the job.

He had the job about halfway done, finished the job.

Ed showed up later on that day after his stitches.

The room was stretched.

His tools were neatly by the Front door.

And you know, that's the story about Ed in Dallas.

Ed's become an amazing.

He's an amazing friend over the years, probably 25 year friendship, and runs a successful business in, in the Dallas area.

Multiple trucks on the road.

And he's an amazing carpet repair technician.

Has him employees.

But I tell all that story to the incoming trainees so they don't cut themselves.

Of course.

Yes.

Crazy story.

So, Mr.

Al, this has been amazing.

I mean, there's been so many gold nuggets that you dropped here.

You know, just a couple questions for you, right?

Because the people that are listening to this podcast, people that are listening here, they want to know how they too can be successfully unemployed and wrap everything together in their life to build businesses like you have, right.

You start off in carpet cleaning, then you had the opportunity to go into the ministry, then you brought it back to that same business.

You monetize it, you built it up and you really scaled it at scale.

So if I'm driving and I'm listening to this podcast and I'm saying, how in the world can I get out of my W2 job?

Because I want to have more freedom, I want to be successfully unemployed.

What are the first steps that you would take?

Right.

Yeah.

I think number one is you got to be passionate about what you're going to do.

Right.

You got to believe in it.

You know, how I got back into the carpet repair business here was kind of by accident getting out of the ministry.

And then, you know, you go back to what you know.

Right.

I mean, I was looking for, you know, quote unquote, a W2 job.

And I didn't think about starting a business.

Honestly, when I got out of the ministry, I was looking for just.

I wanted health insurance and those types of things.

And when you first start a business, it's hard to get.

Now I have health insurance, life insurance, I pay a lot of insurances right now.

Too much, quite honestly.

But to your point, I think, you know, you gotta believe in what you're doing.

You gotta have passion.

You know the old saying, if you enjoy what you're doing, you won't work a day in your life.

I think there's some truth to that.

Right.

Instead of just grinding through, I have a lot of friends that hate their jobs.

We go hang out, the last thing they want to talk about is their job.

I always talk about my career and my job and training new people because I'm passionate about it and I enjoy it.

I really do.

So I think believing in what you're doing, I think finding pain points, meaning there's a pain point, there's a business, a niche, a service that not a million other people are doing right now.

I didn't know that a million people weren't doing carpet repair.

I knew a million people were doing carpet cleaning.

So I don't spend any advertising dollars on carpet cleaning.

I naturally get the carpet cleaning because I'm advertising for carpet repair and they go hand in hand.

I don't advertise for tile cleaning, but a lot of homes including mine, have tile in all the walk areas and carpet in the bedrooms.

And if you have tile, we can clean the tile.

And if you have rugs now, we can clean the rugs.

Right, Right.

So I think finding something that you, you enjoy doing, a craft, a trade, I think maybe finding something that not everyone else is doing is important.

If I was just doing carpet cleaning, it'd be a struggle.

I think you can build a successful carpet cleaning company.

But it's so competitive and I took this by accident.

I can't say that I knew this all would happen because that wouldn't be truthful.

Right.

It just worked out that way.

But the carpet repair industry, not a lot of people do it.

One of the biggest jobs we do in terms of services we do in the carpet repair industry is restretching carpet.

So carpet is installed.

Right.

No furniture in the home, you get new carpet.

Well, a lot of most carpet installers are installing carpet and they're performing neglect in your home because they're malpractice in your home because they're installing with a carpet knee kicker.

They're not using a power stretcher.

We power stretch everything we do.

My knees are perfect because I'm not slamming into a knee kicker all day trying to install.

So for instance, 2400 square foot home, if you get say you have 1500, 1800 square foot of carpet, you'll get two or three guys show up, hard working dudes.

They're going to come in with knee kickers and they're going to knee kick the carpet in and you're going to think, wow, this carpet's beautiful.

Thank you so much.

But in a year to two years, that carpet is going to form speed bumps.

They're called carpet ripples.

Bumps in the carpet because they never got the carpet drum tight to begin with.

And we use the tool that you're supposed to use to install.

Although we don't install, we just re stretch carpet.

So we do a lot of restretching carpet here and nationally through all My locations, because of carpet installers installing the carpet incorrectly, they had an uncle that did it, and hard worker, and they imitated what their uncle did.

But they never got the education, they never went to school for it.

To learn the.

To use the right tools and to basically follow standards.

And there are standards for installing carpet.

And so again, back to your original question.

I think passion, I think the riches are in the niches.

Finding a niche.

Okay.

You know, right now, bitcoin is all popular, right?

Something different, something unique, right?

You know, who knows what's going to happen with all that?

But it's something new and there's a buzz about it, right?

Because it's different from traditional money, right?

So I think finding something that may be a little bit different, that's a niche business.

And then, you know, learning.

I tell people all the time, listen, you can be the best plumber, you can be the best electrician, you could be the best roofer, you could be the best doctor.

But if people don't know who you are, how are they going to find you, right?

And so the Internet has a way of doing that.

And I'm a big believer in getting reviews, building up your reviews so that you can put that before people.

Now, if you're going to go to a restaurant, are you going to go to a restaurant with a 3.1 rating or a 5.0 or 4.9 rating?

4.0, 5.0, for sure.

You're going to.

You're going to look and you're going to read through some of these reviews.

We're really cynical people nowadays.

And all those reviews, they have so many, they must be fake.

You know, I've never gotten a fake review.

We get them consistently because we ask for them, right?

We send out an email.

What did you think about our service?

We send out a text message.

How would you rate our service?

So we're asking people for feedback, and if we make a mistake, for instance, I had a guy, one of my technicians that I was on the job with, we got done stretching the carpet, and I said, see you later back at the office.

And I took off and he was vacuuming and cleaning up.

Supposedly he dropped one of his tools and chipped a tile.

Now, the owner of the home was there when I was there, and his renter was still there moving furniture down on that tile.

They called us and they accused us of busting the tile.

I asked my technician, he said, absolutely not.

I don't believe I dropped my tool.

I don't remember dropping my tool.

And if I did.

I would have told you.

And so now I'm in a situation where he said, she said, my employee says he didn't do it.

The renter's there, and he's saying that my employee did it.

And so, you know what we did?

We paid 250 to have someone come out and replace the tile.

Wow.

And so stand behind what you do.

Wow.

For $250 to ruin my reputation, would it be worth the 200?

Absolutely not.

Wow.

That's amazing.

So just standing behind what you do.

Sometimes it costs money to stand behind what you do.

Absolutely.

And so I was in this predicament, you know, there with.

I asked my technician, he said, no, you know, the.

The renter saying, my technician did it, because maybe he did it, but he doesn't want to pay for the tile, you know, so we just fixed it.

Wow.

And so, you know, I just believe in standing behind what you do.

And sometimes that hurts a little bit.

Sometimes it's questionable.

He said, she said.

But to me, me stepping up and my office manager dealt with the homeowner and shared that story because I had a conversation with her and.

And said, you know, it could have very easily been your, you know, your renter that was there moving furniture around the.

The downstairs.

They got everything off the carpet and put it downstairs on the tile, so they could have easily dropped something.

So it was like one of these things, you know, we're going to take the high road.

Hopefully we created a customer for life by what we did with that homeowner.

Yes, absolutely.

By doing the right thing.

Yes.

Now the rest is on them.

But we followed through.

Not only did we fix the tile, then we called up after the tile was fixed, make sure it was done properly, and just followed through.

And I think a lot of my ministry training, inviting someone to church, Right.

It's one thing to invite someone to church and say, hey, I hope you see you this Sunday.

It's another thing to say, hey, here's my phone number.

Can I get your phone number?

Do you mind if I call your Saturday and touch base with you?

Because I'm going to save you a seat in the front row next to me on Sunday.

And I just want to make sure that you have directions, you know what time it is, and that follow through.

Right.

That follow up.

And I think a lot of companies fall short in that.

In that arena of following through and following up, asking for a review.

I don't think there's anything wrong with asking about the service that was provided and asking, honestly, if there's something that we can do better next time, I want to know about it.

Yes.

Because I'm not at every job nowadays with employees.

Absolutely.

And I want to know that my employees are doing a good job and they're taking care of people.

And one of the ways I do that is I monitor their five star reviews.

And if one of my employees is going a few days a week without getting a five star review, something's going on.

Let's talk about it.

Let's, let's see how we can improve.

No one's in trouble.

Just want to see how we can improve and do a better job.

And that starts with me and my leadership and how I work and operate.

I want to make sure that I can, if I.

There's an area I can grow in and do a better job at, it starts with me and, and then that trickles down to every one of the employees.

And my employees see that.

My employees see.

When I go out and work, guess what I do?

I get five star reviews.

Yes, sir.

So I'm not calling them to do something I'm not doing.

When I go do jobs.

I get tips, even as the owner.

And so, you know, when you lead by example and don't just bark out orders, but you're, you're out there, you know, with your employees, rolling up your sleeves, being willing to get involved, being willing to get dirty.

I go to a customer's home with my employees.

I'm not just standing there watching them work.

I'm working faster than them.

We go in a four room home to stretch carpet.

Usually I'll have three rooms stretched before they have the one room stretch.

Wow.

Because I know the business, I've been doing it longer than them, but I enjoy what I'm doing and I want to show them by inspiration, you know, that you can be quick and do a good job, be thorough, get a five star review, possibly get a Coke or water and possibly a tip.

Yes.

And everyone's happy.

It's a win, win situation.

So, wow.

Thank you so much, Mr.

Ellis.

This has been absolutely amazing.

I mean, this whole podcast was a masterclass.

I'm gonna go back.

There's so many golden nuggets, so many wonderful things that you shared.

Let me ask you this, for anyone that's out there listening that anyone that wants to get in contact with you want to learn a little bit more about your businesses, you know, I know we're chatting a little bit offline, I think.

You said you had four businesses.

Yeah.

You have a lot of things going carpet repair obviously is your bread and butter, but how can someone get in contact with you if they want to learn more from you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll give you my cell number.

Okay.

623-826-9075.

That's my personal cell.

Okay.

I answer my phone and if I don't answer, that means I'm with someone and I call back within the hour.

I'm very diligent about phone calls and business.

I don't mess around with that.

And then my email, I have multiple emails, but probably I'll give my gmail.

Phoenix spelled out Phoenix P N I X carpet repairmail.com Excellent.

So either way, if you have any questions, even if it's not a good fit and you just have some questions that maybe you want to model some of the things we talked about today, five star reviews, systems.

I have no problem sharing information and talking about business.

I really enjoy doing it well and.

That'S how we've had such a great time today.

Thank you so much, Mr.

Atlas.

Oh, you got it.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

I appreciate you.

Absolutely awesome.

Time isn't money.

Time is your most valuable resource.

Thank you for investing some of it with me today on the Successfully Unemployed podcast.

Want to take the next step?

Get your free real estate investing course now by texting the word rental to 33777.

That's R E N T A L to 33 7.

I'm your host, Roger Wesley, and I'll see you in the next episode.