Welcome to Close it now, an H Vac sales training podcast with Sam Wakefield.

Here we'll build your reputation in residential H Vac sales to be the expert influencer in your market.

You'll get insight into the top minds in the industry as they share their skills and hacks to help you on your journey.

This podcast isn't just about selling more.

It's about understanding your customers needs and building efficiencies behind the scenes so you can sell more but work less while being top of mind when people think H Vac.

Now let's get started with your host of the Close it now podcast.

This is Sam Wakefield.

Well, welcome back to Close It Now.

Sam Wakefield here.

Today I am really stoked about my guest.

I as you know everybody that listens to this podcast, I am constantly, constantly in the search for new voices, new perspective, new tools, different things that we can bring into the H Vac and the trade space that maybe we haven't seen.

And from outside our vertical, there's so many innovations that have happened that sadly our industry is slow to adopt.

And so today this is exactly one of those tools.

I ran into this gentleman at Door to Door Con when I was a speaker there and we connected and had a great conversation and I'm really, really excited about what he's doing with this, with this company, with this product, which you'll hear about here in just a minute.

And overall we're going to talk about some sales, we're going to talk about some life.

And so this, this gentleman, I love this introduction and you're going to as well.

One, he shows up to the interview wearing a Phoenix Suns jacket, which is legit, I dig it.

And in fact, for everybody that's going to be watching and seeing some reels and stuff out of this, he went, he had a blue hat on and went and change black hat because it fits the, fits the image a little better.

But, but check this out.

In Little League he was the home run champ and strikeout champ.

He was getting 12, 13, 14 strikeouts per game.

So it's incredible that you're not playing for the majors now.

But he, yeah, no kidding.

12 years of door to door experience, went on a mission with his church and then came back and just couldn't stop knocking doors.

So clearly went into knocking doors for business, not for nonprofit.

And, and I love it.

Lives in Arizona.

Clearly has a massive core value of family because when I was asking him how he likes to be introduced, half of the things he told me were about his wife, his kids and what he's doing for his family.

So I love that and that's incredible.

So he's most excited about his new pool, which is going to be great.

Being in Arizona, you'd be able to use it year round.

Right.

And so we're going to talk about the impact here in a little while because that's the, that's really what this is about.

So everyone please welcome to the show.

If you don't know this person and this company product yet, you will.

This is Brad Mortensen.

He is the CEO and founder of Rep Card.

So thanks for joining me today, man.

Yeah, dude, thanks so much.

I'm glad to be here.

Yeah.

Awesome.

So we connected at door to door.

Congratulations.

In that arena.

Most of the people actually kind of already use your product or at least a huge portion of them do, which is awesome and I love that.

And I actually was exposed to it a few years back when I started my solar journey, but I'd never really heard of anything like this before that because where I come from in the H vac space, everybody listening, you know, this is true.

One, we're 20 or 30 years behind technology, so it's a slow moving ship.

But also raise your hand, all your listeners, if you still.

Your company is all about your paper business cards and it's like this archaic way to do business, right?

They expect us to be like these ninjas handing out business cards and expecting homeowners to not just throw them away.

So, Brad, tell us more about what this is and, well, in fact, let's back up.

Let's go through a little bit of your career.

Like how did, how in the world did you get where you're at with Rep Card?

And why did you even start the company?

Give us a highlight reel of your life and kind of what inspired you to transition out of the field into this?

Like, what were you recognizing that was needed?

Yeah, so, you know, I spent a lot of years selling pest control, satellite TV, did some solar.

And during those 12 years, you know, you, you knock a door and a lot of times people think that you're like some criminal that just like stumbled upon their doorstep.

Like that's kind of the, the core of what it is.

And your rear role, your job as a door to door guys, to break the ice, break the preoccupation, have a good intro, capture their attention and like move on through the sales process.

So this happens a lot.

And then, you know, you do all this work and then you talk to the husband and then he's supposed to go talk to the wife and you're supposed to come back at 7:00 and talk to them about buying whatever.

And you come back and they just don't want to talk to you.

Or there's, there's no, there's no credibility that extends a past that initial approach of talking to that husband while he's carrying the groceries in or he's, whatever.

And so this thought always was like, how do you, how do you leverage, you know, your time better in the.

Hold on, let me turn this off.

So the, the question was like how do you, you know, send something like a digital business card that shows credibility, shows video, shows your business that the husband can show to the spouse and then if they don't buy, which is totally a part of door to door, you're not going to sell every house it's built.

A lot of rejection built in.

How can you have a way to stay in contact and have a text campaign or a follow up tool to stay engaged with these leads?

Because you're going to meet people backing out of the driveway to go to their daughter's dance recital.

That's not the time to sell them solar.

No, the time is in tomorrow at 2pm or tomorrow at 7pm and so how do you look credible and be someone that can be trustworthy from quick interaction of one minute while they're, you're talking to them through their car door.

And so rep card, I just started making, making a, a list of some thoughts and some features that, that it could entail and then eventually I, I started designing it while I was flying around the country visiting my pest control offices.

I just started designing it myself and figuring out how to design an app and then found one developer in India that helped me start to create it.

And, and now we have a team of 30 developers and it's just grown from there.

So.

And the sky's.

And when was that?

When you made that transition?

When kind of that origin of you starting to develop it.

So those kind of thoughts of me jotting everything down was 2017.

And then 2018 is when we actually started developing it.

Then we launched it at door to Door Con 2, which was in 2018.

We just showed up, had a 10 by 10 booth, had no idea what to expect.

You know, you're like 100 grand into this thing.

Like you know, I didn't have another $3,000 to throw at the booth.

You know, but we're like whatever, let's just do it.

But yeah, we showed up and there was just an amazing reception of, of people There that wanted to use it and, and we just continue to build it.

And then two years later, I, I went full time in 2021 and okay, the end of 2021, I went full time and, and jumped all in.

Nice.

I love.

That's really cool.

Now that I know the timeline, I actually started using your.

Using rep card before you were even full time with it.

And because it's, I mean, it's the hottest thing out there when it comes to digital, digital business cards.

So let's do this though.

I'm super curious.

It solves a handful of problems for people.

Right.

So what are some of the main obstacles that, you know, you were fine, kind of did dive into this a little bit.

What are some of those obstacles other than just, you know, when the homeowner's like, okay, well you know, give me a card, we'll call you.

Which is the normal brush off, but let's unpack that a little bit.

What are some of the bigger obstacles that we're actually doing and able to solve with a little bit of.

Of what, why this was developed, I guess.

Yeah.

So that first, that first part we talked about is that establishing the credibility and the trust and maintaining that after you leave the door and then from there, when you send someone your rep card, there's a lot of things they can click on.

They can click on, you know, your reviews, they can click on your videos, they can click on any call to action buttons.

You know, they can save your contact info, they can hit your calendar link.

There's a lot of different buttons there.

So as they engage with your card and when they open your card, you're getting notified as the sales rep of every engagement that's happening.

Yeah.

So, you know, after you leave, if they said come back tonight at seven, you can tell if they're interested or not by the way they engage with your card after you leave.

So a good sales guy is going to be able to persuade people and kind of push them into things that maybe they didn't want to do right then, but you kind of get them to do it and hopefully it doesn't, you know, create some type of, you know, backlash after you leave.

Some like, you know, cold feet, some sort of tension.

But when you send your rep card and you set the go back and you come back, or maybe they say, let me think about it, you know, give me a week.

But then they go and open your card and watch your videos.

Gives you a ton of confidence.

And so we can create confidence for sales reps to go back to that appointment with confidence because they've watched your video two or three times.

Maybe they showed their spouse or maybe they open your card two months after you engage with them.

Life got busy and all of a sudden they get back to thinking that they want to look at solar.

So they go back and reopen your card and watch your video or, or just open it.

And reps are able to then call and do a follow up call right then and there.

And some reps will say, hey, I saw you just open my card and be blunt.

And some are like, hey, I just was driving past your neighborhood.

You know, I was of our conversation, just wanted to touch base.

And the people are like oh my gosh, I just was thinking about you.

And you're like no way.

And it's like this coincidentally incidental, you know, perfect timing scenario.

And so after you, you send your card and you get those engagements, you have the ability to, to be organized, to take notes, set reminders, send follow up text, schedule text.

And then there's a bunch of other features that we could go into.

I mean setter, closer calendar.

So some companies are sending out a bunch of setters to knock doors to set the appointment and then they want to book to a closer.

So we have a calendar that facilitates all that with the round robin approach and, and all that.

We have a full canvassing tool, competitions, leaderboards, a full chat so teams can chat internally.

So a lot of that stuff's been developed since I went full time.

Built into it.

Yeah.

Oh, very cool.

And that's, and one of the things that I'm getting right now because I'm basically leading the charge for, you know, door to door in H vac.

It's something that's very, very, very little of it's being done, but it's the biggest blue sky opportunity for new client acquisition that everybody's recognizing.

If you've been around the space at all for the last couple years, all of the talk in 2023 and this is all home services marketing dollars went way up.

Call volume was down 30 to 40% from online marketed, you know, lead generation and new client acquisition.

So that's obviously everybody's turning to what are some lower cost ways that we can have new clients, we can get in front of people, get in front of more eyeballs.

But it's got to, you know, when your marketing dollars are now four or five times what they were and you're getting 30% less results, clearly that's a losing battle.

And so what are some ways so turning to doors is what's really going on right now.

And I love this conversation because it's the big connector piece, the disconnect.

I get questions a lot of, well, yeah, I go out and I'll talk to people, but how in the world is anybody else going to know other than me just taking a yellow pad and writing it down or trying to use some shared Google calendar for the company, but then people are overriding stuff and it's like, oh, it's just messy.

Right?

How do, how do we handle this?

Well, obviously you developed a tool for that.

Yeah.

So I remember those days of, of knocking doors and you're sweating like crazy and you're writing down, you know, every house number on a piece of paper, and you got the side and the even side, and your hand gets all sweaty on the binder and your paper starts, like, deteriorating from the, you know, just because it's all got sweat on it.

And.

Yeah, and it's evolved.

Like, if you're, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, like, man, I'm a H Vac, I want to give this a shot.

Like, just give us a call.

We can show you all the tools.

All of our salespeople have done door to door for, for at least two years.

It's not like a requirement, but I look for those kinds of people because they, they can understand what our, our potential clients need or what they want, and they can speak to it and relate to it.

And so give us a call.

We, you know, we can just walk you through the tools and show you that with the right tool, it's a lot easier to do the job just like it is, you know, break down a wall.

If, if you've got a hammer or you've got a stick or you got a sledgehammer.

Like, there's different tools, and one of those is going to be a better tool, and it's going to help you just start to see results faster versus beating that wall with a stick.

It's like you're going to give up at some point.

But if you have a sledgehammer, after a few good hits, you're like, dude, this is almost kind of fun.

Like, what else can you do with this?

And so, yeah, H Vac.

In.

In door.

I can already see the pitch, you know, of like, hey, let us free tuneup.

Or it's, you know, normally 150 bucks.

We're doing it for $29 today.

You come back, you say, hey, this is what we found.

Blah, blah.

Like, I think It's a great, great.

Not like new industry forks.

I'm sure there's some people doing it, but we need to hear more H Vac companies.

Getting a team of, you know, five or six guys or getting just a group of four guys that show up, they take the company truck and they roll out to an area and there's totally a viable option.

And we have a lot of tools that can help them create a business out of that or a separate marketing channel.

And.

And they wouldn't have to go and get 10, you know, five or 10 different softwares or platforms and try to like integrate and right it all together.

It's just, it's all right there.

Oh, I love this so much.

And for everybody listening too, if I mean, this is not exclusively for doors.

This is what I want you to hear in H Vac.

This is a much better version of, you know, the old school paper business card.

Right?

Yeah.

Am I saying get rid of your business cards?

No, what I am saying is up level.

It's time to step into 20, 24 or the 20s.

Right.

So because so many times I'm the same way, I give a business card and then you wonder what happened to those people.

So I have.

I.

Especially if you've been like me in my early career or first 10 years of my career, I had, I did a horrible job of tracking who I saw.

This is a great way to automate things to force yourself to be able to do it a lot easier.

And now we know every single time that person opens the card, you know, it gives us notifies.

So they watch the video, they clicked on this link and it's an incredible replacement for that.

So I feel like we started this like bull rush into what all your listeners.

What I don't want this to do.

This is not just a sales, this is not a sales pitch for rep card.

What I want, the reason for this is to bring you a tool that is very usable, it's applicable.

And also, Brad, you have massive sales experience.

This is obviously a sales focused podcast.

How can say somebody use this in.

Give us a couple different situations.

Doors are obvious, that's why it was developed.

But give us a couple other examples of how if this, the rep card can be used effectively, you know, in, in a process.

Right?

Yeah.

So a few things come to mind.

You know, even, even like technicians can use it.

We have a lot of pest control companies, home security companies, where they're in the house or, or at the home doing a service and post install or post service.

They will have their technicians go and have the homeowner scan their, their ID badge or they'll use one of our tap cards or they'll send them a card.

You can do it a few different ways and they'll ask the homeowner to leave them a review.

And the review product inside of rep card allows individuals to get reviews, not just the business.

And so if you left me a review about the service I just performed in your house or on internal AC unit, I was just like, nice and friendly or whatever.

You're leaving a review about me on my rep card.

But then we have a tie into Google.

So then it also allows you to put that review right onto Google's platform and that will benefit the business.

Right.

And so the technician can then ask for review or sorry, referrals at that point.

It depends how salesy or how you know, involved.

You want your technicians to be with the homeowners, but you can have them generate a review and there's already some automations that will then ask for referrals.

But it's a great way for technicians to generate reviews for themselves and for the company and then spark the referral conversation and, and try to get more business right out of it.

And then on the sales side, yeah, door to door is obviously pretty straightforward, but you have your phone with you everywhere you go.

And so it can be someone, you know at your kid's baseball game, you're sitting there talking with some of the parents and it's, you know, getting hot.

And someone's like, dude, we just had this huge issue with our AC unit, like, we're probably gonna have to get a new one.

And you're like, oh, that's actually what I do.

That's funny.

You bring that up like, you know, and you eventually it's going to lead to like, okay, how do I can I get your info?

And, and so, boom, you send your rep card and you send them that video that explains a little bit more about your company and why your company's the best in that market.

And then it could be all the way down to the, the lady at church.

You know, it could be random situation and then shifting gears a little bit.

There's also a huge swing and a huge play for RevCard to be used in recruiting.

So building a sales team, you can do the same process that you did with that guy on the baseball team or, or the person at the door.

You send your card and you have a way to signify in rep card that you're sending the card to a recruit and now you're able to send them the recruiting video and you're interesting information about the, the comp plan and other things.

And then of course see when they open it and it goes back and then you have your recruiting pipeline.

So if you're a recruiter or you're in sales or both or you're a technician, there's a lot of different use cases where you can leverage rep card in your day to day.

Yeah, that is just knocking door.

So yeah, you know, we have plenty of companies that use it for their door to door team, but then also for even the owner or executives that are out networking with people.

And then you've got like the technician side that's using it for a different use case.

I love it.

Thanks for those examples because there, there's.

And everybody listening, think about how this could be implemented into your organization.

Right.

How many hats are you wearing?

Clearly you can just go in and designate within your app as you give that connection to that person which path you want them to go down.

Which is super cool.

And you mentioned referrals.

Let's camp out there for a minute because I know you were highly successful when you were in the field on the doors and and now you also are of course instrumental in training your team to train people how to teach people how to use rep card.

Right.

So let's camp out on referrals for a second because in order to be a master producer in any industry, you have to get good at this.

So this is the sales section here.

Let's do a quick short little masterclass on what is the best way to ask for referrals, to actually get them.

Because that's the, that's the piece most people miss.

They'll ask for referrals, but they, when they do it wrong and they too, they don't get any with the first two or three times they try it and then so they stop asking.

And so that obviously is why people quit.

So what's a good referral method?

Yeah, well, you bring up a good point that like in order to, to really be a top performer, there's only so much you can do yourself and you have all these clients, you know, depending on what industry you're in, you could have, you know, an additional five, ten clients a month.

It could be a hundred a month if you're selling pest control.

And so you need to get all these people to become ambassadors and not all of them are going to take it to the level that you want them to.

And so the first thing I'd say about referrals is that you have to look at it like it's a second business.

You're doing sales for ABC H Vac or ABC Pest Control or whatever.

But then you have this second like hat you wear and it's like this referral generator.

It's, it's, it's a, it's a different business.

So.

And when you get a business off the ground, it takes a little bit of time, it takes a little bit of effort.

And so as you start asking for referrals, if you ask two or three people and they don't send you any, it's not time to be like, well, this doesn't work.

It's a separate channel of business.

You have your active income where you're going out and then you have like this secondary in, you know, line of, it's almost like real estate or, or something passive income.

If you set up this, this referral business, well, it will passively create you leads that are going to turn into revenue.

And usually those leads are going to close at the highest percentage out of all of your lead sources.

Right.

Because there's trust coming from the neighbor referring their brother in law or the neighbor referring another neighbor or you know, whatever the case may be.

And so breaking it down to how you generate more referrals is number one, you have to ask every single time.

So you got to get inputs.

Now when you ask, you want to have a clear path, a clear method.

And what I mean by that is you don't want to change your method every time.

If you talk to someone that's super excited about your product, sometimes it's, you want to think like, you know, I'm not going to give them any bonus for the referrals.

They're already excited.

So I'm just going to be like, who do you know?

And just try to like leverage their excitement.

Like don't do that.

Just create a process.

And this process needs to reward the person giving the referral and the person that that is being referred.

And so you're doing the H vac, you're saying something like, you know, hey, Mr.

Homeowner, we have this great referral program where anyone that you refer to us that ends up, you know, buying one of our packages, we'll give you 25 and we'll give your neighbor 25.

Sure.

And so it gives this homeowner a little bit of leverage and a little bit of, you know, ammo to go to their neighbor and be like, you know, if the conversation comes up or maybe they're talking to their, their brother, their mom, whatever, they're like, hey, like, you can have them come out and we each get 25 bucks or we each get 100 bucks or whatever, you know, in solar, some guys are throwing out 500 bucks a pop.

So you're able to give them ammo because they're not good at sales.

They're not going to go to their brother and like, persuade him to get this right.

They need to have something that's just like, dude, you know, if you have them come out and check out your system, no matter what happens, you get 25 bucks and I get fit 25 bucks.

And then you try to do equal amounts so it's not this awkward.

Like, you know, hey, you get more than I do.

Check out this company.

And it's like, I get a thousand bucks and you don't get anything.

And then you're like, just pushy neighbor MLM guy that's just pushing something like make it equal.

And then make sure that you can be organized so you can use rep card.

Again, I don't want this to be some pitch like you can use Google sheets, you can use a Google form.

Shoot.

You can just, you know, I don't know, type it into your phone notes or whatever.

But rep card has a mechanism where once you've sent the card to the homeowner, they can hit send referral.

And it gives them the option to just send you referrals.

Not only right then, but long term.

Yeah.

And so then it's organized.

You know who the referral is, who it came from.

And because they put in their brother's phone number in there, you can send your rep card to their brother because it creates a record.

You could send a rep card right to the brother right then and there and say, hey, I just talked to your brother Jim.

He sent me your info.

Here's my, my business card and a few videos to watch.

I'll call you within the next hour.

And all of a sudden, the, the, the brother, the referral, opens your card and watches your video.

And he's a referral from his brother and you're calling him in an hour.

Dude, how much leverage do you have going into that referral?

Oh, it's incredible.

It's.

You have all the leverage in the world and the odds of you closing that if it's, if, if they're, you know, qualified customer is extremely high.

Right.

So referrals aren't going to be the main source of your income.

They can be in certain industries, but, but Ask it.

Every single sale, ask it.

Right?

And people that aren't even, maybe your customer could refer you.

You know, it's interesting that you say it.

Some of my best referral clients have been people who were.

Did work with another company, had a horrible experience, and then met me and learned about my company and how we operate.

And they turned out to be the best referral sources because people always ask them, hey, you got this new heating and air system?

Or, hey, you got the solar system, Who'd you use?

And they'll say, well, don't use the company I use.

Use this guy, because they're so much better, right?

Or it's like you knock a door or you talk to someone like, oh, I rent.

I.

It's not even.

Like, I don't even, you know, our AC unit doesn't work very well.

Or, you know, we.

We'd love to get solar, but, you know, and it's like, great.

These people are excited about, you know, something that, that they, that they want to buy, or they have a pain in their life that they wish was being solved.

And you're like, hey, man, I know that sucks, but, you know, I'd love to send you my card.

Now we have something changes and you buy a home, you can reach out to me, but in the meantime, let's make you some money, man.

Yeah, for sure.

You know, you guys want to hit Disneyland?

Like, you guys can make enough money in referrals over the next six months.

Like, turn it into.

That's another part of the referral game is getting them to identify what that money could go towards.

Right?

And the last thing is to.

To pay them quick.

So like in, in.

In an industry like solar where, like, you sell the job and it could go 30 to 90 days before they actually get installed, don't base it off of the install and give them 500 bucks.

Break it down to, hey, if you just give me someone and I can sit at the kitchen table with husband and wife, I'll give you 50 bucks.

Yeah.

And then you get the 50 bucks quick.

But after 10 of those, that's still the 500amount.

The odds of you closing one that's going to get installed is, Is probably the same.

And so you're giving versus they give you a referral.

It takes 90 days to get installed.

You go back and give them 500 bucks.

You're like, oh, yeah, I forgot about this.

Thanks, man.

But if they give you, you know, their neighbor and their brother and you go sit down with them, you give them the hundred Bucks.

They're like, holy crap.

Like, that worked.

Like, who else do you know?

There's much more speed, so love it.

Create your plan.

Take five minutes, say, hey, for every person.

I'm going to give each party 50 bucks.

This is how I'm going to be organized and this is how I'm going to bring it up and just do it every single time and don't change that and do it for six months.

And you should have another stream of income.

Right.

I love this.

And this is.

I mean, I can definitely attest to this.

I did this for years and years and years when I was in the field and heating and air.

And after just a couple of years, I literally had 3 to $500,000 in revenue every single year from people picking up the phone.

Oh, I'm so glad you still work for that company.

Thank goodness you're still there.

We just moved.

We want to do it again or whatever it was, or our credit still sucks, but we saved the cash for it.

Now it just depends on the situations.

Right?

But when you make that lasting impression initially and you give them a way to stay in contact with you instead of just, oh, where was that business card?

I think it was in the desk drawer.

Oh, you cleaned out the desk drawer and threw everything out.

Damn it.

That was where the card was.

Right.

So I've got a funny story about, about that real quick.

We had a client that signed up for rep card, and he's like, dude, you know, I had known about you guys, but, you know, I hadn't really pulled the trigger or whatever for, for my team.

And he's like, I was out knocking doors the other day and I gave my purchase this guy and I had set an appointment for 7 o' clock that night, and he got halfway down the driveway and he realized, boom, he had something going on that night and he couldn't come back.

Yeah.

So he walked right back to the door.

This is 15 seconds after he had just given the guy his card and set this appointment.

He knocks on the door again and the guy comes out and he's picking his teeth with the guy's card.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Let the guy know that, hey, can we move it to tomorrow?

Or whatever.

And.

And it was just hilarious.

He's like, dude, the guy's picking his teeth in my card.

Like, what do you think he's going to do with that card after he's done picking his teeth?

Think he's going to put it on the counter?

Like, no, he's going to throw it in the Garbage.

And so he's like, you know what?

Screw this.

Like I'm doing this wrong.

I, you know.

And so he ended up onboarding and it was just such a funny story.

And it just totally shows like the value of going digital with, with this.

It's just using, using a paper card and if you knock a door and someone's not home, great.

That's a great time to put a card in their door.

Yeah.

But I will tell you, if you have the cards, it's, it's natural to just want to give them out and not use rep cards.

So you almost have to like burn the boats mentality.

Just throw way.

But I love this.

Yeah.

Something that I, I learned kind of have a business card story too.

For years and years and years, I've trained for every single person.

If you don't have your picture on your card, you are missing a massive opportunity.

And of course this takes it to the next level.

And the reason I say that is, you know, years ago we did a training with this guy.

He came into our company.

He was, you know, showing this cool new product, this geothermal product, three hour presentation because it was all this set up and actually had this little operating system in our, you know, our conference room.

We meet, there was about eight of us around the table, we all hand him our business cards.

And we had one guy on our team that we had started implementing the pictures on the business card thing.

He meets us all, sets all the cards down at the end of the table, gives his demonstration.

It was great.

We clapped.

We high fived him all the things.

We're bringing this product into our company.

And at the end of the end of the presentation, he picks all these cards up, spreads them out like a deck of cards or a hand of cards and looks at them all and grabs the one with the picture on it and says, well, I know who this guy is.

And my heart sank to the floor right then.

My gosh, I was like, what do homeowners do when they get 2, 3, 4 bids the same thing?

Right.

Yeah.

This is the way to get our.

Keep it in front of them.

Totally.

Yeah.

You know, that's why the, the, the logo on my hat is a boomerang.

It's the rep card logo.

And it's all about treating people right and putting out good things.

Taking care of your employees first and then your clients and building those relationships that can in return brings to bring, you know, referrals or bring business back to you or just reviews or just to have good things come back to You.

And so yeah, like people, I think when you're talking about a personal brand, like you are your brand, like, show your face, like, and so whether it's your printing paper cards and you want to stick to that method, like you, you know, you killed it, like put your face on that.

Like you are the people buy you before they buy your company or your product.

So show that.

So I love it.

Yeah.

And this is the, you know, obviously the next, next evolution of that.

And I'm so glad that you.

Thank you for founding the company because it's given us a great tool to be like you said, anywhere, connect with somebody.

And not only just, hey, here's my digital card, but it's like we can include whatever collateral we want to with it.

I've had plenty of people on my solar team that have recorded their own little videos that they put in there.

They've got brochures that they've loaded in that you get to curate what that person sees every time they open your card.

And another cool feature that actually probably my favorite feature that I feel like a fanboy of the product because I've used it so much and I love it so much.

My favorite feature is the ability to, in any conversation you're having, somebody we put their data in, we can use it basically like a CRM, right?

And then we've got this notes section.

But even cooler than that of just taking notes, for example, everybody listening, I'd be like, okay, I just met Brad Mortensen today.

He's the CEO and founder of Rep Card and I'm making my notes about him and what we talked about.

But even cooler because I suck at follow up and traditionally have just my brain doesn't work that way.

I have to create systems and ways to force myself to get back in touch with people or I won't do it.

I just know me.

And my favorite feature in here is I can go ahead and say Brad.

And I said, you know what?

I'm.

He's like, I'm busy this quarter.

Let's Talk next quarter.

So 8 mid April, reach back out to me.

It's.

We got to say you're a cpa.

We got to get past tax season.

Reach out to me mid or in April.

Okay, no problem.

I can go into Rep Card and I can schedule a message to go out from my rep card and I can right there on the spot go ahead and type that message and set it to send on that date and to remind me that that happened.

And it's just like the Biggest mind blowing thing that I've ever seen because now I'm building in my own follow up cycle with the message specifically and all of that to happen in one place at one time and, and now I'm not dropping those people aren't falling through the cracks.

I'm not forgetting the ones that are the go backs a month from now, two months from now, three months from now.

And then when we show back up and do what we said, now we're in integrity.

And that impresses the heck out of people when you know, somebody actually does what they say they're going to do.

Right.

So that's my personal favorite feature of the whole thing because it forces me to be organized when I wouldn't be otherwise.

Yeah, no, dude, it's spot on because in that moment when they tell you, hey, come back, let's talk mid April.

Like sometimes as a salesperson you're like, if, if you're having, you know, kind of a rough patch, you're like, dang, man, like I want to sell you now.

I want, I want to move it for, I want to move forward now.

Right, but they're giving you a chance.

They're getting, they're not saying no, they're giving you another chance.

And so you can quickly there just schedule that text.

And so a lot of guys will use that too when they're selling something where the competition maybe, or their homeowners or maybe in a contract, like, hey, there's nothing I can do right now.

I'm in contract for three more months or six more months.

Do you want to just come back by?

And as a salesperson, I, I, I can't just like make a trip in six months.

Like how am I going to remember?

And yeah, you can just schedule that text to go out in six months and say, hey, you know, hopefully you're out of contract by now.

I'd love to give you another quote and see if we can make it make sense for you or whatever.

And, and then all of a sudden just like referrals, like six months later, that text went out, they engaged you, recaptured the lead.

And that just goes in line with our, with our mission.

So I love it.

So, and that's, and kind of to bring it home into the H VAC space or everybody listening.

You know, we're mostly comfort advisors selling tax and you know, managers and owners of the companies.

So what I, one of the things that I really always encourage everybody do is to bam, fam, book a meeting from a meeting, never leave a conversation or an interaction with a homeowner that you don't have a very clear scheduled next touch point.

You know, what day is it going to be?

Have them get their calendar, have them pick a time.

You know, we're coordinating a time, a date, and how we're going to get back in touch with them.

And we can.

All of that can be entered into this.

And just as one source for that reminder.

And obviously for H vac, it's more like, you know, two days, three days out, a week out, usually tops.

And it's just such a smooth way to handle it because now we're automating it on the spot.

If I have to remember later, the chances of me doing it are not going to happen.

I'll just tell you it's not going to happen.

Yeah, I mean, 18 years in the field to tell you it's not happening.

But if I automate it for myself and force it, then it will.

And that's where the beauty happens.

But, man, I love it.

So let's kind of get a step out of the app for a second and get a little higher level.

And one of the things I want to really talk about is getting to know more about your mission.

Right in the intro, we were talking ahead of time about how important core values are, family values.

Something you said just.

It hit me really heavy that I want you to unpack a little bit for us.

You're talking about, especially in the business that you're really excited about, is impacting head of households.

What does that mean to you?

And.

And unpack that for us.

Because that's something that's missing in our industry a lot.

In a lot of cases.

Yeah, I, you know, a head of household, whether it's a husband or a wife or a, you know, just a.

A guy or a girl that's out there hustling, selling whatever it is.

In this case, H vac.

Like, you have a lot of demands.

Like being a dad, being a mom is.

Is extremely important.

And you need your best, you know, your best.

I don't know, like your best, like headspace to do that.

Well, there.

There's a lot that goes on.

I've got four kids, and sometimes it's just.

Just crazy and sometimes it's fun and whatever.

But, you know, at.

rep card, our mission is to impact those.

Those people using our platform.

Not necessarily that.

The thing we talk about internally isn't like, how can we help this company grow?

It's going to grow by impacting the individual.

And so we hope that our features and Our software will help benefit this husband that's out there doing H Vac.

And maybe he comes from being unorganized and he's just kind of running around like a chicken with his head cut off.

He's just trying to like weekends meet.

You know, he comes home some days he's exhausted.

There's, there's a lot going on and all that's not going to just go away with like using Rep Card, but if you can be more organized or you can recapture some business and so you do business on the front end for three or four months using Rep Card and you start to get more referrals, you start to get some followup that brings leads back into your business and you're able to be, just feel, have that overall feeling of being more organized and in control of your business.

We hope that that can impact the way that you can show up for your family because ultimately that's what's most important.

But the nature of life is that you have to go do your job in order to, to take care of them and to, to take care of them maybe in the way you want to, to do that trip or to do whatever.

So if we could impact even just a handful of people a year and hopefully tens of thousands of people in our platform, but, but if we can just impact some of our users to, to have just a more organized and get more satisfaction out of their job so that they can show up better for their, their family like we, we, we've, we've done it.

Like that's, that's all that matters.

So that's the metric you're really measuring off of is like that, that life type of metric, right?

Yeah.

And it's obviously it's something that, that we won't know the full impact.

Sometimes people tell us these kinds of things in testimonial videos or you know, when they call into customer support and they say things and they're, you know, they express it.

It's, it's hard to have like some metric is like life's changed, you know, we're at two now.

Like it doesn't work like that.

Sure.

And that's what's beautiful about our mission is that it's, you don't, you may not know all the people that you impact with it, but that's what we talk about when we're talking with my developers or we're talking with the design team.

Like, guys, we're designing this so that people can use it and they can understand it, they can get more value like those so that they can, you know, win more jobs, make more money and have more time with their.

Their family.

It's not just like, hey, how can we build this so that, you know, we can just.

Just make more sales?

Right?

Have more companies?

Like, yeah, and that's the nature of business is.

Is to.

To build your business.

But we always bring it back to, like, how's this going to impact that individual?

Like, how are.

How are they going to be able to use it better?

Because sometimes companies, as they grow, they get caught up in like, dude, we're scaling, we're scaling, we're scaling.

But, you know, over the course of a year or two years, no one's at the company that was there two years ago.

Like, the turnover's high.

And so, yeah, this big revolving door of.

And ch.

Because the culture or whatever.

Right?

Yeah.

So our, Our mission, like, how can we help these companies keep more reps?

Keep, you know, help them take our tool, present it to their reps and give their reps the.

The toolbox to go and.

And do their job, to then want to stay with that company?

And we've all worked at different companies and, and there's probably that one company.

In your mind, you're like, I would never go back.

I would never work, guys.

I would never.

And then on the flip side, you've got those.

That company, and you're probably with them right now if they're still in business.

But you're like, man, I love it here.

Like, you know, I. I wake up and I go to work and I don't feel like it's a chore, like I get to enjoy it.

Yeah.

There's still hard days and there's long days and it's hot and it's cold and everything else.

But I. I have that true family.

And some people are like, oh, you know, we're a family.

And it gets kind of like where everyone says that, but there's that.

There's those companies that are.

That are authentic and real, where you feel that.

And so hopefully we can help with some of that.

I love this, and this is such a powerful conversation.

It's what Close it now is all about for everybody listening.

In fact, I'll just read the mission statement for the company super quick because it completely applies to this.

The mission statement is basically within the realm of hvac.

We're spearheading a transformative movement.

Our goal extends beyond sales.

It encompasses every facet of life.

We're the driving force, inspiring top performers who crave excellence not only in their professional endeavors, but also in fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth.

Together we're proving that we can indeed have it all.

Join us in revolutionizing the H vac industry and unlocking our fullest potential, both personally and professionally.

And so that's the mission statement.

And it completely aligns with this because like we were talking about before, the episode is like, who cares if you make a million dollars a year if you have a heart attack and get a divorce along the way?

Right.

Your kids don't even know who you are.

And personally, I've lived this.

A couple years ago, I mean, I almost got divorced because my wife was like, okay, for the last decade, every May hit and I was like, okay, I'm the air conditioning widow.

I'll see you in October.

Right?

So I'm missing birthday parties and I'm missing vacations and I'm missing all these things.

And finally she just told me, she was like, you know, I see no reason really to be married anymore because even when you're here, you're not present because your mind is always on work.

And it, man, talk about a heavy moment.

But it gave me the experience and the voice to be able to with certainty tell people that you can make a change.

It doesn't have to be like that.

Let's work smarter, not harder, by finding tools like this to make things way more efficient.

If we can cut an hour or hour and a half out of our day of the tedious bouncing back and forth between apps and trying to track this and then end up in this nasty downward spiral of being unorganized.

Yeah.

And it's a feeling, ideally, that it can help you accomplish, to feel more in control of your business and not be reactive.

You know, I share a similar story in the fact that, like, I spent, you know, 12 years in door to door, like, yeah, door sales.

You're working the 4th of July, you're working Memorial Day, you're working Labor Day, you're working all the holidays.

When families get together and do barbecues, that's the time where companies do the biggest incentives to drive their reps to get out in the field and go hit everyone while they're home.

Right.

And so it works against families in the fact that, like, you know, recruiting meetings at 11 o' clock at night and going to Denny's or going to this or, you know, all these fire, hey, this rep's thinking about quitting and you, you know, have to call them and talk them off the edge and all these things.

All these fire drills that come up.

I lived that for 12 years.

And so, you know, I, I was in a, a Q and A with Ed Mylett and we were talking about this concept of family and work life, balance and, and one thing he shared with me that changed my life was just that there is no balance.

It's all about different priorities at different times of the day.

Right.

And so at 7:00 in the morning, you're gonna find me in my house making pancakes and I'm gonna be crushing the pancake artists.

You know, I'll be making Mickey Mouse pancakes and freaking.

I can, I can make a gun.

I can even be like naked.

I can do.

I'm a beast because I'm making pancakes for my kids to go to school at 9 o'.

Clock.

I'm supposed to be the CEO of rep card.

And crushing that at 5:30.

This is what changed my life is when I go home, I don't pull in my driveway unless I'm off my phone.

And I leave my phone in my car when I go in my house for the first 30 minutes.

Wow.

And that changed because I used to be the guy that walked in the door.

I'm on the phone and I'm like giving my kids the finger.

Like, hey, one more second.

Hey, hold on.

Just one more minute.

Yeah.

And they want to tell me about the field trip they went on.

They want to tell me about, you know, something that happened at baseball practice.

They want to tell me about, you know, swimming lessons.

They want to tell me about tumbling.

They want to tell me about, you know, this new game they found on the iPad.

Whatever is big in their world.

My kids are 11 to 2, I got 4.

So they're, they're spread out in there.

But, you know, that's all they want is your, your attention for that 15 to 20 minutes.

And then they're going to be right back to what they were doing.

But if you give them the one minute finger and then eventually they lose that excitement, they're going to go back to it and you've lost that sacred time.

And for me, I look forward now to going home and, and having that, that moment with them.

It's not that I didn't look forward to going home, it's just, it's, it's a new event.

Like I get to go home and I know.

And they're always like, I walk in the door and they run up, daddy, and it's only going to last so long, right?

And, and so I've been doing that for a year and a half and I'm not perfect at it, but I'd say 90% of the time.

And you know, if you got, if you got an Apple watch, take it off.

Like totally disconnect.

Yeah.

And there it's really cool because there's been many times where I put my phone down and, and all of a sudden it's like 9:30 at night and I'm like, I haven't even like looked at my phone once.

Right.

I slowly realized that I was lying to myself, thinking that I'm so important and that I need to be so responsive to everyone in my world.

All my sales reps, you know, other executive, all I need to be there and quick and responsive.

And I'm telling my family, hey, take, take the back seat, I've got something that's more important.

But you'll justify it thinking, oh, I'm a business owner, I've got to take care of my family.

So I need to take care of this fire drill at work because my family benefits from the work that I do.

And, and, and you'll lie to yourself and justify.

And, and I, I was able to break that.

And it's been so liberating to realize that those people that are going to call you after 5:30, 6:30, 7:30, like if you called them the next day or you shot them a text at 9:30 when you grabbed your phone said hey man, I'll hit you up tomorrow.

They're not going to just walk out of your life.

No, they're going to be okay.

And, and it was, it was hard at first because I had to set boundaries with some of my, some of my closest friends that I would call on the way home.

Yeah, you know, I'm always calling people, I'm driving and we're talking business and I pull into my driveway and then they have, they're in the middle of a 10 minute story.

It's hard to just be like, hey man, I gotta go.

And so I told them like, hey, I'm doing this new thing.

When I say hey, I'm pulling up to my house, I'm hanging up like.

I'm the cut off.

And so then what happened is they started doing it and I told them why.

And so it's cool because like my close network, when I pull up to my house, I'm like, hey, you know, I, I'm pulling up to my driveway like, all right, see you later bro.

Bye.

Yeah.

And then even people that don't know, I was talking to a guy yesterday and he was in a different time zone.

And so I Could tell he was pulling up to his house.

I'm like, hey, man, we can chat tomorrow.

Sound like you're pulling up to your house.

Enjoy your family.

I'll see you later.

Yeah.

And it got me to not be the guy that's sucking someone's time that should be walking in their door, off the phone to embrace their kids and their.

And their wife and to enjoy that just sacred time.

So anyways, I'm a huge advocate of that concept because it's.

It's changed so much for me.

And.

And it's, I think, made my family feel like I'm more of a human and I'm not a robot that just makes money up.

And, you know, it takes time to stop thinking about the business when you walk in the door, like you said, you have to totally like.

But not having any technology.

And then when you think about it, oh, yeah, what about texting that guy?

Shoot, I forgot to text Jim about that huge deal.

And it's like, no, not right now.

And you just slowly, like, are able to just soften that and not.

Not be so reactive to your business, but be organizing and control.

Oh, love, thank you so much for sharing that.

Because it's the.

It's the trap we all fall into.

You know, if the.

You're the owner, you're the manager.

Just a.

You know, top performers are busy freaking people.

Very seldom do I find one that just has one thing.

Normally we've got a side gig going on too.

Maybe a couple side gigs.

I just spent a week in New York working with a company, and every single person in there, like, one guy was a photographer on the side.

The other guy owned two other businesses, right?

And it's like, holy cow, guys, you don't have time.

He's like, don't be a jack of all trades and master of none.

Let's master something here.

But that's the trap.

And so thank you for going through that, because it's the missing piece of.

I personally feel like sales, the actual sales skills is the least important part in this podcast.

All the time.

We say work to become someone worth buying from.

That means having your relationships in order, having your nutrition and fitness and your personal growth journey and your spiritual life, whatever that means to you.

As long as it aligns with your core values.

Every person has something they know they should be doing that they're probably not when it comes to that, if it's just mindfulness and meditation, whatever it is for that individual.

And sales skills are actually the least important because you can take any Top producer in any industry, set them into another industry, they may know zero about the new product or service and will instantly be top of the leaderboard because there's someone that people want to do business with.

Right.

And I love this.

I love the Rep card because it, I just call it the rep Card.

It's like the Facebook.

Right.

I love Rep Card because it just, it.

It.

When I first started using it, I was able to get rid of probably in every single data entry interaction.

I probably cut out five minutes of having to bounce between apps.

So when you start to multiply that across time, Holy cow.

That, that, that frees up so much space in your life to be able to focus on these important things.

And so this is really actually where I wanted to land in the conversation because, man, it's cool to get to know a founder and CEO of a.

Of cool.

A great company like Rep Card.

But even cooler is when you know your core values are very apparent and clearly come out and what your driver really is is to, to help people do this.

So, yeah, thanks for sharing that.

Yeah, no problem, Sam.

Appreciate it.

So what.

So kind of staying along those lines but moving back into some of the technology a little bit.

You mentioned that there's been a couple new things you've released, a couple new add ons, I guess not add ons, just integrations into the app and what it does.

What are a couple of those?

That has been the most recent changes and added to the app that you're really excited about?

Yeah, so over the past six months we added like a set or closure calendar, which allows, you know, everything organization calendar wise.

You know, setters can book appointments to closers or you can book for yourself and things like that.

But being able to see when people are available, when they're not available, if they're already busy during that time slot.

And then that, that was a big need for a lot of our clients.

And, and then we added a competitions platform.

So we had leaderboards for the last few years, but now it's.

How do you take a leaderboard and create a competition out of it?

And so you can have an incentive.

Let's say it's a gift card or it's a, you know, a dirt bike or it's a longboard or it's, you know, a softball bat, whatever, whatever the incentive is.

And then you can run a competition amongst a group of salespeople and say, hey, whoever does the most of this by this date gets this price.

Or you know, there's.

And then there's A way to rank it with different points and weight, different activities and things.

And we also added the.

A way to kind of punish the person that comes in last.

Yeah.

So it's not just like the first, second, and third guy out of these 50 sales reps get surprised.

But like, if you come in last, you have to do a cold plunge.

You have to like get an egg smack in your face or something.

And so there's a lot of fun that can go on with our competitions piece.

And then we added a full chat, allowing companies to chat onetoone or with group chats, they don't have to hop.

Over to WhatsApp or whatever they're using for their chat features.

WhatsApp and Slack or whatever, they can just keep it all right there.

And so it allows for some trash talk.

It allows for people to get trained in real time.

We have a cool feature with like audio messages and stuff so that, you know, when I was in the field a lot, my reps, I would tell them to send audio messages into the group chat and they would say what they're struggling with.

And then someone's like, well, what kind of area are you in?

Or maybe they already knew and like, hey, what are you struggling?

I'm struggling with my intro.

I can't get past the intro with anyone.

Like, right, okay, great.

Hey, try this and tell me how it goes.

And it was crazy.

Within 15 to 30 minutes every time.

Like, thanks so much.

I've already had way better responses.

And a lot of times they were like, hey, I closed the next door.

Yeah.

And what happened was they actually didn't really need the word tracks as much as they needed confidence.

Yeah.

Because after you get 15 or 20 no's to.

To start your day and you already had a bad morning with your spouse or something that happened or had a miscarriage or life happened, and then you go into 15 or 20 rejections.

Sometimes you want to just burn the neighborhood down and freaking dip.

And so you go to this group chat and you're like, I need help.

Someone just texts you back and like, dude, just work harder, dude.

Just make sure you're smiling.

It's like, dude, that's not enough.

Like, they need help now.

And so our group, our group chat feature of making the audio more present and more easier to access.

It's not buried in the app.

It's on the front of every chat.

You can send an audio instead of a chat.

It allows you to give a pitch or give feedback with voice inflection, with real word tracks and truly Impact that rep in real time, going back to the mission so that they can turn their day around, have a better day, maybe close a deal, make some money and be more encouraged to continue with that job.

Because sales, I think, creates a lot of freedom.

It's one of the greatest ways to create freedom in your life to have more.

Absolutely.

Family and all that.

So, you know, if we can do that to help companies be able to affect their reps better and keep that.

And it sounds dumb and nerdy to be like, oh, an audio chat's going to save someone's marriage.

Like that's.

It's just like this overall concept of being more efficient and allowing you to impact the individuals.

Sure.

It's understanding the butterfly effect, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

And letting that evolve.

And.

And so anyways, that's the chat.

I could nerd out on this stuff on why we do these little things, but it's very intentional.

And so chat is one that we've launched.

Well, I think that's the missing piece.

When I've done, as you can imagine, five years of running this podcast, interviews with lots of different founders and CEOs or developers of different tools and apps and programs and stuff.

And that's actually the most important piece is the why do we do these pieces?

Why do we have this feature?

Why do we have this feature?

It's not the, hey, this feature does this.

But just like in sales, when, you know, one of the main concepts is seeing everything through the benefit lens to communicate to the homeowner.

Well, the benefit is the why.

Right.

So thanks for going into that.

So in no way I feel like you're nerding out on it.

Because that's really the most important part is why was this developed?

Because if we understand the why, then we'll use it the way it's intended or even find a cooler way sometimes it's like I didn't even realize this feature would can be used for that.

But wow, these guys in the field figured it out and now it's like multipurpose, right?

Yeah.

So it's always really cool when that happens.

But, man, I love this.

So one thing that's also that I really am a big fan of about the rep card platform is it's great for enterprise level.

So say I've got a team of 50 or 100 guys or 30 guys or however many it can be integrated together and managed like that.

It's also for everybody listening.

It's awesome for individuals, just as a single person, you don't know a soul that Uses or has Rep Card, you can use it very affordably for yourself as well.

Which is like, there's a lot of different products out there that, you know, maybe they're great for teams, but they suck for individuals and vice versa.

This is one that actually is really incredible for both applications.

So can you break that down a little bit and how an individual might use it as well?

Kind of some of the behind the scenes there.

Yeah.

So I'm glad you brought this up because Rep Card initially was built for the individual.

The initial, like me flying around the country 2017, thinking about this software that could.

It really was meant to just help my sales team.

Yeah.

And you always have this vision of like, what if it could grow and what if other companies would want to use it.

But initially it was built for the individual.

Our initial game plan was to build this app, put it in the app store and just have individuals download it and use it and try to just get millions of users.

And then quickly we had enterprise level clients that were like, yo, what if it could do this?

Or can you make a web app so that we can tie everyone together?

And so then we made like the enterprise features.

But the core function of Rep Card you can get today by downloading it in the app Store, it's totally free.

And I'll just say that our free version is better than most digital business card paid version.

Just calling it what it is.

I have a mentor that.

That is one of the founders of Kajabi and massive.

Massive company.

I mean, they.

I think they've raised $500 million.

Yeah.

Brenda Burchard.

And that's the whole.

The whole thing, right?

Yeah, they're like, hey, you know, your free version needs to be better than.

Than most people's paid stuff.

Like, what can you do to.

To make that?

So we've kind of stuck to that.

And so you can get in use it for free.

And where we kind of draw the line is we feel like, okay, if this user's using it enough or in this certain way, we feel like that's where they're going to start, like making money with it.

Yeah.

Then we charge.

But that's kind of where we draw the line is like, hey, we want to give you a ton of value first.

But yeah, you can use it as an individual, send your card, you can have multiple accounts, all that stuff and get a lot of value out of it.

And then, you know, and it.

It works that way for, for our lead gen, sometimes we have people using that and they end up showing their Sales team and then their boss.

And then all of a sudden, we're scheduling a call with the founder, the owner, to get it for the whole company, because two of their reps had really good experiences with it on the individual level.

So you don't have to, you know, if you just are using paper cards now and you just want to start this transition, you don't have to wait for your company to onboard.

You can just start using it and start impacting your.

Your personal life, your.

Your business.

Right.

Right now.

Yeah, I love that.

And.

And he's.

He's not kidding, y'.

All.

I've used the.

For years.

We used the free version.

I say for years.

It was probably about a year we really started integrating this into our team.

And I mean, basically everybody had the free version at first, and they're like, oh, well, what will this do?

And then one person was like, I don't know why we just didn't think about it.

We just.

We're all super fast acting like implementers.

Like, let's just go and try it out and see how it works.

Well, everybody got the free version.

We all, like, kind of halfway set it up, probably not nearly as good as we should.

And then one lady came into the team, and she's like, do you guys even know what this thing will do?

And she's like, I watched a couple of the demos and the trainings, and she's like, check out the paid version.

And it blew everybody's minds.

She's like, oh, my God, it was already so good before.

She's like, I just spent five minutes and set this up, and here's what it'll actually do.

And so at that point was the big turning point.

Everyone's like, oh, my God, I got to get that too.

And so it started this avalanche throughout the team of everybody getting their, you know, their paid version.

Yeah, because it's so cool.

Yeah, you can go individual free or individual paid, but then you can do paid as a company.

And that's where it can get even more involved with integrations or, you know, leaderboards and having all the data flow where it needs to, and it saves reps time.

You know, when you onboard a new sales rep, you know, you give him access to rep card now, and he's got the chat and he already has the company logo uploaded.

And it pretty.

In the whole thing.

I mean, when we first started out, it was.

And I was a lot more involved in.

In other parts of the business.

Like, you know, we.

We print and send out ID badges Yeah.

Okay.

The plastic ID badges, they have an NFC chip in them, They've got a QR code, it's tied to a web page.

So, you know, a homeowner can verify that you actually work for your company.

It's a really techy ID badge.

But we get people that had you.

Everyone has to upload their logo and we would get ID badges and the logo part of the section for their ID badge was literally a selfie, a selfie image.

They would pull their, their polo over and they would try to take a really good selfie of their logo on their shirt and they would put that as the logo for their ID badge.

Sure.

We were just like, oh my gosh.

So we, we actually still will go and that doesn't happen a ton anymore.

But it was, it was wild.

So we, we will just go to the Internet and find their company logo and for them and make sure that when they get their badge it looks pretty.

What I'm getting at is that when you have an enterprise account, you, you set up all the branding, you do all this stuff one time you want to load videos, load, you know, assets into the, into the platform.

When, when a new user onboards, they have, you know, all the bullets and the gun and they're able to go to war now versus it being like, I got rep card now.

I've got to go track down our logo, I've got to go write a text campaign, I've got to go add the video from our YouTube channel.

I've got like all that's gone.

It's like plug and play.

You get access, they make their password, they log in and it's like, cool.

I can go to the doors, I can go into the field right now and start impacting myself, right.

My business, using it.

So that's, and that's a massive lesson for everybody listening is, you know, when you have your teams, whatever their specialty is that they were hired for, make it the lowest barrier of entry to do that thing.

Don't like have them go through.

Okay, you've got to do this step, this step, this step, this step and this step that are maybe something completely different skill set that you're asking them to learn and implement that they will never use again in this position.

So why make that barrier of entry so high that I mean as leader, manager, owner, have that mindset of how can I make somebody's onboarding journey the lowest barrier of entry possible to get to the income producing activities as quick as possible.

And if you can make that process smoother Your whole life will be easier, way less headaches, but your people you're bringing on will feel way more supported along the way.

And that rocket fuel of excitement will last longer.

Instead of being all burned up in these activities that because every new employee has this rocket fuel that will only make it a certain distance until they get a win.

So if we have them burn up all that rocket fuel in the setup that they don't even need to probably be doing, and then they're like, oh well, okay, I guess I'll go not knock doors now or make sell.

But if we have them use that rocket fuel in the income producing activities, that's where the magic starts to happen and speeds the process so much faster.

At least that's my opinion.

What do you think about that, Brad?

Oh, 100% giving, you know, onboarding.

We, we talk with thousands of business owners and the one thing that they all have in common with requests from us is they want to be able to set up a platform so that when they onboard new new users, new reps, new staff, that they can have all the tools in one spot and they can just like get to work.

They can watch, you know, we have a training library so they can start watching the training videos, they can go knockdoor, they can, they can do all these things.

And so they all want to have everything in one platform.

And we feel like we've done a good job at, you know, now that we launched these last few features of having kind of everything you need in a sales environment all in one platform.

So you onboard a new rep and like I said, you gave them like a loaded gun.

You aren't like, hey, here, you know, here's a gun.

But like you got to clean it first and the bullets are over at Walmart and you've got to, you know, go over here, there's a case, make sure you take good care of it.

But we don't have a case for like any, any you know, parable you want to, you want to draw to.

It's just like you're giving them the toolbox ready to go.

Yeah.

Not, hey, here's a, here's a theory of how you could do your, your business with us.

Like kind of figure it out.

It's, it's more of a plug and play approach, getting to the more important things versus getting stuck in the weeds of like the setup and the onboarding of staffing.

100% agree.

Love this.

Well, it is, we just hit the hour mark so we're going to land this plane and thank you for being here.

Man.

This has been a great conversation.

I'm really excited about.

One, about rep card two, about how I just have a idea about a thousand different ways that it can be adopted and implemented into the H vac space even a little differently than how it's been used in the past.

So we'll.

I'm sure we'll chat more about that in the future.

But let's do this one.

Any last nuggets or what would you tell that person that is out there?

You know, speak to that individual that's like a little bit on that unorganized side wanting to tighten things up.

What's the number one action step that they can do right now to immediately implement that will like start to make that shift for them?

Yeah, I would say just to, you know, visualize what that would be like being on the other side of that.

You know, picture yourself being organized and being more in control.

What's a benefit in your life that would happen or what's something that would change for the positive and let that be your motivation and then go figure out whatever process you can implement to become more organized or more structured and kind of stop just being so reactive and start being proactive about your.

Your days that turn into weeks.

You know, you get into months and years.

It starts to get really like out there.

Think about your daily.

Your daily work habits and your.

And.

And your weekly work habits habits and what can you do?

And if that's rep card, great.

If it's not rep card, our mission still exists that we want you to go show up to your family and.

And your life just better and not let work be.

It's already 80% of our day is work.

Don't let it leak into every other area of your life.

And be family time is now mentally work time and all that.

So I would just say visualize that and think about what the benefit could be.

Whether it's more intentional time with your kids or with your wife or making sure that date night is important.

Like think about the benefit that you could have and then let that be your motivation to go be proactive in making making these small changes.

And so it could be rep card could be another platform.

But I challenge you to do that because that benefit that only you know, my benefit was more intentional family time coming through the door.

That was mine.

Right your could be something totally different.

It could be quitting a habit, starting a new habit, whatever.

Maybe you're not even married.

That's fine.

Maybe it's finding someone like could be Whatever.

But let that benefit be.

Be your driver and then, you know, something good happens.

Share it with me.

Give me a call.

Love it.

Wisdom right there.

So how can they get.

How can everybody get a hold of you?

How can they get a hold of Rep Card?

Maybe not you necessarily directly, but, you know, can they follow you?

Where can they go to learn more?

Yeah, so just, you know, Instagram's always quick and easy.

Just the Rep Card app is our handle on every social media.

And then my, my Instagram is just the Brad Mortensen.

There's actually another Brad Mortensen that lives right in my area.

And we're the exact same age.

We got married the same day.

Not to each other.

I'm just kidding.

But yeah, it's crazy.

So sometimes people mix it up, but it's cool.

So, yeah, go, go give us a follow.

And, and that's where we put out, like, new updates and feature launches and trainings.

And if you just get into the app, we do trainings every single week.

And we'll just send a push notification to the app like, hey, we're going live in five minutes doing a training on how to get more referrals.

And boom, you're live with one of our sales guys or me sometimes.

And we're talking for 20 minutes on this, on referrals, and then we do a Q A.

And so it's a chance for you to ask questions or, or figure out, you know, how you can leverage Rep Card.

And sometimes you learn stuff from other users.

Sure.

And there's, you know, 100 people on those calls typically.

And you can learn from networking and from other people just as well as from, you know, you know, podcast or whatever.

So.

Oh, I can imagine the, the level of people that are on that call.

One would vary a lot.

But, you know, traditionally the top performers are the ones that are in all the trainings.

Lower performers are the ones that I don't have time to do all that training.

But what they don't realize is all of the top performers are the ones that are taking all the training all the time, just constantly keep their axe sharpened.

And so hopping into these trainings, you'll be able to network with other top performers.

So people that have gone ahead and have the numbers that you want.

So that's.

That's really exciting.

I'm glad y' all do that.

That's.

I don't hear a very many organizations, especially y' all size, that have that kind of real time interaction with, to support, which is.

That's really cool.

Cool.

Really unheard of.

Yeah.

Goes back to the mission, man.

Got to impact the one, impact that individual.

But cool, cool, cool.

Well, awesome.

Well, let's land this plane.

Everybody reach out to me.

Sam, close it now.net or go to close it now.net.

that's the website.

Or on Instagram.

The real close it now.

And of course find the Facebook group, which is CloseIt Now.

On Facebook, all the branding is sanely consistent, just like rep card, which makes it easy to find.

So do that.

Everybody make sure to check out the March event I'm having March 20th and 21st.

It's a two day sales masterclass which is going to knock your socks off.

This is when we were talking about how every time we go out, companies are going from 40% to 60% plus closing rate.

They're going from average tickets of 9,000 to $16,000, average ticket in a matter of a month and then staying there.

You know, those are the kind of numbers when we do on sites.

Well, that's the system that I'll be training March 20th and 21st here in Austin, Texas.

There will also be the ability at the event to experience Revcard.

We're going to be playing with that a little bit.

I'm going to teach you how to use it.

Basically, it's my new mission is like, let's update our industry.

Anything that's been done the Same way for 50 plus years is ripe for revolution.

And this is one of the simple things that will change so many people's lives in a heartbeat if you just knew it existed.

So I've become the kind of poster boy for this message, which is we're very aligned in our core values here, which is great.

So again, thanks for being here with us, Brad.

I appreciate it.

And until next time, man, everybody go save the world one heat stroke at a time.

Go save the world one frostbite at a time.

Thanks for listening to Close it now with Sam Wakefield.

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