Master Agents

Introduction

Some folks have very strong sales training and experience. They have had decades of experience in the field, selling everything from screws to software. Now they have moved into the “Silverback Gorilla” stage of their career, giving back to the community that had helped them so much.

Initially when we talked to them, hitting the street enrolling the hiring/working side of the Hefe platform didn’t motivate them as much as teaching a new generation “the art of selling.” This how and why we created the “Master Agent” level commission system. You might have seen it before in other parts of the materials we have covered. Now you’ll learn come of the tricks of these Master Agents we had worked with.

As a reminder in case you missed it.

Master Agents earn a small commission from Agents that enroll folks to hire and/or work the system. Master Agent themselves don’t sell directly.

The Side Hustle
Today we are going to learn more about two master agents, Joe of Nevada County, California and Steve of Copperopolis, California. Both of these guys have had a long career in sales, starting from the very bottom selling things like garage doors, screws, bailing wire before moving up into selling technology and expensive tech consultants. Both made six and seven figure salaries. Both trained and mentored many other sales people, but never made a dime off of the earnings of those folks they trained. It was in conversations with them that we fully formed the master agent model. Though the credit for lightbulb event goes to David who sold fleet vehicles. Hopefully soon, you’ll start to see more of David’s upcoming videos.

Joe’s Angle
What Joe had really learned how to do very well from his corporate job is sales training. Not just running the event and teaching people, but everything behind the scenes. From creating killer Power Point Slides, which he says he learned from me but honestly, he has taken it to a new level. To managing logistics, marketing, and so forth. He is a high demand individual in his Fortune 100 Tech Company’s sales arm. Despite the pay check, benefits and stock options…the job never set well with him. It was corporate, which means lame. Long periods of boredom, too many rules, too much management indecision and the list goes on and on. You probably know it yourself, or heard stories.

Joe’s goal is to buy a big ranch, but the price tag is awfully steep in California. Leasing land isn’t much better as he is learning from his current hobby operation for hundred heads of American Waguyi he is running. Plus he has a love for three gun, gun smithing and forging. None of these activities he has enough time for, as he is raising a family and working corporate. Only if he didn’t have to spend 10 hours a day in a job he hated, but they paid so well.

Obviously, Joe does not have the time to go door to door, business to business to sell Hefe services in his area. He can’t give up his day job because of the mortgage and family expenses. So, instead Joe has been training the younger generation in his area through his church and community. These young folks don’t have much opportunity in the area, they needed something. So one-by-one, he has been setting up young folks to learn, sell and work on Hefe. Sure many times they have a problem sticking to it, but for Joe, these are foundations for a bigger problem which we will showcase in the near future. Joe’s goal is to use the Master Agent system to build another revenue stream to replace the corporate job to allow him more time for the cattle business, his kids and his hobbies. Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing Joe featured on our platform in the near future. He does make an occasional appearance on our insiders Zoom call.

Steve’s Angle
The one thing you will notice about Steve is he looks like and has the smile of Tom Cruise. Good or bad, this has been his golden meal ticket to have built up a massive contact list of folks he has sold to, or taught to sell. While having his dream home on the lake, boats and all the toys he has ever wanted, he still made the long commute to Silicon Valley to work his VP job. After all, retirement is expensive when you have expensive tastes and expensive kids. Plus as he said, when you retire, you die. He was looking for something that keeps him in the mix.

Steve’s initial angle has been soft selling his contacts to use services off of Hefe to get stuff done at their own houses. More of a favor to us, than something for himself. Though he didn’t mind the “ammo money” it was generating for him. Like Joe, Steve also had similar sales training experience and has kicked off a mentoring program for the children of the folks he knows. Creating future sales folks by getting them experience in selling of value, NOT selling steak knives and time-shares like he did.

Steve’s biggest contribution to the platform has been the agent dashboard which he uses in everyone of his mentoring calls. He does weekly calls with the kids he mentors. The “Come to Jesus Call” as he calls it, where each person has certain goals they have to reach, they have a minute to say what they promised to deliver by this call, what they have actually delivered since that last call and what they are going to deliver by the next call. This could be number of sign-ups, revenue numbers, etc. Then the call focuses on learning one new skill and having the kids learn how to apply it.

His total investment of effort is about 30 min to onboard the kid to his program. And then one hour on Monday morning with all the kids in the program. The first 30 minutes is spent going through the “Come to Jesus Part” and the last 30 minutes is lessons. When I say “kids” I don’t literally mean kids, but young adults. He occasionally calls bullshit on the call using the dashboard, but not often as he says, because he just needs to instill just enough fear that he is watching, without actually watching. He does it from his Zoom account which he just switched over to the $14.99 a month version for more features.

Steve doesn’t need the money, but it is a nice bonus income stream. His reward is providing a future for these kids either through the Hefe platform and eventually a professional Fortune 500 job if they choose. Steve is awesome to talk to. Maybe we can get him to do a Podcast on the lake this summer.

David’s Angle
Now I said two, but I mentioned David earlier. We are work with David on his new, upcoming podcasts and videos. Exciting stuff as we learn the art of podcasting. David’s weapon is all the other automotive sales guys he has met over the decades of selling cars (David has sold me 2 cars thus far, with 2 more on the way). As you learn more about David, you’ll love his story as well. Coming to the states alone as an underaged youth, getting a job to survive, his first boss forcing him to go to school as a condition of employment. True rags to riches story.

Bigbox David
One more person we need to highlight as well, the other David which we refer as Bigbox David or BBD. Or as he describes himself as “The Guinea Pig” as he has been around the platform since the early days. BBD is an injured general contractor that can’t work anymore in his trade. So he has taken up a retail job at a Bigbox company to apply some of his knowledge and for the benefits, which aren’t great but better than nothing. Just like the pay.

Unlike Steve and Joe, BBD has no formal training or experience in sales or sales operations. He is a very smart guy and just wings it. He is slowly building up a network by helping folks he naturally befriends through his day job. BBD has not only onboard a ton of folks he gets commissions from, but many of them have become agents themselves, making BBD a Master Agent by default. Which at first he, due tot he design of our commissions dashboard, he was a bit confused where the extra money was coming from. Money from people he didn’t know. He thought it was mistake, a nice mistake. So now, in the dashboard, we now show your network.

Helpful Tips from the Guys
This is the part where I try to call out what I learned from them, things you can apply for your own community.

• Think Scalable. Always think about how you can scale your time, which in non-tech speak is “work smarter, not harder”. Which means to make things more systematic and repeatable. For each of these folks, it means different things. For Joe, it meant certain presentation slide decks and other documents filled with links to videos and such. For Steve, it was following a more classic verbal approach that he started with earlier in his career, before the internet. With David, we are working with him and his son to develop to come up with a modern social media approach. Each of them is highly effective and unique. But they all have a common pattern. Repeatability. Same script, same content, with minor delivery differences to spice things up a little

• Be authentic. Folks see straight through you if aren’t legit. Sure there is “Fake it until you make it” but there is a nuance to it. There is folks that want to be successful that carry folks together on a journey of becoming successful. They might not know what they are doing exactly, but are trying to wing it. Versus on the other extreme those folks that rent out supercars, mansions, and parked corporate jets shooting videos pretending to be something they are not. You can smell those con jobs a mile away, and if you can’t, you will learn quickly as they steal money from you with zero results. It is okay to be a Master Agent that is not making HUGE money off the Hefe. Besides, we are not about making “huge money overnight” as a brand or company. Sure we talk about it as potential benefit of hard work. Joe and Steve both sold their experience as seasoned sales folks…and Hefe is a great way to learn and apply those lessons on something that goes back to #1 point…scalable. Not just scalable in selling it, but scalable as a revenue stream.

• Teach Beyond. Part of the value of the master agent is to teach new tricks, even ones you just learned yourself (be authentic). The tricks don’t have to be selling either, they could be as simple as setting up an LLC to help manage your expenses and minimize your tax burden. Or how to get the business to pay for that dream car without getting into trouble with the IRS. These soft value things are of huge value to your network. You’ll set up your network for success and make life long friends if you treat them as family, not tools for your own gain.

• Be a Leader. This is what the world sorely lacks. Being a leader doesn’t mean you have to be some kind of special person like Jocko or Goggins. What it means is that you care for the downstream folks in your network. That you look out for their interests, not just yours. This is so much different than say an MLM which is 100% about exploiting and pressuring everyone downstream to buy, buy, buy. Which as I have said a thousand times before, we are not an MLM, not even close. Every Master Agent we know that succeeds does so by caring about the people they enroll in the program. About the bigger picture of not just their income, but the bigger mission of making their communities stronger. About stopping the theft of big tech that robs them blind. Leaders that believe in themselves, their mission, and care for their people go a long way.

• Apply your skills. Everyone has skills. Even the ones that say they don’t. Maybe you don’t believe in yourself enough to know what those skills are. But you have them, you just haven't listened to your true self. We have a guy in Atlanta that just drove and didn’t think he had anything, but he did. He knew other drivers, he knew how the system worked. He knew how to talk to folks in his ecosystem. Discover your skills and apply them

• Make a Plan. Stick to it. Now Joe we knew for years, he has gone through the Retro 168 years before we came up with Hefe. It was one of the tools he uses in his fight with adult ADHD. Otherwise, he’d fall back to his natural state of being a “professional procrastinator”. He makes sure he has his to-dos and goals for the next 6 weeks written down.

• Have Fun. This has got to be awfully hard for those that are desperate. These folks above are all doing well before they took on being a Master Agent. Having personally lived in a trailer and have once owed more money than I could make in a decade…not a penny left after bills. I questioned them how a person in this situation could be successful. While their first answer it to “just work harder”, I pushed back on them harder to figure out from those that they mentor, what was the breakthrough mind shift to make folks successful. They said that the moment folks went from “having to do it” to “liking to do it” the close rates went up 1000%.

• Your Reputation. It means absolutely everything. It is the only asset you have that you can control. It will either make or break you.

• Build Good Relationships and they will pay off. Joe would add “damn good relationships” by keeping you word. Making sure folks know you by reputation.

• Don’t burn bridges. Or in other words, don’t let your ego take control and ruin everything. If something is fustrating or makes you angry. Walk away. Cool off. Reapproach it after you have a had chance to reflect.

Hopefully, this gave you some ideas on how you could potentially use the Master Agent capbilites of the Hefe Platform leveraging your experience and know how. Please let us know if you have questions, comments, want to share your experience or be in one of our upcoming podcasts.

Hotshot Trucking

Introduction
There is a rapidly growing market called “Hotshot Trucking” which a kind of hauling using heavy-duty pickup trucks with smaller loads. Things like moving a few cars on a flatbed to the next city. Hauling a large amount of lumber out to a construction site that is a bit difficult for a traditionally flatbed semi-truck. Or hauling a load of hay for a horse stable. The list is endless. For many states and cities, there is very good money in hauling. Especially near urban centers.

Use Case
Jesse was frustrated with the main freight broker in his town. While many brokers he had worked with over the years were great folks, including the previous owner of this particular brokerage. Jesse felt this new guy was taking too much off the top and tended to route better loads to certain folks that didn’t include the local haulers like Jesse. Mostly out of towners. This was hurting his income and those others that he knew locally. Jesse heard about Hefe through one of our ads and decided to reach out to us to figure out how he could use our platform to cut out this broker.

Now Jesse didn’t want to get his Freight Broker License. It was just something that didn’t interest him, he knew how to haul and loved being on the road, not be chained to a phone and computer all day. He felt he already had enough paperwork to deal with on his own operation. Taking on more paperwork and more fees for bigger bonds. Managing drivers, schedules, etc. So much work and people, besides he got into trucking to get away from people.

Looking at his town, most of the loads weren’t something you would find on one of those fancy trucking job boards. He knew most folks around town, had indirectly hauled for them for years, and just wanted to bypass this broker.

Push came to shove and Jesse took matter into his own hands. He reached out to all his buddies that also hauled. Enrolled them onto the Hefe platform and together they formed their own virtual hotshot hauling co-op. Their goals were putting the local drivers first, keeping out the out-of-towners and getting rid of this bad broker. They together started to canvas the town, talking to every farmer, dealer, supplier in town about switching their business off of the broker to the Hefe platform. Most of the shippers they talked to knew funny business was going on ever since the new broker acquired the brokerage from another local who retired. The time and effort to switch to someone else that they didn’t know, using some out of some remote call center on the other side of the world didn’t appeal to them either. So they just went along with the funny business and excuses. After all, those guys have their own problems and all they cared about was something making to where it needed to go safely and timely. Which this broker was doing.

Benefits
The first thing that Jesse and crew notice and liked was the immediate pay bump. They had no idea how much the broker was taking off the top and now they knew. Also being able to negotiate directly with shippers was nice for so many reasons. No middlemen offering almost no value as they weren’t the guy doing the actual work. Heck it was nice talking to the real customers instead of relaying a message through some guy on the other side of the world that didn’t care or have any sense of urgency. Jesse had the number of the customer and could call or text with them directly when instructions were funny or if there were some delays. But where it really mattered the most was the bottom line. Before he was earning around $2.00/mile and now he was getting between $2.50-3.00/mile and at times more. These are all ballpark numbers, he didn’t want to provide more specifics when we talked to him. But he said he was on track to getting himself into the upper end of hauling in his area and state. He is also finding himself servicing regions and time slots he hadn’t had access to before. Along with buying two additional trailers, a dump trailer and a smaller trailer to get better MPG.

Oh, as for that broker, that guy basically is out of the hotshot business.

Best Practices
In partnering with Jesse we learned a few things:

• If you don’t have a brokerage license, do not insert yourself into the process between the shipper and carrier. You will get into trouble by your state’s attorney general office for violating the federal and state laws. Do not negotiate on the behalf of anyone, help with schedules, negotiate rates, exchange documentation, and so forth.

• The Hefe Platform is not a brokerage. We do not negotiate rates, schedules, screen drivers, ensure anyone, and so forth. We serve only in the role of a communications platform and processor of transactions. Just like Visa, AT&T and the internet are not brokers, neither is Hefe.

• When enrolling other drivers to serve your community or business. Or you want to offer your services to haul, please remember that this is a highly regulated business. You need to basically get permission first, then start hauling. Getting educated on the requirements of hauling is important and only a short Goole or Youtube search away. That Mother Trucker has an awesome 9 Steps to getting started in Hotshot Trucking.

• When in doubt, take a class at your local trucking school or seek out a local attorney specialized in trucking. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration can be quite complex and their regulations can be, like everything else, interpreted differently by different people. Know what you are getting into before getting into this business. Ideally, you need to be a driver already. Just because you have a small pickup or box truck, you can automatically offer your service on the Hefe platform.

• When enrolling a business to use Hefe as a platform for hotshot hauling, be sure to educate the business on the risk and requirements. They should always ask for appropriate licenses, bonds, records, etc of the person they are negotiating and hiring. Just because someone has been hauling for years for them, it doesn’t mean that they are legal and safe to haul for money. The business might run the risk of losing their load or run into other problems. Yeah, it seems like a pain for them, but the rewards outweigh a couple of minutes of extra effort.

• Some Hotshotters will push back, saying you’ll ruin their rates by introducing too much competition. Obviously getting the broker out of the picture will help rates, but many don’t have brokers in between them for now. With anything, where there is growth, there will be more brokers squeezing the margins, taking 30-40% off the top. The key thing is we are working together to grow the market by making it easier for more folks to hire hotshots. All while helping these operators keep more of their hard earned dollars. But more importantly, keeping more of those dollars inside their own local communities. Making those towns stronger.

• Stress the flexibility and cost advantages of hotshotting. It is the biggest selling point of the business in general. It doesn’t replace traditional trucking, it just gives folks one more option that they didn’t have before. For example, getting a custom-built car engine over to a customer a 100 miles away is faster, easier and cheaper with a hotshot than dealing with a traditional LTL carrier. Okay, maybe not dollar-for-dollar cheaper. But having it there in a couple hours instead of next week. Not having to worry about getting to and from a dock. You know, all those extra things that eat time. Plus your customer will be 500% happier getting it quicker and not dealing with the delivery pains of an LTL.

Summary
Hotshot trucking is booming market during the pandemic. From talking to unbiased experts in this business, they think it will keep growing as we move into the new post-pandemic economy. Shippers will continue to have smaller loads going to more unique places that it is challenging for full-sized trucks. The pandemic was the first time that many of the shippers ever used or consider hotshots for their loads. Or they had to let go of their in-house delivery drivers and sell off their trucks to survive. Either way, they have come accustomed to the speed, flexibility and better rates of a hotshot. And their customers like it too.

For the independent owner-operators, while many truckers did well during the pandemic, many others had to give their truck back to the bank. Have had other challenges staying or getting back on the road. While others just simply got tired of big trucks and want something easier to own and maintain. Many of these operators already have a one-ton pickup with very few miles on them that they can put to use right now. They can use their F350 for hauling loads and taking their family to Foster’s Freeze for ice cream cones. In talking with others, Hotshotting appeals to them because they can be closer to home, doing smaller loads or starting a side hustle to make up for lost hours.

Folks looking to grow hot shot trucking in your community should do well.

Personal Note
For more than 20 years I have been on the shipping and receiving end of traditional and LTL freight. Never knew there was such a thing as hotshot trucking. There have been untold dozens of times where the LTL guys gave me outrageous prices along with horrible lead times. Most of the time it is not their fault, it is just the way it is. Other times it was completely their fault. Like one time I had a shipment of fiberglass race truck fenders that went back and forth across the state of California five times (yes I said FIVE TIMES the LONG way from San Diego to San Jose) over three and half weeks because of confusion on labels and paperwork. No one knew where it was, by the time they found it, it was back on another truck going the wrong way.

Needless to say, the part was horribly late causing other headaches and was damaged. Getting the claims process going was even more time and effort. Paid a thousand dollars for that botched LTL shipment and lost so many hours/days of my time that I will never get back dealing with the problem. Even before it all happened, I would have been happy to pay a hotshot put the crate into the back of a 1/2 ton pickup and drive it up here for a thousand bucks (or a tad more).

For the hotshot driver, 460 each way miles in an F150 would have been $80 of gas. Two drivers could have made $400 each in a day, 16 hours round trip each driving 7 hours…netting them $50/hour. How many jobs pay $400 in a day? And they could have done this after work was over on Friday evening and be home Saturday afternoon. Actually, I would have been happier receiving those parts on Saturday morning than the super busy regular business hours.

At the time of writing, we needed to find 2x 3/4 ton pickup trucks to haul 2x double axle trailers from Safford, Arizona to Madera, California. Wish we had someone in Tucson recruiting hotshot drivers to help with this urgent, complex emergency. It would have paid extremely well for these drivers for a 12 hour, 777-mile trip.

Tutoring

Introduction
Tutoring services has always been a hotspot for the Hefe platform.

High Schoolers and College students are always on the hunt to find a part-time job to fund their schooling without having to flip burgers, which doesn’t use their knowledge or skills.

While on the other side, parents of small children have had very few resources available to help to find these kids. Mostly word of mouth. Who wants to put $10 on a Craigslist ad to get a bunch of strangers applying? School job boards have become professional platforms that either charge too much or make the process so darn tricky for parents to use. Lastly, those other platforms take so much in fees to pay for their investors, executives, and high priced employees. It makes that $10/hr tutor becomes $25/hr when everything is said and done. Who can afford that?

Personal Needs Becomes a Business
Our showcase is Elena, who has two younger kids. She needed to find tutors for them before discovering Hefe. As she described, it wasn’t easy in her small city to find the tutors she wanted. As she will admit, she was very picky about the tutors. Over weeks and months, she learned to find tutors through friends, parents groups on Facebook, used NextDoor, church groups, and more. Through this process, she discovered that other parents were facing the same problem. Usually, the difficulty had the parents just not doing it.

So when we first were introduced to Elena to the Hefe platform to track hours and pay the tutors she had, the light bulb went off. She could use her knowledge to help other parents in her community and surrounding towns to build her own passive income business. From there, she dove head first into it.

That evening, she began her first adventure with an old piano that her husband just brought home.

Elena created her first Piano Tutoring ad on Hefe and then posted the job link back to the various places she had found tutors in the past. Within an hour, she found eight fantastic kids that were incredible tutors, but she could only hire one. Elena then posted videos of the tutor and her daughter learning back to the Facebook group, exciting other parents. Before she knew it, three other parents had put up postings on Hefe for piano tutors. From the first idea to the first deposit was just over two weeks for Elena.

Now Elena has set her eyes beyond just piano tutors. Presently, her side hustle is earning a few hundred dollars extra income. She re-invests her earning to pay for more tutors and other projects. As she says, she is doing nothing particularly special except talk about the stuff she does. Just basic marketing techniques through her social groups online and in her local community. Now that she has watched a lot of YouTube and Udemy videos on how to do better marketing (she said don’t bother paying big bucks for that content). She envisions it becoming a few thousand dollars a month, enabling her to work less and spend more time with her two little ones.

Some Helpful Hints from Elena
At the end of our conversation, we asked her about some useful tips:

• She noted that she added the shorten URL to her postings (https://bit.ly/3fMlZFC), waited until Facebook processed it, then deleted out the text as the bit.ly URL makes people a little hesitant to click on it.

• One of the most powerful things that has helped her so far is that she is authentic and truthful. Folks are using Hefe because they trust her. She trusts us to do the right thing.

• Some folks ask her if the company is paying her to push the platform; she says yes and explains the movement. That it pays for her time and expenses, but it is really about the movement to make the community better and stronger. As she noted, the part that makes them happy is when she says that they can be part of it. In her observation, the people that are concerned that someone is getting “paid” is someone that wants to be part of the platform as well.

• Don’t pay for those online scam marketing classes. Elena had wasted a bit of money on books and classes. She had found all it was on YouTube for free and felt like an idiot for wasting money. However, some of the Udemy courses were quite good.

Summary
We thank Elena for sharing her experience to help the others. She says she is not worried about someone else in her community stealing her idea because the difference between her and others is “talk versus doing.” We are excited to follow her and others as they figure out how to apply Hefe in their communities. If you would like to be featured, we would love to hear from you.

Welding

Introduction

Finding a great welder has always been a challenge for everyone. There are just not that many welders out there anymore. Not to mention the simple fact that there are so many different welding processes and materials.

The companies that need welders all the time tend to horde all the best welders to themselves—paying fantastic salaries to their welders because they know how hard it is to find and retain the best welders. For everyone else, finding a highly experienced welder for a particular job is impossible.

Sure, finding someone to lay down a simple bead with an arc welder to fix a wrought iron chair should be easy and cheap, but it is not. Much less finding an experienced TIG welder to fix an aluminum structure is just about impossible.

When faced with a problem that should be welded, most handymen will typically do an ugly, non-kosher repair. Or recommend someone throw away a perfectly good chair over a minor broken weld that can be fixed in minutes with a guy and a portable 110v arc welder.

Approaching this market.

We have been dealing with this problem in our local market. We have seen all sorts of businesses that need good welders, from automotive to watercraft, agriculture, and construction.

The way we came into this segment was a local marine repair shop. On the west coast, Aluminum fishing boats are popular, especially the welded hull boats. These boats are subjected to much abuse in the rivers, at the ramp, or rough swells. Any repairs or modifications to marine-grade aluminum requires specialized knowledge and skill. It is not something that some guy with a cheap harbor freight welder can fix.

The particular shop we worked with was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They didn’t have anyone in-house with welding skills. Typically they would pull the boat halfway across the state to another shop, which was expensive for them and the customer. Clients didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars for repair. The other alternative was mechanically riveting or screwing a repair patch, which was downright ugly. Who wants to see a big huge patch on the side of their nice fishing boat?

Enrolling the shop was easy. The challenge was finding someone local to do the work, especially in our area where there isn’t much work for highly skilled marine TIG welding. Approaching the trade schools was a terrible idea. The kids there were more likely to blow holes into the side of the boat, causing more problems than they fixed. Until it finally dawned on us to approach the local welding supply stores. These shops knew qualified marine welders and were able to connect us. These shops had job boards that we posted information on as well.

Having welders on the platform has also enabled us to go back to the automotive and construction businesses to let them know that they had a new tool at their disposal. This enabled them to take or suggest new projects that they hadn’t thought about before. Recommending a rather expensive wrought iron gate instead of a more common wood gate is one example. Another one was building a patio cover out of steel instead of traditional wood. Projects that excited their clients, but previously was unimaginable because they didn’t have access to a professional welder and their equipment. 

Summary
In the course of solving one problem for one customer, keep in the back of your mind on how you can leverage that work to the benefit of companies you already onboarded. This is working smarter and not harder.

Electrical

Introduction
Everyone knows the value of electricians. But the world of electrical projects goes beyond pulling Romex or wiring a breaker box.

The Market
When we think of electrical work, it is home/office electrical work. Not automotive or marine work, that work is different and tends to fit into those categories. There are also different electrical work levels, from major home wiring projects all the way down to a simple outlet change. It is important to know and understand the difference, or otherwise, you will have some major pushback.

• Licensed Electrical Firms. These firms are highly professional, pay their licensed electricians well due to the amount of risk and liability associated with this work. They will never hire someone off the street. But they do need auxiliary support for their teams. Having someone doing grunt work on a project saves their high-cost resources from simple work like the demolition of old wiring.

• Basic Repair Work. This tends to be with homeowners who need simple fixes but don’t want to or can’t afford larger firms to do the work. They need a licensed professional to drop by and swap out a power switch or look at why their breaker keeps tripping. The big firms don’t really want to deal with work because they are not as profitable as larger projects.

• Solar. A booming industry for electrical and roofing contractors. With so many firms, many issues need to be resolved, and the company that might have installed the “warranted system” may no longer be in business anymore. Many times the system just needs a simple tune-up. The dirty secret is that it is not as difficult or as expensive as people think it is for fresh installs. The hardest part is finding experienced crews. There is a lot of room to get creative with the Hefe platform with solar.

Success Story
We have not yet had a major wow success story in electrical. Not that it needs one as it is so straightforward and essential to our daily lives. Electrical jobs happen with no explanation. Most of the gigs have been in the handyman space. If you have a great story, we would love to feature it.

Best Practices
A couple of observations so far.

• Professional Firms. As mentioned above, when approaching the professional electrical firms, they have the own highly skilled, highly paid technicians that you will never be able to compete with. Focus on anything and everything else they might need to fill to support their crews—demolition, cleanup, hauling, etc.

• Home Owners. This is just something that folks will need on occasion. You might want to look at the construction best practices on how to connect to homeowners.

• Recruiting. Something to consider in the gig worker space, licensed electrical professionals are highly desired. There is plenty of electrons that work 7-3 that would love some extra evening or weekend work. 

Assembly

Introduction to Assembly Work

Almost everyone has dealt with frustration of assembly work. That awesome looking Scandinavian furniture that comes in a box with a million parts. For those that are not naturally inclined to follow instructions or turn a screw driver. It is an unnatural and highly frustrating effort to get this put together without causing huge amounts of damage to the furniture or themselves.

But the excitement that turned to frustration started long before they got to this point. Usually it started at the loading dock, trying to figure out how to fit a 300lb 10’ x 5’ box into a little Volkswagen sedan. Then when they got home, those 300lbs of parts had to make it up flights of stairs without getting dinged up. Then they realized they didn’t have the basic assembly tools. Once that adventure is done, they still had to figure out how to haul away the old furniture. This creates a fantastic opportunity.

The Market
While we talked about the a certain Scandinavian furniture company, this market is vastly bigger than just that. Most big box retailers have adopted similar approaches to everything they sell. Some of these companies offer services to help for a large fee with some very low paid workers. But the biggest annoyance of their in-house service is the lengthy delay to get someone out to help. Most folks that make the decision to buy something large and bulky last on impulse. They want it transported and installed in the same day…the big weekend project. Having it scheduled out a week or two is extremely frustrating. This is an opportunity to win with speed.

On the other side of assembly work is factories and other similar repetitive work like assembling thousand of chairs at a venue. This is probably the side you want to focus on as it is far easier for an agent to approach the market and build a substantial business around it. Assembly work is fairly easy to staff as there is a lot of people that love repetitive work like this.

Best Practices
Creativity is key with this market. Here is some tips and tricks we have heard from the field.

• With big box, one very inventive individual figured out how to put QR codes on every spot and car in the garage without the company every knowing about it.

• Another had recruited the dock workers at a big box retailer to tell folks at the dock to use Hefe if they need help. As we expanded the app to have a multi-level commission model, the incentives for those workers created explosive demand.

• Always make sure you recruit enough folks with pickup trucks and basic tools that are available on weekends when demand surges for assembly work.

• Short term surge work at a local companies that have large orders the need large amounts of additional staff for short periods of time are ideal for the platform.

• Venues and event companies are a great source of large projects that require large numbers of temporary staff to assemble and disassemble chairs, tents, tables, fencing, etc.
  

We are looking forward to hearing more assembly use case stories from our agents. Please feel free to DM us with a market and pitch that works for your local market that you don’t mind sharing.

Automotive

Introduction
Today, many of the smaller shops are struggling with not only getting enough work but dealing with the newer, more complicated vehicles. Nothing is worse turning away a job because you don’t have the right mechanics. The only thing that could be worse is when the repair becomes one of those where you lose money and pride on.

Use Case
We partnered with a small shop named Quality Car Care that has a really great location but could not handle most of the repairs coming through their front door. While he had a really great team that could handle simple repairs, SMOG tests and AC work. There was ample amounts of complex and specialized repairs to newer, more expensive vehicles that his team couldn’t handle. Which he had to turn away.

We focus on how they could help them stop turning away all this business by having temporary contract specialist on various makes of vehicles.

away less work started to use Hefe to temporary hire specialists to drive more revenue. The small shop, Quality Car Care had a great location but could not handle many of the repairs coming the front door. Not only was his existing staff not qualified for the complex, specialized repairs, they were fully loaded up on simpler, less profitable work all day long. Adding more full-time mechanics wouldn't solve the problem with the wide variety of vehicles coming off the street.

The Rolodex of Experts

One of our independent agents, needing to fund his rather expensive racing hobby (NHRA Super Street) with some other means besides hocking t-shirts and begging sponsors. He came up with an interesting solution for Quality Car Care (QCC), he would recruit guys he knew at the various dealerships that knew all the specialized procedures for modern cars and made them available to QCC to leverage. They would post the different one-off projects to the various mechanics with an agreement, which is shop hours at whatever rate. Shop hours meaning that if the book said it would take 10 hours of the operation, they’d get their 10 hours at contractor rates, even if they could complete the job in 2 hours using their experience. The work would be to the quality of the 10 hours, otherwise they’ll fix it for free. Simple agreement.

The agent setup the account for QCC and enrolled his network of mechanics. When the first job rolled into the front door of Quality Car Care, it was a sunroof for a late model Ford F-150 that would not close. The dealer down the road wanted a $3,200 for the repair and didn’t have a time or date that would work out for the customer. This pickup truck was the customer’s lifeblood, he couldn’t wait for two weeks with the sunroof wide open. Letting in the rain and criminals. Then to make matters worse, the dealer needed the truck for week to do the repairs. QCC quickly jumped on this opportunity to expand their business, saying to the customer that they’d check with their certified F-150 specialist.

QCC quickly posted this job opportunity to Hefe and notified the two guys that worked on F-150s. Both of whom worked down the street at that same dealership. Initially QCC didn’t know what to post the job for, thinking it would be $500, but then after some back’n’forth the sum was settled for $1,000 to do it the next evening. QCC phone the F-150 Owner and said they would do it the next evening for $2,000 as a “overnight rush job” after he was done with work. It would be done in the morning. Shocked at the speed and price, the customer quickly agreed and they made arrangements to drop off the truck.

The mechanic was quickly hired for the one-off job and he’d pickup the rebuild parts from the parts window at work. That evening the truck was dropped off at 5:00PM, the mechanic showed up at the shop at 5:30PM. By 7:30PM the new rebuild parts were professionally installed and tested by the factory certified mechanic. The owner of QCC made an extra $1,000 by staying an extra 3 hours. He had to do some paperwork anyways. Though he did not call the F-150 owner to pickup the truck until the morning, just to make it look like the repair was very laborious and difficult. Which it wasn’t. The owner was overjoyed by how QCC “pulled off a miracle” and worked through the night for him. He was going to bring his truck and his wife’s car into QCC for all their servicing from now on.

The mechanic made $1,000 on the side, which technically he wasn’t supposed to be “working” for other shops. But money talks and this guy also had some expensive hobbies that a $1,000 would go to pay for more parts and tires for his hobby. In a week this mechanic could make another $5,000 on side gigs which was more than his regular salary at the dealership. From what I understand, he had his eye on an aluminum 427 engine block.

The guy who organized it all made a cool $30 off that one gig, which wasn’t going to change his world that moment. But he was playing for the long game and this first win was going to keep delivering day in and day out from now until the foreseeable future. QCC started doing jobs like this daily, after a couple months they were earning him a large sum of money weekly without him spending another minute of “working”. Well he still “works” with QCC, which he said entails stopping by to show off his latest mods to his Super Street car to the crew at QCC. He makes the tour once a week to different shops as QCC was one of many local shops across the city and neighboring cities that he got onto Hefe. The car also helps him recruit more mechanics along the way. But that wasn’t the best part…

The best part was the race car and the nice tow rig were all now marketing expenses for his new business. Before Hefe, he earned around $100k, got taxed on his earnings and then only had a few dollars leftover to spend on his passion. Now with Hefe, he earned, spent money on the race car business and only got taxed on profits that he took himself. One of the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” principles that he had read about but had no idea how to pull off. His tax guy confirmed that the expenses are legit as he could prove to any tax auditor how the car supports his Hefe agent business. Oh, he still works at the GM dealership as well for the healthcare benefits, seniority and all that paycheck money goes to the wife with no more sleeping in the dog house when she founds out about something he bought at Summit. As he says “Happy Wife, Happy Life.”

Summary
There is countless ways that you can apply Hefe to the automotive space. Many times shop owners already know other guys that can hire. But from what we hear from our agents, most shop owners who spend 24x7 in their own shop struggling to survive. They have no time to get out to find new talent or revenue streams for their struggling shops. Because of QCC’s location and market, prior to Covid-19, they were on path to bring in an extra $400,000 in revenue annually with around $200,000 in pure profit that they didn’t have in the past. They didn’t have to invest into sending mechanics to training, which they couldn’t afford to do. Didn’t have to buy (or had the cash or credit to buy) a new machine. Or hire an expensive mechanic that didn’t have enough work to pay for the extra expense. This allowed them to flexibly monetize their one asset, their location to service more vehicles makes and models. Turn away fewer repairs. Get them done faster. Build new loyal customers.

When you look to apply Hefe to the automotive market. There is countless, win, win, wins (the mechanic, the shop, the vehicle owner) you pitch. The automotive space is quite interesting due to the volume and large transaction size. Which means more revenue to you as the agent. While recreating value for everyone. You gotta love that.

We love hearing these stories, dreams becoming reality. More we love telling your story. Please DM us more of these awesome stories. We’d love to come fly out to meet your customers and see you at the track.

Events

Events has always been a tough space for the staffers and workers. It is a very word of mouth and relationship based business. There hasn’t really been a solution to help event planners get staff at reasonable costs. Lots of calling, post jobs, going through resumes, etc.

Most of our events on Hefe have been pre-Covid-19 weddings. For the agents, they had been selling into wedding planners and venue locations. Many of the larger venues already had staff, but for a lot of the smaller venues like wineries, farms, etc getting event staff has been tough. Nothing is worse than being short handed with staff at an event. Even for the large venues, some events surge past staff capacity requiring additional help.

Selling into Event Planners and Venues
The folks that will be most successful will be the ones looking to monetize existing relationships. Those that are just starting out, the best route is going to a large bridal fair and just start talking to folks. It will take time and rapport to target the key individuals. Building strong trust relationships to the point where they switch from their old ways to this new way may take time. For others, it scratches and itch immediately. We only have one example we have heard of where Hefe is being sold into events space rather successfully.

One winery in the outskirts of Napa puts on weddings as a means to diversify income. As the owner said, making wine is a breakeven business for the smaller wineries in Napa and Sonoma. So events and weddings is a way to diversify and bring in more revenue. With that they are trying to pull more services in-house instead of depending on the undependable and rather expensive local vendors. The smaller winery is always battling to get help as the larger wineries sucked all the good local staff for their half million dollar corporate events. Not like this small venue was cheap either. The minimum booking fee for the location along was $15,000. For a typical event, it would run between $50,000-$200,000 when all was said and done. With so much money being spent, it is easy to see why the winery wanted to get a larger portion of the pie.

For you this could mean several hundred to over a thousand dollars per event in referral commissions as this venue alone could spend $10,000-$50,000 on staff for a given event. For this example, the agent was well connected into the restaurant community. Having worked at several restaurants from Calistoga to the City of Napa, all the way down to Vallejo. She knew how to get highly qualified workers. Most of her business was renting uniforms, so this was a natural extension of her business. While she could just staff the event herself and earn more per worker, per hour. It was a lot of work, liability, insurance, taxes, payroll, etc instead she just enrolled the winery into Hefe so she can just focus on her core business of delivering uniforms while getting a few extra bucks from the use of the uniform. The uniform business was much easier and simpler too. Something she like with three kids and a large household to manage. Managing a rolodex of hundreds of people and making sure they showed up. Not something she wants to take on.

This is only one case example of Hefe being used for events. We will have more example coming soon.

Food Service

Introduction
The food service industry had traditionally relied on the gig economy for short term gigs to fill in gaps within their normal staff. The Hefe platform enables them to get the help they need, when they need it.

Market
From small

Success Story
xxx

Best Practices
xxx

Construction

So we always get push back from construction firms that feel threatened by Hefe. We always have to explain to them that Hefe is not meant to replace construction companies. Instead it fills one of the biggest gaps in their business. Getting good reliable workers to fill spot or a job.

Some firms don’t always have a framer or sheetrock guy on staff. Their buddies that specialized tended to be too busy forcing them (or their client) to pay extra to skip the line. Of course this problem was before Covid-19. Before Hefe filled gaps in teams, now Hefe is filling gaps in limited work availability. While the larger firms were able to get government dollars, the smaller contractor firms couldn’t qualify or had other challenges. So they now have their former staff on the Hefe platform. When work comes up, they can post private jobs to select individuals and pay them accordingly.

Now the biggest concern is that these folks were previously W-2 employees. Having these previous employees setup as W-2 workers actually helps the former employees take advantage of the benefits of running a business. Such as the tax write-offs on that pickup truck. Some of the smart contractors push back on this as well (contractors are super SMART). Typically the reasoning I have used is that the hardest part of running your own business is getting customers. That while these guys will enjoy the benefits of being an independent contractors, few have what it takes to build a business. Acquire clients. Hire workers themselves. When the economy recovers completely, these 1099 workers may opt to go back to W-2 work to qualify for loans.

Agricultural

Another one of our foundational “use cases” that we helped solve the needs of a local strawberry grower.

While they had a large operation, the strawberries weren’t always ready to pick. Typically between 1-3 times a week, depending on various conditions, they’d hire between 8-20 pickers to go through the fields and harvest fresh central coast (California) strawberries. Many of these strawberries would be in a grocery store on the other side of the country in a few days.

We were able to not only enroll the farmer onto the platform. But also his 100+ temporary workers already on his cell phone. Saving him countless hours a week of headaches between calling workers, to managing hours and paying the workers. Now it takes a minute for him to setup a new harvest schedule. Notify everyone in his favorites tab. Then pick who he wants that is available. Not everyone is great pickers, but if push comes to shove, he’ll take a weak picker rather than let fruit go bad. The handy ratings scale helped him rank his various pickers so he can keep track who is good or not.

Another plus is he doesn’t have to do ID checks anymore. The Hefe platform handles all that paperwork on enrollment to the platform. This saves him even more time with all government headaches and W-2 filings.

Hefe sets up all the workers as 1099 contractors, which enables these workers to build a business on the platform. One day they might be a picker, the next they are painting a fence for a local home owner. Actually, a lot of the pickers are construction tradesmen that do picking to earn extra money on days off. Every dollar counts in their mind. Pickers are amazing people. Personally, doing it for an hour is back breaking and you have to have an amazing eye. I had to give it a try.

While, strawberry picking is one use case. In agriculture there is always need for extra help. Hefe helps farmers get those small tasks done without needing to drive to “the spot” picking up folks that you have no idea if they can do the job or not.

Demolition & Hauling

Introduction
Demolition is part of construction and hauling, but it is being more unique niche as many local codes are asking for more recycling efforts. While a regular construction crew loves to demo a building, they are not great at separating recyclable materials from general waste. Where as many of these demo crews know what is what and what has value. They can get resell or donate old cabinets and appliances over to folks in need. 

Use Case
Carlos is one of those guys that specializes in demolition in Northern California. His crews can take a two story home down to the studs and bare floors in a day. Typically they show up with multiple trucks and dumpsters. Carpets off to specialized recycler. Sheetrock off to another recycling facility. Furniture, cabinets off to Habituates for Humanity. Appliances hauled to his own shop to be reconditioned and resold. Wood is recycled into mulch. Typically he only has about 10-20% of actual waste in any demolition. Complying to local city ordinances.

Carlos has two Hefe accounts now. One that his foreman uses to hire help for each project which they typically staff from hundreds of contacts. On a typical project they will use between 6 to 20 day workers. But not the day workers off the street, only people they know and trust. These folks know what goes where and gets stuff done quickly. Typically these folks they hire are general construction guys that have an opening in their schedule. They work hard, fast and earn good money. Carlos values quality and speed over low prices.

As for the second Hefe account, Carlos is looking to expand his business. Typically he runs crews for folks he knows, but since they work so quickly, they need to fill the empty spots in the calendars. He has trucks, trailers and folks on tap. So now they are looking to use the app more to build up more smaller demolition and hauling projects. They have been snapping everything off the public listings within minutes of posting for their area. 

Best Practices 
Here is a few best practices we have learned about this space.

• Flexibility. Hefe is great for inconsistent work where a small business can’t afford to keep folks on staff. Carlos’s business is growing but he can’t afford to keep a large staff on payroll.

• Quality Workers. Tip from Carlos is that he likes to pay a premium per hour for contract help to get them to get the jobs done quickly, while making it attractive for the best folks. We watched their crew clear an entire house to studs and bare floors in four hours. He was paying $40/hr for the project with 6 guys. Which was $960 in payroll. These guys typically make $20-25hr on regular construction jobs. So making $40/hr excites them, making $160 before lunch. Some of these guys go back to their regular job after lunch. Carlos typically charges around $4,000 for a project to pay for trucks, dumpsters, dumping. All said and done, Carlos nets out $2,000 a day on his demo projects. His competitors are twice the price and takes several days.

• Scoring. Carlos religiously uses the scoring and feedback for the workers. Mostly for his own benefit. 5 stars is his mind is somehow that gets invited and hired instantly. 4 star folks are usually second in the invites if he can’t get enough of the good guys. 3 star folks are in his desperate list.

• Recruiting Demo Crews. So we asked around our friends to find the best demo crews around. Surprisingly, there is not that many around. When selling into this folks in this space you can cross sell other related jobs with hauling and construction. If you are really desperate, there is always demo guys at the big box or landscaping stores. These guys may or not repress the kind of community business you want to operate. But it is better than nothing.

• Getting started selling Demo Crews. Typically most of the early business that we created for the demo crews we have recruited is for home owners initially. Most home owners and it is not big projects. Tearing down sheds, shrubs, broken concrete, etc. But since the demo crews can set their own schedule and bid on the deals, they do’t mind as money is green. 

• Getting Bigger Deals. As you sell Hefe to construction companies, having couple demo crews that are quick and cheap always interests the general contractors (GC). While they have guys that could do this, they’d rather just sub-contract out the work to a specialized 3rd party, especially if you have folks like Carlos in your area. A couple clicks in Hefe saves the GC having to order a dumpster, deal with recycling and all the headaches with demo work. While they love this work, sometimes its just better to get a crew in there. Especially if there is moving involved, lots of excess non-construction waste, etc. Having a professional crew that is affordable is very attractive.

• Wider uses. Demolition is not limited to construction as described here. Lately there has been a lot of demand with businesses that need to reconfigure work spaces, restaurants and more. While businesses love hiring union labor, but have found that they don’t have budget to clear out spaces. Hefe provides an attractive solution for emptying out an office building, clearing an apartment or emptying out a restaurant. We are seeing Hefe beginning to compete against some franchise junk services. Prices typically are half of the other services…and there is no franchise buy-in continued franchise fees to pay either. Just about anyone with a pickup truck and trailer can start a demolition business on Hefe.

• Relocation. Another exciting space, especially on the west coast and large cities as folks flee these areas. They want simple and affordable solutions to clear their homes and businesses once the “valuable” stuff was packed. While not exactly demolition, it is hauling services…taking all the stuff they don’t want or need.

Summary
This is an exciting space to begin building out in your local community. Eventually folks won’t be thinking twice about where to get help in demolition and hauling. It will be like Amazon for getting stuff done. Except Amazon doesn’t paying you on every order. Hundreds of deals a day in your community, each paying you commissions. Think about it.

Education Pods

One of the hottest new areas is growth is Education Pods. What is that?

Basically, a small group of parents with kids in the same class get together in groups of 2-6 students, hire a college student to supervise and manage the kids together. Solving one of the largest problems with distance learning…that social interaction. Along with enabling these families to focus on their day jobs with the knowledge that their kids are learning and being supervised. Not to mention, this lowers the cost of the hired helped. $20/hr split 2-6 ways is much easier on the pocketbooks than going solo.

One of the most common push backs is that the parents rotate and share the responsibilities instead of paying for someone to assist. Or one of the parents was laid off and is available to handle this responsibility. There is many problems that come into that lead to this arrangement falling apart quickly.

Each parent handles their children differently, firing a parent from the group is a huge bag of worms and very uncomfortable so it never happens. While firing a college student is so much easier and less stressful for everyone to agree to. The student, being a student themselves also knows how they would like to learn. The laid off parent will be distracted with house chores, looking for a new job, social media, etc. You can go on and on with headaches and problems.

How to approach this.

School has just started back up. Many parents put very little effort into making distance learning work. Not that they don’t want to, sure there maybe some that don’t care, but most are just lost. They are feeling the stress of managing a child and working from home trying to hold onto a job. The frustrations are just starting to build up and they feel like there is no options.

This frustration is where you come in to save the day. Working through parent groups, Nextdoor, Parent Teacher Association, School Board, Church, etc to get education pods spun up. Once you get the first pod to posted a position, you’ll need to quickly find 2-3 college students to apply for the gig. Going through your local college job boards is the quickest way of finding folks that are available. There is always students looking for jobs. Especially students that want to earn education degrees. Sometimes with class schedules, you may need to have the families hire two individuals to ensure good coverage.

Once you have this education pod running, then you can use it as your local proof point on education pods. The parents, the teachers, church members and other will spread the word of mouth on their own…with a little bit of assistance from you as the expert of education pods. Before you know it, you could have 20, 30 or more pods going. Some full-time, some part-time, all generating passive income for you with minimal effort.

Real life Success Story

One of our independent agents is a College Student at UC Davis. He is trying to follow the Dave Ramsey teachings to have zero debt coming out of school with his Chemical Engineering degree. Working all sort of jobs, including the a dish washing at the University cafeteria, but Covid-19 changed that. He was kicked out of his dorm with no way of getting hime. His parent’s weren’t in good shape financially, so he was forced to couch surf at his grandparent’s house while he figured things out.

With work being hard to come by, he latched onto the idea of Hefe as a way of financing his education with minimal direct effort. The word he used repeatedly was “Scalable” income.

In his first full month of making it work with Sacramento area parents, he has earned more money through Hefe than he did washing dishes for students he went to class with. He himself started by working some summer tutor gigs, then migrated to getting other students and parents onboard.

In a few months he went from nothing to today. Here at the beginning of September he has earned enough to buy a car cash, pay for an apartment and furnish it…hitting the books hard in the new quarter without needing to wash another plate of a fellow student. Nor take out a hefty student loan. Talk about a great success story. We will love to hear yours.

Cleaning

Another one of our original “uses cases” when we started building the Hefe platform.

The Story.
The biggest problems facing a small local cleaning service was finding folks that were available to work. This was despite the fact that most of their clients was on a fixed schedule with payroll employees. Much of Maria’s staff was fellow housewives that started out needing to earn extra income. With that comes the unique employee challenges of kids, family and homes. Her employees usually called the night before a workday with problems that left her scrambling on the phone looking for folks to work the next day. Most of her clients required at least two people to clean within the allotted time. Which made it impossible to service the client with a single person, forcing her to reschedule constantly.

The chaos and disruptions for this small cleaning company was reaching all time highs and she was losing her customers faster than replacing them.

The Big Spark.
It wasn’t that she did know enough people to help fill in for others, it was the time it took to call everyone she knew to find out who was available. She had to balance finding someone versus the dreaded call to reschedule. After the third reschedule, it was certain that the customer would find someone else.

We figured if we could get her entire phone book into a single platform, she could just create a gig, then notify all of them at once, seeing who raise their hands first to take it on. Usually within minutes she had 1-2 people that said yes they could work. Shen knew within 20 minutes if she truly had to reschedule with the client. Typically telling the client the flat-out truth. Someone called in for a school event and none of her 46 regular people are available. This sounded so much better than I called a few folks.

Hefe as a client platform
We started to seek out other home owners directly or indirectly for cleaning. We bundled it with the whole home service approach. This has brought in additional revenue for Maria’s business, creating a new channel for her to bid on work. When compared to other platforms, the leads cost nothing for her out of pocket and the cost structure in general is much more attractive for her.

Selling Best Practices
We have only touched the tip of the iceberg with the cleaning space.

1. Staffing Shortages. Temporary workers is a big problem in the cleaning industry that you can easily solve with the platform.

2. Leveraging Strengths. Maria’s temp workers are always looking for more work in the gig economy format. While we helped out Maria, we also enabled those folks to take on other work from others.

3. Bundling. When talking to home owners and businesses, cleaning is only one dimension of a host of needs. You may want to consider selling Handymen services, hauling and others as well. Making Hefe the one stop shop for all their needs.

4. Stronger Networks. As an Agent, you can enroll folks like Maria to become an agent on a second Hefe account. Maria is very familiar with her client’s needs and her clients are always asking for referrals on getting something fixed. Typically leaking faucets, broken grout and other small problems she cleans. Position Hefe referrals as a way for her to earn additional revenue.

Handy Man

We started our journey a couple years back in the construction space. One of the biggest areas of need was affordable handy man services. Most “company” style handyman services are very expensive for the kind of work needed which makes folks reluctant to call a company up. It is not the company’s fault, they have costs of running a full business, staffing a scheduler, insurance, licenses, and many more expenses. So sure it sounds outrageous for a handyman to cost a $100-200 to do a simple repair, like tightening a leaking faucet. But a business needs to cover overhead of every visit.

Mind you Handyman services is not construction services, it does not compete against the vast majority of construction businesses. Most licensed construction companies want jobs that are thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars. Not the sub $500 jobs that handymen are legally confined to. Many of the folks that work as handymen (or are capable of working as handymen) are also folks that can no longer do the physically demanding work of regular construction workers. They don’t want to do the big jobs. But they would be happy to help someone tighten a faucet, fix a light fixture or squeaking door.

Meet Stan

Stan is one of those guys, he is a bit older and his body can no longer handle the grueling work of his youth in construction. He loves this work, getting most of his jobs from folks at his local big box home supply store where he works. Technically speaking, he is not supposed to do work for the store’s customers, liability and all that. But that doesn’t stop co-workers from telling customers that Stan can help. When they meet Stan, his natural personality takes over, like that father figure who has seen it all and knows exactly what to do. One thing leads to another and soon Stan is at the customer’s house installing something. He doesn’t do it for money, he does it because it gives him more emotionally. And it does help a lot with retirement.

So Stan came up with a brilliant idea to help his fellow co-workers, which many were former construction professionals that were injured or otherwise can not work construction. The big box retailers does not pay as well as their old jobs and many struggle with medical bills. So it was Stan who actually invented the referral system in Hefe. Personally, I had come to get to know Stan when he worked at the Pro Desk, ordering all sorts construction materials for my own construction projects.

Stan felt that on an average day, he would have a dozen or so folks asking him for help getting stuff installed. While the company had an app for that, most folks were reluctant to use the app to find folks. Nor was the workers rewarded from the app in a way that helped them pay the bills. So he figured if we could make it simple enough to where folks on the floor or specialty depart could text someone an invite…then they take it from there. They could potentially supplement their incomes while helping others get stuff done.

Over time a secret network has formed, as Stan transfers from store to store, he spreads Hefe with it. If you ask him, he doesn’t do it for the money. He actually uses a lot of his services at his Church which he is the handyman for. As he says, they are always tight for money doing any repairs and improvements. The app has been a godsend.

Application.

For you all thinking about handymen services as market that you are interested in. Workers are fairly easy to recruit for, in many towns those folks are standing in the parking lot waiting for work. But to make it really sticky in your community, you want to think about getting high quality folks to build a strong reputation. Many folks knows a guy, who also knows a guy. Soon you’ll have dozens of local high quality handymen.

From there, the harder part is customers. We have seen many approaches to customer acquisition. Folks using NextDoor. Folks going door to door. Facebook groups. Mother’s groups. You name it. The neat part is to watch how fast a job is posted before it disappears because the handymen respond instantly. This space is hot and will only get hotter. Home owners, business owners, Churches and more need handymen. Average spend we have seen has been a few thousand a year in our market. Which is comes out to about $60 per house, per year. Count how many houses are on one street.

Best Practices

We have learned a lot from our own work in this space as well as all the agents that operate in this market. Here is a few best practices we have gleaned.

• QR codes. Some folks going door to door have a paper flyer, small card or business card. They use online QR code generators like https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com to create a scannable code that automatically links the home or business owner to their referral account. Just past in your referral link from the app into it. Create a QR code and try scanning it with your phone.

• Business cards. For handyman services, folks love using VistaPrint, Moo or others they found using a quick Google search for business cards or magnets. Sometimes telling us that they got their first few hundred cards for free or deeply discounted. They add the QR code to the card with a short message on getting help for anything in the house. The idea is to enable folks to quickly find help if they forgot about the referral link that they sent. Or if no one was home.

• Pitches. When doing walks around the the neighborhoods recruiting home owners and businessmen, folks have various 60 second pitches. Short and sweet. Usually looking for something that is obvious. Like “Hey I was walking by and noticed that gutter is broken” with the obvious response coming back from he home owner of they were just about to get it fixed. “so when you want to get that fixed for cheap, there is this great on demand platform where you can just post the picture and get some reasonable quotes” handing them a business card or sending them a text message. People love the safe word of cheap. Homeowner are scared of calling folks because they are still paying from the last time they called a company out for something simple.

• Memorable. The folks that do well create memorable interactions have higher success rates. Put your heart into it. If you just go door to door like it is a job that someone forced you to take, well you will have zero results. If you are outgoing, ambitious and can tell a good story, people are much more willing to adopt what you are selling. This doesn’t come overnight for anyone. It requires a lot of practice and perseverance. If you have ever seen Kenny Brooks, he is worth watching.

• Push Backs. On occasion, folks will push back saying they have a guy, an uncle or someone that does all this stuff for them. This is actually a very typical response which, you should have a way better response that gets the person to stop, listen and remember. First ask them for the Uncle’s phone number because you can help that uncle make more money. That usually has folks stopping to think for a moment. If they won’t give you a number, they probably don’t really have an uncle. Then follow up with, with something about not replacing your Uncle but being there if your uncle is on a fishing trip or too busy to help now. Then throw in something about things you wouldn’t want your uncle doing or he’ll hate you for the rest of his life. You know, crawl spaces with spiders and roof repairs in a storm. From there you can talk about helping local handymen earn money and saving money. People love saving money.

• Recruiting Quality. As mentioned above, if your recruit bad quality handymen to your community. We all will pay the price. Be sure to seek out the best of the best. Make sure they have a really good profile photo. Some of them might need a tiny bit of help getting started. But once they have it figure out, they’ll be very productive and happy. If they are happy, you will be happy.

• Balancing act. Once you get started the biggest focus area is balancing supply and demand. You can’t have too many handymen and no jobs. Just like you can’t have home owners posting and not getting a response fro days or weeks. In our core market, we have been averaging 15 minutes from posting to hire. Usually the handyman work is done within hours. Something to consider when rolling out in your community.

We have more to come in this exciting space for Hefe. We are always looking for success stories to share, so once you get rolling strong, we would love to come fly out or drive out to your community and do some live interviews. Otherwise keep DM’ing us your tidy bit of knowledge and experience to help others across the country.