The Home Service Expert Podcast
00:00:00 · Zach Deering, Zach Deering, Tommy Mello
[00:00:00] S0: 69% of homeowners today are looking for a price online before they have anyone out to their home. [00:00:06] S1: Welcome to The Home Service Expert, where each week, chats with world class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields Like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. [00:00:25] S2: Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview, so I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text notes, n o t e s, to (888) 526-1299. That's 8885261299, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200,000,000 company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com/podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.
00:01:11 · Tommy Mello, Zach Deering
[00:01:11] S3: Welcome back to The Home Service Expert. Today is gonna be an amazing day. I got Zach Deering here. He's an expert in AI sales consulting law and operations. He's based out of New York. He's the cofounder of Mantel. He's ex McKinsey and ex Amazon. Zach is the cofounder of Mantel, an AI powering sales platform, helping HVAC plumbing and electrical companies turn proposals into true buying experiences that close faster and grow ticket size. Before Mantel, Zach held leadership roles across Amazon, McKinsey and Lithic, worked as an investor and venture fellow and taught ninth grade algebra through teach for America. He founded his first business at 12 years old, later cofounded a startup out of MIT and built both for profit and nonprofit organizations from the ground up. He also received his JD from Harvard Law. Known for blending data with human judgment, Zach helps operators simplify complexity, modernize sales systems, and build teams that scale without losing trust. There we go. How are you, brother? [00:02:16] S0: I'm great. You did your research.
00:02:16 · Zach Deering, Tommy Mello
[00:02:16] S0: I'm great. You did your research. [00:02:18] S3: We got a lot here, man. We we go to the... We do all the research and really... This one's pretty cool because I've been pretty excited about this to implement this product into a one, and you made it happen. Mantel, heard about it from Aaron Gaynor, and our conversion rates have flown up anywhere from 10 to 15% on door sales and the average ticket is about $1,500 higher. And the technicians are raving about it. I I did an interview yesterday with a technician out of Milwaukee that made Pinnacle and he's like, man, Mantel is a game changer. And I love it because it helps us eat the fees for the financing And the greatest news about that from my marketing hat, what it does for me is it allows me to market the plans that I used to not have to wanna market because the dealer fee was too high. Same as cash till 2029. That fee is very very expensive, the dealer fee for any type of whether it's GoodLeap or or any of the other finance companies. Now I could use that for marketing. And I'm glad to pay the fee because it's built into the the cost for the client. So the clients are paying that fee. So overall, it's been amazing working with you. You got quite probably one of the best backgrounds I've ever read out loud. Tell us a little bit about your journey, where you where you... How you got here, and where you plan on going.
00:03:48 · Zach Deering, Tommy Mello
[00:03:48] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, first off, thanks for having me on. It's been great working with you and Luke and Matt and the entire a one team. I think you're an organization that a lot of people know a lot about from the outside. I think the thing that I've really been sort of taken aback by is the humility and the desire to learn and grow, and I see it throughout the entire organization. And so I just wanna take a moment to really call that out and I think it's pretty special. [00:04:13] S3: We got an amazing team, and those guys I'm super proud of. And there is a lot of... They're very humble, and you you couldn't ask for a better team, man. I hope we're a ride or dies for life.
00:04:13 · Tommy Mello, Zach Deering
[00:04:13] S3: We got an amazing team, and those guys I'm super proud of. And there is a lot of... They're very humble, and you you couldn't ask for a better team, man. I hope we're a ride or dies for life. [00:04:23] S0: Totally. Totally. Totally. But now to your to your questions. So I grew up in Dallas, Texas. I'm dyslexic, so I actually didn't learn how to read until I was 12, so law school was an interesting interesting twist on that. As you mentioned, I've done several different things, but the way I got into home services was through my mom. She had several HVAC contractors in her house, she got overwhelmed by the experience, and I got a real window into what it's like for homeowners today to make these really expensive, infrequent purchases. Case of HVAC, third most expensive purchase someone will make in their lifetime. Garage door, it's easy to spend 10 or $20,000, like, really meaningful purchases that historically, as an industry, we haven't really thought about it as a shopping experience. Right? We've instead say, here's your two options, right, or here's your one option with a bunch of jargon. And so we're really on a mission to change that, but I think it all started by seeing the homeowners experience and then that traced back to my time at Amazon where one of the things at Amazon, one of the core leadership principles is really around customer obsession.
00:05:30 · Tommy Mello
[00:05:30] S3: Yep. And so what what was the beginning stages? Let's talk about what led you to Mantel. So you're 12 years old, you started a business, you got... You have a lot of vast knowledge from the places you worked. The law degree really helps because there's a lot of legal jargon on these things. But what was the initial... When you you started this up, you got a partnership, it was just the online shopping experience is what you guys were thinking about?