How to Build an Incredible Business with your Spouse (ft. Randy & Dee Milby)

Brandon Welch 0:00
And your ability to be unemotionally affected by your weekly or monthly financial situation has everything to do with planting good seeds and building that company that everybody wants right.

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch and I’m joined for the first time ever by a CEO leadership team, Dee and Randy Milby from the window source of Kentucky. Welcome to the podcast.

Randy Milby 0:35
Thank you.

Dee Milby 0:35
Thank you for having us.

Brandon Welch 0:37
You guys are literally like the most stereotypical, awesome example of entrepreneurs and leaders and builders of something awesome. And I’ve had the pleasure of working with you guys for, gosh, going on a decade now, and I’m just so happy you’re here, and I’m so happy you’re the first leaders that we’re getting to interview. We’ve never done a leadership interview on the podcast, but we’re going to start mixing that in. And so you’re the first you’re the guinea pig. What could go wrong, right? Thank you. Randy and Dee are in our town this week recording an entire year’s worth of production and commercials and marketing for their business. And so we’ve been having fun doing that, but now it’s time to dissect their greatness and figure out how in the heck they have built from nothing, literally nothing, in just about eight years. Right? A business that has grown to multiple locations, multi, multi, millions dollars in sales, a beautiful team, an airtight operation, and just living the life that so many people, I think, dream of living. And so are you willing to share that with us today? Certainly,

Randy Milby 1:47
yes, absolutely.

Brandon Welch 1:50
So Randy and Dee window, source of Kentucky, is their business in Lexington, Kentucky, and then now Louisville as well. Yes, Louisville, they say that, right?

Randy Milby 1:58
Louisville. Louisville got a lot of different names. Yeah,

Brandon Welch 2:02
Louisville. Sorry, Kentucky folks. And we’re gonna ask them about two key things that I know that our listeners will find valuable, and that is just how in the world did you grow? Because you guys had never really owned a business before, and going from nothing to this incredible sales volume you have now. And then you all work together. You’re married too, right, right? Yes, we live in the same marriage, still married and happily married, I might add, yes, Randy and Dee and Valerie and I have traveled the world together. We’ve built companies together kind of the same time. You know, they’ve raised kids. We have younger kids, and we’ve just experienced a lot of life together, right? Yeah, and we’ve had a blast doing it. And so it’s always so refreshing to see how happy and peaceful and just mature and like wise, they do what they do while working together in the business. And we’re going to ask them a little bit about that. So if you’ve ever wondered, how do I build something from nothing? If you’ve ever wondered, how would I ever work with my wife, or how would I ever work with my husband, I think this is a good episode for you. So is that fair? Yeah, we jump to that. They really don’t have any idea what I’m gonna ask about today. So

Randy Milby 3:18
we get that question a lot. How do you guys work together? So,

Brandon Welch 3:23
yeah, so we’re gonna dive into that. But first, I want to know what in the world got you crazy enough to start a window company?

Randy Milby 3:34
So our our past experience mind being in the window industry, Dee’s background being in accounting and manufacturing and lot of bookkeeping, a lot of different areas that I definitely did not excel at. We Excel.

Brandon Welch 3:54
You can you didn’t excel at accounting.

Randy Milby 3:57
she loves spreadsheets. She was quick

Brandon Welch 3:59
of books, though, right? Cool. We had to get a pun in there, right? Yeah, we got that out. Of course,

Randy Milby 4:04
I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, yeah. And so, so we’ve combined both of our strengths, right? And we were had an opportunity to be part of the window source, and we had had partnerships in the past that did not, did not work out. And so we agreed that we would not do that anymore. Just Dee and myself were going to be the only partners moving forward Dee and God, right? And God, that’s right, which he has a lot to do with this. So we’ve definitely been blessed. And so we started on this journey together and working together, we’ve, we’ve gotten here, you know, and got, got a lot more room to grow, and looking forward to that, but so

Brandon Welch 4:51
you are the string to his kite, exactly. Is that a fair analogy? I have many strings. I. Uh, the strongest being Valerie, but Randy I happen to know is a dreamer. He’s a visionary. He’s got big ideas, yes, and so when he comes home and says, Hey, I’m gonna quit my job, I’m gonna start this new thing, start me there. Like, what was that like?

Dee Milby 5:16
Well, I had known, pretty much from the time we started dating that he always wanted to own his own business, and so that was always a dream of his. And I’m more, you know, feet on the ground, you know, just practical, practical all the time. Now, what’s this gonna look like? And yeah, so I was scared to death, you know, when he started telling me about it. But I really I believe in him, and I knew that he had such a passion for wanting to start his own business. So I just had so much faith in him, and he talked to me about it, and he always says, If I can convince her, then it’s a go. And so he laid out all of his proposition, salesman, yeah, laid everything out for me. And so I prayed about it. We prayed about it, and I just had a real piece about it, and I said, Okay, let’s do this. So love it. We decided to jump in and go for it.

Brandon Welch 6:13
So you guys, somewhere around 2016 really got going with the business, right? I think that’s actually when we started, you know, maybe working on your marketing, but yeah, right after we started. What was that like? So you’re, you’re out on your own, starting from scratch. Do you remember your first customer? Do you remember how you first started getting business?

Randy Milby 6:35
Oh, yeah, our first customer actually is a family that Dee grew up with we still have that check, I believe we framed it, so never forget that your first customer, yeah. So, yeah, that was, yeah, kind of surreal.

Dee Milby 6:51
His sister and I have have been friends since we were 10 years old. Wow. And so when we told them we were doing this, course, they were on board right away. And he’s like, Well, I’ve got this house, and I need Windows very Yeah,

Brandon Welch 7:06
people that believe in you, yeah, I’ve got somebody. You guys are actually part of that story for me. And we didn’t know each other. We got introduced from a couple of mutual contacts. And use you heard Utah, that’s right. And we met up in a group of people, and you said, Well, you know, I don’t know what you thought of me at the time, but very skeptical. Yeah, actually, I know what Dee thought of

Randy Milby 7:26
me. Our nature is skeptic. We’re skeptical anyway, you know. And obviously, going into a marketing campaign with someone you don’t know, yeah, takes a lot of money, you know. Well, say a lot. It takes money right to market your business and build a brand, and

Dee Milby 7:44
to spend money to make money, yeah, and so, you know,

Randy Milby 7:48
we just when we met you, you know, we heard your story, it really just gave us a sense, or me, a sense of comfort, of trust. And it takes a lot for me to buy into that. And, and we have, since the day, we’ve met you and and we’ve been dealing with Frank and Maven since. And, yeah, you’ve never given us any other reason but to keep moving forward. So what you’re

Brandon Welch 8:15
talking about, I think, is an experience so many entrepreneurs have. They go, gosh, I’ve got this very finite amount of money. I have this very finite amount of resources, time and really a short runway to get this thing off the ground. And what, since this is the Maven Marketing Podcast, talk about what marketing that you did and we did, you know out of the gate.

Randy Milby 8:38
Well, I’ve been educated a lot from you when it comes to marketing. Yeah, I know the window part. I’ve done that most of my life, but the marketing part a whole new, whole new world for me. But I learned about transitional marketing and about yesterday’s customers, today’s customers and tomorrow’s customers, which are all very important. So this is, yeah, so you started transitional market? Yeah,

Brandon Welch 9:07
that today customer, we talk about people just trying to get that transaction, yeah. And that’s, that’s how a lot of people have to start, because they go, you know, I don’t have time for a lot of this foo, foo stuff. I don’t have time for it to wait for it to work. Yeah. And how were you generating leads or transactions like we talked about today, Martin

Randy Milby 9:27
Angie’s List, home advisor. Who else Honey?

Dee Milby 9:31
Next Door, next door.

Randy Milby 9:35
We weren’t worried about branding at that point. We were just trying to get selling a couple windows and keeping the doors open. Yeah, worried about eating, right?

Brandon Welch 9:46
So what point? And obviously it was there, but just from your perspective, so our our listeners that might be talking about, you know, a lot of lead generation, and it’s just all about, how many leads did I get today? Any appointments that I run this week, at what point did you feel like you could, I guess, for lack of a better word, afford to start thinking more long term. Because you were very today, customer oriented. You were, you know, spending that $2,000 on Angie’s List thing. You were spending some money on search engines. I didn’t think we were doing Facebook lead gen at the time. No, um, at what point did you feel like, okay, I’ve got a steady hold on my cash flow, and I can start investing into the tomorrow. Customer,

Randy Milby 10:33
okay, her so, so she again, she’s the one with her feet on the ground, and I’m the one with my head’s in the clouds, right? The dreamer, so, so if I need to spend money, I have to go see her. Gotta go last month, and but she’s been, she’s, I mean, we wouldn’t be here without my wife, Dee. And you know, as we grew this business, she was saving money, putting money aside, very conservative. And then when we started talking about marketing in the future. Hey, you know we got with you. We kind of had an idea how things looked and kind of money that it would take, which, be honest, scares me to death, but

Dee Milby 11:14
so it scared me worse, yeah and

Randy Milby 11:17
yeah, but we trusted Frank and Maven and you so, so Dee had, you know, done her job, and then I, I sold her on. Hey, let’s spend some money in marketing, right? And

Dee Milby 11:28
that was really difficult because, well, just to back up a little bit, you know, I always, like, I always had this intuition about people. I feel like I’m a very good judge of character. I was with him, and we’ve been together a long time, and I was with you, and we’ve been together a long time in a different way, but yeah, you know, I just the trust factor and how much I believed in you and what you were saying just grew so much over the first couple of years that, you know, I could see, I could see the, you know, proof in the pudding, so to speak. So, yeah, and the juice was always worth the squeeze, you know, because I would, I would test out a little bit and see how that worked, and I would test a little bit more and see how that worked. And so after a while, it was like, Okay, I’m all in, you know, so it just took a while. But I think you have to be really careful, you know, with who you have doing your marketing, because it makes a huge difference. If you feel like that, they have your back and they want what’s best for your company, yeah, and I feel like we have that relationship. We want, what’s best for Frank and Mavin. You want what’s best for the window Source,

Brandon Welch 12:44
absolutely. Well, thank you for saying that. And that’s that’s not all. The purpose of having you today is for us, right? Testimonial, but I will say that I had that experience before, going through the trial and error and all the stuff we write about in our book, and all those, you know, just hairy stories of all the money wasted, and so I get it, and that that’s what fueled that’s why Frankie Maven exists and so. But I want to go back to something that I’ve always admired, that you have said. Andy has this saying that says, Save where you can, so you can spend where you want. And Randy, I don’t know if you just realized that you kind of passed over it, but I over it, but having interviewed, consulted 1000s of business owners, and having answered the question, how do I really grow like, what’s the most profitable type of business plan to grow the plan, I always bring them when they ask, what’s the most profitable is usually the one that hurts a little bit at first. It is expensive, and many either don’t have the courage, but more often, they just literally do not have the runway and the funds. If you listen to last week’s episode, we talked about, we don’t let people do real branding campaigns, the stuff that it takes to make big, big results over time that I think you guys would say you’ve eventually benefited from in a big way. It takes a while to work. And so the entrepreneur that’s hand to mouth, the guy that you know, made a big sale and went and bought a brand new truck, or the the people that are just over leveraged on debt, they don’t have this discipline that I’ve seen and admired so much in you know, the both of you, particularly deep, but Randy. Randy hasn’t bought his Corvette yet. Let me tell you, Randy and their whole business has made enough money to buy multiple, multiple Corvettes for the stroke of a check. And that’s how disciplined they are. And actually, while we’re on the Corvette, topic, didn’t you sell a Corvette to start this, yeah, crazy thing we sold,

Randy Milby 14:42
you know, Dee and I had a an old, an old car, and we did have a Corvette at one time and but we sold an old car, my old muscle car, we had as

Brandon Welch 14:54
pride and joy. It was a pride and joy, man. I remember you talk, you still talk about you get Misty eyed

Randy Milby 14:59
love. I love old cars, and so we sold it to bootstrap our business, you know, man, so and

Brandon Welch 15:09
it’s paid off. So that discipline, though, I want to hone in on that, because we talk a lot about marketing and tactics and the tomorrow customer, and how you’re always building the snowball and the commitment factor. But what we don’t talk about a lot is the mindset behind what it takes to pull that off. Because even a business that’s doing seemingly well, even a business that has, you know, multiple dozens of employees pulling off big things like you guys have pulled off, is really a matter of that discipline, those retained earnings, that building, that safety net that I know you guys have built. And what would your advice be to people I know you live in a much more comfortable and predictable mindset now than you did then. But what would your advice be to somebody who’s sitting there going, Well, gosh, I could go on, you know, 10 more vacations, or I could, you know, blow the money here, there. What would you say?

Dee Milby 16:01
Well, you know, I was brought up very conservatively, you know, with money and everything. And so I learned from a very young age that, you know, you have to put money aside for a rainy day. And so I took, you know, any bit of accounting that I have, any bookkeeping I had all that was just I grew up with that balance in my checkbook and all that sort of thing. Was all that I just brought into the business. I never had any formal training in it. And so for me, it was always, if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it, you know. So when we started the business, I mean, I had markers, ink, pens, paper. I had stuff at home that I just took into the office and used, I mean, we just, if we didn’t have to have it, we just didn’t buy it. And so it was easier to save money that way. You know, we had chairs that we bought, you know, from the thrift store and like that. So, you know, I mean, we really did. We started because we wanted to be able to, you know, save where we can, so we can spend where we want to. So in order for us to want to do marketing, well, we had to take that money and put it in this bucket and use the little bit of money that we had here to get things that we really had to have. Because there’s a big difference between a want and a need. Oh, I

Brandon Welch 17:19
love it. So, oh my gosh,

Randy Milby 17:22
I think you have, you know, it’s biblical. You know that you have to be good stewards of your money, and even in our business or in our personal life, that, yeah, we’ve got a little bit of money put aside to we could do these things, but it’s not being good stewards of the money we want to invest in our business and continue to grow, and that’s what we’ve done. So I got a quick story, real quick. I mean, we can afford envelopes. Okay?

Dee Milby 17:51
So, oh no, we do.

Randy Milby 17:53
When we pay our people each week, we use envelopes that, you know, we get junk mail. They send you a return envelope. Well, we just scribble it out. We just repurpose those envelopes, saying, if you watch the pennies, the dollars that take care of themselves, Oh, my goodness, right, that. So it’s just

Brandon Welch 18:16
little things stop your car if you’re listening to this right now, and just jot that down.

Dee Milby 18:21
Plus the huge Dave Ramsey fans, yeah, well, we love

Brandon Welch 18:25
Dave Ramsey. I mean, without Dave Ramsey’s principles, I think that Frank and Maven would have never been set up the way that it was. And, yeah, this whole zero debt, or this whole just good stewardship, I can’t express enough like when I have the, when I have the opportunity to really talk to a business owner, like we have. We had four or five of them reach out to us this week, and they always want the thing. They always want the prize, right, right? I always want the that was what you guys have. Frankly. They want the cash flow. They want the debt free. They want the flexibility and the freedom that everybody tends to think of, the entrepreneurship. And I’m always going, like, like, as I’ve learned, and frankly, you guys have been a big part of this. I’m always going, does this fella have this stuff? Everybody has the want, yeah, but do they have the stuff? Do they have the discipline and the maturity, really, to think about growth, because what I’ve learned with our company is you can have somebody that’s got a pile of money, or they think they have a pile of money, but they’re emotionally attached to that pile of money, and all the other gazillion things they do are attached to that pile of money. And so I’m really looking for, do these people have staying power? Because I don’t want to attach my effort and take up effort from Nate, the camera guy, and all the other wonderful people in this building, because, like, the least profitable and the hardest work we do is, like, in the first three years of a client, yeah, because if we build, build, build, build, build, build, and then some silly decision they’ve made just pulls the rug out from what we’re doing. Those aren’t those aren’t people that, um. Yeah, I’ve learned that we can do our best work for and that we can get the kind of results that we want to be famous for, right? So if you’re listening and you’re going, this is a marketing podcast, and what in the world are they talking about? Because this has nothing to do with the marketing it actually does. Yeah, your staying power and your courage and your ability to be unemotionally affected by your weekly or monthly financial situation has everything to do with planting good seeds and building that company that everybody wants. Right? Would you agree with that? Yes, definitely, and I can’t. I literally cannot think of a better example of anybody I’ve ever worked with than you guys, because I happen to know how much business you generate, and it’s a lot. It’s really, really, really awesome. And the fact that you’re still sitting here saying that you’re recycling envelopes just gives me goosebumps.

Dee Milby 20:57
So recycle the envelope. Sweet. Go on vacation

Brandon Welch 21:01
now. Now, mathematically, people going, Oh, that’s stupid. You know, what do you save $40 on envelopes? I’m going, usually, if they’re saving $40 in envelopes, you just see the other 40,000 they’re saving in other places. That’s what I would say. So, so let’s go a little bit practically to marketing. You got to have the right mindset. You got to have the courage and the staying power. And I’m telling you, I know these guys, and they came from nothing. It wasn’t like they had some big, imaginary retirement fund. They dipped in. They had a pride and joy car and a couple of things they sold, and they bootstrapped an amazing business. When did you know, I know you talked about you had the money there, which that’s wasn’t a gamble, and a lot of people try to gamble with marketing, but when did you know that? Okay, I’m not going to be transactional, I’m going to be branding, and I would put seeds in the ground, and I’m going to start winning over my market. Because one of the very first podcasts we did, we referred to Randy and D and we shared their campaign, and it’s awesome, and it’s fun, and I can’t wait to show you guys the, you know, 10 new ads we did today. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t work overnight. Yeah. And if you’re sitting here going, Oh, I’m going to run that for two or three months and see what happens. What was your experience with that? Yeah,

Randy Milby 22:16
the experience with with that, you know, credit to you again. You explain to us, as we get into the branding part of it, you know, that’s yesterday’s customers, today’s customers, tomorrow’s customer, right, right? And, and you really broke that down to where we can understand, you know, how you certainly set expectations that, hey, this isn’t a get rich quick thing, but you do have to invest in your future. It is a

Dee Milby 22:45
get rich thing, but it’s not a get rich quick. That was one of the things that helped bring me on board. Yeah, I also, if I can interject, I remember Brandon telling us that, you know, you all aren’t here yet, so why don’t we invest this amount of money right now because I was scared to death, you know. So instead of, you know, jumping in with, you know, this amount of money that just seemed like so much to me at the time, Brandon said, You know what, let’s just start with this and see how that and that made me feel so much more comfortable, yeah. And so I feel like, I feel like it’s just been a, just a gradual process, you know, where we started out, you know, small, and we just continued to build every year. And you told us up front, like Randy was saying, you made it very clear to us that, you know what? This ain’t gonna happen overnight. We have to build the brand, and that’s what’s happened.

Brandon Welch 23:45
Something to talk about in our book is that experience, because I came from a small business background, because I watched my dad write these checks that were painful, and I saw firsthand what it was like to send money away that you were uncertain, to feel like I had an emotional experience with that, and then when I was it was my job to sell advertising. I I had the same on the reserve first time the table. I had the same guilt. I had the same Oh my gosh. I really hope this works for these people. I’m doing the best I can, but I don’t really know what the heck I’m doing yet. And so I’ve had that experience of where I didn’t set expectations right, because I didn’t know and I was the bad guy, right? That’s many, many years ago. But now to avoid that feeling, to avoid being that guy at all costs for them and for me, I’m like, This is why we said last week on the podcast, I don’t let people in this thing can show me I’ve got literally a pile of money set aside. I don’t let them go into heavy branding, because when you’re trained, the false marketing culture trains you to say, dollar in customer out, dollar in customer out. And that can happen on the Today side. That happens a certain percentage of the time, but the way, way, way, way, way bigger result. We’re getting, as you guys have seen, is that what you’ve done consistently for the last 12 months buys you five years worth of your next opportunities, right? And then the next year buys you five more, and they compound and they stack, and stack becomes this big snowball. That’s what we call tomorrow marketing. So fast forward to today. You’ve been doing this. I’ll just summarize really quickly. When we were sure that Dee had pinched all the pennies and had a pile of money that she was okay not seeing for a bit, we allowed them, quote, unquote, we said we’ll put our name on it if we start building a campaign to make the you know, Randy and Dee people famous, right window, source, Kentucky, famous, and just, I think, right on schedule, you know, not a whole lot of stuff in the first six months. Right about it felt a little bit you get a phone call here, there, right? Because their category windows, it takes the average homeowner 33 years before they buy Windows. So somebody today, an extremely small like tenths of a percent of the population cares about buying today, or they, a lot of them care about buying tomorrow, right? So fast forward today, after you’ve been we’ve had a steadily growing broadcast campaign, and the budget is nice today, it started modest, but what is the reality like today, getting business today, selling customers, today’s average ticket, today’s profit margin, today’s ease of closing deals versus when you were waiting for that coupon customer to call or waiting for that big difference search engine. I mean, just tell, tell me, tell, tell us all about the transitional

Randy Milby 26:45
marketing is, you know, you spend these dollars and you expect to get those dollars back, plus some right, some profit, hopefully

Brandon Welch 26:53
enough to pay for the advertising, enough and then ship the lowly little ad guy a little bit.

Randy Milby 26:57
And we were, you know, we were marketing to anybody that had a window, right, or that we thought may have a window. We were putting windows in taco trucks and anything

Dee Milby 27:08
where we run to the bank with $100

Randy Milby 27:10
check. Here you go and in there, yeah. And as this marketing has progressed and our business has grown, we’ve been able to to really focus more on our demographics and our customers. You know that that we’re looking for, our average job size is tripled to start. Definitely, the quality of the leads has improved tremendously. Our closing percentage on the sell side has increased so so a lot of key metrics that we track, and marketing being one of them, you know, your KPIs are important for your business, and just keep and just and just watch them improve and grow. It’s been a really cool journey. I

Brandon Welch 27:56
love hearing that that’s what we hoped had happened, and that’s what happens for the people that do the things that you’ve done. I’ve seen it now hundreds, if not 1000s of times, and it is, it’s the only way to build like a consistently massive marketing machine, and just practically for anybody listening, when rain to D started, we were doing search engine and obsessing over every click and cost per lead. And it’s not that our team has stopped doing that, but they were also running, you know, coupons in a val pack, Val pack, some direct mailers, trying the, you know, the the, you know, $50 off a window type stuff showing up at home, shows, working their butts off for the whole weekend. And just it was like scrape and scrap. And it’s not that we’ve lost that type of customer completely. But now, as rainy was saying, the customer that shows up is the high quality customer, because you guys can’t walk in a supermarket and somebody not recognize you, right? Yeah,

Randy Milby 28:50
we definitely have, probably more people mentioned that they’ve seen us on TV than than we did before. And, you know, it’s kind of a cool thing, but it’s like, you know, they people say, you’re like, Hollywood. Who say, Yeah, except for, we have to pay to volunteer. We have to pay people to

Brandon Welch 29:09
put us on, I don’t know, some of these new ads. I think, I think you’re gonna look at a lot of free media with the

stuff we did last, last couple days. So we’re having fun with it. So,

but now, like, practically, let’s just, let’s just tell the person who wants a multi, multi million dollar business and wants to have that ease, wants to have that customer that’s coming to you ready to buy. I know your close rates have gone up even probably for your greenest sales guy, did you say one of them was hitting 70 80% close rates? And my goodness, if you know anything about home improvement, that is tough. Tough, tough. Like most of my guys that haven’t done what you’ve done, yeah, 30, 40% is good, unless it’s just a really, really seasoned person. So their entry level sales guys are doing phenomenal. And what that looks like today is we basically do two things. We do Google, and actually this last year, we decreased our Google. Budget, we decreased our lead generation budget, a little bit of Facebook in between, but the lion’s share of the budget goes to making you and your company famous and making people like and trust you on a daily basis, right, right? And we do that both Louisville and Lexington. And if you were in those markets, you’ve no doubt seen them. And if you if you’re not in those markets, you can click on the link in this podcast and you see some of the commercials. But it’s consistency. We’ve been in the same places for several years now. We’ve shown up daily to 5060, 80,000 people a day, right? We’ve entertained them. We’ve tried to make them smile, and then, and just in this little window, we’ve tried to say. And when you’re ready for Windows, we make it so, so simple, right, right, yeah. Would you agree with that? That’s been our strategy and reality today, outside of the business growth, the organic business growth, I can tell you, this morning, we just did a little 12 month recap, and the amount of people searching for your business name, just in one year’s time, um, has increased like 41% they come to you first, before they before they look for competitors, before they look for window companies, they look for Windows, source of Kentucky, And they’re finding you, they’re coming to you directly, which means they already like you, right? Yeah, they skipped all the shopping process. Would you agree with that? Yes, your sales guys feel that,

Randy Milby 31:29
yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. I definitely think that they feel that, you know, we’re going into homes. People call that say, I’ve seen your commercial, you know, and we do a good job at asking how you heard about us, and we track all that, and like you said earlier, you know people, we hope that they like us and trust relate to

Dee Milby 31:47
us because we’re just normal people making a living like everybody else, and

Randy Milby 31:51
people buy from people they like and trust. I hate to tell you, but

Brandon Welch 31:54
you’re not normal. Yeah, I’ve seen normal. You are not normal, but we do our very best job to make you your characters look and relate to normal folks. And I mean that the nicest possible way you were, as Dave Ramsey called it, you’re weird. Yeah, you’re weird. You folks are weird. You don’t have debt, you’re weird. Yeah, okay, so I love that. And just just to quickly recap that, start small, they’re as scared as any business owners to spend money. They have this massive force called Dee and save where you can so you can spend where you want. They had this staying power and this beautiful nest egg and this safety net that they built before they even really felt like they had it. And it’s not that they blew it all on marketing, but they had the wherewithal and the courage and the confidence, because they weren’t worried about how to pay their dad gum truck payments or whatever, to do the right thing, to do the long term thing. And now it’s the tortoise and the hare, and I’m seeing a lot of hares really have a tough time right now. See a lot of hairs who are bouncing up and down and grabbing money, and, you know, just getting that today customer so and the play has been broadcast with a little bit of search engine, and constantly more going towards broadcast and search engine. Let’s talk about working together. And you guys have some family that work with you. You have kids that work with you. Yes, I wanna talk about you all first, because some people are going, Holy smokes, how could that ever work? Like, I’ll, I’ll win the bread, and you do all the stuff that makes our house and our life go right? That’s Yeah, unfortunately, that’s Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately. That’s just a lot of the traditional roles. But you guys have done this together. I’ve seen you work. I’ve been on calls with you for years, and you’re, you know, usually there together. How

Randy Milby 33:43
do y’all do that? For first of all, we’re partners in our marriage, yes, and we’re best friends, and we’re also partners in our business, right? And so you have to people think marriage is 50/50, it’s not it’s 100/100 so I love that she gives me 100% of her. I give her 100% of me. We’re human. We fail every day, but we still love each other and we respect each other. That’s the big thing, right there. Yeah. And what

Brandon Welch 34:19
is it? Practically, what look like, respect. I mean, I think a lot of us have around you, but that, but for you,

Randy Milby 34:24
yeah, I say do this to her because of, you know, I’m not at say, I’ve learned a lot from my wife and my friend. I’m not, I never was the saving type person, you know? I’m I wasn’t even I was a buyer. I wasn’t a shop, or I just go and buy stuff, right? She’s taught me how to save money, how to buy, you know, it’s not the next shiny thing, but, you know, the impulse buys can get you in trouble real quick. And she, she’s really taught me a lot about, you know, just don’t, don’t get in a big hurry. You know, let’s wait. Let’s. Save a little money instead of making payments on that. Let’s, let’s wait a little bit, and we’ll just go buy it, you know. And she’s just really good at that patience, you know, and it’s helped me grow a lot. And then her, you know, her other qualities outweigh mine by 100 miles. That’s

Brandon Welch 35:18
not so. So as the kite, or, sorry, yeah, I’m not

Randy Milby 35:20
even the kite. I’m the tail. She’s the string kite. Now I’m the tail.

Brandon Welch 35:26
I’m a kite. Brandon is a kite. Yeah, yes, I can fully relate to what Randy saying. But what does it look like for the string to be looking over the kite? What’s respect look like there? Well,

Dee Milby 35:35
I just think, you know, because I do do things differently, and I see things so much differently, and that took patience for me to try to get used to that, you know. But above all, I would say, you know, if I do make a mistake, or he does make a mistake, you know, I know that he’s doing the very best that he can, and he knows I’m doing the very best I can. So it’s it comes back to respect. You know, I really respect who he is as a person. I respect his heart, what he believes in, what his values are. And so at the end of the day, to me, that is more important than whatever it is that we disagree on, love it. And that has is what has held us together, you know, through some rough times. But, you know, I think working together is a lot of fun too, because when he comes home, or I come home, you know, I know exactly what he’s talking about, he knows exactly what I’m talking about. Is the good side of it? Yeah. And so, you know, we can, we can talk about things. The downside is sometimes we don’t not talk about things. Yeah. So

Brandon Welch 36:49
talk about that. So boundaries. What have you learned over the years? How do you like? How do you turn it on and off? Because that’s something Valerie and I’ve had to learn, is like, she knows when it’s a good time to talk about this. I know it’s a good time to talk about this. And we just, we kind of, we’ve learned that. But it took, yeah, it took some like, think sometimes you got to say, I really want to talk to you about this. I am just not in a place where I should, yeah,

Dee Milby 37:13
well, I think in order to to have a good, strong marriage in the first place, you have to have exceptional communication. I think that communication and respect, and I think that, you know, we have to tell each other, look, I’m kind of in a bad mood right now, just once, you know, has nothing to do with you. Oh, that’s such powerful language. And can we just, you know, talk about this later, given context, whatever you know. And then it’s like, oh, okay, because I thought maybe I did something, especially when you’re working together, you know, had nothing to do

Brandon Welch 37:47
with you having thoughts about our thoughts, right? Yeah, and being able, because you can acknowledge

Dee Milby 37:52
that road, but I think, um, you know, just being able to recognize each other’s strengths too, um, and I have, I’ve learned that more just over the last few months, and it’s, it’s been really eye opening, you know, like I’ve always known he has, he has such great strengths when it comes to, you know, what he does, and his experience with windows, doors, shades, shoulders, blinds, all those things he has experience. And I don’t. I couldn’t run this company without him. You know, there’s, there’s no way, because he just has so much to offer in those areas that I don’t. And so that’s another thing that you have to respect. And just

Brandon Welch 38:34
the way you talk about that just makes it so evident. And I would encourage anybody who, if I’m being honest, like a lot of people I admire, never had a really healthy business relationship with their spouse or their partner, and so I think they had enough us going on good in their life. Sometimes they ignore it, but it builds over time. There’s resentment, and then there’s, you know, frustration, and it’s just like you said, nobody knows how to even pinpoint what’s frustrating them, and it’s led to a lot of really big problems. I think, I think I can think of some people that have gotten divorced because they owned a business and they had all this freedom and they had all this ability to express themselves and go out and save the world, and then they didn’t that spouse, either because they didn’t know how important it was to be involved, or didn’t know how to talk about it, or whatever, they didn’t have that method of connecting there. And a business that grows as big as your alls has grown, can take over you. It can become your prize and it can become your your title. It can, yeah, absolutely. You

Randy Milby 39:36
have to continuously work at it. I mean, it’s not something that’s fixed overnight. But I think we sometimes creates a rub is both of our we have so much passion for our customers, oh, you know, and with shared value, without their purpose, without them, none of us are in business, right? So, you know, Dee has this. You. Such passionate a customer calls in, and, you know, if there is an issue with something, she wants it taken care of right away, because she puts herself in the shoes of that customer, and rightfully so. You know, I’m, I’m on the other side of where, you know, hey, we have processes we have to go through, and we want to take care of that, and, you know, so it’s just just being on the same page, but at the end of the day, it’s about passion for our customers and wanting to get nothing but the best outcome for them.

Brandon Welch 40:30
And you talk about that, talk about that shared outcome.

Dee Milby 40:32
Yeah. Another thing I’ve really, really realized, too, is that, you know, I have a very strong personality, you know, and you know, I want things done this way and this way and this way.

Brandon Welch 40:44
That’s why we call her dang Dee.

Dee Milby 40:47
And, you know, Randy’s the same way. So I think that, you know, even though we’re partners in life and we’re partners in the business, I have learned this, that one of you has to be the chief, and one of you has to be the Indian. Wow. I mean, in in it’s taken me a long time. I’m just going to be trans, wow, taking me, you dropped that mic for us. It’s taken me a long time to realize that. And I think that, you know, at the end of the day, somebody has to make that final decision. Now I think both people should come with their input, but you can’t have that tug of war and that back and forth just constantly. I want to win. I want to win. I’m going to take you down, because if you do, you’re not only going to lose your business, you’re going to lose your marriage too and your best friend. Wow. So I think that folks

Brandon Welch 41:45
rewind, play that back. I’m gonna rewind that. I’m gonna play that back. Yeah, strong put that sound, but probably make that your ringtone or something. Nate the camera guy can make that happen. Download the free Dee wisdom ring tone. Oh, yeah, right, you were telling me something earlier. I actually saw you post this a few weeks ago, and I thought it was awesome. Read it to us. It says,

Dee Milby 42:06
to build a strong team, you must see someone else’s strength as a compliment to your weakness and not a threat to your position or authority. That spoke volumes to me, and I think it really points to the what I just said, I mean, my strengths, you know, I can’t look we can’t look at each other as opposing teammates. You know, there are no opposing teammates. That’s an oxymoron. You have to be on the same team, me and him against the world at all times. Because, you know, as we know

Brandon Welch 42:43
I think it’s so easy to look at other people that are on your team. I’m just using the camera guy, for example, and it’s like, when you’re looking at it, it’s not a person you have all this life intertwined, and it’s just somebody you go to work with, even though you might have a great culture, and we do here, and I know you guys do as well. It’s easy to think that about somebody you’re not married to, or somebody who’s not in some sort of, as you said, tug of war needs to go, oh, well, they can do, like, a gazillion things I’ll never be able to do, right? And it’s easy to see that, and Caleb and Megan and Riley and Audrey and all the people that you know work on our team. But I think I don’t know why we lose sight of that, and it’s the person we It’s lovely,

Dee Milby 43:22
yeah, to say to yourself, you’re better at that than I am, and I’m not going to fight you on it, yeah,

Brandon Welch 43:28
that’s beautiful.

Randy Milby 43:30
That’s what I want to create. Is a team of people that’s a lot smarter and a lot better at their jobs than I am.

Brandon Welch 43:37
That is probably why you are where you are at this point, my friend and teach me. Yeah. So I don’t know how long we’ve rambled on, but I think this definitely one of my favorite.

Randy Milby 43:48
This is real

Brandon Welch 43:50
Frank, real as real as it gets. You got it? Frank. So speaking of the Maven side, let’s teach just a little bit more. Is there anything so say there’s somebody that is you 10 years ago, and they’re looking at this massive thing they want to make happen, and they’re going, how in the heck would I ever make that happen? What’s your advice to people who are sitting there going, I know it can be better, and where I’m at now is not where I want to be, and I know that the organization I’m at is not going to ever change this world like I want to change it. So what? What would you say that person who’s

Randy Milby 44:25
don’t be afraid of failure, that pit in your stomach, that fear should be a motivator. So the more fear and the more that weird feeling in your gut, that’s a good thing. Don’t lose it. Wow. But keep it. Keep keep that faith over fear. Faith over fear. Yeah, exactly. But failure has taught me so much and and my last 40 years of doing this that I’ll be honest without the failures I probably you know, without Dee next to me. Yeah, and the failures I’ve had are probably wouldn’t be where I’m at today.

Dee Milby 45:05
Yeah. I mean, I definitely feel that way. I mean, I really, I cherish the fact that he’s my husband, and that we can work together and that we have built this business, and, you know, things are going well for us, because I would have never I’m the type of person I you know, I was in the same house for 20 years. I’d probably still be living in that house, working the same job I worked forever, if I didn’t have this dreamer as a husband, because that’s the way I was. And with the stream brings up the kite, he brings me along. Get out your comfort zone, yes, yes, come on, let’s go. Like everything we did today, come on, man, that’s Randy’s, yeah, everything we

Brandon Welch 45:48
did today, holy, I just say like Dee stole the show. Like these commercials coming out, yeah? And probably the greatest feat as a sales guy ever pulled off was not getting Dee to spend the money on TV, but was getting her to actually be in her own commercials. I’ll pay double

Randy Milby 46:06
She’s a natural.

Brandon Welch 46:08
Oh, she’s awesome.

Dee Milby 46:08
Thank you

Brandon Welch 46:10
Well guys, thank you so much for being here. I know this is spoken to somebody, or dozens or hundreds of people who are looking up, wanting the exact things that you guys have built. It’s an honor to work with you. It’s honor to be part of your story. And we’re not done. We’re not even close to done. Just getting started, you are. We’re on the verge of some really, really promising signals for explosive growth, and it’s because you’ve had the discipline and the groundwork and the and the faith and just the awesomeness that you guys bring to the world together. So give the podcast a like and a subscribe if you want to hear more from Dee and Randy and people like them, we’re blessed to say we have other people that other Dee’s and Randy’s. That’s actually not true. We have other wonderful people that we’re going to be bringing to you more often in the podcast. So hit that LIKE SUBSCRIBE button. Share it, forward the emails. Subscribe at Maven, or sorry, subscribe at frankandmaven.com for the newsletter. We’re putting all sorts of fun stuff, and if you didn’t get it today, we’re going to drop Randy and Dee’s campaigns in there so you guys can take a look at him, and we will back here every Monday talking about your real life marketing and business questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why, you guys know it, marketers who can’t teach you why are just a fancy lie. Oh, you know that you’ve heard before, marketers that can’t teach you why are just a fancy lee. We’ll talk to you guys next week.