Home Service Super Summit Offers Free Online Education

Official world record attempt at largest online business conference June 11-14

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From landscaping, lawn care and pest control to HVAC and cleaning, everyone who works in home services will discover new managerial and accountability skills that directly benefit their business in the attempt to hold the largest online business event ever.

The Home Service Super Summit will be taking place online from Thursday, June 11 to Sunday, June 14, with each day having a different theme.

Registration for the summit is free at www.homeservicesupersummit.com.Hsss Logo

The summit was developed after more than 100 events had been canceled or postponed for the home service industry including some that Conquer owner Brandon Vaughn and his friends and colleagues were scheduled to appear at.

Traditionally, bringing 44 speakers such as Mark Bradley of LMN or Frank Bourque into a physical location and putting on a trade show like this would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to organize and equally expensive to attend.

"Going virtual, the benefit is they can be on Zoom, they can share exactly what they would share in person and people would be able to sit at home and soak in the education, no travel, no hotels, no viruses," says Brandon Vaughn, owner of Conquer.  "That's the benefit of hosting something online and when we started putting it out there, we realized how big it can be."

Guinness World Records started a conversation with organizers about wanting to verify the event as an official Guinness World Records attempt for the world's largest virtual business conference.

The record is 10,000 people online at the same time. Vaughn says they are on track to hit and far exceed that record depending on how many people show up. Should the record be attained, all participants will receive a Guinness World Record certificate.

"It is 100% completely truly honestly free if people just want to come and attend jump into the live stream hang out with everyone," he says.

Upon registering, participants receive a link to click and watch any of the four-day sessions live. There are options to upgrade access and have an all-access pass to the sessions.

Typically, at events like this you have the ticket costs anywhere from $200 to $500 depending on the speakers and you have $500 to fly there and $500 to $1,000 to stay there.

“We decided to make this super simple since our costs are so low to put this event together as far as the speakers, no travel and no speaking fees and those types of things,” Vaughn says. “$47 gets you the all access pass, which is lifetime access to the recordings.”

Another option for $27, gets participants detailed summit notes where a professional note taker takes notes on each session in PDF format.

Currently, Vaughn said anyone that gets the free registration about 70 percent are signing up for the all access pass.

Going Virtual

Vaughn is a second-generation service business owner himself, who grew his father’s business from $100,000 a year company to $500,000 per month in six years.

His success led him into speaking engagements and coaching. Since that time, he has operated the Conquer which provides business coaching and mentorship to home service business owners.

"Now we actually have a whole team of home service business owners that actually work with our students or our coaching clients, one on one to implement and execute and hold them accountable," he says. "We basically say it's three pillars community clarity, and accountability. Those are the three parts that we inject into home service business owners."

When several in-person events were getting canceled due to COVID-19, Vaughn started to gather up speakers he knew and sponsorships for a larger-scale online event.

Rather than just pull all the speakers together, he chose to suggest the concept of putting together the world's largest online event by taking everything they could and getting as much of the experience of a regular conference as possible.

“These are the times when the weak and the ones who are ill prepared and also sometimes due to circumstances outside of their control, businesses are collapsing and are going under and are disappearing,” Vaughn says. “This is an opportunity to kind of level the playing field and to really rise above.”

Looking back at depressions and recessions, the companies that grew from those lean times were those that put their efforts into marketing during that time.

“It's really interesting, because a lot of people feel like they have to really take a step back and be like, well, I'm just going to wait this out to see what happens when the exact opposite is true, this is actually the time to push forward as hard as you can and you can capture so much more market share, because a lot of the other people are pulling back,” Vaughn says. “It's a massive opportunity. Time is of the essence to start executing on these things and I think the timing of it is more important than ever to keep getting your education on rather than just kind of waiting and seeing what's going to happen.”

Four Days of Business

Each day of the Home Service Super Summit is divided into themes.

Vaughn says the first day is all about marketing: How to get the phone to ring, how to get the leads coming in, online presence, YouTube, tracking and measuring.

"We go through the whole gamut of marketing with 11 speakers just talking about marketing," he says.

The next day is dedicated to admin and leadership. Vaughn describes it as being lessons about how to have a strong back of office, how to automate processes in your business, good HR principles. In addition, he says there is a focus on how to lead, how to have a phenomenal company culture and how to attract people into your business.

The third day is all about production.

"This really is kind of a deeper dive into the technicians, how to attract them, how to get good employees onto your team," Vaughn says. Speakers will also go over how to organize shops and vehicles and have good back office systems. One of the concluding sessions will be a virtual tour of multiple home service business owners that will tour and show their trucks, shops and training centers and how they have things set-up to get owners thinking about how they can implement some systems like that. 

And then the fourth day is all about sales, with an emphasis about how to talk to customers.

Vaughn specifically is excited about David Mattson, CEO of Sandler Sales Training, a program he went through early in his career, because it's going to be role playing on exactly how to talk to a customer, what you should say and how you should say it. “We walk through the whole process,” he says.

Each evening will be concluded by a virtual happy hour that allows participants can come hang out and talk to people in the Facebook group and just kind of network with each other.

Who Should Attend?

Vaughn says the people that will get the most benefit out the Home Service Super Summit are really those who are struggling in their business and feel like a slave to it and are seeking more time freedom.

“Our big primary focus is for owners to get off the truck,” he says. “If you're on the truck right now and you're answering the phones, scheduling the jobs, dispatching, trying to get the employees, you wear so many different hats.”

For Vaughn, the breaking point for his business was learning how to delegate and systemize some of those things to a point where he could get off the truck and start trusting other people. “As soon as that happens, it's a game changer for home service business owner,” he says.

“If you're looking to grow, or you're just looking to extract yourself more out of the business to have more time freedom, this is the conference for you,” Vaughn says. “I don't view this as a money thing. This is not the conference on how to make millions and millions of dollars. This is a conference of how to have the business finally realize your why, whatever that is. If your why is to make $100,000 a year, $80,000 a year but to work maybe 10 hours a week, five hours a week or if it's to build a multi-million dollar behemoth, everyone's going to get a little bit something from it.”

That is one of the reasons the summit has such a diverse speaker line-up. There are those who have million-dollar companies sharing their best tips and others doing a lot more, but the focus is generally on how to free the owner up to serve as an owner.

"The amazing thing is, is that every home service business has the exact same problems," Vaughn says. "If you're a plumber, a landscaper, a pest control company, a painter, an exterior cleaner. It's employees, it's trying to get the phone to ring, it's running a good back office and having automations, answering the phones, its selling and converting the jobs.”

Nearly everything is the same except for the technical how to. A landscaper is teaching a tech how to use a string trimmer versus a window cleaner showing a tech a squeegee.

Vaughn notes that the technical aspect represents a minimal portion of owning and running a business. Citing Michael Gerber, he stresses that it is important to not just be a technician, but to be the entrepreneur and the manager and the driving force of the business.

“Most people who start growing their business realize very fast the technical part is super tiny and the back end of actually being the entrepreneur and growing a business is the toughest part,” he says.

From personal experience, Vaughn knows that owning a home service business is hard.

“We don’t sell the squeegee, the lawn mowers and weed wackers, we sell services that require people,” he says. “This is an extremely people-focused business and people can be hard to motivate, develop and train. A lot of business owners are struggling with generational problems that they're claiming, when really there's so many common principles that can fix this problem.” That’s why a whole day is dedicated to just the production side of the business.

Vaughn says leading up to the summit, the important thing is for people to share news of it so more people participate.

“The more people that can share this out and get others involved, the greater likelihood that each and every one of us can get that Guinness World Record certificate that you participated in the official Guinness World Record, which is pretty cool. I've never done that myself personally so it's going to be a new experience for me too,” he says. “Just share it out to fellow contractors and anyone else and come hang out with us. It's going to be a lot of fun.”

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