Phil M. Jones: Started Washing Cars at 14, Built a $240 Million Company With 5 Salespeople

🎧 Listen now to hear why Phil Jones thinks "always be closing" is backwards, how two words can direct someone's decision without them feeling told what to do, and why he believes most agents are destroying their future business every time they pick up the phone to follow up.

Watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgqBzEuWnOY

Phil Jones told me a story on the pod about a parent trying to get their teenager to clean their room.

The parent picks the moment when the kid is in the middle of a video game with a headset on. Picks the modality of shouting up the stairs. Has the conversation 50 times and nothing changes. Same parent, same kid, same request. But now they wait until the kid is in the passenger seat on the highway. Can't leave. Can't escalate. Side by side instead of head to head. Already in motion, so talking about change doesn't feel like an attack. And the conversation that never worked from the bottom of the staircase works the first time from the driver's seat.

The words didn't change. Everything around the words changed.

Phil put a framework around this. He said there are three things that determine whether communication works: moment, modality, and message. In that order. Everyone skips straight to message. What should this email say. What's the script for the listing appointment. What are the magic words. But if you get the moment wrong, the best words in the world won't save you. If you pick the wrong modality, you've already lost before you open your mouth.

That took me back to when I was serving tables at Outback in college. I was outselling every server in the building and it didn't matter what section they gave me. I'd look at a guy on a first date and ask "do you want the little beer or the big beer." Big beer every time. "Little filet or the big filet." Big filet. I thought I was just good at selling, but hearing Phil talk about it now, that's not really what was happening. I was reading the moment. A guy trying to impress someone, a decision he wants to make fast so he can get back to the conversation, a setting where nobody's going to overthink anything. The moment was right. The modality was right. The words just had to not get in the way.

And when you start looking at our industry through that lens, you see the problem everywhere. Agents closing every call with "if there's anything I can ever do to help, don't hesitate to reach out." That's not a bad sentence. But it's landing at the tail end of a call the other person was already trying to get off of, through a channel they didn't want to be on in the first place. The message isn't the problem. The setup is.

Phil said agents are making far too many phone calls to people who do not want to answer the phone. We're in a world where serious business is getting done over text and DM, channels that a decade ago were throwaway, and our industry is still treating the phone call like it's the only real modality. Not because the phone doesn't work. Because nobody's stopping to ask whether the phone is the right vehicle for this conversation with this person right now.

He went further. He told a room full of agents that if he could do one thing to improve their conversion rate it would be to turn off their smart plans. Because most of them are dumb. Every automated touchpoint that hits someone's inbox without real thought behind it is proving you don't know them. It's giving someone a reason to tune you out permanently.

Here's to thinking before dialing,

Leo

P.S. Phil also built a $240 million business with five salespeople using a referral network that converted at 95 to 100%, demonstrates a technique live on the pod using just the words "most people" to direct someone's decision, and drops a post-game framework called LBs and NTs that replaces obsessing over what went wrong with something that actually compounds.