From $800 to $100 Million: Sardor Umrdinov's Entrepreneurial Journey | S2 Ep. 155

0:05Hey everyone, welcome back to Founder's Story. Today we have Sardor Koumerdinov. So Sardor, you have an incredible story from immigrant to the U.S. looking for your American dream with$800, building a$100 million company called Home Alliance, which is a tech-enabled home services platform. I mean, that's insane. I think there's a lot of people out there that they also just moved to the U.S. and they want their American dream. or maybe they want to go to the US or maybe they're in the US and they just want to start a company. And I think you can help answer all this. And I know it's been a 20 year journey for you.

0:44So let's kick it off with first, how do you even get into entrepreneurship from only$800? Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I moved to the United States in 2003 as a student. It was$800. And I did all kinds of odd different works from dishwashing, bass boy waiter, painting. And I ended up in the construction and servicing different kind of things like plumbing, electrical work. And ended up doing a washing machine repairs in the company. And later on, I decided to open a company for fixing washing machines and driving machines in the coin laundromats and hotel and hospitals. First, it started with coin laundromats.

1:29Basically, I print out the business cards for$100 and actually drive around the coin laundromats and actually start handing them over to those places. And that was the beginning of the entrepreneurship journey. So how does somebody, when you're starting off like that, how do you continue to just put in all this work and effort knowing that you may never win? And I'm guessing at that time, you weren't making a lot of money from it. So what was that motivation that made you want to continue doing that? Yeah, when I moved from Uzbekistan to U.S., I came as a dream and I couldn't go back with nothing.

2:08And that thought of actually making my parents proud, my relatives and everybody else proud, and actually kind of drove me to try to actually work harder. that I even had three jobs at the same time. I was working like Monday to Friday in one work. Saturday, Sunday, I was working as a waiter. And on Saturday, Sunday, during the day, I was working to go into the moving job, like moving furniture and other places. I had to kind of even have three jobs to survive and actually make money. And I was sending some money back to home at that time to actually make sure that my parents feel that I'm okay.

2:45I'm doing well, and otherwise they would call me back. So that was kind of my driving force in the beginning. But later on, of course, it kind of changed after having a family and kids. So let's go to Home Alliance. It sounds like you started getting a lot of the experience, which then enabled you to create this company. What is the mission and how did you get started? Yeah, the Home Alliance was started basically bootstrapped the Home Alliance from service company, then marketing enabled, lead generation to the tech enabled. kind of a bootstrap the company from whole thing without fundraising first and the mission of the home alliance first was basically connecting the best contractors to right homeowners on demand like building an uber and it kind of that vision became a more of an ecosystem direction and now we are basically building business ecosystem where we want to empower millions of contractors to basically build their vision and the mission and to be the most trusted business ecosystem in the earth, which empowers millions of partners to achieve their maximum potential and deliver world-class service.

3:54That's our mission. So I know you're scaling the company. You have a net promoter score of 70 plus. You've held over 500 ,000 customers. A lot of companies, when they do this, they can't maintain that same customer service level. I think we see this time and time again. How did you do that where you also had that small company feel, really care about the customer, but at the same time, scaled the company? One of our core values is customer obsession. We basically monitor and we have algorithms to distribute jobs among our contractors and technicians. And we monitor every single job like an Uber with the stars.

4:33but the job distribution itself happens with algorithm and we really go beyond uh the the customer to deliver that kind of exceptional service and we are continue working on that and our goal uh uh to to reach a 80 plus uh score by the and uh by the end of 2025 and we would love to kind of catch up with tesla in three years in this internet promoter score by 92 well it sounds like you're going to surpass Tesla. Tesla is going to be wanting to be like home alliance, not the other way around. When it comes to leadership, obviously I can tell the passion, the mission, the fact that you have core values, you've really laid down the foundation at the company and you're really driving everyone in the same direction.

5:18What is maybe one or two things that you have found over the years has been critical for you as the leader? Leadership, of course was kind of evolving always uh the caring for the people caring for uh for for employees caring for the contractors here caring for the customers right making sure all of the stakeholders are happy and and always working and another core values we have is hire and develop the best we always kind of try to hire the best and always working on them and making sure we even have a book club in the company we want to make sure everyone is developing and kind of growing together.

5:54What is a book that you really like to read or maybe a book that you always recommend to people? I have multiple of them. And recently, the book I read was, one of them is Zappos, Delivering the Happiness, right? It's one of the good books. And another one is The Principles. The Principles also is one of the great books, Ray Dylos. When is your book coming out? I think I'm going to finish it by the end of the next year, hopefully. Well, I can't wait to read your book. It's going to be amazing. I think a lot of founders, many times they have a lot of ideas and it can be hard, at least for me too.

6:30I have this problem. I get excited about a lot of different ideas and sometimes it's hard to really hone in on one thing and then also stay within that and not try to, you know, overdo a bunch of different things, right? It sounds like you really wanted to be good at one thing and you really mastered that one thing. Yeah, I'm working on a business course, how to actually build and grow and scale the home service business. And even probably it's going to be applicable for any service business. So the course should come within the quarter or two. That's what I'm working on now. Wow, that's amazing.

7:06I know there's a lot of talk now about the American dream. And is it alive? Is it dead? How do immigrants feel about going to the U.S. and becoming entrepreneurs? how do you feel about this? I think American dream American dream is of course alive it's just the best thing and I would really suggest and I think everyone should actually go for it and this country I think has the biggest potential to actually achieve the American dream and I don't believe like some people are saying like American dream is not achievable anymore I'm one of those stories and there are a bunch of others as well. You have to just work hard and do the good thing and do your best and grow and read books and find a mentor and try to actually follow someone good and mentor and do your best.

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9:16Indeed.com slash founders story. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. It's the biggest economy in the world. I believe it's$27 trillion. And the California is where we are. It's like the biggest economy of one of the biggest. And it will be itself. I believe it's almost like$5 trillion. So you cannot not succeed in this country. And I think if you go after your dream, it's achievable. Very inspiring. Thank you for sharing that. So you become an entrepreneur, you see success. I'm sure you went through a lot of challenges. And we ask this question to everyone that we have on this show, because I feel that people learn from the challenges that other people went through, right?

10:03What is a challenge that you went through along the journey? and what did you learn? I think we always face, in the different stage of the business, we always face different challenges. And those obstacles, I think having a grit and having a not giving up and always having actually trying to solve those problems and actually think about how I can solve the problem. And by asking those questions, you can always find answers, right? Like entrepreneurs, I think we are problem solvers itself. So actually by thinking of how can I solve this problem actually makes me, and one of the greatest ideas actually comes at 2, 3 a.m.

10:42at night when I wake up, so like I want to actually get up and I want to write it down because that was kind of a moment when I actually came up with an idea. And it normally is about when you care and ask really deep questions like how you can solve that problem, you can always find answers. If not, just Google it, check GPT it, read books, and all of the answers are there. And you have to always be reading and hearing and looking for all those answers. And answers are there. Yeah, three things I took away from today. Customer service, obsession. I don't hear as many people, I think, talking about that the last few years like you used to.

11:21You're hyper obsessed and your net promoter score is going to be better than Tesla. I can't wait for that. And the problem solving. It's almost like if you really want to make money in a successful business, you have to solve a problem. But the interesting thing about what you're doing is you're not just solving a problem for the customer consumer. You're also solving a problem for other business owners. So if you enable other people to make money and you enable people to get jobs done, it seems like when you marry those two things together, now you have a hundred million dollar, maybe billion dollar company.

11:54but if people want to get in touch with you, obviously at one time, they're going to have to buy your book. I know that. They want to find out about your course. How can they do so? Yeah, it's actually, they can follow me on the social media. It's like they can go to Instagram or the Facebook or YouTube, or they can just go to sardor.com and all my information and social media information is going to be there. Sardor, this has been great. I'm fired up right now. I can't wait till people hear this and I get all the feedback about other people who are in the same situation with only$800, knowing that they can make it too.

12:30But thank you so much though, for joining us today on Founder's Story. Thank you, Dal. I really appreciate it.