Tommy Mello started A1 Garage Door Service painting doors for $100 each
Tommy Mello learned garage doors by painting them on weekends in Phoenix, then built A1 on manuals, a training center and a share of the company for technicians.
Phoenix, AZ
In 2014, one of A1’s employees missed the two-hour appointment window a couple had been promised. The owner, Tommy Mello, went to their door himself with flowers, a Starbucks gift card and some other freebies, the Arizona Business Gazette reported that year.
“I want them to say, ‘They screwed up but the owner cares about the business and he’s going to make it right,’” Mello told the Gazette. “If you keep that attitude, you grow your business, recession or no recession.”
At the time, A1 had about 40 employees and served the Phoenix and Tucson areas. Mello said the company had billed $30,000 a month in services in 2010 and was billing $500,000 a month by then. By 2025, A1 said it served 32 markets, and Mike Rowe, who had Mello on his podcast The Way I Heard It that year, put the staff at about 700. Mello is still the chief executive. Since 2022 a private equity firm has owned part of the company alongside him. How a man who learned the trade with a paintbrush built all of that is a story contractors around the country know, because Mello has told it for years, on podcasts and in two books.
Mello grew up in Sterling Heights, Michigan, north of Detroit, where his father owned a transmission shop. He moved to Arizona in 1999. As a kid he had mowed yards and shoveled snow for money, and in Arizona he worked for a landscaping company, tended bar and studied business.
Then a roommate took a job managing a garage door company. “I just remember I was like, what? I’m like, what goes wrong with a garage door?” Mello said on the Moneywise podcast in 2025. Six months later the roommate offered him $100 a door to paint them. Mello did not know how. He found a painter on Craigslist, an older man, who taught him. Soon he was painting 10 doors on Saturday and 10 on Sunday.
On those jobs he met the technicians, and he noticed how much they were making. Another roommate went to work as a technician and became the top salesman. Mello asked him to start a business. They named it A1. “A1 just happened to fall first in the phone book,” Mello said on Moneywise. The company dates its founding to 2007. Mello bought the business phone number of a struggling garage door company, the Gazette reported, and inherited the customers who kept calling it.
The early years were thin. The partners did cash jobs, split the money and paid their rent out of it. In 2010 Mello gave his partner a choice: take the business and its debt, or let Mello have it. The partner told him to keep it and moved to Montana. They stayed friends, Mello said. Mello took the company and about $50,000 in debt, a figure he later put in the title of his 2018 book, Home Service Millionaire. He asked his mother and stepfather to move from Michigan. “You guys are going to have to take a leap of faith on me,” he recalled telling them on Moneywise. By 2014 his father was working on A1’s vehicles, and his mother and stepfather worked in the business.
Mello has said he did not know the basics when he started. “We didn’t have manuals or standard operating procedures, so everything was chaos,” he said on ServiceTitan’s Toolbox for the Trades podcast in 2020. “I was the dispatcher, I’d pull over to answer the phone … there were no systems in place.”
His accountant became a mentor. He had Mello read a new business book every couple of weeks, and one of the first things he told him to do was take down the bikini calendar in his office. Mello said that, having grown up in his father’s shop, he had thought it was normal. Later he met Al Levi, a consultant and the author of The 7-Power Contractor, who helped A1 write its manuals and standard operating procedures.
The rules Mello took from those years are specific. He told ServiceTitan that no manager should have more than five direct reports. With more, he said, “stuff starts slipping through that shouldn’t have.” He tried to outsource the call center and called it a big mistake, because the outside agents did not know the business or share its culture. He bought and repaired his own trucks and ran his own warehouse until theft and spoiled inventory showed him it cost more than it saved. “Focus is everything,” he told ServiceTitan. A1 has stayed with residential garage doors.
Training became the center of the system. In 2020, new A1 apprentices spent three or four weeks training in their own market, then six more weeks at a full-time training center in Phoenix, Mello told ServiceTitan. While they trained, he had them call family and friends and offer a free service call or tune-up, so they could get comfortable with the company’s tools.
In December 2022, Cortec Group, a New York private equity firm, completed what it called a growth recapitalization of A1, in partnership with Mello and his managers. Cortec said Mello would keep running the business and keep a significant ownership stake. On Moneywise in 2025, Mello said he owned 47 percent of the company. He said about $100 million from that deal went to employees.
He has said he wants more of them to own a piece. On Moneywise, he said about 25 people at A1 had become millionaires, and he talked about his technicians in plain terms. “They leave a smile on their customers’ faces. They fix it right the first time. They’re trustworthy. They take care of our clients,” he said on the podcast. “They should be millionaires.” Instead of a standard equity plan, A1 uses what Mello calls profit units, which give technicians a path to earn equity. In the year before that interview, 49 had earned it, which he called a record.
He also described a role at A1 he calls a dream manager, whose job is to help each employee reach personal goals and find balance between work and home. “We are going to make thousands of people in the company highly successful homeowners,” he said in a 2022 profile for the Titan 100, a business leadership award.
For customers, the point is the same one he made with the flowers. Sam Kladis of Mesa told the Gazette in 2014 that a friend sent him to A1 after another company “charged a fortune” and failed to fix his door. “They came out, fixed it right, did it better and for less money,” he told the Gazette. “Tommy stopped by personally to make sure the tech was doing the job right, and he was.”
By 2023, when Mello went back on Toolbox for the Trades, he had about 600 people on the payroll. He said that with their families, the company was supporting roughly 2,400 people. “Revenue is for vanity, and profit is for sanity,” he said on the show.