Want to know if you’re underpriced? Your P&L already told you. If your gross margin isn’t 50% or better, you probably are. Your cost of goods should sit around 50% in HVAC, plumbing, or electrical. When it climbs higher, overhead starts eating your profit line and you feel it in the bank account, not the top line. The numbers aren’t hiding it. You’re just not looking.
How do you know if you're underpriced? Your KPIs should tell you. So if you look at a P&L and your gross margin is not 50% or better, more than li...
The hardest part of taking over a family business isn’t honoring what your parents built. It’s knowing when to change it. What got us here won’t always get us there. Protecting the legacy sometimes means changing direction, doing things differently, and having conversations nobody wants to have. That’s the job of the second generation.
Sometimes protecting a family business means changing the things that built it in the first place. Easy to say, sometimes not easy to hear. When I...
The most useless thing an owner can do is watch the competition. There’s more than enough work to go around. Point that attention inward instead. Every company, including ours, has things breaking daily. The one who wins isn’t the one watching everyone else. It’s the one obsessed with fixing their own house.
solve the problems that you have in your own house. We don't really worry about our competition because frankly, we have enough problems to solve ...
The minute I have to be the one coming up with every idea is the minute I know I’ve failed to develop my team. Growing a company means evolving as a leader, and that means building people who understand the business almost as well as you do. Ask yourself: which meetings are you still the smartest one in? That’s where your growth is stuck.
Trying to prove that you're the smartest one in the room is the fastest way to stump the growth of your company. When I'm in a meeting, I want to ...
Most owners think recruiting ends when the new hire shows up. That’s the mistake that’s costing you people. Recruiting has only just begun on day one. We run a structured two-week process, every day building on the last, so nobody’s handed a set of keys and left to sink. People don’t quit the job. They quit a bad start.
People don't quit jobs. They quit the first 90 days. What do I mean by that? What I mean is your onboarding process must be robust and detailed an...
If I lost everything today and had to start over, I’d choose HVAC again without hesitation. It’s recurring revenue through memberships, big ticket sizes that make growth easier, and a customer who actually wants to pay for maintenance. Seasonal? Sure. But the opportunity in this trade has never been bigger than it is right now.
I lost everything today and had to start over. This is the trade I would choose without hesitation. The opportunity is bigger than ever. HVAC is r...
Your close rate isn’t just made in the home. It’s made on the phone before the tech ever shows up. The person who answers with empathy on someone’s worst day, the dispatcher who sends the right tech and sets clear expectations. By the time your technician arrives, trust is either already there or already gone. Train the front of the funnel like it matters, because it does.
Many people in home services focus just on training and development for their technician, which makes sense, right? They're the ones going out in ...
Financing isn’t a fallback for people who can’t pay. It’s the tool 80% of our customers choose on purpose. 1,500+ systems installed this year, more than 8 in 10 financed. Real customer service means giving people a way to invest in their most prized possession without draining their savings. Skip financing and you’re not being conservative. You’re losing every day.
If you're not using financing in your home services business, you are losing every day. When I look at our sales dashboard, year-to-date, we've in...
More calls per tech isn't growth, it's just burnout with extra steps. We'd rather a tech run fewer calls and knock every one out of the park: take their time, offer options, catch the problems before they break, and give the customer an experience they've never had. You can't scale on halfway calls. You scale on great ones.
How do you get more jobs done without burning your texts out? I think the real question is how do we do a better job on the calls that we are able...
One of the KPIs we monitor every single day is options offered per technician. Why track something that specific? Because the techs offering the most options close the most jobs. Every time. One solution is a sales pitch. A menu of options is a shopping experience. Give people paths, from “just fix it today” to “$150 a month for all of it,” and conversion takes care of itself.
The biggest thing you can do to increase your closing percentage is to offer options. A lot of businesses out there are offering one solution to t...
The best technician in the world can’t help a customer who doesn’t trust them. That’s why we coach communication as hard as we coach the trade. One-on-ones, ride-alongs, rapport-building. All the technical skill in the world is useless if you can’t get the customer to believe you’re the right company for their home.
Technical skills can make you valuable, however people skills determine how valuable. What do I mean? In residential home services, building trust...
Stop running your business by looking at everyone else’s. What works for another company means nothing until you know your own numbers. Are you operating efficiently? That’s the only question that decides whether you’re ready to grow, and only your data can answer it. Not comparison. Not FOMO.
the worst advice that people get is they start comparing themselves to other people and are like, "Hey, I need to go get this." Well, you need to ...