Everyone says training your own technicians is too expensive, but almost nobody calculates what it costs to fight over the same labor pool as everyone else. The Indeed spend. The ads. The signing bonuses. The “experienced” hires who turn out to have none. Training costs money too, but it’s the fastest way to grow your tech base and take care of more customers. It’s not an expense. It’s an investment, and you have to look at the back end to see the return.
Everyone says training your own technicians is expensive. Have you ever calculated what it cost to just recruit the same labor pool as everyone el...
People think entrepreneurship means freedom. Often it means quitting a 40-hour week to work 80 for the toughest boss you’ll ever have. You. The goal was never less work for the sake of it. It’s leverage: building the people, process, and systems that let the business scale without burning you out. That’s the real work, and it’s nothing like the highlight reel.
Many entrepreneurs quit a 40 hour per week job to work 80 hours for a psychopath themselves. Entrepreneurship doesn't automatically equate to free...
The best business to start isn’t the exciting one. It’s the boring one people can’t live without. If I lost it all and had 12 months to rebuild to $100K a month, I wouldn’t pick something I’d have to convince people to want. I’d pick something they already need, sell it hard before building anything, and make sure someone other than me could eventually deliver it. That’s how you scale.
If you took everything away from me and gave me 12 months to get back to 100k a month, I wouldn't pick a sexy business. I would pick something bor...
Everyone in the trades is complaining about the same thing: no good techs to hire. We decided to stop complaining and do something about it. In 2020 we built Top Tech, a 5,000 sq ft training lab, to take people with no industry experience and turn them into great technicians. Because great service comes from great techs, and great techs come from great training. Not from a job board.
Let me guess, you can't find enough great technicians. We stopped complaining about it and started training our own. We launched Top Tech in 2020,...
The fastest way to blow up a family business is to both try to make the same decision. My brother and I fixed that early: we wrote out separate job descriptions so our lanes never crossed. He makes his calls, I make mine. Add a shared long-term vision and the trust to let each other lead, and you’ve got the whole formula. Divide and conquer beats overlap and friction every time.
Going into business with family, the few lessons that I've learned are each of us having individual roles. One thing that we did very early on was...
Your best lead source costs you nothing, and most owners barely pay attention to it. Referrals convert higher than almost anything, yet they’re treated like a happy accident instead of a system. Track them. Incentivize your techs to set them. Give your office staff referral codes. We even built a dashboard just for referral traffic. Stop hoping for referrals and start engineering them.
One of the highest converting leads that you have, probably has a marketing budget of zero. What am I talking about? Referrals. We all talk about ...
Nobody tells you that success can be isolating. The higher you climb, the fewer people understand the problems you’re facing. I’ve felt it my whole career. What changed everything was building a circle of people running similar businesses, folks I text constantly, who challenge me and have been where I’m trying to go. You don’t have to carry it alone, and the best operators don’t.
The bigger your company grows, the less people you actually find to talk about the problems that you're going through. This has been something tha...
Nobody would watch a game with no scoreboard. You wouldn’t know who’s winning. So why do we run our businesses that way? Every position in your company needs a scoreboard. We learned this the hard way: our field techs had no idea what good looked like, so we gave them KPIs to measure against. Are the numbers perfect? No. But now everyone knows if they’re winning or losing. That changes everything.
We would never watch a sporting event if there wasn't a scoreboard. Why would we? We wouldn't know what was going on, we wouldn't know who was act...
If your company falls apart when you take a vacation, you don’t own a business. The business owns you. Hustle matters early, when you’re wearing every hat. But as you grow, your role has to change, and a lot of owners get addicted to being needed. They want a hand in every decision. Here’s the fix: write down everything you do for a week, then look at what could be delegated or turned into a process. Free yourself, or stay trapped.
If your company falls apart when you take a vacation, you don't own a business, the business owns you. Don't get me wrong. Hustle is extremely imp...
Growth can bankrupt a profitable company. Sounds impossible until you understand cash. Revenue and profit are not cash, and fast growth burns through cash buying the very things that fuel it. The P&L looks great right up until the account is empty. Sit down with your accountant, build a cash flow forecast, and grow at a pace your cash can actually support.
Do you know that you could actually show a million dollars in profit and still run out of money? Revenue is not cash. Profit is not even cash. Fas...
The experienced tech shortage is real. The solution isn’t recruiting harder. It’s training. We bring people into our lab with zero experience and build them into technicians. Yes, it’s an investment. But there are so many great people out there who just need someone willing to teach them. The industry has to step up and be that someone, or keep fighting over a pool that keeps shrinking.
there aren't enough technicians with experience out there to meet the demand. Here at our training lab, here at TopTech, we train our technicians ...
The most expensive employee in your company might be you, doing tasks worth a fraction of your time. Here’s the exercise: pull up your last two weeks and label every task. Is it a $10 task? A $50 task? A $200 task? Most owners are shocked how much of their day is cheap work they should’ve handed off or systemized. Your time is the budget. Stop blowing it on low-value work.
Door calendar might be the most expensive payroll mistake in your company. Owners love saying they're busy. We tout how many things that we have t...