The most dangerous thing about growth is how good it makes a broken business look. More leads mask a bad booking rate. More calls hide a falling conversion rate. Revenue climbs, so nobody looks under the hood. Try this with your leadership team: if the leads stopped tomorrow, what would scare us? Whatever the answer is, that’s the thing you should be fixing right now, while it’s still hidden.
Growth in a business can hide a lot of stink. Let me tell you why. Growth can oftentimes make everyone look smart. We know what we're doing. Every...
Here’s a hard truth: if the company doubles but your people’s lives stay the same, they’ll leave. Every orientation, I tell our team we grow to create opportunities for them, so this is their last first day ever. Growth isn’t for me or the balance sheet. It’s the thing that lets your best people keep rising instead of hitting a ceiling and walking out the door.
If your company doubles in size and your employees' lives don't get better, you're going to risk seeing your best people walk. Every other Monday,...
Getting bigger doesn’t fix your problems. It just gives you bigger ones. A lot of owners want to scale because it sounds impressive, not because they’ve defined where they’re actually going. Pick your number first. $5M, $50M, whatever fits the life you want. Then you know when and how to invest. Growth without a destination is just motion.
I talk to a lot of people who say they want a big company. I want to build what you've built. Do you really know what that means? Bigger companies...
Bigger feels like the answer, but it’s usually it’s the most expensive one. A new location means buying leads in a market that doesn’t know you exist. Meanwhile you’re sitting on thousands of customers who already trust you. Before you chase the harder, flashier path, ask how you could serve the base you already have at a higher level. That’s where the cheap growth is.
Most owners pick the harder path because it feels bigger. A second trade or a second location. If you already have thousands of customers in one a...
When you rate home service trades as businesses, two factors decide almost everything: ticket size and seasonality. The best ones have big tickets and ring year-round. The weakest are stuck in a single season no matter how good the work is. Before you pick a trade or add one, forget which sounds exciting and ask: how big is the average job, and how many months does the phone actually ring?
rate these home service industries as businesses plumbing plumbing nine out of 10 no seasonality high tickets HVAC eight out of 10 seasonality but...
More leads is the instinct, but it’s almost never the answer. Your customer database is the most underutilized asset you own, and most owners walk right past it chasing new leads. Booking rate, conversion rate, average ticket. Those are the numbers that decide whether you’re actually maximizing what you’ve already got. Master the leads you have before you go buy more.
When we think about our operation, often times the first thing we think is we need more leads. What are we actually doing with the ones that we ha...
Scaling fast and scaling efficiently are two completely different things. Most owners only do the first one. That’s why you can have your best year ever and still wonder where the money went. Growth eats cash, and if you’re not watching your numbers, it eats you too. Know where the needle’s moving, and you can grow responsibly, so the company’s still standing in 24 months.
If your business is having the best revenue you're ever and you're wondering where in the hell all the money went, you're not crazy. Growth eats c...
Could your business survive you disappearing for 30 days? That’s the real test of whether you’ve built a company or just a very demanding job. You can run on brute force and yourself for a while, but it hits a ceiling fast. Scaling means building the processes and people that let it run whether you’re there or on a beach with your phone off.
Here's a brutal test. Disappear from your company for 30 days. Where does the revenue go? We have to be thinking about what processes, what proced...
If your direct labor is running over 23%, your business is quietly bleeding out. Most owners don’t even know it’s happening. In home services, labor should sit in the 20 to 23% range. It varies by trade (HVAC install runs lower, maintenance runs higher), but that band is the health check. When it creeps past that, it’s usually a comp plan that’s off or efficiency that’s slipping. Watch the number before it eats your margin.
Your direct labor is running over this percentage. Your business is actually quietly bleeding out. Let me explain. Typically, in a home services b...
Your cheapest lead source isn’t Google. It’s the customers you already have. Every owner has a database full of people who already trust them, and most do nothing with it. We built an entire role around it: a database marketing specialist who reactivates past customers with the new products and services they don’t even know we offer. That’s growth you already paid for.
If you want to generate more leads, before you pay Google another dollar, do this. We all have customer databases. Now how effectively use that da...
The most dangerous time in our company’s history was when revenue was growing the fastest. Everyone saw the phones ringing and the top line climbing. What they didn’t see was us throwing people at broken processes and ignoring the mechanics underneath. Fast growth doesn’t fix a broken business. It just hides it, until it can’t anymore. Grow efficient, not just big.
Back in 2223, we were exploding on top line revenue. Calls were coming in, the phones wouldn't stop ringing, however, internally we were throwing ...
You can train skill into almost anyone. You cannot train attitude into someone who doesn’t have it. That’s why “hire for attitude” only works if you’ve actually defined what that means. What are the non-negotiable traits you’ll never budge on? Write them down and hire against them, because the wrong attitude doesn’t just slow training, it costs you the customer.
You've all heard it, higher for attitude, train for skill. It sounds good in theory, but are you actually doing it? What are the non-negotiables f...