If all I had was a truck, a phone, and $5,000, here’s exactly what I’d do. I wouldn’t spread that money thin across Google, TV, and radio. I’d get big in a small area. Pick the zip code or the cluster of older neighborhoods where things break, and dominate it. Branded truck parked there daily, door knocks, yard signs. Look like a massive operation in one confined area. Small, focused, and everywhere the customer looks.
If all I had was a truck, a phone, and $5,000, here's exactly what I would do to build a business. We all know that marketing is expensive and it ...
Every healthy home services company runs at the same revenue split. If yours is off, your profit is too. 50% to COGS (labor, materials, permits, subs). 30 to 35% to overhead (trucks, insurance, office, gas). 15% left as net profit. Those three numbers are the health check. If you’re not hitting them, you’re not pulling the right levers yet.
Every home services company should run at this exact revenue split. When you look at how your model is constructed, what you should be looking at ...
A wrapped truck is probably the best marketing investment you can make. But the wrap alone isn't what works. The story is. My ugly mug is on the side and back of every truck we own. I can't go anywhere in this city without someone asking if I'm one of the Peterman brothers or staring at me over dinner trying to place my face. That recognition isn't the wrap doing its job. It's the story behind it that people actually remember.
A rap truck is probably your best investment that you can make in marketing. I would say in conjunction with that is having a story around the bra...
Offering one solution is quietly costing you two things: your close rate and your average ticket. When there’s only one option, the customer’s choice is yes or no. When there are several, the choice becomes which one. That shift changes everything. People want options everywhere else they spend money. Your service call shouldn’t be the exception.
to increase your average ticket, start offering more than one solution to your customers. I catch a lot of heat for the number of options that we ...
HVAC, plumbing, and electrical look like they combine perfectly. Operationally, they’re completely different businesses. I’m not saying don’t add a second trade. I’m saying overprepare before you do. Have you built a membership base big enough to carry HVAC through the slow shoulder seasons? Do your customers even know you offer the new trade? We’ve had plumbing for almost 10 years and still get customers surprised by it. That’s a cross-selling gap most owners never plan for.
HVAC plumbing and electrical look like they combine perfectly. However, their operational models are completely different. There's a little simila...
The most expensive accounting mistake in home services hides in one line of your P&L. Technician labor belongs in cost of goods sold, not overhead. Owners who get this wrong think they’re running 65% margins when they’re really at 50 or below. Get it in the right column and you’ll finally see your true numbers: aim for 50% COGS, 35% overhead, 15% profit.
And these are the KPIs that you need to be paying attention in order to make sure that your HVAC plumbing or electrical company is operating effic...
Most growth hacks for owners aren’t hacks. They’re expensive shortcuts that only work once the basics are dialed in. I rated five of the most common ones, 1 to 10. Trucks with no one to drive them, trades added too early, ads without testing. All lower than you’d think. The single 10 out of 10 is the move most owners resist the longest.
I want you to rate these growth hacks for owners. One to 10, based off whether or not you feel like they work. Okay, so buying more trucks. Well, ...
The person closest to the problem usually has the better answer. Most owners overrule them anyway. Holding every decision doesn’t protect the company, it stunts it. Your people have a perspective you’ve lost from the owner’s chair. Set the guardrails, hand them the KPIs, define the win, and let them get creative. That’s how the company grows past you.
Often times owners want to stick their hands in every single decision. Well, if it's not my decision, it's not the right one. And we don't allow p...
Every few weeks, a group of owners flies in to walk our facility. They see the board, the lab, the warehouse, the trucks, all of it. I do this because nobody opened their doors for me when we were small. I had to figure it out the hard way. If seeing how a $115M home service company actually runs helps one owner skip a few years of mistakes, that’s worth the afternoon. Follow the journey.
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The most expensive way to fix a broken process is to hire a person to hide it. I did it for years, chasing headcount like it was the goal. But throwing a person at a broken system doesn't fix the system, it just buries the problem in payroll. Document the process first. Automate what you can. Then hire someone to make a good system great, not to patch a bad one.
Before you approve your next hire, ask yourself this question. Are we hiring this person to compensate for a broken process? More employees seems ...
A vision your team has never seen might as well not exist. Mine goes out to every employee at the start of each year. Three years out, rewritten annually, edited when something didn’t work. And here’s what I’ve learned: the bigger the vision, the harder the right people grab on. I’d have quietly lost good people if they didn’t know where we were headed.
What is the vision that you share with the team to keep everybody looking in the right direction? Is it three year or five year or fifteen year? T...
There was a time where I thought my dad had it backwards. Turns out he was exactly right. He built this company on a simple order: our people, then our customers, then the bottom line. Every time we’ve struggled, it’s because we flipped it, chasing profit directly and making calls that cut against our culture. Take care of the first two and the third takes care of itself.
My dad built this company thinking that the bottom line was the last thing we should worry about. As we started to grow, I began to think he may b...