We doubled our revenue in two years, and it was the most painful stretch of my career. $50 million to over $100 million. From the outside, that looks like winning. From the inside, we were throwing people at problems instead of fixing our processes, and it caught up with us. We had to let go of people who’d helped build the company. If you’re doing that right now, you’re outgrowing your systems, not your market.
2024 was one of the most painful years of my life. And as a business, we were growing the whole time. In 2024, we had just went from two years pri...
There’s one number separating a profitable shop from a busy one: ROI per lead source. Most owners track how many leads a source generated. Almost nobody tracks what those leads actually turned into, booked, run, converted, and average ticket. If you’re not that granular, you’re not managing marketing spend. You’re guessing with it, and hoping the revenue covers the guess.
there's one set of numbers that's separating a profitable shop from a busy one. That set of numbers is ROI per lead source. You need to understand...
I didn't call it The Empowerment Plan. I called it The Empowerment Project, on purpose. A plan implies an endpoint. Empowerment doesn't have one. I think about it the same way I think about being a parent, you never stop, no matter how old your kid gets. Same with leading people. There's no finish line, only the daily work of watching what it does to your people, your customers, and your business.
I didn't call my book The Empowerment Plan. I called it The Empowerment Project. Here's why. Empowerment is something that never ends. A plan insi...
The hardest admission I can make is that we hired people in 2022 we had to let go in 2024. Overhiring during rapid growth feels like the safe move. It’s actually the one that costs you the most later. Building real process is slower and harder, but it’s the thing that scales. More headcount is just a more expensive way to delay fixing what’s actually broken.
We had to let go of people in 2024 that we never should have hired in 2022. That's on me. Overhiring when you're growing really fast is natural. I...
“That lead source is cheap, so we’ll spend our money there.” That sentence cost us $200,000. We found it buried in one line of the P&L, money spent on leads we were never actually tracking through to conversion and sale value. Cost per lead means nothing without booking rate, conversion, and average sale attached to it. Measure the whole funnel or risk finding your own $200K.
I found $200,000 we were lighting on fire, and it was in one line item of the P&L. If you're not measuring every lead source that you have, if you...
I lived through hiring 300 people in a year without the systems to back it up. It was a disaster. Adding headcount without process doesn’t scale anything, it just multiplies the chaos. A bigger team isn’t automatically a stronger one. Build the infrastructure first, then hire into it, or you’ll learn this lesson the same hard way I did.
We hired 300 people in one calendar year and here's what broke first. It wasn't hiring. Adding people to the equation without process and procedur...
The first time I paid myself a real salary, I felt guilty. That thinking is completely backwards. An owner’s salary is part of a healthy P&L, not a luxury you feel bad about. If you’re paying yourself next to nothing and just taking distributions, you don’t actually know how healthy your company is. If someone bought your business tomorrow, they’d have to hire a replacement at market rate. Pay yourself that number. Otherwise your numbers are lying to you.
The first time I paid myself a real salary, I felt extremely guilty. Here's why that thinking is backwards. An owner salary is part of a healthy P...
We’ll do over $100 million in revenue this year, but that’s not the number that matters. Two numbers actually tell you the truth: gross profit and net profit. Gross profit tells you if you’re running efficiently, or if low overhead is just covering up a weak conversion rate and average ticket. Net profit tells you what the business actually produces after everything. Revenue is the headline. Those two numbers are the real report card.
We'll do over $100 million in revenue this year, and that's not the number that matters. Here's the two that do. Gross profit and net profit. What...
The golden age of the trades isn’t guaranteed for everyone in it. Two groups are about to find that out the hard way. Owners with no real brand, just PPC that works until AI and search change underneath them. And owners still hiding from price transparency, while customers already have the tools to find pricing without you. The businesses that lean into both instead of resisting them are the ones still standing when this shifts.
Everyone is screaming about the golden age of the trades. Here is who is about to get completely wiped out. Those people are the people that aren'...
Here’s something nobody tells you about taking over a family business: you’ll undo half of what made it successful in the first place. My dad spent 25 years building this. My brother and I changed a lot of it, not because he got it wrong, but because our vision was different, and different visions need different ingredients. Protecting a legacy means knowing when it’s time to let some of it change.
My dad spent 25 years building Pedermen brothers. I've had to undo half of what made it work, but that's part of the job. Growing a business and t...
I’ve spent millions in marketing scaling from $5 million to over $100 million. Here’s the pattern behind every keep-or-cut decision I make. The channels I own always beat the channels I rent. Anything that puts me at the mercy of someone else’s algorithm, or attracts the cheapest possible customer, gets cut. Anything that builds our brand or deepens trust with people who already know us gets doubled, sometimes tripled down. The flashiest channel isn’t always the best one. What’s worked for you? Let me know in the comments.
I've spent millions in marketing scaling from five million to over a hundred million. Here's what I would keep and here's what I would cut. What w...
Most people never see the part of the business that actually makes the rest of it possible. This distribution center supplies five locations across Indiana, close to $70 million in revenue, and it opens at 4:30 in the morning. Every truck gets loaded the night before, bin by bin, so a tech’s whole day is ready before they even walk in. This is what operating at scale actually looks like.
this is our distribution center. So this place right here basically supplies Indianapolis, Lafayette, Muncie, Columbus, Indiana, and Bloomington, ...