The hardest thing about a family business isn’t the disagreements. It’s watching someone your dad hired walk away. We’ve had this happen multiple times over 15 years. Every one of them helped get us where we are. But growing means change, and change sometimes means people who were critical to your past aren’t part of your future. We wish them well. It’s still the toughest part of the job.
The hardest thing about family business isn't the disagreements. It's seeing someone that your dad hired leave. Let me tell you, we've had this ha...
We’ve grown 80% in 365 days. In some of those years, we actually made less money the year after. Here’s why: when you grow that aggressively, your process either breaks or was never built in the first place. Big growth years sound great on paper. But if your infrastructure can’t withstand the pace, your bottom line shrinks, because you end up throwing people at problems instead of building the process that would’ve scaled you efficiently.
we've grown up to 80% in 365 days before and what I'll tell you in some of those bigger growth years, we actually made less money the following ye...
This is the part of the business almost nobody shows: dispatch. Nearly 500 calls a day, all routed centrally, one team constantly reshuffling to match the right tech to the right house. Skill, geography, timing, the conversation that customer actually needs, all of it factored in real time. It's not an exact science. It's just the thing that has to work for everything else to work.
just want to take a quick minute and describe how our dispatch process works. We're running almost 500 calls a day. So there's a lot of calls, the...
Tell me your booking rate and I’ll tell you if your company is going to make it. The bar is 90% on qualified leads only, about half of our calls aren’t even real leads, so those get filtered out first. Below 90% on the ones that matter, you’re lighting money on fire, because you already paid for every single one of those leads.
I can look at any home services booking rate and tell you if they're gonna survive. Your booking rate should be at 90%. Every 10 calls, you should...
One person on the phone can undo an entire marketing budget in 30 seconds. We can generate leads all day long. If the call doesn’t make that customer feel like they found the right company, all of it was wasted money. Booking rate and phone-sold memberships are the numbers that actually tell you if your marketing spend is working.
The person who answers the phone has more impact on our success than my entire marketing budget. Let me explain. We can market all day long. We ca...
The best business advice I’ve ever gotten didn’t come from a book. It came from conversations exactly like this one. Another owner, another perspective, no script. You compare notes, you get honest, and somehow the hardest problems you’ve been sitting on start to make sense. That’s not something you can read your way into.
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With over 500 team members, I know exactly who gets trained and who gets fired. It’s not about talent. A brilliant tech who hides mistakes gets fired faster than a slow one who’s honest about them. A top performer who’s toxic still gets fired, results never buy back what toxicity costs a team. And the person everyone forgets to praise, the one who stays and fights during the crisis? That’s who actually built this company.
- I've built a team of over 500 plus team members. Here's who I would train and here's who I would fire. - What would you do with an employee who ...
My dad’s biggest warning was growing too fast. He was right about that. He was wrong about something else, and it’s the reason we doubled. Invest in your people’s growth, their actual career trajectory, and they start growing the company alongside you. That’s the piece he missed, and it’s become one of the core beliefs we built this business around.
My dad and I disagreed on the one decision that ended up doubling the company and he was wrong. I hope he's not watching this. However, what I wil...
Every dollar in this business passes through three stages: marketing, call center, technician. Most owners only pay attention to two of them. Marketing gets overspent without anyone noticing. The call center is where leads you already paid for either turn into bookings or quietly disappear. The technician either fulfills the promise or loses work that was already earned. The stage nobody fixes is the one deciding whether the other two even matter.
Marketing gets you the phone call. Call center gets you the book lead. Technician gets you the sale. Marketing, you may overspend and never know i...
Our biggest revenue year and our closest call to collapse happened at the exact same time. We had the COVID recipe down cold: hire more people, run more calls, ride the wave. It worked because the demand never stopped. The mistake was never building the process to support all those new people. So when the wave broke, we had a team with nowhere to point them. Growth without infrastructure just delays the problem.
The year that we grew over 100 million in revenue was the same year, the thing almost collapsed. Fast growth coming out of COVID, we hit COVID so ...
You probably don’t have a lead problem. You have a booking rate problem, and most owners have never actually measured it. We paid for every single lead. So the real scoreboard isn’t how many came in, it’s how many got booked, and how many of those bookings later cancel. Check both numbers before you spend another dollar chasing more leads.
Most home service companies don't actually have a lead problem. When we're looking at our boards in the morning, determining what success is going...
Growing from $5 million to over $100 million came down to habits, not luck. Here’s how I’d rank them. Booking rate tracking, answering Saturday calls, handwritten notes, and showing up early are all near the top of the list. The handshake deal is the one habit that didn’t survive the years. Do you agree with the ranking, or would you move something?
We've scaled from 5 million to over 100 million. Here's my tier list on the habits that actually impact your results. - Answering the phone on a S...