Is the golden age of the trades ending? No. Things break in people's homes every day. No robot is walking through the door to diagnose the problem, explain the options, and make sure your family is comfortable before they leave.
is the golden age of the trades coming to an end anytime soon. Here's my thoughts. I think what we have is a tremendous opportunity here in the ho...
Marketed leads usually don't come in when it's 60 degrees and the windows are open. You have to create revenue streams even in the slow season. That's what the membership base is for. Recurring maintenance keeps trucks moving, and the older systems on that list feed your install department when nothing else will.
Low seasons are tough and they come, especially being here in the Midwest, we get a spring that sometimes never ends and a fall as well where the ...
This company was about to spend $21K on marketing to hit $100K in revenue. The problem was never their lead count. It was a 65% booking rate and a 15% cancellation rate quietly bleeding them. We fixed the call center numbers and their marketing spend dropped $6,000 overnight. Your KPIs tell you what to spend on marketing. Most owners have it backwards. In the comments below is the same calculator from this breakdown, for free.
I want to tell you about a story about a company that we were helping that didn't know why they couldn't hit their budget. Do we need to spend mor...
The moment you give real options, selling disappears. You’re just curating a menu and letting the customer decide what’s right for their family. It has costed us millions, but I would never change it. Trust compounds. Overselling doesn’t.
I have willingly lost millions in sales, and I would do it all over again. Let me explain. We teach our field pros here at Peterman Brothers that ...
Just like you have to ask for the business, you have to ask for the review. People typically do not leave one out of the goodness of their heart. And here's the detail that changes everything: the customer reviews the technician, not the company. That's who they know. That's who they'll rave about.
What is your system for getting a review on every job? Let me tell you about what we do. The biggest key is asking for the review. Much like you'v...
Scaling is one of the most uncomfortable things you’ll ever do, because you have very little control. You only have influence. The owners who accept that build companies. The ones who can’t give up control stay the bottleneck forever.
owner has the day when they realize I'm the bottleneck. We've all been there. We're fighting to grow this company and yet we're not seeing the res...
Callbacks are silently killing your business. Not because they happen, but because nobody learns from them. Most shops send the closest person. That tech fixes the problem and moves on. If they made a mistake, they probably don't even know it... We track every callback and KPI, and review them in our morning huddle. You can't learn if you're not paying attention.
Do you know that callbacks could be silently killing your business? Let me tell you why. Callbacks are something that we run just to go and take c...
Private equity isn’t your biggest threat in home services, your systems are. PE didn’t come to kill the industry. It came and showed everyone the scoreboard: documented processes, a scalable model, people bought into the vision. Build those whether you ever sell or not. That’s just what a great company looks like.
Private equity is not your biggest threat in home services. Your systems are. Let me explain. What private equity has done for our industry is rea...
Nobody on earth was qualified to start our trade school. Not me, not my assistant, not my dad, who thought I was out of my mind. We did it anyway. Took the old building off the market, gutted the offices into classrooms, built a house in the back of the warehouse to train on. Top Tech Academy launched October 2020 with 12 in HVAC and 12 in plumbing. We couldn’t find the people, so we started making them.
We get to 2020 and the calls just keep rolling in. And we don't have enough people. And I make the assumption that like we're probably not going t...
Raising your price is easy. Earning it is the part most companies skip. Before the new price goes live, ask where the new value is. A sharper call center script. Tighter dispatch. A better in-home process. Cleaner installs. Raise the quality first and the price stops being a conversation.
most companies raise prices the wrong way. Here's how to make sure your customers don't read. Before you ever raise the price of a service or a pr...
Honest admission: I don’t think I was qualified to run a $15M company. And suddenly we were doing $90M. $29M to $50M to $90M in two years, 300 hires in twelve months. Everybody celebrates that run from the outside. From the inside, it was mass chaos, and I’d never scale that fast again.
In 21, we hit 50 million. So we go from 29 to 50 in 365 days. And it was a whirlwind. When you grow that fast, you're gonna break a lot of shit. A...
The best raise structure we ever built is one where I don’t give the raises. The techs give them to themselves. Every technician sees the same KPIs, the same levels, and exactly what it takes to move up. When people can see what good looks like, the ceiling stops being a mystery and starts being a target.
What if I told you you're probably underpaying your best technicians and overpaying everybody else? Let me show you how we fix that. We fix that w...