The biggest owner pay mistake isn’t taking too much. It’s taking too little, with no math behind either number. Budget from the bottom up. What does the company need to be profitable? What are the expenses? What’s a healthy gross margin? Back into your number from there, and it stops being a guess.
@officialchadpetermanTranscript
The biggest mistake most owners make is not paying themselves too much, it's paying themselves too little. The most important thing to understand when you're thinking about what you should pay yourself as the owner of a business is working backwards. You should start budgeting from the bottom up, figure out how much money the company needs to make to be profitable, figure out what your expenses are, understand what a typical gross margin looks like, and then you can back into it. Too many people want to take all the money out of the business, only to wonder why six months down the road, they have no cash fueling the business. Work smarter, not harder.
Download Transcript
Related Videos
This is where we build technicians from scratch. Zero experience walks in, and electricians, plumbers, and HVAC pros walk out. Everything in this lab is functional. They can tear it apart, we can plant faults, and they can fail safely here instead of in a customer’s home.
Everyone thinks adding a trade is a growth hack. Here’s what it looked like for us: YouTubing plumbing repairs from the truck because our only plumber quit three days before the new one started. We figured it out, but I’d never do it that way again. Master the trade you’re in before you buy yourself a second set of problems.
Your membership program might be the most valuable asset your company owns. Most shops treat it like an afterthought. Two fixes: offer it in the contact center before the truck ever rolls, and have techs plant seeds all call long instead of dumping a benefits list at the end. Memberships fuel the repeat business and the slow-season calls. Sell them like it.
The residential vs. commercial debate misses the real question: what kind of business do you actually want to run? I wanted to create a customer interaction unlike anything else, and residential is where that lives. It demands double the training, technical and human. That’s the cost of the more meaningful lane.