On this episode of the Huge Transformations Podcast, host Sheila Smeltzer sits down with Brad Davis of Best Exterior Cleaning in Seattle, Washington, to unpack one of the most honest kinds of growth stories in home services: rapid sales success followed by the hard reality of building operations that can actually support it. Brad shares his unconventional path from ironworker and crane operator to top-producing real estate agent and eventually exterior cleaning business owner, explaining how he helped grow the company from about $60,000 to $600,000 in a year through relentless networking, outreach, follow-up, and sheer volume of sales activity.

Brad and Sheila also dig into what happened after that explosive growth. Brad opens up about the breakdowns that came from scaling too fast without strong enough systems, including hiring issues, poor training, inconsistent job quality, operational chaos, and the financial pain of expensive mistakes. The conversation then shifts into what he is building now: clearer technician levels, stronger onboarding, better accountability, a more structured training process, and a roadmap for creating real career paths inside the business. Along the way, they talk about leadership, culture, recurring revenue, commercial versus residential work, and why long-term success in service businesses depends not just on selling hard, but on creating simple, scalable systems that help people win.

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Transcript:

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations podcast. I'm Sid Graef out of Montana. I'm Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee. And I'm Sheila Smeltzer From North Carolina, we are your hosts and guides through the landscape of growing a successful home service business. We do this by interviewing the best home service business builders in the industry, folks that have already built seven and eight figure businesses, and they want to help you succeed.

Yep. No fake gurus on this show, just real life owners that have been in the trenches and can help show you the way to grow profitably. We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100% experience, 0% theory. We are going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Our guests will share with you the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to winning. In short, our guests will show you how to transform your home service business into a masterpiece. Thanks for joining us on the wild. Journey of entrepreneurship. Let's dive in.

Welcome today to today's Huge Transformations podcast. I am Sheila Smeltzer here with you and I am interviewing Brad Davis. Best exterior cleaning outta Seattle Washington. Fascinating story about Brad. I met him recently in the huge mastermind group and I had the pleasure of interviewing him today. Um, this is a guy who was an iron worker journeyman, got his spine crushed, uh, moved into real estate, became a top producing real estate agent, um, rookie of the year, and ultimately started an exterior cleaning company.

And sounds to me like he can sell like crazy and we're gonna talk a lot about that. But he also, 10 Xed his company. One year going from 60,000 to 600,000 and he shares the trials and tribulations and the really difficult things that came along the way of that type of rapid growth. And we dive into that today and, uh, we have a great conversation and talk a lot about training.

We talk a lot about. Sales. And, um, by the way, he's an excellent, um, digital creator, has excellent video content. Highly suggest you check out his stuff on social media. Um, and yeah, we're learning together here at the Huge Transformations podcast and really enjoy you joining us and listening to Brad Davis's interview and promise.

You're gonna find some gold and you're gonna learn some things that either A, you can relate to. Or B, can help you prevent making some of the same mistakes that we do as entrepreneurs. So welcome to the huge community, and thank you for listening to today's show. Hello. Hello everyone. This is Sheila Selzer with The Huge Transformations Podcast.

And thank you for joining us today. We have Brad Davis, Brad's with Best Exterior Cleaning outta Seattle, Washington, and, uh, a new, um, attendee with our huge mastermind group. Brad, welcome. Thanks, uh, thanks for having me. Uh, yeah, I'm exterior cleaner out of Seattle, Washington. Uh, happy to be here. Really love the huge convention.

Yeah. So Brad, I, uh, you and I got to know each other a little bit whenever, uh, at one of the recent masterminds and we connected on the safety topic. Don't know if we're gonna get into that today, but, um, happy to. But, um, I'm just really excited to be able to get to know you a little bit better and share, you know, your experiences with our, with our viewers.

Um, you know, I see that you've done some real estate. I see that you've done some iron work and you're about two years into your, uh, company in the exterior cleaning space. So, c tell us, tell us a little bit of your background please. Yeah, so, uh. So like a lot of entrepreneurs, I, uh, didn't do well in high school, uh, A DHD and dyslexia.

And so that was a struggle. So I became an iron worker outta high school, um, four year, four plus years. Um, after being an iron worker, I was nearly crushed to death at work. Um, I have four fuse vertebrae in my lower back. Had to learn how to walk again. Took multiple back surgeries and years of physical therapy.

Um, and I say it like it's nonchalant, but you know, it's kind of normal for me, uh, now. And so then I, um, after that I got into construction cranes, uh, was doing like mobile cranes and, and tower cranes, um, for a while. And then got an opportunity to work at Boeing, was a overhead crane operator at Boeing for five years.

And then, um, started a, uh, cannabis processing company out of Oregon. Um, we. They make marijuana products. Mm-hmm. Um, realized I was in over my head, but I was a part of like a group that started it and decided I just didn't want to be a part of it. So I left that, uh, got into real estate, got like a top, um, top producer, uh, one year and rookie of the year, my first year.

And, um, rookie of the year. Yeah. So they gave like a rookie of the year for our office. There were like 200 agents. Um mm-hmm. There was like five, five, uh, five rookies, five new people. And so I, uh, I, I actually, uh, proudly won it by quite a bit. Um, and then I got, uh, top five, uh, real estate agents in my offices, um, the next year.

And then my third year things just slowed way down and I was just, look, I, it just wasn't. What I wanted to do long term. And so I looked for something that I could, a machine that I could build. I wanted to build a business that I could slowly work my way through every single position to where I could then be able to, um, have a asset that works.

And so I knew right away to get, you know, coaching and training and things like that. Um, my first, uh, we started in September of 24. Mm-hmm. Um, September, October, November, and then December. Um, that combined, I did about $60,000. Um, and then after, uh, and then, and then, so that was 20 24, 20 25, uh, we pushed really hard.

I, uh, essentially like brought on a partner who had, um, a really small, like one man show business that did a lot of multifamily. Okay. And I, um, essentially what I say is I took what he had and I put gas on it, and we did. Um, and he did like about 200 or less a year. Um, but he had a lot of, like, his wife was going through cancer treatment and, um, had two small kids and just couldn't really grow it.

Um, there's just too many hats for him to wear between the business and home. Mm-hmm. Um, and so he, he, we partnered up and we did 600 K last year. And so we just like, uh, and it was, and about three quarters of the way through it all started like falling. So, um, I thought this was going to, you know, like I was selling and things were going really great and we just didn't have systems that really made what, like made it work.

It was just like we were going off of. Momentum and just trying to make everything happen. And about three quarters of the way through the year, I was getting pulled out a lot for, um, uh, about, actually probably about halfway through the year I was getting pulled out of, of selling to go and fix problems and deal with things.

And we just, my focus couldn't be in, in sales and trying to make things happen. So, um, we were just having to, you know, try and, and we were, we weren't training people as well as we could. We didn't have as good expectations as we could. We weren't hiring that well. We were just kind of doing everything okay.

But we were selling really well. Okay. So it was a lot coming in, a lot of problems. And then we were delivering, but the, but we'd have jobs that were big, that were like, oh, this is gonna take us a week. And then it took us a week and a half or two weeks bec...