How to Scale to $100M Without Breaking Your Business

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "How to Scale to $100M Without Breaking Your Business"

Owned and Operated – A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
Host: John Wilson
Guests: Chris, Ishmael, Plumbing Business Owner
Date: February 5, 2026

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Main Theme / Purpose

This episode dives deep into the real-world challenges and strategies of scaling a home service business (plumbing, HVAC, electrical) to $100 million and beyond—all while avoiding culture breakdown and operational chaos. Host John Wilson and guests (Chris, Ishmael, and a Plumbing Business Owner) emphasize the importance of disciplined reinvestment, leadership development, and building a customer-first culture. The conversation features candid war stories, memorable advice, and tactical insights for operators aiming to scale rapidly without losing their organizational soul.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The True Cost of Growth

• Growth creates cash demands: Rapid scaling consumes resources—not just for trucks and equipment, but for expanding leadership and infrastructure.
  • "Growth is actually really expensive...at our peak in a single year we bought $6 million of trucks." – Chris [02:18]
• Operational Overhead: Sustainable scaling requires hiring and developing leadership, building marketing and purchasing infrastructure ahead of growth.
  • Margin compression is a risk when you're always investing ahead of the curve.
• Balancing Growth with Culture: Pausing growth can be culturally disruptive once an organization is in “go” mode.
  • "Culturally, growth and change and challenge... that's become part of our culture. It would be really hard to slow this thing down." – Chris [02:59]
  • "I don't even think you can [slow down]. It becomes the culture." – John [03:49]

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2. Leadership: Scaling People as You Scale Revenue

• Key Challenge: The bottleneck to continued growth is almost always talent, especially leaders who “own” their span of care.
  • "We need folks who understand our process playbook, who can execute it, and ultimately who can take ownership...without having to reach up the chain." – Chris [05:36]
• Internal Growth Strategies: Identifying and promoting “rock stars” from within is a recurring growth lever.
  • A story: One top leader started as a trench-digging laborer, now leads market launches.
    • "I have no doubt there's four more of them inside of our business. How do I find them and...pour into them today?" – Chris [06:20]
• Succession & Self-Awareness: Bringing in outside expertise (e.g., hiring a board member with large-scale integration experience) and “firing yourself” to let new leaders take charge is critical.
  • "One thing I take pride in is I want to be able to recognize when I'm no longer...the constraint." – Chris [10:48]
  • Chris now has two direct reports versus eight, allowing a more strategic focus [12:30].

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3. Financial Discipline: Reinvesting vs. Lifestyle Creep

• Delayed Gratification: Resisting early lifestyle upgrades (boats, second homes, etc.) in favor of pouring cash back into the business.
  • "For the first four years...I was at like $85 or $90,000 a year. That's all I paid myself. Even as we passed $30 million..." — Chris [07:53]
  • "I paid myself $65,000 until we crossed $15 million." — John [09:31]
• Avoiding Cash Drain: Owners who start extracting large salaries too early are often the ones who stall their growth.
  • "Suddenly you're sucking cash out of the business that it needs to continue to march down that high growth path..." — Chris [07:46]

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4. Learning from Others: Leveraging Industry Playbooks

• Peer Groups/Organizations: Affiliations with groups like Nexstar are credited as essential for learning best practices.
  • "Don't think you’re smarter than the thousands of peers who've gone before you...Get your hands on [a playbook] and just start executing." — Chris [08:46]
• Operational Excellence: Execute the basics, don’t reinvent the wheel.

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5. Tracking and Operating by the Right Metrics

• Revenue vs. Gross Margin: It’s easy to chase revenue, but disciplined operators build systems to track daily gross margin and profit.
  • "It was earning the right to know your gross margin every day...it did move the needle because we now have daily dashboards everywhere..." – John [15:13]

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6. Customer Experience: The Real Battlefield

• Winning Inside the Home: Technical/cost metrics are important, but delivering top-tier customer experience is what actually wins the market.
  • "Don't fucking forget—the war is fought inside the home...whoever provides the best customer experience is who's going to win the war." – Ishmael [15:38]
• Onboarding & Culture: Set clear pay plans, cultivate unshakeable trust, and be transparent with employees to create a culture where people can focus 100% on the customer.
  • "I'm the most unselfish person in the world. If I'm making money, everybody's making money." – Ishmael [17:21]
  • "You gotta have a pay plan right in front of them...that they look at it and go like, okay cool, I know how I'm getting paid..." – Ishmael [19:32]
  • "All I need you to do is make sure that when you get inside that house, you take care of our clients no matter fucking what..." – Ishmael [18:18]

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7. Building the Brand (and Reviews) From Scratch

• Bootstrap Growth: The first 7 years for the plumbing business owner were spent grinding, bootstrapping every penny, and building reviews as their first real marketing lever.
  • "We weren't making money...I was putting every dollar I could in the bank account...Angie's List was my first actual marketing platform..." – Plumbing Business Owner [25:36]
• Review-Driven Brand: Relentlessly chasing customer reviews (starting on Angie's List, then Google) drove credibility and perceived scale.
  • "I said, get reviews...I want to make—want to look bigger than we are...social validation will be our play..." – Plumbing Business Owner [27:37]
  • Obsession with reviews led to being among the most-reviewed businesses in Ohio.
    "Our reviews on Google, there's only three places that have more reviews than us...Cedar Point, Kings Island, and the Columbus Zoo." [29:13]
• Patience and the J-Curve: Growth feels slow for years, then accelerates rapidly after persistence and foundational work.
  • "The world really tests you if you really want it...Once you kind of break through...it comes so fast...It was all these things that we were doing to build up to that." – Plumbing Business Owner [31:06]
  • The ‘J-curve’—years of grinding, followed by an explosive leap (from $1M to $8M to $12M to $21M+).

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8. Vision as a Recruiting and Retention Tool

• Bold Goals Attract Talent: Having a clear, ambitious vision (“let’s build a $100M business”) brought key partners and galvanized staff.
  • "You have to have something big out in front of you to get people on board with what you're doing. Vision is very important..." – Plumbing Business Owner [32:26]
  • The partnership with a future CFO/partner started when he shared the $100M goal—when the company was only $1M in revenue.
  • "Pick a number, set a deadline and go to work. I just picked $100M because it felt big and bold..." – Plumbing Business Owner [33:56]

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9. Committing to Marketing for the Long-Term

• Three-Year Marketing Plans: Real leaps came only after committing to multi-year, multi-channel marketing (radio, TV, billboards, reviews) with a cohesive brand and messaging.
  • "We put together a three year marketing plan...we're going to commit for three years to this plan. And it went—from 12 to $21M." – Plumbing Business Owner [35:16]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Growth breaks the moment your team can't keep up." – John Wilson [00:54]
• "Culturally, growth and change and challenge...that’s become part of our culture. At this point...it would be really hard to slow this thing down.” – Chris [02:59]
• "I joke about firing myself seven times over the last eight years." – Chris [11:11]
• "Don't think you have to reinvent the wheel...just start executing the basics." – Chris [08:46]
• "If I'm making money, everybody's making money. And that creates a whole culture..." – Ishmael [17:21]
• "Whoever provides the best customer experience is who’s going to win the war." – Ishmael [16:41]
• "We want to look bigger than we are, and we want to get social validation. So social validation will be our play to build our brand..." – Plumbing Business Owner [27:37]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [00:54] – Growth breaks when your team can’t keep up
• [02:07] – The true cost of growth: overhead, cash consumption
• [05:31] – Scaling leadership infrastructure and finding internal talent
• [07:00] – Financial discipline: reinvesting vs. paying yourself
• [15:13] – Daily dashboards and tracking gross margin
• [15:38] – The war is won inside the home: Customer experience first
• [17:21] – Culture, onboarding, and simple pay plans
• [25:36] – Building a review-based brand from scratch
• [32:26] – Vision as a north star for recruiting and growth
• [35:16] – The impact of a three-year marketing plan

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Conclusion

Scaling to $100M is less about explosive revenue and more about patient, disciplined reinvestment, obsessive customer experience, and the relentless development of both people and process. This episode offers a roadmap laden with firsthand accounts of what breaks (and what holds) as a service business chases industry-defining scale.

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For more episodes and industry insights, visit ownedandoperated.com.

Transcript

[John Wilson]

What's up everybody? It is John Wilson from Owned and Operated. Over the course of January, February and March, we are acquiring a couple businesses. So we're a few weeks into January, we've already bought two, we're about to bring on our third. So I'm super busy and because of that we are going to be our recording schedules a little bit messed up. So we have some super cuts of some of my favorite moments. Also stay tuned as we start dropping more information about the deals that we're doing and how we're thinking about acquisitions. Foreign. Plus percent growth is a lot and so we've been 30 plus percent growth for a long time now. But it's different when you're doing 30, 30% from like you know, 3 to 10. And even now we're in the mid-20s and we're at, we're at like we'll probably end the year mid-40s and it is a lot to manage and, and I think about you often because I'm sitting here like I next year, like I want to slow down but it's almost like how do you slow down? Like, because I think momentum just keeps going. Like how. I'm sure there's a lot to it, but how did you think about managing that? Here's an uncomfortable truth. Growth breaks the moment that your team can't keep up. I know that finding good people fast is really hard. Especially in home services positions like hr, accounting, marketing, call center. It is hard to keep up. Quick Staffers helps home service companies build reliable virtual teams that actually understand the trades. Quick Staffers provides vetted remote staff who are pre trained on service titan and use best in industry sops. These are team members ready to integrate into your business on day one, handling roles like customer service, lead, follow up, scheduling support and more. We're actively hiring an offshore assistant controller right now through Quick Staffers. I can't recommend Quick Staffers enough. They've helped us scale our business without a headache. Head over to quickstaffers.com for more.

[Chris]

Yeah, we used to joke all the time a couple things. One, growth is actually really expensive and to do it in a that's my.

[John Wilson]

First thought is like that consumes cash.

[Chris]

I mean I think at our peak in a single year we bought $6 million of trucks right after you outfitted. I'm shelving, lettering and like it's e your cash. And so not only is it expensive in terms of the capital outlays you have to put in place, but the other way that it's expensive if you're going to do it the right way and in a healthy and sustainable way is you really have to lean into what I'll call some, some of your, your SGA body, your overhead infrastructure, your people infrastructure, leadership infrastructure, whether that's purchasing and customer experience and digital strategy and marketing and all these, all these purchasing, supply chain, all these other different functions that if you don't really make some people investments in those areas, they're going to become pain points in the very near future. And so as a result, if you're keeping the toggle at this 30 plus percent growth rate, you can see some margin compression happen from that because you're intentionally continuing to build the overhead body that your business needs next year and the following year, and you're building it a little bit earlier just to make that journey a little bit smoother, a little bit less turbulent, a little bit more certain. And so that we always joke that, well, maybe this would be the year that we should just slow down and we could, we could have 22% EBITDA margins and just pump the brakes and pause it on 130. But I'll say this, culturally, growth and change and challenge into the opportunity that comes from it for promotions and advancement and new roles, that's become part of our culture. And at this point, I don't think it would be really hard to slow this thing down and to culturally say, you know what, we decided not to grow this year. I think everyone would look at me like I've got, you know, three heads.

[John Wilson]

Well, I don't even think you can. I think it'd be the same thing internally for us. I think it becomes the culture. Like everyone's always looking for the next thing. And it's not just you driving. You have a hundred for us, 100, whatever. You have 400, whatever driving. Yeah, it's. I don't know, like, what was the biggest growth year percentage?

[Chris]

I don't know. I'd have to do some math on those. I would say not. I would say we were remarkably, in 2023 and 2024, we were below 30%. They were tougher years. They are tougher years. And there's even a disparity within our business this year around. Like St. Louis is a large, stable $100 million plus operation is growing at 9% this year.

[John Wilson]

Right.

[Chris]

The reason we're growing at a consolidated just under 20, 19% is because of the Nashville market. We're growing at 56% and because of our roofing acquisition is also experiencing really high organic growth but so I would say at any point, it was really stayed between like 30 and 40%. And then 20, 23 and 20, been more challenging environments. No doubt about it. We budgeted this year. Our budget was like 34% organic growth consolidated across all three entities. And we're off. We're at 19. It's been a tougher year.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, it's a lot of growth. I know the challenges that I'm sure you've dealt with, but that we're feeling. Leadership's been a huge one. Cash, I mean, that's a huge one. It just consumes cash, growing and sort of the. How do you create a good process? How do you create something that works when you feel like you're flying so that it doesn't break again? So it's sort of like taking the time you need while you also don't have time.

[Chris]

Yeah, leadership, I mean, that's been a challenge, Persistent challenge every year. And I would say it's only been exacerbated recently because as you, you know, Nashville was our second market. Then we had this roofing acquisition. We've got another opportunity that we're looking to close on here in four weeks or so. Big business, big opportunity, big operation. And the constraint continues to be within all of our locations and across the different businesses is we need folks who understand our process playbook, who can execute it, and ultimately who can take ownership of everything within their span of care without having to reach up the chain to ask for help all the time. Right. And just that, those caliber of leaders that can. That can do that and exercise sound judgment and make good decisions for the business, for the team, that is hard to find. And it continues to be a real challenge. We're trying to solve it a number of ways. Of course, we want to recruit externally when that makes sense, but we're also looking internally and saying, who are our really high potential rock stars? I mean, one of the gentlemen who launched Nashville, and he's been instrumental in our transformation of our roofing business. He started with us in our plumbing underground team as a laborer busting up concrete right in basements. And now we found him. He was a really talented individual that was working at the front line in our business, and we were able to develop and pull him up through our organization. And I'm sitting here today saying, I have no doubt there's four more of them inside of our business. How do I find them and how do I start pouring into them today? And so trying to be really thoughtful around how we're building that talent internally.

[John Wilson]

When you think about, you know, as a part of this series, what we've been trying to unpack is like, hey, that's a, that's a hell of a journey. Right? 110 or 130 from. From 10. That's, that's wild when you think about some of the pivotal decisions through any point. But I would say especially those early nextar obviously would be one of the, one of the big ones. What do you think those were sort of that 20 mark? The 30, the 40.

[Chris]

I'll make a few comments on that score. Where I see a lot of operators, a lot of business owners go off the rails is as soon as they reach what I'll call like a moderate level of success. You know, you get to $10 million and you made a million dollars in a year.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Or a million and a half or whatever you end up making. And then you get comfortable and then you make substantial shifts in your lifestyle, spend and all. Suddenly you're sucking cash out of the business that it needs to continue to march down that, that high growth path that you had originally thought you wanted to go down. And I can say for the first four years in the business, I don't think I changed my salary. I was at like 85 or $90,000 a year. That's all I paid myself. Right. Even as we passed like $30 million, paid myself that same salary. And that was it. It was in there. I had a truck from the business. But. But it was financial discipline and commitment to reinvesting in the organization and putting your money where your mouth is and going all in. Because to scale quickly, it does suck up capital, particularly in those early years. And in those early years are also when banks would be hesitant to lend to you anyways. Banks get a little skittish around a $5 million H vac business or even a $10 million H vac business. And so it can be hard to access bank financing to support your growth. So you really need to make sure that you've got a commitment to reinvesting in growth. The other thing I would say is, is don't think you have to reinvent the wheel and don't think you're smarter than the thousands of peers who've gone before you. I preach a lot about nexstar and say how great it is. There's a lot of other organizations like nexstar, but the point is, go learn from those who have gone before you and don't think that you're going to go figure it out on your Own and you're somehow going to do better than the collective wisdom of these thousands of contractors who've contributed their knowledge to these playbooks that exist out there. So financial discipline and commitment to the business and focus on the operational basics. Those playbooks that already exist in our space today, get your hands on one of them and just start executing.

[Podcast Host]

That's great, John. Actually we have an episode on that specifically on reinvesting in your business. And you said something incredibly similar to what Chris is saying right now. It's wild from a third party to actually hear both of you fairly successful.

[John Wilson]

The cash has to go from somewhere exact same. Yeah, I mean I, my salary was a little bit more modest, but I, I think we start. We were a little bit smaller when, when I started, but I paid myself $65,000 until we crossed 15 million like and then I upped it slightly.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[John Wilson]

But yeah, it's yeah. Modest house. Don't have a lake house. Because I think the thing that mattered like what I, what I joke when I tell my wife is like I'm a simple man. I don't need a boat, I don't need a Lamborghini. I need to build a hundred million dollar business. And that is literally it. Yeah, I'm a simple guy. Yeah. But yeah, I think I, I agree. I mean we, I usually see it like earlier on not even that like million of cash flow to the owner. I feel like I see it a lot at the three to five. Like they make their first 200 grand and they were a technician in a truck once and now they've got a boat and a lake house and a 90,000 DOL up and they're like I'm good, I'm good now.

[Chris]

Not to mention the time you're spending on that boat and at the lake house. That's I can tell you in those first four years in particular. Thankfully I didn't have kids at the time too. But there wasn't a lot of time for other hobbies. Right. If you're, if you're really leaning into executing on that high growth plan.

[John Wilson]

What's your time look like now? Like what do you, what does, what does your day to day?

[Chris]

You know, it shifted in February when a gentleman, Matt Wyatt, came off of our board. He'd been on a board for two years. Phenomenal leader. He spent 20 years in the Air Force before retiring as a colonel and he led the first Department of Defense TEDx speaking series when it was at Scott Air Force Base and a local CEO happened to be there who at the time was running a $700 million manufacturing technology business. And he recruited Matt, this was in 2014, 2013, to join his company here in town called Barry Wehmiller. Matt joined in a role that wasn't quite defined. But this leader, Bob Chapman, knew that he needed somebody to really help him lean leadership development piece to make sure they could, they could scale their organization in a healthy way. And so Matt spent 10 years there really as they went from 700 million to three and a half billion and acquired another 150 companies over that period of time. And Matt was at the tip of the spear with respect to how they were leaning into their people, strategy, leadership development, integration work. So I asked him to join our board as we were entering this next stage of growth. And he's been just a really impactful contributor. And when I thought in 2000 or in February 2024 this year, I was saying, man, I need. I think one of the things I take pride in is I want to be able to recognize when I'm no longer, when I become the constraint, when I think there's someone that could do my job better than me, I want to get out of the way. Right. I joke about firing myself seven times over the last eight years because I'm firing people who are going to do a far better job and have a far greater business impact on the span of care that I give them, that I take from me and give to them. And this was an example where I thought Matt's experience, what he's bringing to the table, is going to allow him to propel our business forward as we think about this next stage of growth, which will include a much more acquisitive growth and really excited that some of the things that we're working on there and hopefully we'll be able to announce soon. But it's been a ton of fun. So my day looks a little different. I've been spending a lot of time helping with our pipeline building efforts in there. We're resetting our board now to bring in some different perspect based on what we think, the voices we think we need to help us execute on this next four or five years. But I now have two folks in my span of care where I used to have seven or eight. So Matt and our CFO are the two folks in my span of care and I try and work through them and it allows me to focus externally on how we're guiding our organizations, how we're allocating capital across our global balance sheet and business, and be a Little bit more strategic and a little less tactical in my approach. But I will say, and then I'll shut up is whether you're in my seat or Matt's seat or any one of our leaders. Like we have this mantra around having a frontline obsession in our business and that shows up. That means that, that I'm spending time doing ride alongs, staying connected to what the people are doing, what our people are doing, who are serving our customers right there where the rubber meets the road. And so I think no matter how sort of deep our structure gets and how many layers there are to it, I hope to always remain really, really focused on what's happening at the front line and making sure that I'm spe there to see it with my own eyes.

[John Wilson]

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[Plumbing Business Owner]

Yep.

[John Wilson]

But gross margin and gro daily gross profit takes, that takes a lot to get right. But we've spent, we've spent a lot of time on it and it did, it did move the needle because we now have daily dashboards everywhere where month to date I can tell you our gross margin, gross profit dollars any day of the month, which has been like that's. Been a really pretty big unlock for us as we've been moving.

[Ishmael]

Before we get into the next one. Look, you guys, the numbers are cool and the KPIs are cool and the accounting's cool and all that. Don't fucking forget that the war is fought inside the home. Right? Don't fucking forget that, that the battles are won inside the home. Having a dope ass customer experience, being able to turn a phone call to revenue is where the fucking magic's at. Yes, the numbers and the gross profit and the gross margin and all these sales like all that is dope guys, and you need to pay attention to it. And what makes us solid operators and fucking dope ass operators is that we are able to, to see everything. Not just, hey, let me just focus on marketing and hopefully that fixes the operation. Let me just focus on sales and hopefully, like being a dope ass operator requires you to focus on every aspect of the, of the, of the operation. Don't forget that the fucking war is won inside the home. And making sure that we are providing these customers more value than what they see on a piece of paper is the name of the game. When you are in there providing the value, providing the option, making sure that the customers are trusting you, that's where the money's at. Not, yes, the KPIs are cool and you know, having a badass accounting team and knowing your numbers are dope. At the end of the day, whoever, whoever provides the best customer experience is who's going to win the war. Okay?

[Podcast Host]

And Ishmael, how did you, how did you design or how did you cultivate that culture within NextGen? Because that, that's one of the, the key pieces that I keep coming back to with your story and trying to understand how to get that. Not, not the experience for the customer, but how do you find and attract the people that can give that experience?

[Ishmael]

Being a look at, I don't think I've ever told this to anybody that. So guys, our employees aren't fucking stupid, okay? They're not retarded. They know what, they know we're making money. They know that how much we're charging. They see the contracts, they see the repairs, they see the cost of the parts, they see how we're running. Like why we created such a dope ass culture at Nexon is because I, I'm number one. I am the most unselfish person in the world. If I'm making money, everybody's making money. And that creates a whole culture of like, hey man, if this guy's gonna take care of us, you guys gotta understand. How many times have you had, have you guys heard your employees? I was at this company and this guy grinded me on my commission and he wouldn't be sometimes, and sometimes this and sometimes that, right? And like these were disgruntled employees that weren't treated properly, right? Why we were so successful in action is because part of the, part of the most the key elements in operation is the onboarding process. And this is where you fuckers miss it. Onboarding people properly setting the expectations. Property. Making sure that when you hire somebody, when you hire somebody, you let them know exactly what's going to happen. And being confident enough that you fucking step in there and you go like, hey, look, you don't have to worry about money here. You don't have to worry about leads, you don't have to worry about getting paid, right? You don't have to worry about am I going to have a job tomorrow? That is 90% of the fucking battle. Making sure that you have 100% employee to work every day instead of a half ass employee that's worried about their pay, that's worried about making money with you, that's worried if they have leads, that's worried about their bills, that's worried. Like part of the dope ass fucking culture that we built was being able to bring our employees in and be like, look, I'm going to take all your fucking worries away. All I need you to do is make sure that when you get inside that house, you take care of our clients no matter fucking what. I don't care if we're wrong, I don't care if we did something wrong. I don't care if we fucked up there. Whatever it is that we need to do to take care of that client has to be done. And we took and we had that message from day one of always taking care of the clients and whoever took care of more clients, the most clients would make the most money. Right? That's how simple I got it to everybody that went to a buy on exchange is making sure guys that guys you gotta fucking onboard property. You gotta set the expectations properly. You gotta make sure that you set your boundaries for employees and clients and you don't fucking violate them. Okay? This is how you're going to get paid. Being black and white. Look it, I'm going to give you guys a fucking tip and write this shit down if you're listening to it. When you're onboarding people, you guys got to have a Paid plan right in front of them that is so fucking simple and so retarded that they look at it and they go like, okay, cool, I know how I'm getting paid, right? You guys got to be able to do that on every single employee. You ask anybody on NextGen. You go to any technician, any sales guy, any installer, any customer service rep, any accounting, any production, any, any in that operation, okay? You ask them how they're getting paid, I guarantee you they'll, they'll describe it with less than 10 words. This is how I get paid. That's how simple my pay plans were, right? And that's half of the battle, guys. It's making sure that they understand their pay so they could, they can in return focus on the client and taking care of the client every single time. That's what you guys need to do.

[John Wilson]

Can you give me an example of that for H Vac service or call taking?

[Ishmael]

Dave? Ready? Technicians. Technicians get paid on hourly backup. But then we pay them on performance, okay? Performance, hourly backup. Meaning California is the strictest state in the universe. Not the, not the country, not the world, the universe. If you, if you can pay people properly in California. My paint plans work across the universe. It works in Mexico, Japan, it works in Mars, baby.

[John Wilson]

Elon's going to use it in 60 days.

[Ishmael]

So hourly backup. So we would pay everybody $20 an hour, backed up. So they would get, you know, double time overtime, eight hours, all that, right? And then we would show them what their performance pay was based on what they were doing. So repairs, we would pay them 30% on a sliding scale all the way to 15, okay? 30% sliding scale, 15% meaning, hey, if I went out there and did a motor for a thousand dollars, and that was the full book price for the motor, a thousand bucks to install it to take care of the client. That's what they need. And I didn't discount anything. They would get a full 30%. If they discounted 5%, we would give them 5% on their commission. If they discounted 10%, we would hit them up to 10% on their, on their repairs, turnovers, okay? Meaning when a technician goes in there, provides the service for the client, and it has, you know, three, four different options for repair ranging from $500 all the way to $2,500, whatever you guys want to fucking come up with. And the consumer then in return says, hey, look, it's a 10 year old unit. I don't want to invest 2,200 or $2,500 into this unit, how much is a new one? When those magic words come out of that customer's house, that means we provided so much value to them now, now they want to explore permanent solutions. That is called a turnover. That turnover, that type, that turnover gets paid. And we were paying 5% on action. And again what I was paying attention, the 30% slightly scale to 15 and the 5% on turnover is because we had a high average ticket, we had high closing percentage, we were priced out property. Okay? So I'm not saying go ahead and do this to your, to your companies right now because you 99% of these fuckers are not priced out properly. So first price yourself properly in order to pay your employees property. So turnovers, they would get paid 5%. I've seen companies pay 2 and a half, 33 and a half percent. We were paying 5% because we wanted to recruit the top talent in the industry. The reason why everybody wanted to work on action, there's two reasons, okay? We had a dope ass competitive culture. We have a dope ass competitive culture, right? We have a, we every, everybody wanted to work there because the top technicians, top sales guys, top installer, top everything was there. So competitive atmosphere. And the number two, and don't fucking forget this because you fuckers forget, we pay more than anybody. People go to your job, people go to your contract, people go to your shitty ass shops, people are driving your shitty ass vans because they're, they're getting paid. Okay? The reason why they were coming to me to action over anybody in Southern California is because I was paying more than anybody. I was treating them better and I was paying them better. That's the reason why we were, we were growing so fast. So again, super simple, 30, 15% slightly scan anything, repair or IQ and then anything that had to do with the labor department, which is install insulation, ducting, whatever they wanted the Labor Department to do, they would get paid a flat 5% on for too long.

[John Wilson]

I was letting the wrong marketing agencies set my money on fire. And their marketing looked pretty good. On paper the reporting was attractive, but at the end of the day it just wasn't driving leads. That's why I started using service scalers at Wilson Service Scalers is a marketing agency built specifically for home service companies. They focus on the channels that actually drive leads like targeted ppc, local service ads, SEO, Google business profile. So that you're showing up in front of your customers that are actively searching. They'll help you see exactly what's working so you stop wasting ad dollars on low Quality leads. Right now, they're doing something crazy and they're giving the opportunity for one entrepreneur to get up to 12 months of marketing on them. So that's up to $100,000 in services for the right operator. If you are serious about tightening up your marketing in 2026 and want to see what this could look like for your business, go to service scalers.com and book a free strategy call and let them know that I sent you. Taking this back maybe a few years. Can you walk us through? I don't know if it helps year by year or how you want to think about this, but I mean, bankruptcy to 75 million is obviously, that's a big leap. Can you walk us through some of the steps there?

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Let's call it first seven years. We're basically nothing. It was just trying to actually just grind. I mean, I, we weren't making money. We didn't have money to advertise. I was saved putting every dollar I could in the bank account, trying to build up capital, you know, trying to get back, you know, bankruptcy stays under credit for seven years. Right. So I had some time to try to figure out some of that. Some. We're still growing, we're doing stuff, but we weren't doing anything significant. They're still trying to figure out how do I build a brand strategy? What does it look like, you know, joining, you know, end up, you know, finding all these things. So the first seven years is basically, I mean, it was just every day, sun up to sundown, just still working in the field, doing anything. If I got a random service call, I go do it right slowly. Surely I didn't understand pricing. So one of the ways that I did to figure out even how to build a price book, because I didn't have any money to go find an organization to teach me a price book. So Angie's List was big in our area years and years ago. And I mean, Angela still exists, but it was pretty big.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

It was probably the real first platform for reviews before Google kind of took that over. Yeah, I got on Angie's List and I signed up for Angie's List and I read through all the reviews on Angie's List and the price that any, any person said was the price they paid for a water heater, a drain call.

[Ishmael]

Interesting.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

And I wrote them all down. You know, this is. I'm not savvy enough for an Excel sheet. So I wrote them all down and then I went through them all and I said, okay, this is how much people are saying they're buying from this company, this company, this company. And I started building my price book off of what consumers said in there. Then I obviously went back and looked at my prices and built it from there. And I signed up for Angie's List. Angel's List was my first actual marketing, like, platform besides having just a website. And I signed up for Angie's List, which, you know, at that time was like, it's free to be on Angelist now. It cost $15,000. So it's like, it's free to have your name somewhere, but nobody will sue you. So I was like, well, I was like, I don't have any money. But they're like, guess what? We'll finance you.

[John Wilson]

Oh, interesting.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Finance, right? So basically they said, it's 15 grand. We'll let you pay payments on it. And I said, you know what? Screw it, let's do it. So that's where I started off at, is on Angie's List. And the major, major goal I had was get. Get more reviews than everybody else in Angels. That's what I told the five people on our team. We branded our. We had wrapped our trucks with the Eco Eco Plumbers. So people thought we were kind of a franchise. They're like, you guys, a franchise. Like, now there's like four of us trying to make it happen. And all we did was get reviews. I said, get reviews, get reviews, get reviews, get reviews. I said, I don't care what we do the job for at this price, at some point to the price a little bit. Get reviews, get reviews. We want to make. We want to look bigger than we are, and we want to get social validation. I said, so social validation will be our play to build our brand, get more people to think that. That. Not think, but. No but think we're bigger than we are and that we have the most reviews. And we did that, and we started passing people on Angie's List within probably a year or two years with more reviews than. People have been on it forever. And then we took that same approach into Google immediately when Google started driving us down and said, get reviews, get reviews, get reviews. And that was before everybody was really. At least in my world, before everybody's like, really focused on reviews.

[John Wilson]

Oh, yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Today our reviews on Google, there's only three people that three places have more reviews than us in Ohio. You know who they are? I'll tell you, it's. I don't. Cedar Point, Kings island, and the Columbus Zoo.

[John Wilson]

That's funny, dude. I'm looking, I'm looking. This up right now. Oh, yeah, yeah. 13,000. That is chunky. That's a lot.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

That's just in one location.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

You start adding up all of our, all of our Google reviews between all of our locations.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

So it's pretty crazy. Yeah, that, that, you know, and that, that's, that was definitely it. And I know reviews at some point. It doesn't matter if you have 13 review,000 or 5,000 reviews, you know, but the idea was build, build social validation through. Through, through the platforms of reviews. And I started with Angie's List and then we carried it over to Google fast.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, you had.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

I guess, I don't know if that answers your question. Talk through, but I'm telling you, that was how we started the service business, was. I went to Angie's List, I really put a platform on Angie's List, started driving reviews and driving more reviews and then from there we obviously started digging into more. More marketing strategies.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Branding, et cetera, et cetera.

[John Wilson]

Yeah, no, it, it did. It was helpful. Who was the big player a decade ago in Columbus?

[Plumbing Business Owner]

So Waterworks has been. Was big. They're still decent size here. Waterworks was big here. Rotor Rooters.

[John Wilson]

Here is Atlas Butler Columbus.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Atlas Butler. Yeah, Atlas Butler's here. Atlas Butler's big H Vac. Big H. I have a plumbing division, but they're H Vac. Yeah, they're big H Vac business.

[John Wilson]

Okay.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

So I mean, big one was really mostly was Waterworks was the bigger plumbing business here. And Roto Rooter.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

And then there's a handful of other, you know, companies, but those are really who we were, you know, thinking about who we would beat, I guess, for lack of a term.

[John Wilson]

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Yeah. I think we. When did you cross that first 10 million or 20 million? Because it sounds like it was slow. And then all at once from sort of what you've described so far.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's it. Right. I. I truly believe in the idea that the world really tests you if you really want it.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Just the universe does in some level. It really tests you. Right. Do you really want it? And once, once you kind of break through the idea that you're really done, everything that there is, it's like it comes so fast that, you know, like, what happened all this time? It felt like there was nothing and then all of a sudden it's everything. Right. And you're like, whoa, whoa. And. But it was all these things that we were doing to build up to that. Right? And yeah, it takes time to build a brand. Like, everybody thinks you're gonna go out and flip the switch and have a brand in a marketplace. Everybody's gonna know who you are. Like, yeah, you can run a lot of ads and get some marketing, messaging, ads, but it also takes time to get the reviews. It takes time for people to know, like, and trust you. It takes time. These things didn't happen overnight, right?

[John Wilson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Especially Bootstrap too.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

I mean, yeah. That a lot of it is word of mouth beginning, Right. Because I didn't. I couldn't have any money to run a TV ad right.

[John Wilson]

Today.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

We spent a lot of money on TV and radio and buildings. But. But. So I guess I'd say the first seven years were very much struggling. About 10 years ago, I met Mike, our CFO, now partner in the business. And we were at a party that neither one of us really wanted to be at, but we were chatting and he was like, what do you do? I was like, I'm a plumber, own a plumbing business. He's like, what do you. I'm like, what do you do? And he's like, I just, you know, I'm in finance. He just got graduated with his master's in finance from Fisher. He's working at Victoria's Secret. And he's like, what? I was like, I want to learn more about finance and projections and other stuff, right? So we got into a little bit there and then he's like. I said. He's like, why? I said, well, I own a business and I want to, you know, I want to grow it. He's like, what do you want to grow it to? I was like, 100 million. And he was like, oh. He's like, oh, okay. Caught his attention, right? He's like, well, where are you at today? I was like, a million. Okay, okay, we got some work. But then he was like, let's get together and start building some modeling. And then we got together and built out a hundred million dollar plan to build 100 million dollar business. And then eventually he ended up coming on and now has become a partner in the business. So that's played a big part in that. So, you know, that was a. A part of like knowing that I needed this. And sometimes fate finds its way. But the reason, the reason why I say this is you have to have something big out in front of you to get people on board with what you're doing. Vision. I think vision is very important in an organization. And I had vision. So even when I reset. I knew I was going to grow something. I had vision and the vision was to grow $100 million service business. I didn't even know $100 million server business even existed back then.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

And I know that's the. I don't know if I'll use the right word, trendy, but it's kind of the trendy benchmark to use today. Right. Get to 100 million and that's fine because that's a hell of an achievement to get that right. Building 100 million dollar business. Trust me, when I first joined Next Car, it was like 20 million. If you got to 20 million, you were the, you were, you were on, you know, you were the, the king of the world.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

But you know, obviously business evolved. Things have got bigger acquisitions and goals. When I first came up with 100 million, I'm driving around in my truck by myself and it's one of those things that, you know, just come to you.

[Chris]

I don't know why.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

It's like I need a goal. 100 million sounds big and bold. Sounds ridiculous in some sense. But I think I just got done. I read Think and Grow Rich, greatest book ever in my life. Changed my life. And then I also had read, I listened to Good to Great and they know that bigotarious goal. So they all kind of found their way together and eventually Think and Grow Rich is really. Is like pick a number, set a deadline and go to work. And I just picked 100 million because it felt, felt like big numbers. So my point is like that has helped attract people to growing because they knew I'm going somewhere and wanting to build something that helped bring that conversation because I had that goal.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

Had that conversation. Which created that relationship, which he's here today. So that was a big movement for us. And then from there just, we just started building plans, joining service titan Nexar, learning more about the industry and the business. And you know, then you started going, you know, 1 million, you know, 2 something, 3, 4, 5. And then it was like, then finally started jumping. Hold me exactly to these numbers. Top of my head. But it's like then it went to like 8 and then it was 12 and then 21, 33, 44, 60, 75.

[Podcast Host]

Super inspirational. So I only got five years left of grinding before I hit that J curve.

[John Wilson]

Yeah.

[Plumbing Business Owner]

And it's like, but all the things you're doing but. But that's fine, right? It's like, yeah, it feels like it, you know, but it's a long time. And in the last five years people have heard more about our business, but we've also, it, you know, we've hit the curve, right? It's gone. And we've made some good decisions, some bad decisions. And we put in the one thing I think that we did really well that wasn't happening right away, that that found its way to us right around that. 12 million to 22 is. Well, Covid came, which obviously helped too. We grew big then. But right before then, we had put together a three year marketing plan, three year marketing plan. And we said this is what we're going to do for three years. We're going to have our radio plan, we're going to have our TV plan, our billboard plan, our correct messaging for our brand. And we're going to plan and we're going to commit for three years to this plan. And it went the third year, 12 to 21 million.