I’ve wasted money on almost everything owners think they need. Let me save you the lesson. The stuff that looks impressive, the fancy office, the over-loaded software, the branded giveaways, rarely moves your business an inch. Your customers never see your office, and nobody bought from you because of a koozie. What actually pays you back is investing in your people. Developing your team is the one spend that compounds, because it grows the humans who grow the company. Spend on what makes your people better, not on what makes you look better.

Everyone tells me six options is too many. My dashboard says otherwise. I hear it from owners all the time. I hear it from techs. “Too many choices confuses the customer.” “It feels like pressure.” Truth is, the data shows the opposite. There’s a direct correlation between how many options a tech presents and that tech’s total productivity. The techs who follow the system and give customers the most to choose from are our most productive people. Here’s why: options aren’t a sales tactic. They’re customer service. Presenting fewer options isn’t restraint. It’s deciding for your customer what they can afford, and what level of care they want. Lay it all out and let them choose. When you do, you'll see customers choosing you to take care of them. We track options per call as a KPI now. It predicts output better than most of what owners are already measuring.

A lot of owners are terrified to give a customer more than two options. We give six, and here’s why it works. Six sounds overwhelming until you realize it’s really three: option one and one plus, two and two plus, three and three plus. That turns a buying experience into a shopping experience, and nobody likes to buy, but everyone likes to shop. We hand the customer a menu and let them pick, mix, and customize until it’s exactly right. Offer less if you want, offer more if you want, but don’t assume more choice scares people off. In our experience, it’s the opposite.

The bigger your company gets, the less you should be in the room. At this level, I’m not in our daily huddles. Our regional managers run them with their managers, covering the daily blocking and tackling and any companywide initiative. I stay out and watch the dashboards to make sure we’re moving the right direction. That’s the shift most owners never make. Being in every meeting feels like leadership. Building people who can run those meetings without you actually is.

Everyone thinks rebuilding a business comes down to hustle. I’d do the opposite. If I had to start Peterman Brothers over, I’d begin with process and procedure, document everything, and watch KPIs from the very first day. Early on we didn’t look at dashboards or numbers at all. We just worked as hard as we could and called it progress. The truth is we were inefficient and flying blind. Knowing exactly what’s happening in your business every moment of the day is the edge. Not grinding harder than the next guy.

Residential or commercial? The answer isn’t one or the other, it’s knowing which commercial actually fits. If you’re already doing residential, light commercial is a natural extension. Under-20-ton rooftop units, a dentist office, offices with residential-style systems, it’s the same service and repair work you already know. What I’d be careful with is full commercial. New construction and multifamily aren’t just bigger jobs, they’re a different business. We tried running two at once and it split our culture and our people in half. Grow into light commercial. Think hard before you take on the rest.

One month into building our water treatment division, and here’s the honest update: our biggest fight right now is lead quality. Customers don’t know us for water treatment yet, so the challenge is reactivating our own customer base and proving the value to people who already trust us for everything else. We’re standing up outbound calling as an analog way to reach them, alongside some paid channels on the digital side. The good news is our guys can absolutely close when we put them on the right leads. So the whole game right now is getting them in front of better ones. More to come. Follow along.

If you’re working in your business more than on it, the problem probably isn’t your workload. It’s trust. When you don’t fully trust your team, you end up doing everything yourself, stuck in the weeds instead of leading. And the fix isn’t venting to your spouse about why so-and-so keeps dropping the ball. It’s sitting down with the actual person. Where do they need help? What can you make better together? The one question I ask my team when they complain about someone is simple: have you talked to them? The answer is almost always no. Trust gets built through open, direct conversations, not around them.

Everyone keeps asking if the golden age of the trades is about to end. They’re asking the wrong question. The opportunity in home services isn’t slowing down. It’s wide open. People go home every day. Things break. Someone has to show up and fix them. Will a robot ever replace a faucet? I won’t say never. But walking into a home, solving a real problem, having a conversation, and earning someone’s trust so they know they called the right company? That’s not going anywhere. The human part of this trade is the part that lasts.

We’ve installed over 1,500 HVAC systems this year. More than 80% of them were financed. That number should change how you think about financing. For years the industry treated financing like a flag that someone can’t afford the job. That’s backwards. Systems are more expensive than ever. Financing is just the tool that lets a homeowner invest in one of their most prized possessions without blowing up their monthly budget. If you actually want to deliver great customer service, offering financing is one of the best ways to help people say yes to taking care of their home.

There’s a reason some leaders can’t keep anyone, and others never lose their best people. It’s not luck and it’s not pay alone. It comes down to a standard. The boss people walk out on reacts, controls, and does the bare minimum on training and development. The boss people never leave builds leaders before the seat opens, makes training the reason people apply, and creates a path where the best out earn the market. Same team, same industry, completely different retention. We chase that higher standard every single day with 500 people. Follow for more on leadership.

Your weekly ops meeting might be why you keep missing numbers. Think about what it actually is. A room full of managers reviewing numbers from a week that’s already passed. That’s not a meeting... That’s an autopsy. We run a daily huddle off one dashboard. Every manager, every KPI they own, one color: Green: tell us what you’re doing to keep it there. Yellow / Red: come with a concise plan for today. Not an excuse. Not an explanation of what went wrong last week. A plan. The whole point is to affect the number while you can still affect it. Every manager should walk in with a color and a plan, not a report. What does your meeting cadence look like right now?

Most people think acquisitions are about buying the biggest company you can find. I think of acquisitions the opposite way. Give me a small, single trade shop with a few thousand customers and an owner ready to retire, and I’ll show you an untapped goldmine. The ones that never spent a dollar on marketing are my favorite, because the growth is already sitting in their database waiting to be activated. We put our brand over it, start talking to those customers, and take great care of people who were never fully served in the first place. The growth was always there. We just turn it on.

The hardest part of being a 9 figure CEO has nothing to do with money. It’s the weight. Every decision I make touches hundreds of families. This is where they pay their bills. Where they take care of their kids. Where they build their lives. One rushed policy, one wrong call, and the impact lands on real people who call this place home. That’s why I take this seriously. As your company grows, the stakes stop being financial and start being human. Every decision you make lands on someone. Lead like you understand that.

The difference between a $1 million owner and a $100 million owner was never luck. It’s how they operate. Same trade, same problems, completely different habits. The owner who stays small clings to control, guesses at the numbers, and tries to win on price. The one who scales builds leaders, watches the right metrics in real time, and defends profit like his life depends on it. Nobody levels up by working harder at the wrong things. You grow by trading the habits that got you here for the ones the next level actually requires. We did it the hard way so you don’t have to.

The bigger your business gets, the less control you’ll have. And that’s exactly the point. When you’re small, you make every call and you make it fast. That feels like a superpower. Until it becomes your ceiling. Real scale was never about doing more yourself. It’s about how well you develop leaders who can make the right call without you in the room. That’s how one person’s judgment becomes ten decisions made at once. Your business can only grow as fast as you grow the people around you.

Franchising would’ve grown us faster, and that’s exactly why we said no. It’s the simplest way to add locations. Less capital, less of your own time, more flags on the map. But the moment someone else owns the name on the truck, you lose control of the thing that matters most: whether your people and your standards show up the same way at every branch. This business is people first. I’m not willing to risk a customer getting one experience at branch one and a different one at another. Choosing control over speed costs something real. Slower expansion. More capital. More of my time. But consistency, once you lose it, is almost impossible to get back. Every growth decision is a tradeoff. Just make sure you know what you’re trading away. Franchise owners, I know some of you see this differently. What’s made it work for you?

Most owners are obsessed with the numbers that feel good and are blind to the ones that actually matter. Revenue, truck count, followers. They look impressive on the outside and tell you almost nothing about whether your business is healthy. The numbers that actually decide if you make it are the unsexy ones under the hood, the ones most owners never look at until it’s too late. Knowing the difference between a vanity number and a scoreboard number is what separates the businesses that grow from the ones that just look like they’re growing.

A million dollars a month sounds like a dream until you see what actually has to be true to get there. It comes down to the boring stuff. Enough leads every single day, conversion and ticket numbers that hold, and a team running a process that works the same way every time. We start by reactivating the customers we already have, then add text and outbound, and only layer in paid social once we know the engine works. No shortcuts, no magic. Just the math, done right, over and over. Follow the build from here.

We just found a broken process that quietly cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single month. Here’s what happened. We’d go do warranty work, not charge the customer because the part was covered, but then never return the old part to get our credit. So we were buying material and doing the labor and getting nothing back for it. The leak was there the whole time, we just hadn’t looked. We had the meeting, built the to-do list, and we start attacking it today, because every month we wait is another six figures gone. What’s the problem in your business you already know about but keep pushing off?