Our Top 10 Growth Tips to Help You Scale in 2025

There's a saying you can't grow if you say. No, but I like that. Welcome to Masters of Home Service, a podcast for home service pros by home service. Pros, as we look ahead to growing in the new year, this is the perfect time to focus on reaching big business goals like hitting a million dollars in revenue. In this special episode, we're sharing some of the best tips from guests who've successfully grown their businesses. These ideas will help you scale up.

Let's dive into the strategy to skyrocket your growth in 2025. How did you change each step along the way? You hit a hundred thousand when you first start, 250,000, 500,000, a million. How did you have to change at each of those levels? Generally speaking, what did you have to do on yourselves to get to there?

I break this down backwards a little bit. So there's two levels of mentor for myself and that first level is don't get too big. People suck. They're going to take advantage of you. Clients won't pay, you're never going to have any personal time. More negative. Yeah, work-life balance kind of thing. And the second level of mentor, which is a huge shift, but it was so powerful when I got there and I found it. It was people. People are everything. Our team is great,

our leadership is awesome. I'm not the smartest person in the room. You have to talk to this person in our business to get that answer because they're the expert, they're smarter than me. And as soon as I shifted that, the business just exploded, which was what my purpose is in our business, is creating opportunities for others so they don't need to leave our business.

And by doing that and empowering them, it it's exploded and then you start getting refining and actually have the time to work on how to make the profit when you're over a million bucks. Because. You're not worried about doing all the work, you're not worried about going to all the job sites. You're empowering your team to do it because just like you said, that $4,500 a day, you can't do that by yourself. So what does that mean? Well, it's a simple answer. You have to empower people.

Yeah, I mean I think for me, getting over a hundred grand, you got to get off the truck, right? You can just work and make a hundred grand to get over two 50. You probably got to start building up your office admin side of things, getting over half a million. Got to start developing a team. It's not just husband and wife combination, right? You might can probably get up to maybe half a million or something like that with just wife in the office or husband in the office and the other person.

You kind of divide those roles, but over half a million, I think you got to start actually building a business. That's not just going to happen. I've have people just make a hundred grand or 200 grand without really growing the business side of the business over a million bucks.

That's a tough barrier. You got to get past what I would say is that middle of the road size business, and even though I've done over a million revenue, I feel like I'm still kind of stuck there because there's some things that I'm still lacking. I think to really sail past a million, you need to have maybe good core company culture, so you got to have some core values. Some company culture, I got a lot of room for improving on that one.

I think maybe you need to have some sales team or sales staff and then you got to have people who are integrators. If you're not integrators, you're not going to get over a million bucks by doing what you already did. You're going to have to say, okay, I am not good at showing up on time. So you got to hire people who are showing up on time. You're not just going to sail past a million bucks or your business is going to go up and down, up and down, up and down.

If it's relying on you too much like you're saying, you got to empower people.

Where entrepreneurs can get stuck. It's just trying to keep all the balls in the air and then realizing that things are dropping and not wanting to let go. They want to have this amazing service and this amazing business, and they're worried that if they let go, someone else can't do it as well as them. So they kind of get in their own way and trap themselves where your business feels more like a ball and chain than the freedom that you originally wanted when you started your business. It's.

Tricky. It's totally tricky and if it was easy, everybody would do it. I would add to what you said earlier, they think they can do it better than everyone else. That's a third point I would say is they think that they can cut the grass better than anyone else. They can answer the phone and talk to clients and put out fires. It's just not true. It's just not true at all. What do you think? I think that everyone has a unique genius.

Harvard did a study and they found that if you don't like doing something as much, it usually means you're not the best person at it. So when you think about all the things on your plate, the ones that you dread, there's someone out there who's going to do it better than you because if you have passion, you're going to do it better.

Again in the book who not how they talk about procrastination is always seen as this negative thing, but it actually can be a very positive thing because it can show you which parts of your business you need to delegate because if you're procrastinating it, then that means you're not the right who for it. So yeah, entrepreneurs, you can do it all and you're amazing at it, but there are pieces that someone can actually do better if you find the person who that's their greatest passion.

I want to touch on this a little bit more because I think there's two listeners right now, and I think one listener should stay in the truck because they freaking love what they do and they're magicians at it. They're awesome at it, they're awesome cabinet makers, whatever they do, they do their craft literally better than anyone else, and I think they really should stay in the field doing what they love. The worst thing is taking someone into putting that person in a place where they

can't be magical anymore. A lot of our listeners are the opposite, where they're pretty good at it, but they also aspire to have a business that's bigger than themselves. They're both equal. And so I think you're right. If someone has just a magical touch versus someone who's like, you know what? There's a lot of things here I don't like to do. I should delegate those, and that's how you build a business by delegating those things.

What are some key indicators that it is time for a person to start getting off the truck, so to speak, to start delegating, start building a business? What are some of those indicators that you've seen? It's when you're filling overload. I had a client who explained it once.

He called in right after he had signed up to help get help with his phone, so he's trying to outsource some parts of his business so he didn't have so much on his plate and he said, Michelle, I'm at Tetris level 60 right now and immediately, I mean you can fill it right immediately. My heart rate rose.

I mean I loved Tetris as a kid and you know that the blocks are coming down and the higher the level, the fast, the faster they're coming down and you got to figure out how to fit it where and to change the shape and the higher level you get, the harder it is to do it until you're game over. It is expanded, blown up. And so that's how it felt in his business that everything is coming down at once

in all these different directions. You got employee fires to put out, you got phones to answer you, you got marketing, got to do in sales and all these different pieces. And so when you get to that level, it's time to offload because you don't want to, you're not going to perform well at Tetris level 60. You need to be more level 10 or 20 or something like that where business is coming in, you're busy, but where you're not to this level that you can't keep all the balls in the air.

And so the secret is you got to actually become really good at firing yourself. That's one of the number one skills an entrepreneur needs to learn. And you can't just do it once. You need to continually do it. By way of an example, if you look at someone like Warren Buffett, so she's about to be a trillion, billion dollar business, has over 400,000 employees. And do you know what he spends all his time doing mostly is reading books and figuring out the next investment opportunity.

But the way he got there is actually through learning how to fire himself. I mean he started out on sales and then he built his career there and then he learned there were different pieces that he needed to offload, so he found another good person to delegate that to and then fired himself from that role and then moved up to another role. And that's really what the entrepreneur needs to do is you might not be building a trillion dollar business.

You might be going from a hundred thousand to 300,000 or maybe you're trying to go from 800,000 to a million or whatever it is, but the pathway to get there is to learn to do a skill really well and then find another who to let it go to create a system and then fire yourself from that role so that you can move on to something else that brings other value to your business.

The lesson I learned many years ago is we were spending like 80% of our marketing budget and my painting company going into the slow season when demand was taken a hit And we flipped that. We're like, we need to be spending it when demand's the highest. That's not so little tweaks like that. You talked about the lagging. I think another big area that people blow it in marketing is you work really hard to get your phone to ring how many people you have in your database.

If somebody's given you money, they're like 85% more likely to do it again if they had a good experience. And yet most contractors that we work with, most that I talk to aren't doing a thing with their database. We have about 22 unique customers per year and it grows every year. Okay, 1,801 year. Last year, 2023 was around 22 2300 unique customers, and I'm talking like somebody vias a sales training course to everyone that comes to our events or whatever. There's this app that I use at anytime.

Somebody purchases something from our company, it could be a hat, I don't care what it is, drops into our Slack channel and then goes to this other software that I use to send videos and I record an individual thank you to every buyer. Wow. Okay. Adam, thanks so much for grabbing the contractor fight swag, really appreciate you. Keep slugging away. Have a great day, whatever, or hey, thanks for grabbing an event ticket. We can't wait to see you in September.

I know it takes a lot to get away from the family and to bring your team and this and that. I just want to know we appreciate you guys. If you did that, you would see an increase, like a crazy increase in profit, right? I see the value. Where does the ROI come from or people tell me more about that. Gratitude man, right out of the gate. It's gratitude. So take a painter, I was a painting contractor, I'll just go painter right now. We have a painter that we use, they're awesome. I love them.

Last time they were at my house was two years ago. I do multiple pieces of content a week throughout the year and I have frequently talked about, so we have these things we call 'em profit touches or unintentional or unexpected intentional touches, whatever you want to call. So it's basically I painted your house last year. I'm going to call you up. Hey Adam, it's Tom with Tom's painting painted your downstairs last year. I just wanted to check in with you, see how it's looking. I care.

Just care. The ROI of that is more repeat business, more referrals, more goodwill. Most contractors you can't find like they do the work and they disappear. And what we found with the ROI is about 5% of these touches. If you do three of these a day to your database, about 5% annually convert to another project. So three a day times the working days, it's around 800 of these a year when 5% of that is 40 projects. I mean, think about it. If you do a $10,000 project, it's free money sitting there.

And so this is where I think a lot of people don't understand. You worked hard to get the phone to ring, you worked hard for the lead, worked hard to build this relationship, and then you're not going to do anything with it, but you're fanatical about ad spend to get new customers.

So I think all these things just kind of work together to help you sell at the higher rates and it's easier to, I mean, they say it's around five to 20 chance of getting a new customer versus an 80 or 90% chance to reengage a past customer. So much. I tell people all the time, if you're not emailing. Your. Clients on a regular basis, you're losing money. Yeah. Well listen, you have to be the kind of company that counts things.

You have to measure things. Jobber is great for that. We can measure all of the things there. The KPIs just come out of it. As long as we put the good information in there, Just take the very top of the software, the CRM, how many inbound leads did we get? What was our conversion rate, how many deals? Those are all important. Once I start to measure those, I can manage them and I don't want to sound like I'm quoting another book, but I can't manage what I can't measure.

And so measurement becomes really important. One of the measurement things that a lot of us overlook is thinking that we need a 100% conversion rate. Every customer I talk to buys for me, that is not good. You do not want a hundred percent conversion rate. The only people who have a hundred percent conversion rate are doing illegal things, right? Yeah. One of them is selling drugs. You can guess what the second one is, right? So we don't want a hundred percent conversion rate.

We actually want some people falling off and that's why it's called a funnel. So. Just measuring things really allows you to find the nuggets in your business. Yeah, this is a big one. Processes. If you want to go from 400,000 to 2 million, if you're sloppy small, you'll be sloppy big. If you're sloppy at 400,000. That's a good way. To say just wait until you're 2 million and you're still sloppy, so you have to have a really strong foundation.

Standard operating procedures manual, this is how we do it here kind of things. What do you think about that? I a hundred percent agree, and actually you said it really well, so I'm going to say it in reverse so it sounds like I did it first. Let's say that you're running a business, and let's just use for an example. Your business is doing a million dollars a year, but I call it fluttering around the edges.

You just can't keep control of things. You or you're stuck in a million, last year you were a million this year, you're 1.1. You'd figure this year you're going to do 1.2. You're really not growing. The problem there is most likely your systems because you're running that $1 million business on $750,000 systems. So you've maxed out those systems. You actually need, and this is the crazy part, this is the business coaching part, folks, you don't need to go to million dollar systems anymore.

You need to take that $750,000 system and imagine it as a $3 million business so you can pull yourself through that next bottleneck.

And those systems do so much, obviously, they reduce chaos and bring order to your organization. They also make it better for your employees. Your team doesn't want to work in a crazy zone. Nobody. One wants care. No one wants that. They don't want to show up to work and Hey, boss, where are we going to today? They don't want that kind of stuff. They want to have a plan. They want to have an app like Jobber that allows 'em to see what the job is to

today. They want to have apps that are professional, they want to have a nice fan and good uniforms. All those kinds of things go into building a company that it's not sloppy. It has order. Just runs well. Yeah, it just runs well. As a business owner, that's what you want. And so in order to do that, you have to have some systems in place and processes and gosh, we throw that word around so much, right? Processes and systems.

But give me a really concrete example of just a system in place, in a business. A very simple system. So imagine though that every business is a little bit sloppy, and so we're always working on systems. Right? So the very first thing I'd encourage every business owner to understand is you're always going to be chasing the next bottleneck. You're always going to be chasing a system that's broken.

So let's understand that first. That's a change in mindset, but a simple system is let's start with a script for any inbound lead. Great. This is how we answer the phone. This is how we take the initial information. This is what we say, this is what we get, this is what we enter. If you're using the software, there's a simple system, right? Yeah. You might also have a dispatch system. You might have how a job ends system. Here's another one that's great for marketing.

Here's the system for the foreman to go talk to the neighbors on the first day of the job. If you've got a great system for that, your customer service complaints are going to go down and your referrals in that neighborhood are going to go up because the foreman came, gave them a card, said something very simple like this, Hey, we're going to be working next door. We're only doing the gutters, but this seems like a very close knit neighborhood.

You're probably wondering if you see trucks you don't recognize. So that's myself and my crew working next door. If you have any questions, here's my card. Give me a call, and the person will say, well, thank you for letting me know and you do gutters. Can you just maybe, and boom, your system is making you money.

Have you ever changed your service offerings? How does your service change and evolve over time in a competitive market? Have you asked services? Have you added new services? I know you guys do a lot more commercial now, Christine, a little chandelier cleaning as well, so that's a good example of that. Maybe you can elaborate more on that, but I'm just curious how you guys evolve your company to stay relevant. We offer services based on the client demand.

So Clearview 20 years ago started as a window washing company. That's all they did, and people who are getting their windows cleaned, we're asking for, do you do power washing? Once you get enough of those questions, you're like, I really need to go into power washing. Well, now you're doing power washing and window washing. Hey, do you guys clean gutters? My gutters are clogged. And we always say, we say yes before we say no. So of course we clean gutters. Let's do it. Do you clean roofs?

Of course, we clean roofs, so we go based on demand. We have a lot of high-end luxury residential clients who are asking if we shrink wrap patio furniture. That's become a big thing in New Jersey, and we did not. And then three years ago we were like, of course we do, and we bought the shrink wrap stuff and we learned how to do it, and now we shrink wrap patio furniture because enough people asked for it. So there was enough of a demand, and you have to price accordingly.

You can't just add on a service where you're going to break even or lose money. So you have to make sure that you learn it, you're efficient and it makes sense for your gross and your net profits. And we axed one service in the past to get specific, it was gutter whitening because we didn't want our crews using the whatever chemical is needed, chemical, chemical, and we didn't do it for any reason other than the safety of our technicians. That's not a recommendation for anyone who does it.

It's just we didn't want to deal with it. We add services. We've been asked like a handful of times, do we do air duct cleaning? And we don't feel like that compliments, so you have to make sure it also compliments the services that you offer. And we didn't feel like it complimented our power washing services. We just keep saying no to that. But if there's something that really compliments your services, I would say to give it a shot and see if it works out.

Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree with that. There's a saying you can't grow if you say no, but I like that you also don't want to get too crazy going way off the wall and doing all these random tasks and stuff. One thing that I would tell businesses to look at is your current process or the current service that you're offering, are they scalable? Because a lot of times business owners, they get so caught up in pricing every single job down to this and that.

Is there a way that you can standardize your pricing in some instances to help streamline the processes? What we found a lot of the big companies is that they're making it so tight so that a high school student can sell this service or a college student and getting that process so dialed in that this is our specific Clearview washing program. It's so tight that it's not hard to sell over and over again. And that's what we've seen to help scale the process for sure.

Yeah, I would say a final thought on this. I think Christine's key point is you've been around for 20 years. You did not start doing all these different sources the first year, and so I think our listeners would be better off making sure that they want to dominate, they have to dominate one thing really, really well. And once they've completely maximized in terms of a tier, once they max out a tier, then they can branch off.

There's a book called Good to Great, and there's a hedgehog mindset in there, which he says, you got to focus on this one thing and be so great at this one thing up until around a million dollars. If you're so good at this, no one else can touch you, and everyone's else going to be chasing all this stuff all around you, and you're just staying true to yourself. Yeah. Let's talk about cashflow.

So what kind of capital funding do you recommend for companies that want to go to a million dollars or more? What kind of cashflow management do you need to have in place that doesn't dry up on you? Any tips on that? Don't take on unnecessary debt. I mean, start the process, but I should have started getting credit for my business sooner. Didn't. I've only done that for the last maybe three years or something like that,

but I went over 10 years with just cash, right? So yeah, we grew to a couple million bucks with no debt, with no, when I bought a vehicle, Adam, again, when we met, I was driving, I had a thousand dollars truck. I literally paid a thousand bucks for this truck, and it was earning two, three grand a day. And so I think that if you're going to grow your company, I don't think that you need to take on an unreasonable amount of debt. Now with that, start the process. Go ahead and get an LLC,

go ahead and get your credit. Start building that. But when you get a credit card, don't use it like a credit card. Use it like a debit card, pay it off twice a month. Don't go out and buy a hundred thousand dollars truck if you don't have the money in the bank. If you're like, I can't afford to buy this tool, but I need it to complete a job, maybe you shouldn't take on that job.

I think again, everything that you do should be profitable and in the back of your mind, you should always say, if this goes sideways, is it going to be detrimental to the company as a whole? Because keep in mind, if your company goes under, then everybody that works for you is going under, right? You got how many people in your organization that literally you're putting food

on their table. And I think that most business owners, at least me, sometimes I stay up at night and I'm like, if I make a bad decision, this is going to affect a lot of people. And I think that debt is one of those things that you can very quickly get out of hand. If you know how to leverage it, awesome. But I think that you should be able to grow without it and use it like a bank account, like a debit card where you can get by without it, but you're building it.

I would say if we take it back to when you're starting your business, make sure you can get personal lending. Before in Canada, the banks don't really recognize you as a business for the first two years. So if you're not. Interesting. So if you're not successful, you don't have a track record. They want to see that.

So I would say get a good accountant to understand your cashflow because you're not going to know what it means or how to understand it if you don't have someone explaining yours behind you. But then also understanding that your banking partners. Some of the best advice, as I said, it's like when you go to your mortgage broker and they don't have a mortgage,

so when you go to your banker, but they don't have a business, right? Yes, maybe they've seen some businesses, but as you start in the small business world, understand the other side of the desk, that person is in an entry level business banking position. They're in small business banking. A lot of the times that is just a stepping stone into commercial banking. A lot of times that's just a stepping stone in a private wealth management.

So understanding that you're not dealing with the expert all the time, but you're dealing with somebody that has guidelines. And so if you can reverse engineer your needs from the bank's guidelines, it's the best advice I ever got. And once I kind of understood that, and it's not manipulating, it's playing by the rules and playing by their rules. So going to the bank and saying, listen, we've got this new job coming up. There's 60 day terms on the payment. It's legally binding.

I just need to take on the job and have the cashflow to do it. It's a profitable opportunity. And then you can come in with the right amount of paperwork and say, okay, listen, that's how we're going to take this job on. Or kind of like you said, with that tool, we're going to be able to take this job on, and this job's going to pay for that tool, and then we've got that tool for the rest of our business's lifecycle. You don't want to do it. And I think we're agreeing on that.

You don't want to do it to the point of it's not really risk, it's just like you're just shooting from the hip all the time. Yeah. Structured. Debt, the difference between structured debt and just racking up a credit, you maxing out your credit card. Right? Exactly. And you also need to understand there's different types of credit. Exactly. To your point, you got to understand what do banks want to lend to you? Well, they want to return on their money, so that's what they're looking for.

It is similar in the states. They want two, three years worth of history. And so that's why I'm saying start out small, right? Start out with a 500 credit card if that's all you can qualify for or something like that, but start building that out and then do other things. I mean, there's lines of credit, there's invoice factoring, which is what you were kind of referring to, I believe, where you say, Hey,

we got a big job. It's under contract. We just want to upfront on our money, and if that job is going to be a 20% profit and the debt only costs you 3%, 5% all day every day. Yeah, let's go for that. But you got to be a little financial literate so you don't get in over your

head. Yeah, I think the best, we're talking about scale and over that million dollar threshold. The best thing you can do is have an in-house bookkeeper By far. I highly recommend it. A lot of the times they will do part-time work, but in-house is the critical thing there. In-house bookkeeping, you want to know your numbers as quickly as you can. Outsource bookkeeping, it is going to be every month, so maybe get 'em at the 15th of every month. That's not effective.

That's reactive decision making when you can say, Hey, how was this week doing? Okay, there we go. Let's make a decision based on that. Well, how are we looking this month? Listen, there's some extra cashflow. Let's buy that tool. That tool's really going to pay us off and it's going to set us up for next month. You know what? The trucks need some oil changes, that thousand truck needs, new tires. But also if things are tight, you know what, man, let's work Saturday or Sunday, right? Let's.

Get it going. And being able to scale it back or scale it up. You're saying the in-house bookkeeper, a guy had a hundred thousand dollars cannot afford to pay. You know what I mean? You can't afford to pay a fulltime in-house bookkeeper at four or 5 million. It's a necessity. So I think hanging around people, it goes back to your advice at the beginning of the episode.

Hang around people who are at where you want to be, get advice from them and then have that plan at X amount, at 1,000,005, we're going hire an in-house bookkeeper, and this is going to be a typical salary for our area, and this is how many hours and X, Y, Z. So you have that plan in place, so when your business reaches that threshold, you can quickly pull the trigger.

And again, it's about that opportunity cost, not missed opportunity cost and capitalizing and reducing those missed opportunities.

Just put your eyes on your goals once a day. I don't care where you look at 'em, how you do 'em, how many minutes? Doesn't matter. That's on you, right? I'm not mandating how much time anybody does any of this stuff, but just the habit of I take care of me and I look at where I want to go. We spend so much time focused on where we're not or the problems that we have or the issues or the circumstances that are hitting us in the business.

And sadly, well, the reality is we get more of what we focus on, and if we're not intentionally focusing on where we want to go, we're going to have a hard time getting there because we're consumed with the guys didn't show up, we didn't hit our sales goal, we ran on this issue on this project. I'm trying to get the phone to ring. It's easy to see all the things that we want to make better. And.

We give. Those things are attention, and I've just personally found the more that I look at where I want to go, the faster I get there. And those could be quarterly goals. It could be yearly goals. You don't care as long as they have goals for the time period that they're looking. Yeah, if you want to build a dream house somewhere, right, with five acres overlooking the mountains and read that every day. I have a thing on my phone I call it. I call it my standard, how I put my focus every day.

I have some affirmations on there. I have a little reminder to remind myself who I am and what I'm here to do. And it's a personal type phrase for me. That means something. I have a list of all the things that I'm shooting for that I want to accomplish. I have a never do it again. List that's on there that my coach taught me. He's like, everyone has a, I want to do this. How about a never do it again? And then I revisit that every morning as well.

So I'm just starting my day with reading some good stuff, putting some good things in my head, getting the oxygen and moving my body, whatever you want to call it. So that's the first activity is a personal activity of the FW day. The second we call a pipeline activity, which is a prospecting or a hunting activity. Do something to build your pipeline. Pet peeve. Mine is that listen, if you're a salesperson, and by the way, if you own a business, you're a salesperson.

So it blows my mind how little focus,

intensity, consistency, whatever you want to call it that the average contractor has when it comes to filling their own pipeline. They hire the marketing agency, which is great. I'm all for running ads and doing things, billboards, truck signs, whatever. But you can't just rely on those things. What do you have control over? Can you call a past customer? Can you do what we call a warranty call? Hey Bill, it's Tom. We restained your deck last year.

Your warranty is up in a month. I'd like to set up your warranty call. What's that, Tom? Well, we come out and we put eyes on it and make sure that everything's looking good. So nothing becomes your problem. It remains our problem. Nobody walks it. Nobody seeks out warranty work. We do because it's uncommon. You got to be uncommon. So that's a pipeline activity. Now I'm standing back in the yard having a conversation 99 of a hundred times.

Nothing's wrong. Sometimes I'd tell our guys to find something, right? Just find something like, oh, this window sill looks like it's going to start peeling in a couple of months or something, so I'll sand it down and repaint it. Right now, the law reciprocity kicks in, okay? You're standing there, they're reminded of why they like you, why they hired you. You're not running from warranty work.

You're uncommon. And what we found in my companies is about 38% of the warranty calls that we physically did, 38% of those, you would hear, Hey, Adam, while you're here, we were thinking about this, and it's more work. So that pipeline activity doesn't have to be prospecting for cold business, cold traffic, cold people. It can, pipeline activity could be something along the lines of creating content to get more eyeballs on your brand.

There's so many things that we have control over that we're not relying on our marketing agencies and the Google gods and all those other things to fill our pipeline. So every day our listeners should be doing something to get new clients or get more work, I should say, from potentially existing clients every day. Yeah. Thank you for tuning in as we enter this new year filled with growth and opportunity. We hope these insights help you take your business to the next level.

Here's to making 2025 your best year ever. I.