Full transcript9 chapters · 11,420 words
00:00From ER trauma nurse to co-owning a plumbing company
Ashley Stroud: So when I see somebody jump $20 million in a year, I don’t think genius. I think who funded that and what’s it costing them to service the debt?
Tyler Martin: Welcome to Profit and Grit with Tyler, where blue-collar owners and insiders spill the real story behind their hustle, building businesses that thrive through sweat and smarts. We’ll dig into their journeys from scaling chaos to growing the bottom line with lessons and grit that pay off big.
Tyler Martin: Here’s your host, the blue collar CFO, Tyler Martin. Most people only talk about the wins. They’ll tell you they hit 5 million, 10 million, or 20 million. But they rarely talk about what it took to get there. The setbacks, the missed goals, or the problems they had to solve along the way.
Tyler Martin: That’s what I liked about this conversation with Ashley Stroud. Ashley and her husband built plumbing outfitters from one truck into a multi-million dollar plumbing company. And she’s refreshingly honest about what happened as the business grew. We talk about the different ceilings they hit, what broke along the way, and the leadership,
Tyler Martin: recruiting, financial, and marketing changes that help keep them moving forward. Let’s get into it with Ashley now. Hey, Ashley, welcome to the Profit and Grit Show. How’s it going?
Ashley Stroud: It’s going pretty good, Tyler. Thanks for having me on the show.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, thanks for being here. Love to start just learning about you. Can you share a little bit about yourself in terms of what you do these days professionally? And then if you got a tidbit, you can share personally. I’d love to get to know you a little bit on a personal level.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah, awesome. So my husband and I are the co-owners of Plumbing Outfitters. So we lead a team of about 20, 17 members here in the Austin, Texas area, Plumbing Outfitters. And we mostly do residential service work as well as what our bread and butter is.
Ashley Stroud: and my focus right now is mostly in business development and then I kind of also oversee all of our marketing tactics and strategies that we’re doing. We have a really great operational team here. I’m super passionate about leadership so I love seeing leaders rise up in our organization
Ashley Stroud: and getting you know seeing those people kind of rise up and take over the day-to-day operations so we have a pretty cool thing going here and that’s what professionally what I’m doing and then personally I’m a mom to five amazing kiddos so we’re in full swing of summer
Ashley Stroud: juggling all the schedules, buying the endless amounts of snacks, and trying to remember to put sunscreen and eardrops in our ears every day after swimming. So that’s the personal side.
Tyler Martin: I always have the most mad respect for, and in your case, it’s a husband and wife team, but for folks that have a relatively large family, five kids, and are running a business. That,
Ashley Stroud: to me, is just a gargantuan task. I mean, occasionally it can get a little overwhelming, But I do feel like, you know, your capacity grows. It didn’t just happen overnight. So I do think that, you know, your capacity grows and you’re able to, you know, pivot where you need to and swing and just improve on the areas that you need to.
Ashley Stroud: But it’s never easy. It’s never just a walk in the park. It is takes a lot of diligence to make it all work.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. OK, I want to start. You were in the ER room at one point, the emergency room at one point. And, you know, that’s a pretty big leap to go from emergency room to trades. So, and knowing and researching you and learning a little bit about you, you feel like there’s a lot of overlap in some of that skill set actually applies.
Tyler Martin: So I’d love to kind of just maybe take us back a little bit. We’ll just chat about this a little bit. Take back when you were there and then how you think some of that skill set applies over into the trades.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah. So I knew at a pretty early age that I wanted to get into nursing. My mom was in the nursing world. So it all just, it kind of always just called to me as a, as a way to help people and serve people.
Ashley Stroud: And I kind of always knew that’s what I wanted to do. and I was always drawn to the adrenaline that was could be found in you know in the trauma rooms so when I was looking at what part of nursing I wanted to go into because obviously there’s a wide
Ashley Stroud: gamut uh ER trauma always just really spoke to me so yeah it was uh I graduated in UT Austin nurse school in 2010 and I did uh I went straight into a level one trauma center uh working in Temple and their Scott and White ER there and met some amazing people had some amazing experiences
Ashley Stroud: it grew me a lot as a person as far as time management goes and communication. So when we talk about things like how do they overlap, I would start right then and there, right? There’s always such a great, I would say just like a gap in the trades world,
Ashley Stroud: I think with communication. And I mean, you see that with every single team, it’s not just trades, but across every organization, communication is always going to be where you have the most gaps and the most pain points, the most friction. And so I learned a lot about closed lip communication
Ashley Stroud: and processes. Because when life and death is on the line, the processes that you follow are generally what has been shown to be data-based backed evidence of helping people stay alive. So I learned a lot about processes and communication in that world. And then also leadership.
Ashley Stroud: There’s always great mentors in the nursing world. And there’s always a hierarchy of your charge nurse and your director. And there’s really great leadership that can be found in nursing world in the hospital settings. So, and then you talk about like cross-collaboration, right? You never
Ashley Stroud: work in a silo in the ER. You’re never just, you know, by yourself. You’re working alongside respiratory therapy or you’re working alongside interns or medical students or orthopedic or nutrition, dieticians. Like there’s so many different other, you know, industries that you’re working alongside. You have to learn how to coexist with them, how to communicate with them,
Ashley Stroud: how to, you know, all come together to solve a customer’s problem. And so all those things, I feel like were really helpful with entrepreneurship in general.
Tyler Martin: Do you feel like from an operational standpoint, like staying calm when it escalates, you know, when something escalates, like, do you feel that’s something also that maybe like transferred? So I’m kind of thinking like typical business owner, HVAC, whatever their trade is, but, you know, it gets pretty hectic at times.
Tyler Martin: You get people complaining or whatever. Do you think that’s transferred pretty well?
Ashley Stroud: I do. I think most more than anything, it’s just giving me perspective. I can remember, you know, early on, you know, I would just be able to come home and tell my husband like, well, the good thing is that nobody died today. Right. Like, um,
Ashley Stroud: there’s not like life and death situations that were generally, you know, I’m not saying that the trades can’t be dangerous, but I’m just saying that there’s a customer issue or an employee issue. It’s never rarely life and death. So that gave me a lot,
Ashley Stroud: a strong perspective working in the ER and seeing that, you know, when it truly is life and death, uh, the, the smaller things that we come against the hurdles that we face there, there’s usually a solution to them. There’s usually, you know, a path to resolution. And so, yeah, that, that definitely gave me perspective. And then,
Ashley Stroud: yeah, I mean, just overall, I do tend to have a higher threshold for adrenaline. So, you know, when things start getting crazy, I don’t generally get pulled into it. I generally can keep a pretty, at least I would like to hope that I keep a pretty even keel on some escalated
Tyler Martin: issues. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I want to switch gears here a little bit. So you guys then go
07:04The Biltmore trip where they wrote the business plan
Tyler Martin: and you start your business, your shop. Take me through how you get to a point of starting your business or getting into your business, I should say. And then I also want to talk about your first million came pretty easy as I understand it. And then you hit a ceiling. So I kind of want to just
Tyler Martin: break down kind of those thresholds of where you felt pressure or ceilings, I guess I’ll call them, and you’ve either broke through them or you’re working on getting past them. So two part there, maybe like what got you into this industry, into trades industry. And then, and then we talk a
Ashley Stroud: little bit about those ceilings. Cool. So I think I was at a point in my career where I pretty much had to make a decision on whether or not I wanted to go into nursing leadership or I want to go back to school for like a doctorate degree. And I was kind of weighing in between those things. I was
Ashley Stroud: also just feeling a little bit burned out. I had actually left the ER and went into clinic nursing. And while I loved my patients there, it just was not nearly as high adrenaline as the ER was. So I was feeling a little bit just less, I guess, engaged on a daily basis, less challenged. And
Ashley Stroud: And so I was feeling a little bit burned out. And then that just does happen to kind of coincide with Warren. He was working for a residential service company locally. And he also did not feel like he had a really clear path to further his position.
Ashley Stroud: There wasn’t a clear ladder to climb. There wasn’t clear goals to obtain. And he just didn’t see exactly a future there other than just being a technician. And he felt like he wanted to do more. So those just happened to coincide. And it was actually Warren, who I think
Ashley Stroud: kind of got bit by the entrepreneur bug a little bit quicker than I did. I had some experiences growing up with different business owners who just were really unhappy. They didn’t have work-life balance. They didn’t, they always had cashflow problems. They’re just generally kind of crabby and unhappy people.
Ashley Stroud: And so I kind of had this association that that’s just how all business owners operated. And so I pushed back on it for a couple of years. You know, I was like, I don’t want to be an entrepreneur. yada, yada. But it was always kind of his, he just kind of kept pushing the idea, pushing the idea.
Ashley Stroud: And then we ended up going on a trip to North Carolina and it was a long road trip. I think it took us 16 hours to get there. So 17 hours. And we went and saw the Biltmore mansion in Asheville, North Carolina. And we were walking, we did a tour and we were walking through the halls and,
Ashley Stroud: you know, just seeing all the craftsmanship and original elevator that wrote, you know, It was just so much, I don’t know, intricacy and I don’t know, just really great, you know, craftsmanship. And that was kind of where we were just talking about legacy and things that
Ashley Stroud: outlive, you know, outlive the view. What does that look like? And that’s kind of where I finally started breaking down my, my concerns and my hesitations about the business side. And the way back is where we pretty much wrote out our business plan for plumbing outfitters. Like we,
Ashley Stroud: we pretty much, uh, you know, yeah, wrote all out, uh, what we, you know, everything except the name. It took us forever to, to, uh, agree on a name, but, um, yeah. And then, so that was in 2000 and I think six, uh, 2016 is when we were on that trip and, uh, it took us about a year
Ashley Stroud: probably to get like everything in line that we wanted to like fun. We just wanted to make sure we had plenty of, we had two kids at the time. So, you know, just making sure that we had funds set aside some emergency funds and getting insurance and all the things lined up. It took
10:21$400k on one truck and hustling to the first million
Ashley Stroud: us about a year and then we launched and yeah, we grew pretty, we grew pretty rapidly. I mean, Warren was a, he was a top earner, top performer at his, his prior company. So we knew he had the potential to, you know, do, do pretty well on his own. And I mean, I think we did like 400,000
Ashley Stroud: our first year, uh, just with him running a truck by himself, you know, um, that was him selling all the work and doing all the work. And then, uh, the next year we, that’s when we kind of started had people reach out wanting to, to work for work, work with us. And it was funny because we, we just,
Ashley Stroud: I can barely remember telling people like, you don’t want to work with us. Like, we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re like, we’re on, you know, unfounded. We, we, we don’t have any, like you’re taking a big risk on us, you know? And, uh, but we hired our first plumber, I think
Ashley Stroud: in 2019 was our first plumber that we hired. And yeah, I mean, after that, it went pretty fast. Like we got to a million dollars in revenue within two and a half years of business. We were, we’d cleared the $1 million mark. I think it was 2020 is when we, uh, or 2019, 20, uh, 2020,
Ashley Stroud: something right there. We cleared a million. Yeah. That just felt like it came easy. You know, I was like, do a good job, meet the right people, network hard, get some great mentors in your corner that can give you some solid advice and just hustle.
Ashley Stroud: And I feel like you can hustle your way to a million dollars. It’s kind of what I feel like.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And so the million came pretty quickly through hustle. Then I think your next threshold was around 3.5. What did that kind of look like? And if you could maybe like, if some things stand out to you that what you think got you past that or blow through past that, I’d love to know your impression of what pushed you through.
Ashley Stroud: Well, you know, I do think we had somewhat of a kind of a hand up on this one because we in 2021, we had a massive freeze in Texas. I don’t know if you or your viewers remember that, but it was very massive.
Ashley Stroud: And so there was a ton of plumbing problems for probably a solid two months. and we actually hit our yearly revenue goal in Q1 of that year. We just blew it out of the water. And so it was funny because I don’t think that we were necessarily…
Ashley Stroud: That was totally a one-off. It was like we would have never… We were on track. We would have liked to… I think our goal that year was like 2.5, I think is what we were shooting for. But that one quarter alone, we were able to…
Ashley Stroud: We put so much revenue on the board. So we ended up finishing the year at like 3.5 that year at 3.7, I think. And so it was funny because it’s like, once you hit it that one year, I mean, we all knew it was a fluke, right? We all knew that it was like, Hey, this was just, uh, we had this mother nature that just like sent us this, you know, huge revenue increase.
Ashley Stroud: But, you know, once you hit it once, you just like, you realize that you can, you know, and oddly enough, it just, it pushed all of our systems to maximum capacity. And we had never, like, rarely ever, at least in my experience, rarely ever do you get to really experience that where you push your processes and your team to max capacity, right?
Ashley Stroud: And I think that when you do that, you identify gaps, you identify exposures, you identify improvements that need to be made, but you also get armed with this knowledge that you wouldn’t normally have. So it’s like, were we ready for that? Did we expect it? Was it in our bingo for the year?
Ashley Stroud: No, it wasn’t. But it actually just laid the roadmap out. Okay, well, we did it this way. This is what we need to do it. And so replicating it was easy. So I do think that we got a little bit of a hand up there because it just, it happened to us. I wouldn’t say that we led the charge on it. We just kind of, we just took the intel and then we applied it to the future years, you know.
Ashley Stroud: But what it did expose more than anything was just our lack of leadership overall and our lack of organizational foundational scalability. That’s what I think was our biggest takeaway, was just that we did not have a lot of our processes weren’t scalable. We could not reasonably expect that unless we made changes that we would be able to replicate that unless we had another massive Mother Nature event take place.
Tyler Martin: Sure. Two things I wouldn’t mind cutting in here. One, are there any of those processes that stand
14:28800 calls a day exposed no overflow and no bench
Tyler Martin: out that you addressed first that had a big impact on the business?
Ashley Stroud: I’m trying to think back through. I think one was just like, well, for one call volume, right? So like, do you have, what do you have in place for overflow? Because at the time we had two people in the office and our call volume on a normal day was about 70 like calls, not 70 leads, but 70
Ashley Stroud: calls would ring through the phone. Right. And we had two people running the office. It was fine. Well, during those two week period where we had this massive freeze, we were handling like upwards to 800 calls. Um, and we, you know, obviously are you ever going to get a 10, 10 X influx of calls
Ashley Stroud: for that? Same time. No, but it did make it make us realize that we had, we had no, nothing in place for overflow, right? Like we were always just fine with them leaving a voicemail, us calling back whenever we got called back. So we had nothing in place to capture overflow. So that
Ashley Stroud: was one of the things that we were like, hey, if we’re going to be paying for marketing, we need to make sure that we have a process in place for capturing overflow. And that was one thing we moved forward with. And then I would say another process improvement was also just
Ashley Stroud: during that time, the governor lessened some of the requirements on licensure. So in Texas at the time you had to have a tradesman license to perform work. Well, during this timeframe, there was so many people without water. The governor released some of those stipulations
Ashley Stroud: and allowed for apprentices to run a truck so long as the master plumber was willing to say they were competent. And that just made us realize that as you scale and as you grow, we did not have enough manpower at all to respond to the influx of calls.
Ashley Stroud: we weren’t prepared in that way which made us realize just how we need to always be on the front edge of recruiting of training of getting the next person in line because you can always find work like you can always find the work fill the board but if you don’t have like a steady
Ashley Stroud: pipeline of people qualified technicians to run those calls then you’re like you’re going to always be chasing you’re gonna always be on the wheel right chasing and losing calls because you
Tyler Martin: can’t handle them. Right. Okay. And then the other question I wanted to just touch on when you hit that original 3.5, does that, is there some mental thing that kicks in there where you’re like, oh
Ashley Stroud: yeah, we can do it now. Like, where does that play into it? Yeah. It’s just, it gives you this, yeah, assurance and this like satisfaction of like, Hey, we’ve done it once. We can absolutely do it again. So yeah, it’s just, it’s a major confidence booster. The whole, when the whole
Ashley Stroud: team sees the numbers that can be achieved. And obviously, we’re a commission-based company. So it also just helps with like, okay, these guys can see what potential they have to earn. So yeah, that absolutely… Every time you hit a ceiling, it’s a massive boost to confidence.
Ashley Stroud: And it’s a massive… Everybody gets realigned with newfound grit and determination to make it a regular occurrence. I would absolutely agree to that.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. As a side note, I had Alyssa Rogers on my show and they had these mental barriers that, oh yeah, maybe we could just do 5 million. Maybe we could do 10 million. And then they got some coaching and the coach was like, you’re just thinking too small. You could be a hundred
Tyler Martin: million. And so they started to lay out different locations and what that would look like. And now they’re at 10 million and opening locations. And it’s like, you know, part of it is just belief and having a plan, but belief obviously plays into it too.
Ashley Stroud: Oh, I can’t even begin to say how much our limiting beliefs impact our journey on entrepreneurship. Yeah. I mean, if you don’t, it’s the absolute thing that has to be in place before you have to believe you can do it. It won’t happen without that belief.
Ashley Stroud: Right.
Tyler Martin: And since we’re on this topic, I’m going to go back to something you said. You know how you said the business owners you had been around were grumpy and cash flow problems and stuff? It’s funny. I literally just talked to a guy before this meeting and he was giving me a story and he said,
Tyler Martin: the reason he went into roofing is his neighbor had a jet ski, had two brand new fancy cars. He listed like all these, you know, assets and things he had. He said, you know, if you can make that kind of money in doing roofing, that’s what I’m going to do. But that was his whole percent.
Tyler Martin: It’s funny how our perceptions of who we’re around, who we grow up with, sometimes our family, oftentimes our family, can really either be a perception of how great it is or a perception of how hard it is. So it’s fascinating to me, actually.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah. Yeah, it is fascinating. Funny story. And I love my parents to death. And they’re obviously amazing. But I don’t think they even still yet quite grasp the magnitude of what we’ve created. It’s just hilarious. My dad, the other day, he was like,
Ashley Stroud: we were at dinner and he said something along the lines that told my husband, he’s like, yeah. And then she just went and let her, you know, let her, uh, her good thing in nursing go, you know, now she’s off chasing being just a plumber. And I’m like, Oh man, dad, like you,
Ashley Stroud: you don’t even know dad, but yeah, it’s funny. Parents do have a way of bolding us and giving us some, uh, some beliefs that sometimes we have to work through and let go of the ones that don’t
Tyler Martin: serve us anymore. I fought through them the whole way. You know, I was a licensed CPA. And when I, I was on the path to become a partner and I was on my way and I said, you know, I want to go start
Tyler Martin: my own business. My dad said, oh, you’re so stupid to leave this great job. So I went and did it. Then I sold my practice. He said, oh, that’s the dumbest thing you could ever do. I went on to build, you know, part of being part ownership of a $25 million company that wasn’t in accounting.
Tyler Martin: And he was disappointed that I left accounting. Still wasn’t good enough when I left that and sold it. So it’s just, you know, I mean, he was grown, he was raised probably some similar stuff to your dad. You know, my dad works six days a week, 40 plus hours every, probably 50 plus hours
Ashley Stroud: every week. And that’s what he knew how to do really well. My dad still does that. Yeah. I can’t, I can’t get him to take off for a family vacation to save my life. I mean, that is just what he
Tyler Martin: does. I mean, one of the hardest working men I know. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that’s good, Ashley. So just to kind of set this up here, 3 million made some process changes that got you above it. Now you guys have moved forward to 6 million or around there. You were kind enough
Tyler Martin: when we had our first conversation where you said, Hey yeah, we’re at 6 million, but I’m not 100% saying I broke through it yet because sometimes I’m above it, sometimes I’m below it. Can you talk through that? What’s got you to $6 million? What do you think is your next move
Tyler Martin: to the logical one for me? A lot of people obviously talk about it is $10 million. This is
20:52Losing three plumbers and a GM on the way to $6M
Tyler Martin: the holy grail. So to kind of talk through that if you would.
Ashley Stroud: Okay. Yeah. So I do feel like there’s probably a threshold somewhere around $6 million. And oddly enough, you can get some great momentum and you can get great where you’re like, okay, we’ve done two or three or four solid months at a certain revenue.
Ashley Stroud: And then you can make all these projections where you’re like, we are going to clear 6 million, like no doubt. Right. And then it just, something happens. Right. So in our instance, like we, we lost three very high performing plumbers right back to back to back.
Ashley Stroud: And they were, yeah, we, we learned in that moment that we again had not been recruiting like we needed to recruit, but it massively put this large kind of hurdle in our way and brought a lot of things to a halt that we were not prepared for. So then, you know, you kind of take a couple steps
Ashley Stroud: back, rebuild. It’s just, there’s never like, I feel like there’s at least in our experience, like it’s not just a super linear growth, right? Like you do take a few steps forward and then you take a step back and a few steps forward. So other things like we transitioned our general
Ashley Stroud: manager. We had our general manager in last year and we ended up terminating him in August or July, I believe, June or July. And then, you know, it took us like three or four months to find a person that we could trust put back in that role. So we lost like a whole quarter of trying to get,
Ashley Stroud: you know, momentum, finding the right person in place to kind of lead the helm as a general manager. So, you know, it just, it, it does feel like sometimes you can have these like string of amazing revenue months where you’re like, okay, we are on track for X amount of revenue. And then
Ashley Stroud: something happens, right? Something you’re not expecting, something comes out of left field and it, it exposes a gap that you didn’t realize was there, a blind spot that, you know, you hadn’t known before. And then you have to patch that and fix it and bridge it. And then you start ramping
Ashley Stroud: back up again, right? To get back to there. So I do think that that’s at least been our experience. I do see people post and I see people talk about this just super linear kind of growth model of like we were at X revenue and then we’re just increasing by 15% every single month for the
Ashley Stroud: last two years. I don’t know. That’s not been my experience. It just hasn’t. And I do think that there’s probably some underlying operational things, perhaps even in our marketing strategy that we need to work on. But that’s not been our experience where it’s been super linear
Ashley Stroud: every single month, month over month growth. It just hasn’t been. So yeah, I would say that… I mean, it’s a struggle sometimes because you get your hopes up and you get your anticipation, you get your sights set on this revenue number and you don’t get it for the year, which was…
23:22Tearing down paid lead spend and rebuilding the brand
Ashley Stroud: That was last year, we didn’t hit our revenue goals. And I was just devastated. It was our first year that we hadn’t hit revenue goals. And I just, I mean, I remember just being like, what am I doing? This is my nine years in business. And this is eight years in business at the time.
Ashley Stroud: And I was a first year not hitting our revenue goals. So, but you know, we made some crazy, cool changes last year. And what I tell people sometimes is that like, sometimes what you don’t get in revenue, you, you get in knowledge and you have to, you cannot undermine how valuable that
Ashley Stroud: can be. Right. So like last year, you know, we kind of did a massive restructuring of our marketing because it felt like in our market, we could see the writing on the wall of our cost for acquisitions was just so incredibly high that if we didn’t make some changes, the runway to
Ashley Stroud: continue that was going to run out. We could not keep up that level of cost for acquisition long-term. It wasn’t sustainable. So we had to tear down a little bit of our marketing strategy and refocus it more into like a branding aspect. And we know, I mean, we knew going into that,
Ashley Stroud: that that was going to be a much longer term game, right? Like you don’t start branding and then immediately start getting phone calls from it. You know, it’s not like a lead aggregator. So we knew those things, but it’s like we are exchanging revenue right now
Ashley Stroud: for long-term sustainable growth. And I think that that is just as important in a growing company as is like this year, month over month growth, so.
Tyler Martin: Right, two things I wanna, one I wanna ask you and one I wanna share. So I frequently have had prospects or clients come to me and I had a guy a couple of weeks ago that stands out and he said, he put his head down and he’s like,
Tyler Martin: I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I’ve spent $100,000 on branding. He’s got all these big, beautiful signs, beautiful branding, it is really beautiful. The weather isn’t cooperating. We haven’t had any high heat. So we have no business. And he was just frustrated.
Tyler Martin: And he’s like, I’m seeing these things and I’m not going to name names, but I’m seeing these people posting on LinkedIn and Facebook. And, you know, one week it’s 10 million. The next week it’s 20 million. The next week it’s 50 million. And I’m like, well, what am I doing wrong?
Tyler Martin: I’m just trying to get my first 5 million, you know? And he was really devastated, really. And you know what I did? I took, I’ve got so much podcast content and memories from interviews. I went through like a whole bunch of podcasts where I could find snippets of people that had
Tyler Martin: talked about where they hit rough points or where there was a guy named Mark Popp I had on my podcast and he said it took him eight years he was stuck. And Darren Yarbrough too also had another one. And so I just took all these little slices of, you know, people talking. I said, dude,
Tyler Martin: I’m not gonna say his name. I almost said his name, but dude, like, listen to this. Like, this is reality. This is, this is what you don’t see that we all just hear on the internet. that everything’s squeaky clean. And it’s not, I mean, it’s just not the truth.
Ashley Stroud: I agree. Yeah, I think that that’s, I think it’s really good perspective. And I do appreciate, like we’re in mastermind groups where like we can talk about these things where you don’t feel like you’re on an island. You’re the only person struggling because,
Ashley Stroud: yeah, and we talked about this when we were preparing for this podcast too, is that another thing is that, you know, I know for a fact that like business owners or trade these influencers, you know, they can post all they want to about top line numbers.
Ashley Stroud: But what you won’t always see them post is their bottom line numbers, right? So you can put revenue on the board, but doing it while being profitable is very difficult. And for most of us in the small business world, most of us don’t come from tons of money with
Ashley Stroud: deep, deep pockets and sitting on millions of dollars of assets that we can liquidate at any minute. Most of us are bootstrapping this, right? It’s organic growth. And organic growth takes a little bit longer. and it also is just, it can be slower, you know?
Ashley Stroud: And I feel like that’s okay. I feel like we all have to give ourselves some grace and understand that that’s like, that is a normal process for growth. I do think you can’t, you just have to find healthy margins along the way and make sure that you’re raising up a profitable,
Ashley Stroud: you know, healthy marginal business and growth will happen. Like it will happen. And you have to know when to expand and when to pull back. And that’s lessons, you know, we’ve learned along the way too. So yeah, I think somebody the other day
Ashley Stroud: described like to the three to three and a half to seven million dollar range as like the wastelands right it’s like you you know that to like when you’re in this frame of somewhere between no and i felt it after the three and a half million dollar mark so since then until like where we are
Ashley Stroud: now where we’re shooting to be at um which we’re you know we’re we have our eyes set on you know trying to be somewhere in the in the seven and a half million dollar range by like probably by the end of next year is what we’re shooting for. But it’s like you, you have to build so much
Ashley Stroud: infrastructure to get past this point. And that’s expensive, you know, so it can feel like it never ends. It could feel like the day will never break, but there is, you just have to keep going. You know, it’s like, you just have to keep getting up and keep going. It really is just like last man
Ashley Stroud: standing, right? Like it’s not a race to the top. It’s just who can put on their boots every morning and get back out at it and, you know, and figure out a way to move forward with it. I really feel like that’s the answer.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. I’m such a fan too of like, you’d mentioned masterminds or peer groups, whatever you want to call them. Because if you get in the right group, like people share the reality because we don’t really see that on the internet. We just always hear the best.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah. Highlight reels.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. It allows you to kind of connect and feel like, hey, I’m not the only one going through this.
Ashley Stroud: Yes. Yeah. I’m a big fan. We’re pretty like dialed in with the Built for the Trades community. and they have mastermind groups and it’s a best practice and there’s coaching and it’s a great group of trade-specific people. And I think they’re an awesome group to be a part of.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah.
Tyler Martin: One other question I want to ask, you talked about losing three plumbers under a short timeline. Yeah. Did you guys do anything? Because when I hear three, and this happens, I mean, with my own client base, I see this happen. I have a client in particular
Tyler Martin: that’s coming to mind where they lost their key players, you know, and I’m not saying yours were key, but in their case, they were the highest producers. When you went into service site and you clicked on revenue, these guys were near the top every time.
Tyler Martin: And so were there adjustments that you made? Was there something? Because when I hear three, I think, hey, I know me as a business owner when I used to run my business. If I lost a couple people like that, I might go, hey, these are the adjustments I’m going to make.
Tyler Martin: Maybe I’m communication. I don’t know what it is. Like, was there a takeaway there for you?
Ashley Stroud: Well, all three of them started their own companies.
Tyler Martin: Oh, wow.
Ashley Stroud: None of them were… We do exit interviews with everybody to see what we can learn from them and what we can improve because obviously that’s important. Retention is huge. So we’re always open to like, hey, what drove you away? So the three that we lost all did go
Ashley Stroud: start their own companies. And none of them felt disenfranchised. None of them felt disgruntled. I think that they just… Here’s the thing. When you have a culture like ours, We’re constantly investing in our team. We’re constantly leveling them up. We try to give them everything they can to be successful.
Ashley Stroud: We know that comes with a risk. It comes with the real risk that one day they are going to feel so empowered that they want to do this themselves. Honestly, it’s a badge of honor, truthfully. I didn’t realize that was the reasoning. I mean, that’s a badge of honor.
Ashley Stroud: It doesn’t feel good, but it’s a badge of honor. All three of them are in our market too. So it’s just funny. They’re doing great. And I’m super happy to see them out there killing it and doing a great job. The cool thing about it is that they’re all leading good businesses where their pricing is correct.
Ashley Stroud: They’re doing things the right way. So I welcome that type of local competition. It’s like, hey, we’re all going to level each other up. And they’re going to… I’d rather them do that than us have just some random person start up a company that
Ashley Stroud: doesn’t know how to price correctly. They don’t know how to, they undercut. They’re not professional. They give the plumbing industry a bad name. Like I’ll take what we’re doing all day long over having that in our backyard. So yeah, but I do think it’s, yeah, always.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah, if you start having high turnover, like you’ve got to figure out what’s going on and why you’re losing people. But in this situation, I do just think that all, I think all three of them felt really empowered to move forward in their own companies
Ashley Stroud: and they’re doing great, so.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, that’s pretty unique. Yeah, it is.
Ashley Stroud: I mean, I’ve had that happen to me and it sucks. I’m not going to deny when it’s happening, but when you have time to reflect on it and then hopefully replace those folks, it is a pretty cool thing that you’ve given someone the tools
Ashley Stroud: and the ability essentially to go. And if that’s what they want to do, more power to them type of thing.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, but I do think that it made us realize though in that moment that you have to kind of recognize, especially technicians, you have to recognize them for like a life cycle and like what you can reasonably expect. because for a long time, it was taking us two and a half to three years to get plumbers
Tyler Martin: qualified and ready and actually their investments start paying off. And that was way too long. You have them for three years where they’re costing you payroll. And then maybe you get three more years out of them where they’re actually contributing to the company and you lose a lot of… You don’t really get the full ROI on that, which is
Tyler Martin: Something we kind of realize is that you do… It’s important to have really great onboarding and training to get technicians qualified faster, competent faster, so they can start being producers earlier. Because you really should look at it as a life cycle and just kind of expect that
Tyler Martin: somewhere around that… If you start with them green, somewhere around that six to eight year mark, you’re likely going to lose them. If you’re investing in them and you’re pouring into them the way that you should be, it’s the normal life cycle of a plumber.
Tyler Martin: So I think that as long as you go into it with that knowledge and it doesn’t catch you off guard, then you can kind of protect against it.
Ashley Stroud: Yeah. Have you guys considered or is it something you’d consider like along the lines of Phantom Equity or Phantom Stock where they would have some level of…
33:35Phantom equity, keyman bonuses and killing the spiffs
Ashley Stroud: It’s like a perceived ownership that if the business were to ever sell, they basically get like a giant bonus is what happens.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. We have looked into that specifically with some, not completely yet. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I’m kind of hesitant to go into true ownership sharing. I’m a big fan of profit sharing. I’m just not always the biggest fan of complete ownership sharing.
Tyler Martin: So I haven’t looked into it yet, but I do think that it’s like, it’s, it’s not a bad idea, right? Like to get the full best buy-in, um, like that is true buy-in. Right. Um, and I do love the idea of like employee owned companies like that is what we haven’t yet decided, like what our exit strategy looks like. I just, we just have not gotten there yet. We’re still in such growth mode that we just haven’t, don’t have a clear picture for that. But I absolutely love the idea of like an exit with employee owned, you know, exit.
Tyler Martin: So it might be something we could see in the future, but we probably haven’t flushed it all out yet.
Ashley Stroud: The cool thing about this phantom equity too. So there’s like two, there’s true equity where the employee owns it. There’s like this phantom equity where they really don’t own any of the stock. They have no voting rights. They have no ownership. It’s more of like, it’s really a bonus that this, what they get if there’s ever an event.
Ashley Stroud: And so there’s a company that does this, which the name’s escaping me. But basically what they do is they have a scoreboard and the employee can kind of see as the valuation of the company grows, this is what they stand to get in this bonus.
Ashley Stroud: But they call it phantom equity, and that’s why they use the word phantom. It’s kind of interesting. It may or may not be a fit. It’s definitely worth something to talk about. But to your point, like if you don’t really have an exit plan, it could be a little bit or even have you’re obviously in a very growth mode.
Ashley Stroud: So it would be weird to be thinking about exit. But it would be probably weird to have something like that because the natural inclination is if you give that to someone, they’re like, okay, when are we going to sell? You know, when am I going to, you know, when’s it going to grow and when am I going to get something out of it?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. I mean, oddly enough, I don’t know if it’s just like where we are in our area, but selling, it’s just not exactly our culture. Like, I don’t think that would be widely accepted or even like celebrated for us to take that path.
Tyler Martin: Like even if they, even if, uh, people did stand to win from it, like, uh, they would push back on it. There’s just, there’s like a, I think that there’s just this pride, just like pride in craftsmanship and pride in the trades where like they’re most of our team just really
Tyler Martin: cares about protecting that and not letting that be distorted by private equity. So I don’t know how that would go over, but I have read, um, have you heard of like the Keyman insurance is kind of similar. Oh, yeah. Like bonuses based on Keyman insurance.
Tyler Martin: I’ve looked into that and I think that’s a great idea. You pay for an insurance plan that will pay up bonuses and large sum bonuses. And I actually do like that model a lot. So we’ve been considering some things to get a little creative in those situations.
Ashley Stroud: It’s a really fascinating topic because you introduce bonuses and you got to make sure they’re set up in a way that they’re doing the right things for the business. You know, I’ve had people introduce like performance bonus plans and their numbers are exact the same.
Ashley Stroud: Nothing has changed. And now they’re paying $100,000 a year on performance bonuses.
Tyler Martin: Yeah. I can’t, I can tell you that that has, that has been a similar, like we have faced similar things where it’s like, man, what, what exactly are we, uh, we actually, for a long time, we had more spiffs. Like we had a, we, I mean, we really bought into the whole like spiff, spiff, spiff, spiff, spiff.
Tyler Martin: and it kind of, it feels like it creates a little bit of an environment that’s not exactly like a team environment. It kind of creates this sense of, I don’t like to use buzzwords like entitlement, but it does kind of create that. And it kind of erodes a little bit of like the team culture
Tyler Martin: that we’re trying to curate. So we’ve been very careful about like, what do we spiff for? What is just like an expectation of like, Hey, this is like, we are trying to build something together. And if you want to build with us, like, what are you willing just to do? Because you know
Tyler Martin: that this is for the good of like the organization and the growth opportunities it’s going to bring for you. And obviously, you know, the, the pay increases that will come and all these things. So we’ve really tried to scale back a little bit on all the, like, for a while there, we were
Tyler Martin: spiffing everything and it was like, dang, we’re not even getting that much better results from it. And it’s becoming, it’s kind of creates this, like I said, this attitude of like, well, I’m not going to do that if I don’t get spiff for it. It’s like, well, we need everybody
Ashley Stroud: to like, we need everybody to row together in a team mentality. You know? It’s a slippery slope. I mean, exactly what you say. It can turn into, Hey, I’m going to only, it’s the carrot and the sick. I’m only going to do that if there’s a carrot and you want to build like this code
Ashley Stroud: culture and cohesiveness. So there is a fine line. Yeah. It’s, it’s an interesting topic. We could probably talk about this all day. One thing that I, and I were, as usual, I’m kind of starting to go over time here. I want to, uh, last topic I’d love to just actually last two
Ashley Stroud: topics I’d love to touch on is one is in my number of segment. I like to talk about a couple of numbers that are important to you. And when we did the pre-call, we talked about gross profit and then just marketing data in general. So I’d love to just talk about that a little bit.
Ashley Stroud: What do you look at in terms of numbers that stand out and that are really important to you? Yeah. So, um, we do try to, I think that if, if I was giving advice to any like new business owner,
38:57Holding a 57% gross margin by matching costs to revenue
Ashley Stroud: I would say like learning in the ins and outs of your P&L, how to interpret it, what it means, what it looks like, how to actually have like actionable data from it is invaluable. So if you don’t know that, like you can’t pull up your P&L,
Ashley Stroud: you know that the data is clean and that you can read it and absorb it and then have actionable data from it, then pay somebody to like educate you on how to do that. So that’s my first thing is that for many years,
Ashley Stroud: like we literally would just look, we’d get our P&Ls back and we’d look at the bottom. And as long as there was, positive money there, then we didn’t care about anything else, you know? Right. And I think we missed a lot of opportunities there to fine tune things. So that’s my first,
Ashley Stroud: I guess, just like recommendation, but yeah. So we have metrics in place for everything on our, like for at least like the five big things on our P and L. So as far as like gross profit goes, it’s one of the things that we track most. And we have a very, we’ve set a very aggressive gross
Ashley Stroud: profit margin for ourselves. So 57% is our minimum for gross profit that we shoot for. And I would say nine times out of 10, we’re hitting that number. We’ll have an off month where we have a high subcontractor cost or something. But generally speaking, we’ve gotten that really
Ashley Stroud: dialed in. So I got one question because I know there’s people out there going, oh man, I only have 45% and might be stressing out. And this may be too in the weeds. So feel free if I’m getting to in the weeds. When you do your cost of goods sold to get the gross profit,
Ashley Stroud: what’s included in that? Obviously, direct labor would be, materials would be. Are you putting workers’ comp as it relates to the direct labor? Do you know? Would that be included? Right now, we have just materials, direct labor, and we have subcontractor costs. And then we just
Ashley Stroud: moved to add in merchant services on that, like financing specifically. So we do, we did feel like we were missing a little bit of insight by not having finance charges above the line. So we are moving, we are aiming to move that up, which is about, you know, 2.5%. So it’s going to take us
Ashley Stroud: some like to keep hitting those numbers. We’re going to have to do some adjustments to make that happen. We just keep direct labor materials, subs, and then now finance fees above the line. Perfect. That’s going to help people though. Cause I know people who put more, like some people put
Ashley Stroud: commissions even up in cost of goods sold. It just helps from an apple to apple. So that’s cool. So 47, 50% is a great number in that number. Like let’s say you end a month at 52. How are you breaking that down? Or are you, how are you adjusting the business or are you doing anything
Tyler Martin: that might change your behavior? Yeah. I mean, so, uh, we did have, I mean, yeah. So if we have back to back months, we’ll take one month. I’m like, okay, we’ll adjust it to say, okay, We hit low here because maybe we had a project that just got way out of hand that we underbid.
Tyler Martin: I mean, one bad project that you underbid, that you blow out your labor on, right, can make massive things, changes in your growth profit. So sometimes there’s that. A lot of times we find that it’s just a matter of bookkeeping too and keeping really, really
Tyler Martin: good, a good pulse on your materials and your subs. So we are detailed to the nth degree on making sure that labor materials and subs all hit the same month that our revenue does. That was a lesson it took a while for us to learn is just how important that was.
Tyler Martin: We moved to an accrual basis, but even when we moved to accrual, we still were not always doing great. Sometimes we would buy materials for a massive project, say, and we would have 80% of the labor in the month of April, but then we would have maybe 10% of the project left, but we would not finish the revenue until the next month.
Tyler Martin: Well, now you’ve got this massive mismatch of tons of revenue in this month, but all of your costs were in the prior month. And so you can see issues there. So we’ve been really diligent about making sure just to try to match those up to as much as possible.
Tyler Martin: if that means partially invoicing, or if that means closing out a project and just making sure that you finish it up in the first couple days of the month, like we will do whatever we can to make sure that we are sandwiching all of our cogs with completed revenue.
Tyler Martin: So one bad month, I usually don’t, we don’t worry too much about. We’re like, okay, that was a fluke. Or we sold this huge subcontractor job and we just didn’t have enough additional revenue to balance it out. So that happens occasionally. But for the most part,
Tyler Martin: we usually don’t have like… That’s one of those things that once you get dialed in, it doesn’t seem like it takes that much to keep it there, right? Like that’s a matter of getting your pay plan in correctly. It’s a matter of getting great processes around how much material you’re using.
Tyler Martin: Like I feel like once you get that dialed in, to me, it doesn’t fluctuate all that much. We’ve had pretty easy time at keeping that there. So that’s at least my experience with it.
Ashley Stroud: I love how you’re talking about like the timing of your cost of goods sold versus your revenue. Because a lot of times we miss that and we get really distorted financials. And then we’re mad one month and happy the next month or extra happy the next month because you all have all this extra revenue.
Ashley Stroud: So it’s cool you’re thinking that through. You guys are that in-depth, your numbers. That’s powerful. One other thing. How about on the marketing side? Are there a couple things on the marketing side that you’re really focused on?
Tyler Martin: Yeah, yeah. And I think we’re in a really aggressive market and we’re also trying to grow. And so obviously that costs money. I would love to see us get to where we are closer to like 5% to 6% in our marketing budget right now.
Tyler Martin: we consider ourselves really blessed if we are under 11%. So, I mean, there’s still a ton of areas there to improve, but also like we are trying to edge out, like create a name for ourselves in this market and that’s expensive. So I would say that like my happy spot
Tyler Martin: would be somewhere around five to 6%. Right now we’re still in pretty massive, just growth mode and trying to, again, brand. And so we are spending more and obviously that definitely eats into profit. And you just have to kind of accept that there’s a trade-off.
Tyler Martin: So we’re willing to take a little bit of a profit hit for a couple of years while we build this brand so that eventually we can sit at a 5% or less marketing while the organization grows. So I do think you just have to weigh what’s more important to you, right?
Tyler Martin: For us, we’re just trying to get to that higher revenue numbers and we’re willing to invest more on the marketing side. I don’t think there’s necessarily, though, a right way to do that. like obviously you should track it more than anything. I don’t feel like, I don’t feel like trade businesses over market themselves.
Tyler Martin: I feel like they under market themselves. Like that I feel like is probably the biggest thing is that when they look at their P&L and they’re only spending one or 3% on the marketing and then they’re wondering why they’re not growing. Like it’s just not enough.
Tyler Martin: Like 3% on the marketing is not going to move the needle for you. Like you have to be willing to invest in that aspect of your business to get a return. So spend money to make money. But that’s one of those things that I feel like for a long time,
Tyler Martin: for probably three years, we were sitting in a 1% or less marketing budget. We were growing organically, but we were not doing anything intentionally. So I’d say, I mean, for the businesses I’ve looked at,
46:00Running it with her husband and staying in their lanes
Tyler Martin: they’re not usually overspending, they’re usually underspending in the marketing.
Ashley Stroud: I want to just wrap up here with one last topic is the husband and wife dynamic. How do you guys kind of stay in your lanes, if you will, or how do you manage that? Because you’re obviously, you’re going home to each other,
Ashley Stroud: you’re at the office all day. I just always love this conversation in terms of how you manage that.
Tyler Martin: I do too. It’s one of my favorite things about plumbing outfitters is that I get to run it with Warren, right? Like that is literally… If it wasn’t for him being here, this wouldn’t be nearly as fun. So I love getting to work with him every day.
Tyler Martin: I love getting to spend time with him. But we have had to learn how to work around each other, how to complement each other, and how to not… Lessen the friction, lessen the tension, but obviously hold each other accountable and keep pushing each other to being our best versions of ourselves at work.
Tyler Martin: So yeah, I would say that it was harder early on when we didn’t have a management team, when there wasn’t a great leadership team because him and I were both operating a service manager and general manager. And there was just way too much like who’s doing what.
Tyler Martin: Now that we have a great leadership team in place, and they’re the ones doing a lot of the execution, it’s been really easy for us to get clearly defined roles. And my suggestion would be to anybody listening is like, write yourself, like if you have position agreements for everybody else in your company,
Tyler Martin: write one for yourself too. Like you’re not excluded from that. So write yourself a position agreement and a scorecard and hold yourself accountable to what you’re supposed to be doing because this patched year has been kind of a breakthrough year for Warren and I,
Tyler Martin: where we’ve been able to, I’ve been focusing on marketing. He’s been focusing on the forge, which we didn’t get to talk about, But he’s been heading up the forge and quality development of our technicians and quality control, pretty much everything that a master plumber would do.
Tyler Martin: And then the only time where we kind of overlap is in business development and networking and building pipeline relationships. We kind of get to tag team that, but we’re each obviously doing our own, working in our own geniuses on other sides. But we’ve been able to do that because we have a phenomenal general manager and a phenomenal office manager in place that have helped keep us from crossing each other’s lanes on that aspect.
Tyler Martin: And then as far as just not carrying work home with us, I don’t think that that’s completely realistic. I would love to say that we leave it all at work and we never talk about it at home. But our kids would call me a liar if I said that.
Tyler Martin: So we do try to take time away from the business where we do unplug. I think that’s important. Like we’re leaving for a two week vacation. The next, we’re leaving Saturday for a two week vacation. We’re going to be gone from the business.
Tyler Martin: And I fully anticipate us to turn our phones off and our team will take care of things. And I think that that’s important, especially as a husband and wife team, just to your business can’t be stronger than your marriage. It just can’t. So I feel like that’s my suggestion to any married couples doing a business together
Tyler Martin: is just realize that like your business will never be stronger than what your marriage is. So invest in that first. make sure that stays incredibly strong. And, uh, that’s, that’s a foundation that you can build on. But if I had to, you know, if there was a glass ball and I was told that I had to choose between
Tyler Martin: my marriage or my business, I mean, I would let go of plumbing outfitters right this moment. So, um, I think it’s important to keep perspective and check, you know, especially when you got a family involved and, you know, you just can’t ever, can’t ever lose sight of the most important
Ashley Stroud: things in life. Yeah. What a cool, that’s cool way you guys are, uh, uh, complimenting each other, knowing kind of where your boundaries or lanes are, for lack of better words. Cool. Very cool. Okay. Well, I’m going to wrap up here. I’m bummed though. We didn’t talk about
Ashley Stroud: the forge and the forge is your training program. So I feel like there’s a part two in our future.
Tyler Martin: Fair enough. I’d love to learn about that. But you can ask Warren to come on the show for the forge. That’s kind of his baby. So that actually would be cool if he’d be open to it. Maybe you
Ashley Stroud: should give me an intro. Okay. Your website, plumbingoutfitters.com. By the way, I love that name. Check out the website. It’s a cool website. I’ll put it in the show notes. Your LinkedIn kind of has a weird number to it, so I won’t blurt out the whole URL, but I’ll put that in
Ashley Stroud: the show notes too. If people want to connect with you, I know we had mentioned there’s some people that I’ve interviewed you already know. People want to connect with you and maybe just network or just have a relationship. Is LinkedIn the best place to do that?
Tyler Martin: Yeah. I would say for anybody hearing this podcast or anybody that wants to reach out that have heard this, you can reach me by email too. That’s fine. It’s Ashley at plumbingoutfitters.com. So I welcome, yeah, I welcome connections and learning from each other and building on each other.
Tyler Martin: And if there’s any mistakes that I have made that I can save somebody else from making, I’m happy to help, so.
Ashley Stroud: Awesome. Thanks, Ashley. You are an amazing business owner. I love your willing to be so open and candid about your journey and definitely want to talk with you or Warren again here in the future.
Tyler Martin: Yeah, absolutely. I really appreciate the invitation on your show, Tyler, and looking forward to plugging into your podcast and listening more frequently, so.
Ashley Stroud: Awesome. Ashley said something during this conversation that I think is easy to overlook. She talked about missing a revenue goal. And instead of looking at it as a lost year, she looked at everything they learned. They rebuilt parts of their marketing, strengthened their recruiting,
Ashley Stroud: improved their systems, and came out as a stronger business. I think that’s the mindset that a lot of business owners struggle with. We naturally focus on the revenue number, but sometimes the work happening underneath the surface is what makes the next stage of growth possible.
Ashley Stroud: The other thing I appreciated was how honest she was. Growth wasn’t a straight line. They lost key employees, missed goals, and had to adjust. That’s a lot closer to what most home service companies experience than the overnight success stories we often see online.
Ashley Stroud: If you’re trying to build a more profitable home service business, understand your numbers more, or make better financial decisions as you grow, please head on over to ProfitAndGrid.com or book a free intro call at CFOIntroCall.com. As always, I can’t thank you enough for listening, and I hope you have a great one, and I will catch you on the next episode.
Related Episodes
- How to Grow Without Experienced Technicians – Austin Blanchard
- How a Blind Plumber Built a 40-Truck Business – Bob Beall
- Why This Plumbing Company Shares 50% of Profits – Dustin Marx
- What Numbers Drive HVAC Growth? – Lawrence Castillo
Tyler Martin works with owners on the numbers behind these stories: Profit & Grit CFOs. For where your business sits right now, read the $3M to $15M scaling breakdown.
