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

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

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

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

For years I ran the business off month-end reports. I thought I was on top of my numbers. I was just reading a history book. By the time the month closed, the problems were already baked in and there was nothing left to do about them. Now we check our dashboard daily, by the hour, asking where we are and what needs help before it’s too late to respond. That one shift changed everything. Stop reporting on your business. Start steering it.

The gap between a shop that’s dying and one that’s thriving isn’t luck. It’s a handful of habits. Two companies can sell the same services in the same town and end up in completely different places. One is scraping by, one is scaling. The difference is almost never talent or market. It’s the small decisions made over and over: how you answer the phone, how you price, how you market, how you hire, how you sell. Get those right and you don’t just survive, you pull away from everyone else. Follow along and I’ll break them down.

My dad spent decades building this business. Then he handed it to two kids in their twenties who wanted to take it somewhere completely different. I'm not sure I'd have the guts to do what he did. But before he gave us the keys, he gave us the foundation: Work hard.
Do what you say you're going to do.
Take care of people. We run the business differently than he ever did. We chase success the exact same way. The vision changed.
The principles never did.

Average performance is one of the most expensive things in any company, and most owners never put a price on it. The questions that actually move a business are uncomfortable: What are we working on? What do we expect? And what are we quietly tolerating? You have to hunt for the gaps and close them. But don’t live only in the gaps. Celebrate what your team is crushing too, then go find the next thing to get better at.

Most owners can tell you their revenue to the dollar and have no idea what their direct labor percentage is. That’s the number that quietly tells you if you’re bleeding out. Healthy is 20 to 23 percent of revenue, but it shifts by trade, install sits lower, maintenance sits higher, so the number only means something in context. When we hold ours in that range, it’s proof our comp plans are in line, our efficiency is right, and our work is getting done on time. Miss it, and you’re losing money before you ever feel it. Click the link below and my team will set up a call to see where yours stands. ⬇️ 40kl04.share-na2.hsforms.com…

Everyone thinks a storm is a response problem but rather, it’s a planning problem. When a heat wave or a cold snap hits, you see owners scrambling. Phones ring off the hook, techs get stretched thin, and customers wait sometimes days. Most wear it like a badge. “We hustled hard when it hit.” Here’s the truth: by the time the weather changes, you’ve already won or lost the week. The response was decided months earlier: -Call center and dispatch staffed for demand that hasn’t shown up yet -Extra crews lined up and ready to absorb the surge -A field team that knows summer is go-time Carrying capacity before you need it is expensive and uncomfortable and most owners wait for demand to justify the cost. That’s exactly why they get caught flat-footed every single year by something they probably knew was coming. There’s no such thing as reacting well to a weather event. You either built for it or you’re behind. When did you start planning for this summer?

For years I blamed the team when things slipped. Then I looked harder and realized the problem was me. I never gave them a clear picture of what winning looked like. Our meetings were an hour of talking and zero to-dos. Nobody left owning anything. Once we built real accountability, everything changed. People don’t rise to vague expectations. They rise to clear ones.

"We're slow today" is the most expensive sentence in home services. By the time your callboard is empty, you've already lost. Capacity you paid for, sitting idle. Technicians with no work. Customers who had needs you never reached. The fix isn't more marketing. It's being proactive with what you already have. Know your max capacity. Watch what's driving demand. And when it's slow, mine your database and fill the board 7 to 10 days out. Slow days aren't bad luck. They're a planning problem.

I owe thousands of our customers an apology. For years, people all over central Indiana have been living with hard water. We had a solution the entire time. We just never told them. It could have protected their plumbing and their health, and we stayed quiet. That's the hardest part of launching our water treatment division. Not building it, but realizing we should have done it a long time ago. Starting late beats never starting. Now we go back and tell them.

I spent a few days at Pantheon surrounded by people who think differently than I do. That’s the real value of getting out of your own four walls. Not the keynote, not the slides, but the conversations with people solving different problems in different ways. Every one of them leaves you with a new angle on something you’ve been staring at for months. You can’t put a price on the rooms you choose to be in.

AI is coming for a lot of jobs. It's not coming for the person who fixes your faucet. We are a long way off from a robot walking into your house and repairing a furnace. But everyone goes home. And everything in a home eventually breaks. That means the skills you learn in the trades stay valuable for decades, not years. The customer base keeps growing, the demand never dries up, and work is the last thing you'll ever have to worry about. The trades might not be sexy. But they're stable, they're reliable, and people will always need us.

My dad spent decades building this business. Then he handed it to two kids in their twenties who wanted to take it somewhere completely different. I'm not sure I'd have the guts to do what he did. But before he gave us the keys, he gave us the foundation: Work hard.
Do what you say you're going to do.
Take care of people. We run the business differently than he ever did. We chase success the exact same way. The vision changed.
The principles never did.

Every home service owner trains the price book and the process. Almost none of them train the one thing that decides whether their people can execute it when the pressure is on: mindset. On this new episode of Can't Stop the Growth, I sit down with mental performance coach Collin Henderson , the mind behind UCLA's championship "Mind Gym," to turn elite mental conditioning into something your team can run Monday morning. Watch the full episode now ⬇️ youtu.be/-GUo5raJcEQ?is=4F5z…

Most people filter the water at one faucet, but this system filters the entire house. We’re building a water treatment division at Peterman Brothers, and this is the piece I’m most excited about. A whole home RO system. Not just the water you pour into a bottle at the kitchen sink, but every drop you touch, shower, laundry, ice, all of it. This is the Cadillac of water treatment, and I genuinely think it changes how people think about the water in their home. Follow along as we roll it out.

For years I thought a slow month meant we needed more leads. Then I actually looked. Two techs running the same call volume were producing completely different numbers. The leads were never the problem.
What happened on the call was. We stopped buying our way out and started coaching our way through. Mindset. Questions. Options presented. That's where the results actually live.

Most owners get stuck because they chase the result instead of the thing that creates it. The goal is always the easy part to say out loud. The discipline underneath it is where almost everyone quits. You can want the outcome all day long, but you only ever get it by building the boring machine that produces it. That’s the whole difference between the companies that break through and the ones that repeat the same year over and over.