Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
5 Jun 2026 · 9 min
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In this solo podcast episode, John Wilson, co‑owner of a family‑run plumbing company, recounts the ten books that shaped the growth of his business from a $1 million, 6‑7‑person operation to a $44 million enterprise with about 200 employees. He begins by noting his modest starting point and the scale achieved through disciplined leadership, operational systems, cash‑flow management, and strategic acquisitions. For each book, Wilson explains the core insight and how it was applied: 1. Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell) taught him that authentic leadership—being yourself—trumps a single, charismatic CEO archetype. 2. The E‑Myth Revisited highlighted the distinction between working in the business (the “baker”) and working on the business, prompting him to step back from day‑to‑day tasks. 3. Traction introduced the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), providing scorecards, weekly L10 meetings, and accountability charts that became the operational backbone. 4. The Goal reinforced the singular purpose of building a profitable business and the need for clear, concise metrics. 5. Profit First offered a cash‑allocation system that ensured profit was prioritized, funding acquisitions and cash purchases. 6. Extreme Ownership (Jocko Willink) emphasized taking full responsibility at every level, a culture he seeks in hires. 7. Who Not How shifted his problem‑solving mindset from “how can I fix this?” to “who can fix this?”, encouraging delegation and talent leverage. 8. HBR’s Guide to Buying a Small Business gave a step‑by‑step framework for sourcing, valuing, negotiating, and closing acquisitions, shortening his learning curve. 9. Buy Then Build (Walker Deibel) validated the acquisition‑growth model, which he used to purchase ~15 businesses, driving much of the revenue jump. 10. The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) provided gritty, realistic guidance for navigating crises and maintaining resilience. Wilson wraps up by urging listeners to visit ownedandoperated.com, subscribe, and share book recommendations, emphasizing that these resources helped him survive hard times and solve specific challenges during the decade of scaling.
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I'm John Wilson, and over the last 10 years of my life, I have scaled our family's business from $1 million to $44 million. Today, what we're going to be talking about is some of the books that helped to change my life and helped teach me how to build the business as it is today. I was not a start from nothing, pull yourself up from bootstraps. I did start with a foundation. Business was around 6 or 7 employees. It was around $1 million of revenue. But today, we're 200 employees and mid-$40 million, and that wouldn't have been possible without these books that we talk about today and the lessons that I took away from each one of them. Before we dive in, if you could make sure to like and sub, it really helps other people find our content. All right, let's kick it off with number 1. This is one of my personal favorites. It's Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. What I like about Outliers is it's a story of, I think, 8 different CEOs, and it walks through how each one of them is an outlier. I know that when I was growing up inside the business and I had this perception of what a CEO was supposed to be, this rah-rah CEO who could drive culture and sales and pop champagne in the office every day, like maybe Wolf of Wall Street type of CEO. I think that's what we're trained to think, uh, that's what we should be doing. But outliers really helped to bring perspective to me that we can only lead as our authentic self. Like, we can only bring whoever we actually are to the table every day, and the best version of an authentic leader is just whoever you are. Uh, so I loved Outliers because it showed that there wasn't just one path and one way to lead. The best way to lead is whatever, whatever you bring to the table. One of the next ones, and this was really early inside our business, and it's E-Myth Revisited. The book is basically a story of a baker, and they have what the author calls an entrepreneurial seizure. So they decide, hey, I love baking. I'm going to go open a bakery. Suddenly the office is a mess and there's bills and invoices and things due and money. Baking is only one very small part of running a bakery. Just like in my business, plumbing is only one very small part of running a plumbing company. The trade is important, but you also have to get paid. You have to pay your vendors, you have to have rent, you have to run marketing, you have to have HR to hire people. What it helps you to get into the mindset of is are you working inside your business as the baker Or are you running the bakery? And this was a really formative book for me in my early 20s as I stepped into entrepreneurship. The third one that made a really big impact on our business is Traction. Traction is the basis for a system called EOS, which is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. What it is, is it's a way to communicate scorecard, set meetings, and communicate vision. They have a weekly meeting that they call their L10. They have accountability charts so you can organize your company by who's doing what. They give you some clear paths on how to measure the progress of your company on a weekly cadence. I call Traction the business tastes like chicken. What does a bakery and a plumbing company have in common? Both of them need a scorecard. Both of them need accountability charts. Every business needs these fundamentals. It tastes like chicken, and Traction helps build that foundation for you. Number 4 is The Goal. It was a book and it was a narrative on a manufacturing business, and he's trying to discover Like, what do we do here? What is the goal? Like, what are we here to do? And every department he goes to, he gets kind of slightly different answer on what the goal is, which was a red flag for the author. But the second point was the goal is to build a profitable business. Like, that is the goal. It's so easy for everything else to get in the way of the goal. How do you measure the least amount of things? How do you communicate in the most succinct way possible? And how do you keep your eyes on the prize, the goal, which is building a big profitable business? My next one I have been using for literally 15 years. It is called Profit First. It's easy to imagine we're here to fix pipes, we're here to bake muffins, we're here to draft legal whatever. We are in business to make a profit. That's the goal. Profit First is a mentality and an operating system that keeps that in the forefront so that way you can maximize the cash that flows from your business. So the way it works is every week or every month you divide your checking account into a few different checking accounts, and as money flows into your business, it gets separated by percentage or however you're allocated. It works. It's effective. It's how I paid for acquisitions. It's how we buy vehicles in cash. It is an effective tool, and this book can help to get you there. In like 60 minutes. The next one's frequently cited, and this one is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. The mentality that we all have to have is that the buck stops here. Buck stops with me. Whatever you are in your position, if you're the owner, if you're a team leader, a manager, or an individual contributor, extreme ownership is I'm going to take ownership over the scope of control that I have been given. It is helpful as building a business to look for people that have extreme ownership. They take extreme accountability for their team. And you want people inside your business that have that ownership mentality. It's one of the hardest things to find as you are recruiting more and more people into your business and you want to be able to replicate that mindset through the rest of your business. I bring the next book up frequently, and that is Who Not How. Every day your business is going to have a challenge that you have to fix. Our brains are wired to immediately go, how do I solve the problem? And you just get in this framework of firefighting and who, not how sort of helps break that narrative. Because the problem is, if you fix a problem once, it's probably going to happen again because you didn't actually solve the core issue, most likely. So who, not how flips it. And instead of, hey, how do I solve this problem in my business? The question becomes, who can solve this problem? We talk a lot about acquisitions on our podcast. I get asked a lot of questions, how do I learn more about this? And honestly, there's a couple books for that. So we're gonna talk about them next. The first one is HBR's Guide to Buying a Small Business. It gives you, here's how to source them, here's how to negotiate, here's how to value, here's what the legal stuff means. It is a deep dive and a masterclass into buying a small business. And I would advise anybody that is thinking about buying a small business to start there because it will reduce your learning curve by at least a year. The next one, and this book was very formative to me, and I've— we actually had the author speak at a conference that we run and he was really great, which is Walker Deibel's book Buy Then Build. So I found Walker's book and it really opened my eyes that, hey, this is real. Like, this is a tactic that has worked for 100 years. Where other companies buy each other, they merge, they get bigger. And this is a totally normal process to do. It's just not normal for small businesses. Buy then build is roughly what we've done here at Wilson. We bought 15 businesses. We went from $1 to $44 million, and a fair amount of that growth was buying and then building the businesses that we bought. The final one is one of my favorites. It is the hard thing about hard things. As you grow your business, you are going to have Some of the most brutal days of your life. It is high highs and low lows, my friend. Hard Thing About Hard Things continually brings me back to attack mode and wartime. It is a great read. It's a great read if you're in a hard time. I have read it far too many times as I've gone through all the ups and downs over the last 10 years of building this business. This isn't the full list of every book that has allowed for our success, but these are some of my favorites that have really helped either in hard times or solve specific problems as we're building our business. I hope that they help yours too. If you want more of my thoughts on building a business, make sure you check out ownedandoperated.com. Check out our podcast. We have a great newsletter where we send out to 50,000 contractors a week. And check out our LinkedIn and X. If you liked what you heard today, make sure you like and sub. And I would love it if you threw a book recommendation down in the comments.
