Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
25 Aug 2025 · 3 min
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In this episode of Double Your Profit, the host emphasizes the "Simple is Scalable" principle as a catalyst for business growth. He describes how increasing complexity creates friction points—such as broken sales processes or over‑detailed procedures—that hinder performance. By examining his own experience, he shows that teams often inflate tasks to 25 steps when three or four would suffice, leading to missed details and slower execution. To counter this, he proposes two main strategies: (1) narrowing the service offering to a single, easily trainable trade (his example is water‑heater installation), which simplifies lead generation, staffing, and geographic expansion; and (2) consolidating administrative systems into one QuickBooks, one payroll, a few bank accounts, and a single credit system. Over three years of stripping away excess, his business saw accelerated growth, freeing mental bandwidth to focus on high‑impact activities rather than bureaucratic “bullshit.” The episode closes with a call to like, subscribe, and follow for more profit‑doubling content.
Chapters
Welcome back to Double Your Profit. Today is probably— I know I've said this, I know I've said this probably a few times— one of the most important, right? They're all, they're all super important. This next topic, which is cut complexity, I'm going to give a different version of the title, and it is simple is scalable. Simple is scalable can cover a lot of different topics, a lot of different facets of the business. And when I first started trying to implement simplicity into the Business, I don't think I did a great job of it, and mostly because I didn't think things were complicated. What I thought was just good was actually complicated. As we were growing the business, we kept running into friction points. Friction points are this moment where things are breaking or things are hard. We have someone in our pro group right now, and their sales process isn't what they want it to be. One of their technicians was on like. Paternity leave or vacation, or it was something kind of for like a few weeks. This member went out and started selling and sales went up. You'd say, what does sales going up have to do with simplicity? But kind of a lot, because if your sales process was simple, then everyone would be doing a great job of it. The bigger the business has gotten, things naturally get complicated. What I've tended to find is whenever I put a team member in charge of building a process, they will come back to me with 25 steps to do whatever. The reality is it's almost always like 3 to 4. Like, we always overcomplicate everything. The more complicated and detailed you make things, the more likely you are to miss things because it takes too long. So as you're thinking about how to drive simplicity into the business, here's a couple different ways. One, what is the least amount of services that we can offer inside our business to be profitable? I've always said my dream business was just to install water heaters. It's one thing I can train anybody in the world to do it. Leads are going to be much easier and standing up new locations or expansion geographically would be a little bit more straightforward. We talk a lot about how you should not add multiple trades too early. This lesson is why. You can overcomplicate the business so fast and you don't have the resources to see it through. In 2023, we sort of looked at what we built and there's a company down the road from us at the same size with less complexity. And I looked at that and I was like, man, they would beat us like they would win. So we've spent the next 3 years since then unpacking those decisions that I made. We're down to one QuickBooks, one payroll, a couple bank accounts, one credit system, and the business has exploded on the back back of that. So we've spent years building the whole business administratively as an organization around simplicity. So we're constantly looking for ways to simplify what we're doing so our headspace can go towards the real meaningful movers of our business and not just all the bullshit that we create. So simple is scalable. Make sure you like and sub and follow along as we drop more content on doubling your profit.
