Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
26 Jun 2026 · 8 min
0:00
In this solo podcast episode, John Wilson—owner of a multi‑state plumbing, HVAC, and electrical company—argues that excellent technical work is merely the cost of entry for home‑service businesses and cannot, by itself, generate growth. He frames a home‑service company as a three‑part enterprise: marketing creates demand, sales converts that demand, and operations fulfills it. Wilson stresses that the owner’s primary responsibility is to make the phone ring, because without leads no cash flow, payroll, or vendor payments are possible. He explains that marketing is more than spending money; it’s about generating measurable leads and tracking how many calls result in booked appointments and sales. Sales, he says, is not a dirty word but a necessary educational interaction that builds trust and offers options without being pushy. Wilson outlines four common traps: (1) believing good work alone will grow the business, (2) treating marketing as solely an agency’s job, (3) assuming only salespeople should sell, and (4) believing one’s market is uniquely different. He illustrates these points with anecdotes, including a failed $10 million acquisition where the owners could not master marketing and sales. The episode concludes with a call to action for owners who want to scale beyond a one‑person operation to adopt the three‑leg model, measure key metrics (leads, calls, sales, service quality), and embrace the owner‑as‑business‑operator mindset. Links to the Owned and Operated podcast, newsletter, and socials are provided.
Chapters
I think that home service is a marketing and sales business and that most owners have it wrong. Before everybody gets mad, you still have to do good work, you still have to do a good product, and you have to be experts. You have to be an expert plumber, you have to be an expert HVAC technician or electrician or whatever it is. Bad service will kill you, but great service itself is not going to grow the business. Marketing and sales is first. I have to get the lead, I have to sell that lead. It doesn't matter if you're Jesus with a pipe wrench, you still have to get and sell the lead. My name is John Wilson, and I run a plumbing, HVAC, and electric company in Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee. And for fun, I talk to my friends on the internet on our podcast Owned and Operated about how to grow their home service company. Let's dive in. To state the obvious, bad service creates refunds, angry customers, bad reviews, maybe like even employees that don't want to work with you and your business anymore. But good service doesn't solve every single problem in the world. You can have the greatest service in the world And still go bankrupt. Most small plumbing, HVAC, electric businesses do incredible work. That's almost never the missing piece of the equation. What I always hear—it's never like our work is bad. It's always I don't know how to get the phone to ring. I don't have enough money in the bank account. I'm not sure how to grow. Like those are the problems. And guys, that's marketing and sales. That's not we install the best water heaters. It's getting the phone to ring. It's closing those jobs. It's allowing the business to grow and knowing how to reinvest. So. Are we plumbers or are we running plumbing companies? Good work is the cost of entry. If you're doing good work, that allows you to market. If you're doing good work, that allows you to sell. If you're doing good work, that allows you to grow. If you're doing bad work, does the exact opposite. The formula is simple: marketing creates demand, sales is going to convert that demand, and operations fulfills the demand. You do need all three. Most plumber turned business owners only have operations. You got to learn the other 2. A lot of owners think that this business is just the technical work, but once you start running a business for a little while, you realize like, hey, that's actually a pretty small piece of the puzzle. I have to pay vendors, I have to collect from my customers, I have to figure out payroll. You have to really figure out all of this baseline stuff. And on top of that, I'm telling you, you have to figure out marketing too, because your guys need work tomorrow. A better way of thinking of it is we are a marketing and sales organization. We happen to deliver plumbing, HVAC. But we could do roofing, fencing, concrete, whatever it is that we want to sell to the same customer segment that we know how to market and drive leads to. Nothing happens until the phone rings. And the harshest reality is that as the business owner, this is your job. If the phone's not ringing, you can't pay your employees. If the phone's not ringing, you can't pay your vendors, can't pay your vehicles off, you can't pay your rent. So that makes that The most important problem in your business. Marketing is the engine that creates the opportunity for your company to exist. Every technician needs calls. Every CSR needs phones to ring so they can answer and book that call. None of this exists without the phone ringing, and the phone ringing shouldn't be reaction. We have to be proactive. Like, we don't wanna be victims. We wanna be aggressive. We wanna grow our business and take control of our life. Marketing isn't just spending money. Marketing is driving a lead and measuring How many times did it make that phone ring? How many times did we go out to that house? And how many times did we make a sale? And for how much? That's the whole process of marketing. Even big businesses get stuck in marketing is just spending money, whereas if they sort of retooled their marketing department, started really measuring, really analyzing what they were doing, and bothering to learn, then the business would explode. Once that lead comes in, someone has to sell. I think this this one's kind of funny to me because people are so convinced that sales is like a dirty word, like, oh, it's gross, it's whatever. You're already selling something. Like, you're already doing it. It's just you're probably doing it badly. All a sale is is getting someone to pay you money to do something. Avoiding sales doesn't make you honest. It honestly makes you kind of bad at your job and often deceptive to the customer. We've walked into situations where someone didn't want to sell something or appear salesy, so they just kept offering repair after repair after repair, and suddenly People are spending thousands of dollars a year to repair something that they could have replaced for a much less annual payment. Not selling is just as dishonest as being overly pushy. Good sales is education, options. It's creating trust with the homeowner. It's urgency when the urgency is real. But if the urgency is not real, you don't have to be pushy. You just want them to communicate clearly what the options are that the customer has. So here's the four traps that we see a lot: one. Good work is not enough. Like, my dad did great work for 30 years and the business didn't grow much. Then we started figuring out sales. It's not enough. You have to figure out how to run a business. 2, marketing is not just the agency's job. An agency or internal marketing hire or whatever you're doing for your marketing is the most important thing in your business. Nothing else happens until that phone rings. So you have to get it to ring, which means it is your priority as an owner to understand and drive the bus. 3rd, sales is not just for salespeople. Everyone sells. If you are going out into a home right now and someone's paying you money, you're doing a sale. Like, that's completing a sale. It's just, do you want to be good at it or terrible at it? And I think you just have to decide that internally. If you want to grow, you should be good at it. You don't need to close harder. You don't need to be pushy. Good sales is education. Here's what is happening in your system. Here's what you could do with your system. Trap number 5, and I'm using air quotes, my market is different. Everyone's convinced that their market's totally unique. It's a total unicorn of all the other markets. And the one thing that works here Doesn't work in that other place. That's just not how it works. I have seen this story play out time and time again from people that we've talked to in the podcast, from our workshops to my own lived life, and then to businesses that we've bought. They were businesses that didn't know how to market. They didn't want to learn how to put the energy into performing better sales process, and the business floundered because of it. One of the hardest realities for me was 5 years ago, we bought a business here locally and the owner had this dream of getting to $10 million of revenue. And that was his he made it number. And they just couldn't figure out how to do it. They just couldn't figure out how to add more and go to the next step. And he just felt lost in the whole thing. He said, hey, before I sell this business, I need to give this another shot to see if I can do this. So he gave it another year and the business went backwards because he still didn't figure out how to market and how to sell. I've talked to so many owners like that most weeks, whether it's through the show or in person or whatever, and it's the same thing over and over and over again. And it's just down to this simple idea: the business is a 3-step business— marketing, sales, fulfillment. And that is the dumbed-down version of home service. And if all you bring to the table is that 3rd leg of the stool The stool will never sit up on its own. You have to be able to bring all three legs. The way to think about this is: Can we make the phone ring constantly? That's number one. Do we know how to get our phone to ring? Yes, no. Can we answer and book the call? Can we convert that lead into a sale? Did we do good work? Did we do what we said we were going to do? And five, can we measure any of that? Do we know how many leads? Do we know how many booked calls? Do we know how many sales? And Is there a way to measure our good work? But if you want to grow, service cannot be the only thing that you're good at. You have to learn the other parts of the business. If you want to stay small and be just a one-man craftsman, that's awesome. You're going to do amazing. If you want to run 10, 50, or 100 trucks, or if you want to be like that friend of mine that wanted to hit a $10 million business, you have to get comfortable with marketing and sales because that is how you get there. You don't— no one trips and falls and gets to 100 trucks. Nothing happens just until your phone rings. Don't pay vendors, you don't pay payroll, you don't sell to customers, you don't grow your business. Nothing happens until that phone rings. If you want to hear more of my thoughts on home service, check out our podcast Owned and Operated. It's a top 200 business podcast. We also have a weekly newsletter. We're very active on socials. Links to all of those and more in the description.
