Phil Risher ranks what matters most for home-service businesses scaling from $1M to $10M: hire a dedicated salesperson first, then an Operations Manager and marketer. AI automations become critical at $5M, but don't let them replace your focus. Skip expensive CRM tools; Jobber works fine.
The best investments after $1 million for home service businesses. Salesperson after $1 million is S. Between that $1 to $3 million mark is when you have to build a sales process. You got to remove yourself as a number one salesperson, even though you might be the best, and you have to build a functional sales process to get you to $3 million. Operations manager, I'm going to put this as an A tier. You have to figure out what am I better at? If you're better at operations, then do that and hire a salesperson. If you're better at sales, hire the operations persons and focus on building the sales team. AI automations, I'm going to put this in the B tier. And the reason is, is because if you go from $1 million to $5 million, you need to layer in automations because everything's going to start falling through the cracks. I also think that you can get trapped as the CTO inside of your own business, chief technology officer, if you try to layer in automations and you be the head person. Okay. Marketing after $1 million is going to be an A tier. And the reason is because as you buy back your time, you have admin, CSR, you have delivery technicians, then you have marketing as the number 3 slot that it can't all rely on you. So I'm gonna put that in A. CRM, I'm gonna put that in the C tier. And the reason is because you can have a CRM that gets you to $5 million from zero, like a Jobber or something like that. So I don't think that a CRM is something that you have to invest in when you pass $1 million. SEO, I'm gonna go with A tier. And specifically when we talk about right now, like 2027 prep, there's a shift happening in SEO from what you used to do, which is just Keywords, jamming them together, trying to rank on specific things to what is now shifting to content creation and answering real customer questions.
