Chad M Peterman

The best way to grow isn’t to put more dots on a map, it’s to own the one you’re already standing on. Everyone thinks expansion means a second location or going regional. That’s actually the hardest, slowest way to grow, because distance kills culture and spreads you thin. The real moves are density plays. More capacity in your core market, acquiring the small shop down the street for its customer base, and adding the trades hiding inside the ones you already do, like water treatment inside plumbing. Grow deep before you grow wide.

If you find yourself handing out refunds and discounts all the time, I’ve got news for you. It’s not the customers. It’s your process. By the time a complaint reaches my desk, we’ve usually dropped the ball three or four times already. At that point I don’t have a leg to stand on, so we make it right, period. I had one recently that turned out to be a manufacturer issue, but the customer just saw a leak we couldn’t fix. We jumped on it, replaced the coil, handled it. His last email said the reason he’s staying with us is that we stepped in. That’s the whole lesson. How you handle the screwup matters more than the screwup.

2024 was the year I had to lay people off, and the hard truth is I’m the one who put us there. Revenue dropped from roughly 9 million a month to 6. The margins were fine. The problem was all the overhead I’d let pile up when times were good. Open credit cards, no real process, a lot of things I’d been irresponsible about as the owner. When my CFO sat me down, I finally had to stop feeling sorry for myself and own it. Everything falls on the leader. That’s the weight of the chair, and in 2024 I felt all of it.

My best ideas don’t come when I'm at my desk. Often times, they come on a drive in silence. Most weekends, I take a solo drive. No calls. No podcasts. No Pink Pony Club blasting (unless my daughter is in the car, and then it's fair game). And almost every time, three or four real ideas show up. I capture them with voice memos to myself. A lot of owners feel guilty about unstructured time. I know this because I was one of them. Like it’s a reward you’re supposed to earn after the work is done. I now see it the opposite way. The quiet hour is hugely valuable. It’s my own mini R&D department. It lets me reinvent myself at every stage of this business. Ultimately, your capacity to think isn’t the problem. Finding the space to do it is. So I'll ask: When was the last time you gave yourself an hour of nothing?

I know owners doing eight figures who take home almost nothing, and owners doing a fraction of that who are quietly building real wealth. Revenue is the number everyone wants to brag about at the conference. It’s also the one that tells you the least about how a business is actually doing. A big top line with no margin underneath it is just a bigger machine for breaking even. The real scoreboard is what’s left after everyone else gets paid. Chase that number, not the one that sounds impressive.

Everything you want from your team is really a demand on you first. You want great technicians, so you have to build the training instead of just hiring and hoping. You want people to stay, so you have to offer a career, not a job. You want accountability, loyalty, a team that actually cares. Every one of those starts with what you do before you ever ask it of them. The team is almost always a mirror of the leader. If you don’t like the reflection, that’s where the work begins.

I get asked all the time why I’d open my doors and show other owners exactly how we run things. Here’s the truth: I’m not worried about someone copying our playbook, because the trades aren’t a zero-sum game. When one of us raises the bar, all of us get better, and the whole industry wins. And honestly, I walk away from these conversations with just as much as I give. Some of my best ideas came from an owner I was supposedly there to teach. The fastest way to grow is to stay in rooms with people chasing the same thing you are.

On a $100 job, $15 should be yours, however, most owners keep less. Everyone says “we’re profitable.” Very few can tell you what a single job is supposed to break down into. Here’s our standard: $50: Cost of goods. Everything it takes to deliver the job. $35: Overhead. Call center, trucks, insurance, everything that keeps the doors open. $15: Net profit. 50 / 35 / 15. The power of this model is that it’s a diagnostic. When the bottom number comes up short, it tells you exactly where to look. COGS at 60? The problem is in the field. Overhead at 45? The problem is in the building. Eliminate the guesswork. Run your last job against it. Does yours look anything like this?

Everybody obsesses over recruiting and pay, but almost nobody invests in the two things that actually keep their best people. Recruiting gets you the applicant. But training is what turns that applicant into a technician your customers trust, and culture is what turns that technician into a career. Skip those two and you’ll keep hiring fast, regretting it fast, and losing your best people without ever understanding why. The companies that win the talent war aren’t paying the most. They’re the ones building people after the hire, not just chasing them before it.

Finding the right people is more important than almost anything else you’ll do as a leader. I wish I realized that sooner. I had smart people early. But the moment you assemble the right team, the real experts who work well together, everything gets easier and you scale faster. The hard part is that great people cost money, and when you’re small, the budget isn’t there. My mistake was treating that as a reason to wait. The right hire is an investment, and the sooner you make it, the sooner you grow.

Your dispatch team isn’t just telling people where to go. If that’s all they’re doing, you’re leaving money on the table every single day. The best dispatchers understand the why behind every decision. Why Billy goes to that call instead of Johnny. Why the goal of the day is to maximize the calls we run, because that’s what makes us a profitable company. When dispatch gets the mission, your managers get freed up to do their real job, developing technicians, instead of babysitting the board. Everybody rowing in the same direction is the whole game.

My dad has always made sure my brother and I know he’s proud of us. The hard part is that I’m wired to never feel like it’s enough. That drive built this company, but it has a dark side. It’s easy to get in your own head, look at what everyone else is doing, and feel like you’re falling short no matter how far you’ve come. I’ve had to train myself that always wanting more can quietly turn into never being satisfied. The real goal isn’t to out-do anyone. It’s to do what’s right, take care of the customer, and build something that lasts well beyond me.

The highest-ROI marketing we do isn’t the flashy stuff. It’s the channels that squeeze more out of customers we already paid to get. A referral costs you almost nothing because the lead is already warm and usually has more than one problem to solve. The channels that make you recognizable, like wrapped trucks, compound for years. Meanwhile the stuff that’s hard to track quietly eats budget you’ll never account for. Before you chase the next channel, get ruthless about what each one actually returns.

We’ve been in Indianapolis for over 40 years and we still own less than 10% of our own market. So when an owner tells me they’re saturated, I don’t buy it. What they’ve actually hit is the ceiling of their current brand, marketing, and capacity, not the limit of the market itself. There are hundreds of thousands of homes in your territory that have never called you or even seen your truck. A second location is the hardest way to grow. Run the math on your own backyard first.

Most owners think growth is more leads, more techs, or the next piece of software. It usually isn’t. My new episode of Can’t Stop the Growth with Jenny Benbrook gets into what’s actually broke in your business, why the average contractor wastes 25% of their tech budget, and how to fix the operation before you spend another dollar. If your tech stack feels like a pile of tools nobody fully uses, this one’s for you. Watch the full episode here 👇 youtu.be/GRz8YtvPnPA?is=JOYD…

“Work smarter, not harder” is the most comfortable lie in business. You have to do both. I learned it in sports. I played alongside guys who were flat out more talented than me, and the only way I was going to see the field was to outwork them. That never changed. Systems, processes, and good people absolutely make you smarter, but almost nobody reaches the top by kicking back and claiming they figured it all out. Smarter is the strategy. Harder is still the price.

Everybody obsesses over getting the customer and nailing the job. Almost nobody does the part where the real money actually lives. The first call makes the impression. The service earns the relationship. But the follow-up is what turns one job into ten years of that customer, and it’s the stage almost every company skips. You can win someone once and never hear from them again. Do great work nobody remembers. Or let a loyal customer walk straight to a competitor because you went quiet. Lifetime value isn’t won at the door. It’s won after.

Running a warehouse is a different business than running a contracting company, and I learned that the expensive way. We stood up our own distribution center, and it’s the part of the operation I understand the least to this day. We’re always learning on the fly, patching gaps we didn’t see coming. So here’s my advice if you’re not forced into it yet: lean on your supplier partners. Every dollar of inventory sitting on a shelf is a dollar you can’t use, and that cash drain adds up faster than you think.

I’m not always working, but I’m always thinking about it. There’s a difference, and it took me a while to see it. The business lives in my head rent free, even when I’m supposed to be present with my two little kids. I love what we do and I don’t take lightly how many people are counting on me. But that responsibility can quietly follow you into moments it was never meant to touch. I’m learning that enjoying the ride is part of the job too, not a distraction from it.

If I could hand my younger self one thing, it wouldn’t be more leads or more trucks. It would be our numbers. We were flying on gut for too long, and I can see now how much faster we’d have moved if the data had been in front of us. AI makes it almost effortless to get at today. Every department here leans into it now, not just to find what’s broken, but to find what’s working and actually celebrate it. Know your numbers sooner and you grow sooner.