In this episode of Owned and Operated, John Wilson sits down with Sam Preston, CEO of Service Scalers, to break down one of the most overlooked (and misunderstood) marketing channels in home services: Nextdoor.
They unpack why Nextdoor feels annoying—but works incredibly well when used the right way. From neighborhood recommendation posts to organic storytelling, this platform behaves less like Google Ads and more like a digital referral engine.
John and Sam discuss why salesy ads and coupons usually flop, while real-world job photos, personal narratives, and community-driven content quietly generate high-intent leads. They also explore how small operators are winning big by treating Nextdoor like a mix of Google Business Profile + Facebook Groups, and why larger companies struggle to replicate that authenticity.
The conversation covers the three ways to win on Nextdoor (ads, organic posting, and commenting), common mistakes contractors make, and how operators can turn technicians into content creators to scale neighborhood trust—without blowing up their marketing budget.
If you’re looking for more phone calls, higher close rates, and marketing that actually feels like referrals—this episode breaks down how to think about Nextdoor the right way.
What You’ll Learn
- Why Nextdoor behaves more like referrals than traditional lead gen
- The three ways to market on Nextdoor (and which ones actually work)
- Why organic, narrative posts outperform coupons and ads
- How small, local operators beat larger brands on trust
- The role of social proof in neighborhood-driven platforms
- How to turn field techs into authentic content creators
- The biggest mistakes that get contractors ignored—or kicked off
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💼 Shoutout to ReferPro
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More Ways To Connect with O&O
John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome back to Owned and Operated. I'm your host, John Wilson. Here's my super handsome host, Jack Carr. What's going on? No mustache. New Year. New me. New Year. New you it. Yeah. It's December 19th, 2025. We're, yeah, near, near in the end. Snow started falling. I've skied four times so far this year.It's felt great. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, you did move to Nashville like, this is not a me problem. That is a, that is a big fault of mine. Yeah, I think, I think we're doing a roundup of 2025. What we like, what we think, what we hate. What would we do different? Oh my goodness. So where do we start? Well, if you had to brief someone on my 2025 before they entered 2025, what would you tell them before 2025?We were in turnaround mode. We had a plumbing department that wasn't working. Oh, I remember that. Yeah. We had a plumbing department that wasn't working. It was losing money month over month. Uh, every month for consecutive months. After we bought a large business, uh, plumbing division, we had to shut down a new construction vertical of that plumbing department, which was $1.1 million in top line revenue.Lots of change. 2026 was a good year. We had good growth, we hit our goal, or we're on track to hit our goal. We still have a few days left, but overall, I think the theme for me on 2026 or 2025 was. Recruiting. Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. While the industry had issues with marketing and leads, we had the opposite.We had more leads than we knew what to do with. We had to shut down all of our marketing because we could not fulfill capacity. So again, we hired a recruiter. And then we hired a new recruiter and now we're on our third recruiter to make sure that it's gonna work just as we need it to work. And going into the end of the year, it is still recruiting.So good news is we've gotten our lead cycle down. It's just recruiting. Yeah. My 2025, uh, if I had to brief somebody on what would happen in 2025 and what would I say, variable overhead, probably. Uh, I think most, uh, especially in hvac, like in plumbing, plumbing, everyone I know in plumbing, like still sort of moved and grooved and all that stuff.Um, but anybody in hvac, like tough year, um, like I remember the headlines of the summer that didn't happen for California. It was like 60 degrees in July. Like, you know, shoulder season was tough. The switching refrigerants was tough. Going from four 10 to R 32 or 4 54. Uh, they didn't have refrigerant for like three months there.I, I think in general, like if you were an hvac. It would've been have variable overhead and try to be nimble because it, it just was hard. Like this was a hard year for hvac. Yeah, I think that's fair. That's where most of our growth, I mean, we had decent growth in, uh, HVAC. I think it was like 30%. It was modest, but our big growth came from plumbing, which this month actually might surpass our hvac.On total revenue, which is wild. That's beautiful. Yeah. Isn't that beautiful? Yeah. So I, I don't disagree with anything you said there. I think that, uh, the industry definitely had some troubles this year. It was, like I said, we heard from a lot of different contractors across the country. Leads has been rough.And then we were lucky enough to not have to really have that, that refrigerant change issue. Mm-hmm. I know a lot of people did, but we didn't. I mean, there was leads, there was refrigerant problems, there was uh, how do you install equipment without refrigerant? There was tariff price increases, and then there was moderate weather pretty much everywhere.And then like once it started to get good, the government shut down for 45 days. Huh. And then all the things that came with that. So e even if people, even if demand was there, which demand has been there for a while for us, but we're seeing more customer, uh, financing declines than ever. So that true. I dunno.It, it, it is interesting. I think, uh, my biggest headline of the year, and I'm curious what yours is, but my base headline of the year is, uh. If, if people aren't watching. Home Pros, home Pros. Uh, our friend Alec over there just runs a really good like, industry newsletter. Newsletter and I, I like it a lot.And it's like, it's like industry news. It's timely. It's interesting. And uh, there was one like two days ago we were working on budget budgeting and we were like trying to figure out like HVAC for next year. 'cause HVAC for this year we like, it was hard to figure out. And like I go to Home Pros News, I think, and the headline was, and this is my headline for the year.October, HVAC shipments, crater 49% year over year. Yeah. And it was, it was just like, yeah, that's, that's, that's my headline for the year. Yeah. I mean, and I get it. Like I get it. If you look at the market from the whole, I mean, yeah, three, four years ago we were selling 1517 sea equipment at the price now of base model equipment.So. It completely understand. I think my headline, uh, I think I've already said it, is don't skip out on recruiting. Otherwise, you'll feel a lot of pain, um, even at a smaller size. Like you should be recruiting all the time. And the fact that we weren't or we had issues, getting a recruiter in place this year and learning that and strengthening that muscle was, was our big, uh, downfall for potential this year.All right, sweet. Um, we have like a couple segments here. I think this will be kind of fun. So, uh, the first one, biggest wins 2025. Let's start off with some dubs. What decision paid off the most? New plumbing manager. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, your guy is good. So, you know, we, our plumbing might surpass our HVAC.It has absolutely blown up. Uh, plumbing has been the star of the show in 2025 for us, and I mean, we have more water heaters sitting down in the scrap pile than HVAC units, and it was cold last week. All right. So let's go. Yeah, let's go is what I'm talking about. Yeah. And so he's the one I I'm, bro, you're a plumbing company.Now I tip my hat off to him. Yeah. Yeah. I should, you know, it's, it says rapid response plumbing first, so, yeah. Um, you know, I, I seriously considered going through our GMBs and changing our primary contractor status on some of our GMBs to plumbing because of how well plumbing is doing. I think, you know, I don't know.I don't know. But that's been the biggest decision is, or biggest paying decision, is we took a chance on somebody. Um, he took a chance on us as well, and he's been an absolute all star. So it's just a reiteration of a lot of times good leadership really moves the boat. Uh, what decision paid off the most?I think we made a decision in the very beginning of the year or late last year, and it was to be transparent down to net. Mm-hmm. And I think that that decision paid off the most. So if you're new to the show. We do a monthly net profit financial session once a month with our frontline and senior leaders, and we've been doing this for like basically a year now.I think it started in January was our first one, and that decision ended up being incredible because we were able to really talk about exactly what was going on in the business. At any given point, and they knew the score with that. John? Um, there was a, when we mentioned this in the Facebook group, there was a bunch of people that were asking for more information, like, how do we do this and what do we do and why do we do in all this information?Like, is there another book I could read on it and I didn't answer anybody? 'cause the answer is. I just opened up my p and l to the team. Like we did the same thing this year and I just said, Hey, this is how much I make. Which was, I think, you know, shocking for them. This is our meals and entertainment that we spend.Mm-hmm. And they saw, oh, Jack's not pulling money out of the business. This is, and, and they also understood like where all the money goes and how tight it can be at the end of the month. So we talked about, you know, give us opportunities to talk about refunds and. Callbacks and how much not turning in warranty parts actually can hurt the company.Yeah. And so that's been a huge win for us this year as well. We, we are in our third month of doing that. We started in September and uh, it's been really good. Yeah. My advice to people is, uh, one, just like that, just start and then two, talk about what happens after net or after EBITDA or after whatever it is that you're showing or talking about.I think that was probably the big one, but yeah, we like, it's the second Wednesday of every month. And we just, here's the p and l. Here's my notes on what happened for the month and by department. Here's what we did. But like when we first started, it was like, here's the p and l like it. It wasn't that deep.We've gotten better every single month with, here's more data, here's better versions of the data. Yeah, here's like something you can make decisions from, but just starting. I would just talk openly. Yeah. I mean, honestly it was crazy to see the eyes, like everybody's eyes just went oop wide as like, oh my gosh, no one's ever shown us this before.Yeah. Because I think there's a misconception, right? Is I sold a u, I sold a HVAC unit for 10 K. I know you can buy that thing for four. You guys made $6,000. It's like, no, we didn't make $6,000. Yeah. All that goes into overhead and keeping the lights and paying office staff and doing this and that and that, the other thing.And so at the end of the day, they get an actual view under the hood, and I think it really drives the, the bus. What system or habit? Did you, do you have that compounded? Like what do you think like really just built on itself? Oh, daily huddle. Dude. We went from daily huddle being like a basic, Hey, this is how we're doing.Trying to figure it out to like, now we have this seven person daily huddle that really hits, it's 15 minutes long so it's, stays really short, but it really opens up the day on what we need to do and how we need to do it and where the misses are. Um, and that's aligned the entire team. So that, that's the heart.We've like doubled and tripled down on getting that right and it's been really good. I think for probably leadership development, that's been one of our big superpowers. It's like compounded. Um, and that paired with like the transparency thing from earlier, like we have two leadership cohorts we launch when every six months.And uh, our first one's about to finish up their like cohort and we've graduated three managers from that first cohort. And they're like, they understand. So us deciding to do it and then sticking with it, the habit, the system like developing that has turned into a superpower for our business. But it's taken a whole year.I can imagine. I mean, I, I sat through Brandon doing that, um, couple months ago. It's really good. Super valuable. It's like, yeah, it's really good. It's, it's become a very important part of our. Future. By the way, I love the difference in our answers. 'cause yours are like this. You could tell like the difference in the size of the business based on your answers.'cause yours are like your leadership cohorts and training to get the next round of leaders. And mine are like, you gotta get the basic systems down this year. But that, that's, well I think they're, I think they're both good because like, I think people are valuable. I, we'll like this about what, we'll talk about our misses, but like my misses were like.Kind of basic. Yeah. Like I miss the basics. Yeah. And it wasn't me talking shit on it. It was actually me saying like, I really like the kind of the. Juxtaposition of the two. Let's do some, let's do some Ls. I mean, what was your biggest L Like, just like what, what was the, what was the biggest L Our, again, our biggest L goes back to my headline of the year is we lost our two of our top HVAC guys, which I mean, in a company that's five HVAC service technicians drops our, essentially our service staff in half stuff.In June, right at the beginning of summer. And the value that we think we lost from them is about a million dollars in top line over the next three months. 'cause we didn't have recruiting down yet. Um, the second big L is I don't think we were pricing effectively. Um, we were pricing too. Keep things moving, but we were not pricing as high and aggressively as we should have been.We had a closure rate probably in the middle of summer of about 80%, which mm-hmm. Which is great. 'cause you're like, oh, I, I just make 80%. But realistically the issue was we weren't priced high enough this year. Our big LI think we had two big Ls. Mm-hmm. Um. So I shared this with the team. We did a, we did. So it was like, it's kind of funny.Um, you know that meme of like, men used to like go to war, men used to like build things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I felt, I like really like, felt that this week because I, like, we finished putting together like our budget and our, like our. Uh, it's our EBITDA bridge. Like how do we go from three and a half to, we want to hit 7 million, 8 million of EBITDA next year.So like, it took a lot of work. Like, and, you know, I was exhausted. And, and then on, on Thursday we spent like five hours with the senior leadership team and we, we dove into this and. My, the, the meme was like, I felt exhausted, but like, I hadn't, like I didn't do anything right. Like I like filled out a spreadsheet, like Yeah.Be moved my way through Excel. Whereas like most of our team is like doing actual work and doing like really important things like hucking water heaters and you're, yeah. Yeah. And I'm, and I'm just like, it, it was hard work. I did learn a lot, but it, it, it was, it was sort of like men used to go to war and I'm like, here I am working on a budget.Yeah. Like, it was just very boring. So the biggest for us, we put, uh. We put costs before revenue this year. Mm-hmm. So when we budgeted for the year, we had big growth plans and we did not hit budget. Uh, so budget was 30 million and I think we're gonna achieve like 27. And um, but last year we were like 22 or something, 23.So like still grew. We just didn't hit budget. Yeah. So, uh, which on the surface isn't bad. Like, okay, that happened. Um, but the, the pain point that we had is like, because we were driving this budget in, we made decisions on costs and investments that mm-hmm. Were too fixed and not variable enough. And that's, that was my headline is like, be variable and then it, it, it just, okay, hey, HVAC was weird.Shipments are cratered, 49% in October. You know, I can't control that and I can't control the government shutdown and I can't control, um, like finance declines being higher. What I can control is like how nimbly we can respond and react and iterate. And so like my big L was, uh, budgeting and like beginning to implement a cost structure that was hard to unpeel.But later on in the year it went. So with that same thought in mind, where did you ignore the early signals? Because right, there's early signals in each of those processes where you should have started getting out, but it was so hard to get out that you probably stayed in it, you know, a month or two too long.Totally. So, so we started, I, we started seeing that there was a problem in June and almost all of it in hvac. So just like running through our year really quick. Plumbing grew 16%, electrical grew, 23. Drains grew 21, restoration grew 50, and HVAC was flat, which is beating the market. I mean, if the market's down 49% and I was flat, hell yeah.Like, I mean flat, like 0.7% year over year, like flat, right? Mm-hmm. But we probably upped our prices and we probably, uh, like moved less pieces of equipment. But as a, for dollars, we were flat. So, uh, we started noticing an issue in June and because we had this plan, you know, it was sort of like, Hey, this was the plan, this was the strategy.Like, we believed in it. Yeah. And, uh, I don't know that I want, I remember in our monthly financial meetings being like, Hey, we missed budget. We set these plans, I'm not going to react yet. Like that's in my financial notes that I told my whole team, like, Hey, we're not going to react yet. We want to see what next month looks like.Next month came around, Hey, results were slightly better. I'm still very cautious. So if you look back at my notes from May, June, like we started identifying the fact that there was an issue in August. It was like, Hey, three months in a row. We are not where we thought we would be. We need to start acting right now.Not to mention like, those are the biggest three months too. So to miss like the, the majority of, of most people's year, um, is hard. And it's hard to cut, right? If you miss one month, like, ah, it's really hard to cut June. Right? And we, this was strategic. We put a lot of thought into these investments and, uh, so I don't know that we held on too long because like, Hey, we saw it happening, we.Responded, we reported on it. It's not like it caught us by surprise. We're like, Hey, we're actively watching this situation. Maybe we could have responded sooner, but I mean, a 90 day response time on an investment that we expected to have a 12 month payback feels like it wasn't too, I still really don't know.I still really don't know what the, but ultimately we ended up trimming up quite a bit. I think, I mean, ours is much simpler. Um, no, no, uh, no surprise there. But ours was, um, we held on lo we held on too long to personnel. So shortly after, towards the end of this year, we picked up Isaac's model. Hi. Hire fast.Fire fast. Because it's very hard to tell how good a person will be at the job until they're actually on the job. Right? Some of the best interviewers. Or interviewees are people who do a lot of interviewing because they're good at interviewing, not good at their job. And so we learned that the hard way.Unfortunately, uh, we held onto people That's right a little bit longer than we should have, um, when they were quite obviously showing poor performance. Uh, yeah. And so that, that was our biggest, um, thing that we held onto for too long. Going into next year, we are. We have been much quicker at, on and off, on and off.Big surprises. What was harder than expected? HVAC this year was harder than expected. I mean, this is, it's like we're beating the dead horse here, but really, like historically, HVAC has been easy for us, but this year we just had a slew of. Of, of issues and a lot of them are around the new units, um, hey, different mm-hmm.Types of warranty. Things that crop up. If you start doing this, this specific 15.2 seer, then you have search protection issues. Like we had a lot of HVAC installation issues, which historically has not been something that our company has had to deal with. Yeah. So that has been fun. Yeah. Big surprise. So it as a whole, we had a good year.So like, I'm just giving the top line, like we, we grew 15% or 14% or whatever. Gross margin grew in 2024. We were at 42 in 20, 25. We're at 49. Like that's a insane jump. Yeah. And EBITDA grew from a million to three and a half. So like we did work. Yeah. So like when you look at that. It was good. Right? Uh, so the year was good, but what was harder than expected was managing like the mental load and sort of pulling myself out of the, Hey, the last six months has been really hard.Like this has been tough. Uh, and like discouraging and pairing that and like, how do I show up every day? Like how am I showing up for my team? So in like September, October. I think I was just stressed, right? Yeah. Like we were, we were, summer was weird. We're trying to figure out like, okay, how do we respond to, like, shipments being down like crazy.Like, what are we supposed to do here? Uh, are we the only ones feeling this? And just feeling a little, like, alienated. And, um, what was really har what was really hard was, I, I don't feel like I know I didn't, I didn't show up in like, the way that my team needed and it was hard to balance my mental health during like a challenging moment.Like, now I feel good. It's sort of like I recognized it like 60 days in and I'm like, oh, I'm being an asshole. Like, I'm, I'm like, I'm wa I'm like, I'm bringing a cloud with me wherever I'm going. Yeah. And like that's not helping anything or anybody As, as a director of vibes, you cannot be doing that, John.Yeah, I know for sure. Yeah. And, uh, so I think that was harder than I expected. Because I, I've usually, I'm usually able to just, uh, historically able to show up in like the right mindset mm-hmm. To be what the team needs. And like there was a 60 day period today or this year where, uh, that was hard to do.Yeah. Which dovetails into like, that's actually some, some along the lines to the thing that I found surprisingly easiest this year. So on the other end of the spectrum, surprisingly easiest for me this year was. And it's, uh, there's a caveat here. It's okay. Surprisingly easy was my team's willingness to have change management in their.How their, their leadership managed them. So it was very difficult for me to get the paperwork and to start the process of like, Hey, how do I go from managing frontline to managing managers? Um, which is where I think a big part, part of this year was for me, was going from frontline to managers and in managing managers.They were, that's a big jump. They were craving though. They were craving structure and they were craving information. And they were craving, yeah. Um, the ability for me to manage them. Like how, like a Yeah, a very um. Good way of management and to have some kinda structure there. And so once I put that in place, that was very easy from a change management standpoint to say like, oh yeah, lemme show up to this meeting.Let me fill out my rocks, let me go over my weekly updates. Like they were pumped. And so I really liked that it just needed to do it and get over the hump of like, Hey, I don't know what I'm doing, and figure it out. So that's been good. What was your easiest? Um, I would say the easiest was, um, making decisions like, like making decisions Interesting because Yes, so I've never had this much data in my career.Yeah. So when we're going through a hard time, I've never had this level of clarity. I have all of the clarity in the world now, all of that. And on top of all of the clarity. I also have a team, a full leadership team of like 22 people that see the p and l every month and understand exactly what's going on.This was the easiest dis like there were still hard decisions, but they were easy to make because we all know the score. Our leaders can see it. And the, we weren't fighting against ourselves to like explain the context. Everyone understood the context we've been looking at, like us missing budget in July, and I'm assuming they're all incentivized in the same direction as well.So like they're all on top of that. It was easy to make those decisions and they're all incentivized to do the thing that you are hoping that they do. Time. You remember three years ago for you, probably three, four years ago, like the, the half of the battle is getting the why down. It's getting the team on board.It's getting the why down. Yes, hundred percent. Figuring out where the issue is and then getting the team on board to make the change that's necessary to, to, to. You know, get back. That only gets harder with more and more people. 'cause there's these like new layers of communication that you now have to go through.Mm-hmm. So everyone knowing the score and like being transparent about like, here's the levers that we have available to us. Um, like, okay, do we, do we shut this contract? Do we stop doing branded map marketing for hvac if we're fighting against like big headwind? Oh yeah. Yes. No. Right. So like we did, but that would.And it became a light switch instead of a 30 day, like, let's, well, let's talk about it. It's like, no, we've, we've talked about it once a month. Everyone knows. So I, I think that that was like easier than expected. That's cool. No, that makes sense too. Like that, that's logically the thing that I would imagine for you would make sense.What ended up not mattering at all this year that you thought would be important? That just wasn't, I have a funny one. You go first. I don't know. I don't know. I think like AI search. Like ended up, yeah, like, I don't know. So I remember doing like, I'm not saying it won't eventually I, I know it's an important part of what we're doing, but it, it just was funny because I remember at in budget of 2020, like going into budget for this year.We were like, oh man, I think Google, I, I think leads are gonna be really challenging because, you know, like here, you know, these five different factors and AI and all this stuff, and, uh, man, it just didn't matter at all. Yeah, that's true. It just didn't matter at freaking bit. Uh, I think eventually maybe it matter, but, um, it, it didn't matter in 2025.I think for me it was acquisitions, which is a hard thing to say out loud. Ooh. Acquisitions host of Jack acquisitions. We, we tried, we tried. We put in five Lois this year. You did? You talked to so many people this year and we had not gotten one. The Nashville market is too hot. I'm just not buying a sub, you know, sub-business for six Xes.Well, some of happen, well, some of the, yeah, some of the ones you were looking at were crazy. It's like, Hey, we've got like 80% new construction. 80% new construction, 10%, 99 handy man. And yeah, like we sub everything out we're, I'm like, yeah, we're gonna need a two times revenue for that. Yeah. And I'm just saying no, just hard nos across the board that's like laughed out of the room.No, I mean, I know like there's some offers that I should get laughed at, but there's like a lot that we're. This is what you were asking it. You don't deserve this, but like someone came in 10%, 20% over and I'm going, what are you doing? Yeah. Hopefully that means though that in the next couple years those are gonna have to retrade because there's no way you can run on the debt that those businesses are have picked up.But we shall see. So I'm didn't end up. That's funny. So didn't, acquisition didn't end up mattering at all. Acquisition didn't end up mattering this year though. I will say last year's acquisitions, did we, we still get weird like. Hey, Jeff and I was like, we bought Jeff's business three years ago and people are still reaching out.Yeah, I love that. Oh yeah. That's my favorite thing. Yeah, that is cool.What would, uh, what would you have started earlier? What, like this, what are we doing differently as our next couple? So what would you have started earlier than you did or moved faster on? Oh gosh. Uh, finance, financials, data, financial data, just like for the reasons that you said was surprisingly easy to make decisions this year.We are trying to, I've never had this much data in my life get to that point where we is incredible. We have data, we just don't have it going in. Well, we don't have it tracked as well as we want, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this year, like we've gotten. POS structures down, we stopped employees buying things like yeah, we're trying to just figure out the financial side of the business more so that we can track and make good decisions and um, I wish we would've done that sooner because it would've been easier to onboard people with this process already in place.Yeah, and it's not that hard. It's just lots of busy work. Lots of busy work to get to going, I think emphasizing plumbing. Something that was really funny this year, like I've said this, but like we, we went into 2025, like plumbing has been our largest division forever, right? HVAC has been growing like crazy.So like the last two or three years, HVAC is like 50%, 50%, 50%. So this year we were like, in 2025 we're like, okay, HVAC's gonna be 50%. Like we're gonna do it. Here's how we're gonna get there, and we, and here's all the investments we're gonna make to get there. We made all those investments. What was funny was, uh, again, we did beat market, so if the whole industry's down 40% and I'm up 0.07, like, okay, I guess I won.But, um, I would've, as we were like investing hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a year into this one department. Yeah. And it was like not going anywhere. Plumbing was growing 25%. Like with basically no energy at all. Yeah. So I just like would've emphasized it earlier. Yeah. Like we probably could have hit 50, right?Like plumbing, we're still clocking every single day. Easy wins. And it's our biggest department, but HVAC has been like the lion's share of our executive attention for almost three years because it went from a million dollars to like 10 million this year. Like it's just been Yep. Sort of exploding for us.It's been the hot blonde. Yeah, it has. It's been the hot blonde and you've just been, you've been ignoring wifey over there in the corner. I know Tsk t John, I know tsk, tsk. I should know better. What would you have stopped immediately? Plumbing new construction work. Yeah, that one's easy for me. How long did you do it?We did it for, I mean, it wasn't that long. Well, we, we start, I, I don't know if this is even 2025. It might have been 2020, end of 2024 that we did this. So I don't, I don't know what would you have stopped immediately? I'm just gonna say that 'cause that's an easy answer for me and I actually don't have another one.So that's what I'm gonna say. We over-resourced. Uh, so I would've stopped that immediately. So, um, this is back to like one of our core philosophies for 2025 and, and for the past few years is we have an idea, we invest resources, revenue comes later, and we don't think about ROI. What I would've stopped immediately was that, yeah, I would've, Hey, here's this thing.We're feeling constrained in plumbing. We're feeling constrained in whatever we need to add this resource manager, coordinator, dispatcher, whatever, and like, hopefully revenue follows it, but like in some cases it didn't. I got an answer now, so I would've just like stopped. I would've stopped putting. Cash out the door before revenue was coming in from that project.Mm-hmm. I would've stopped buying vans, high top transit vans, box trucks. I would've stopped all of that. And Maverick's only, I think we're about 17 this year. We are only Maverick, only company now. Um. I love myself. That's funny. Some Mavericks, man, I love, when I look out the parking lot, they're, and it's all Mavericks.Yeah. Lined up with their little, little boxes on the back and their, their ladders on the top. My favorite. Um, so that's what I would've done. I think that there's a world where you can run a, you still need a truck at some point to pull like a trailer, but outside of that, I wouldn't have bought two vans that we bought.Saved us. That's funny. Saved us 120 K or something. Mm-hmm. So what would you have protected more time? Health focused relationship? Cash. Oh gosh. Time, health focus and relationships. Cash, probably. Cash. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I guess we can't pick that one. Yeah, that one's easy. Like that's the number one. Yeah. Yeah.I mean, I probably would've focused, uh, protected. I mean, focus is a good one. Focus is a really good one. Our relationships with our vendors is good relationships internally and the company's good. Health is fine. Time is okay. It's focus, right? You, you focus on the wrong thing for too long and then something else drifts.I mean that, that was the story of our plumbing, HVAC kind of pendulum as we focus on plumbing to try and get plumbing back to functioning and, and. Being profitable. And then HVAC slips. So then we go run over to hvac, try to get that focused, and then plumbing slips, it's like this back and forth pendulum.'cause we didn't have the right leaders in place. So I would've focused on protecting focus This year I probably did the best I've ever done on time, or at least in a few years. Uh, so that felt pretty good. Probably health, I think this is the l. This is the least I've exercised in a year. Ooh, that's a good one.Yeah, I didn't do a good job. TS tsk, John. Sk not enough. Running freaking tsk. I know. Not enough. Not enough. Getting yoked or running or skiing, frankly, that definitely not ski. That's, that's what I need to protect is my ski time. Just need some more vacations out to the slopes. And any final thoughts on 25 before we hit like, what's up next?2025 wasn't bad. Like I said, we grew two. Mm-hmm. Uh, we missed goal a little bit, but. Overall happy, healthy business. Yep. I'm ready for 2026 though. I'm so excited for 2026. God, I'm I'm, yeah, I'm ready. 2026 my one rule. What's on the brain? My one rule for 2026. A BR. Always be recruiting. I don't care. Yeah. If we have every position full and there's people sitting at home mm-hmm.With no jobs, that is the last thing I'm going to stop this year because that is the hardest, that, that's what kicked our ass in 2025 was not recruiting enough. Yeah. And being. Reactive rather than proactive. So this year, reactive or proactive. Always be recruiting coffees for recruiters and closers. Um mm-hmm.So that, that's my big, that's our big theme. We have the leads, we have the systems. We just need the people in. So, okay. Okay. We, okay. We declared this our one rule. Uh, I didn't think of it as a rule. Our mindset for next year is lean and lethal. Ooh, something, something that we ran into this year was, uh, as we were like over the last $10 million of revenue, this was a good thing and it ended up being a weakness, which I think is kind of funny.But for the last like two years, we had to become a process driven business and we had to silo roles and create specialists and do all of those different things. And towards the end of this year, as we're trying to move fast and like, hey. Hey, what, what do we do when things aren't going to plan? Well, you have to respond.You have to iterate. And in many, in many ways, we were not able to at the pace that we would've liked because we siloed into specialists and, and became like this process driven business. So our big focus for next year, uh, is lean and lethal, where process can't get in the way, like a red, we can't red tape ourselves.Yeah. If something is like very straightforward, so I'll, I'll give some examples that we've run into. We have a process on how to onboard a, a technician into a vehicle. We had a vehicle that like needed a battery from AutoZone. No one just took the charge and got that battery. There was a process. Because of that, it took two weeks and I think, I think that honestly in that case, the technician might have quit.Yeah. Because we were so slow to go to AutoZone and get a freaking battery there. There's a few of those cases where we just tripped all over ourselves. Mm-hmm. Trying to follow these processes that at the end of the day, like they don't like, yes, they matter in the, you know, if it, if it's real and it progresses, but like, we're still a small business, like we should be able to react.So lean and lethal 2026, lean and lethal. That's the tagline. I'm getting hats. What do you leave l and l? What are you leaving behind? Like the way I'm interpreting this is like I, I am leaving behind like a version of me that didn't know how to do this. Uh, so maybe the way that I grew, which I think is better, like the big way that I grew this year was understanding ROI off the p and l.Like what's a high ROI project? What's a low ROI project? And what should we be focusing on? Should we be putting costs ahead of revenue? How to set, um, plans, not goals, which sounds kind of cheesy, but if, if I look at this year, our budget was kind of a vibe. Like it was like, ah, I think we can, like, here's the data.Like, ah, like there was some thought put to it. It's not like I just like threw fricking darts, but what we did this year was like he, Hey, we wanna go from three and a half to seven of ebitda. And that's not like a vibe. We, and you've seen the document, it's this like 15 freaking page document where it's like, here is exactly the steps that we will be going, that we will be performing to do this.And like we expect step one to give us 300,000 of ebitda. We expect two to give us 900. We expect three to give us 50. Um, and ha, half of that list has already been implemented and we have actually achieved exactly that amount of EBITDA over 2025. Uh. S So yeah, I think like those two things are the same thing in my mind, where it was, um, less vibe and like a vibe would be like, let's grow.So like, let's invest in all these places. Not really like being thoughtful about, Hey, what's the actual return to what matters? Mm-hmm. To our, to our company. Yeah. I think we are leaving behind financial ambiguity. Like that's our goal is we need to know where we're at at all times when we're winning on the day, on the week.And we've done a really good job starting that in the last quarter and I think going into into 2026, that is part of the culture, is knowing when we're winning, when we're losing, how much we're winning, how much we're losing, and being able to make decisions quickly off that, because historically it's been very slow.So we, A great example is, um. I was looking at our daily huddle, which we're doing daily, and I said, Hey, this is like we're in the red for on the weekly, for the daily huddle in this category. Let's go look at what's going on. And so immediately down in the daily huddle, it shows our gross margin by department labor versus material.And we're seeing, hey, the revenue generated is not justifying the, the, um, the labor. The, the revenue generator is not justifying the labor. Yeah. Let's look into it. We open it up and sure enough, we have technicians in HVAC that are passing over 20-year-old units not offering. And we talked to that technician and the answer is, you'll, you'll get a kick outta this.He doesn't work here any longer because of this. Um. But his answer was that our 22 systems are better. They last longer and they're better than the new systems. So I don't offer them new systems. And I said, you are a service techer. This is not your choice. That's the customer's choice. Whether they would like to get a new system under warranty yet, or take that risk.Um, that all being said wasn't a good fit for the company unfortunately, but we were able to find that really quickly. Like that's. It was within a week we could see that this issue had sprung up. We got to the bottom of the issue and we're able to move forward with a solution. And again, always be recruiting, having someone ready to go to fill that spot.Mm-hmm. So, yep. 2026. Next year we are, we want to drive three and a half to 4 million of additional ebitda. And so for Q1, our big we're, we're acquiring again. We've talked about that on the show. Like we're probably gonna do like between three and four acquisitions next year, which feels like a lot Wild.It feels like a lot. Uh, I'm already tired, like I'm an old man. I'm ready for a nap. Um, we have our first one closing in 10 days. Yo, congrats. So our focus for Q1 is close. Integrate. Close integrate and how can we do that while remaining lean and lethal? Yeah. I think ours is for Q1, no loss months, I think.Oh yeah. Like that's the big, that helped us a lot last April. Yep. We have literally not had a loss month since we declared that on this show in April of 24. Yeah. I haven't lost money, which is crazy. It has been amazing. Yeah. That's amazing. Well, yeah, like if you look at my 10 year career. The longest I went was like three months.Yeah. Without like a net loss month. Well, like our January last year was negative 54. I think there was some, um, back and forth from December. Yeah. To January. That was the plumbing issues and everything. Yeah. But that all beside like. Once you declare that as well, like you can see it in ours as well, that the folk, once the focus started, like we really didn't have lost months.We had maybe some swings, maybe like a month with negative a thousand. But yeah, compare that to like years prior where it was, we only won three months, we only won four months. And that was two business. I mean, that was a float. Yeah. Um, so yeah. Q one's the hardest, in my opinion, to keep those at no loss months.Yeah, I think we'll be able to do it. And the goal is this year, no loss year. So, uh, no loss for Q1 across the board when we were growing, uh, like we still are, I, I guess when I say that, I imagine us like maturing when we were maturing. Um. We did not obviously have the same, uh, philosophy. And I, I'm, I'm sure I said this on this podcast and I know that I said this shit on Twitter, so like, feel free to check me Boo.Like I know that, I used to think that switching to like a profit minded, a profit first business, uh, was like a light switch. I used to think it was just like, oh yeah, you just do it. You just do it one day. And on one hand that is kind of what happened like last April, right? Yeah. Like that is sort of what happened.But it took us like we're almost 20 months in, 19 months in or something. And it has taken a lot. It was nowhere near a light switch. Like it was a light switch to go from like break even to five, 6%. But now this is my first, uh, like double digit EBIT a year in my whole career. Yeah. And that took a lot of work.Uh, and we're at like 13, 14% and, uh, I think 15 after rebates. So that was, I think, my thing on rebates that ends up being gigantic. Yeah. But, um, but like we, our target was 17 and we did not hit that. Now granted we were a lot closer, but now we wanna set our target for 20, like how do we hit 20? And, uh, the cool part about this though, we, that took like two years.That's gonna take two years. We, we didn't mention this though, throughout any of our, these questions is one of the big focuses this year for both of us. And I think the reason that all of this culminates in the right direction Yeah. Is a huge focus on gross margin. Like. We, we spent like six episodes in like, April, may, June, July.Yes. Just like talking about gross margin and people just like, shut up. We don't wanna hear about gross margin anymore. But that has been huge. Like, that is how mean we from, mean we two and 24 to 49. Yeah. And, and like we're going from 49, our budget's 52 next year, and that's a difference of millions of dollars.Yeah. Like if our overhead doesn't, so our overhead this year was $100,000 more. Than last year. Mm-hmm. So like. We did pretty good for growing by 4 million or whatever, organic. So that feels like really healthy and like we did a good job. Our goal next year is like drop overhead while still raising revenue.So that'll be the tricky one. Uh, but so much of it came from gross, just improving gross margin focus. Our, our OPEX expense didn't adjust at all. Well, that's what I mean is like you guys, you focused your entire company in that we talked about, you know, sharing. Your financials with your team, but that started with, yeah.Hey, we're sharing gross margin. We talked about incentives. Yeah. It started with gross margin. We started, everybody started actually incentivizing their employees on gross margin. Yeah. So like I think a big thing that I don't wanna skip over here at the very, very end if you're still listening, is how important gross margin was to all of these items.Like Yeah. Across the board. That is the only way that it, our business did as well as did is 'cause we started to focus on it and we started making decisions based off gross margin.Here's my fun nugget for that. And I got this from my friend Rich Jordan. Yeah, so ins instead of, uh, so like thinking about gross profit, the approach that we're taking to budgeting next year, which I think is kind of fun and I like it, is. Instead of budgeting off of revenue, we're gonna budget off of gross profit.So the way to think about that is field labor and field materials no longer becomes like a part of the p and l. Like it. It obviously does like as we're looking at performance, but the way that we really think about revenue is gross profit is our revenue to spend on OPEX or gain an ebitda. So. What percentage of our gross profit dollars are we willing to invest into opex?And that's the way that, which we've never really approached it that way. And I think if I would've in the past, I probably would've been a lot more conservative. 'cause all the numbers that people tell you like, Hey, your office wages should be 10%. Well that's of revenue. And if your gross mar, if your gross margin's 30%.You're spending 10% on office wages, like you're fucked. Yeah. Whereas if your gross margin's 60% and you're spending 10% on office wages, like pop off. Yeah. You could spend like go do your thing. Not 10% on advertising. You could spend 20% on advertising if you're running a hundred percent, 65% gross margins, a hundred percent.So, and there's people that are spending 15% on advertising. It's like, well, how are you doing that? Well, they're plumbing only and their gross margins 65% versus like, if you're an HVAC at 42%, you can't do that. So I think that gave us a ton of clarity as we think about next year, where, hey, it's actually more like 15% salaries of our, of our gross profit, and we just think about gross profit.Like our, our real revenue now is gross profit. Interesting. I love it. Yeah, I, yeah, I'm a big fan. That's gonna keep me up tonight. Trying to figure that out, like, thinking back, well, it, it forces like real clarity because revenue. Yeah, because it's actual really, like, it's the actual money you have to spend.It makes sense. Yeah. Like, yeah. A lot of it's all percentage. Well, and then know, we, we do the math and we're like, oh, like hey, our OPEX was 70% of gross profit, or for us it was 77. Yeah. So it was 77% of gross profit. Why couldn't it be 60? Yeah. Like how do we get there? Well, do we raise, we can raise gross profit, we can drop opex.But like how do we increase that delta, because that's our ebitda. But I, I definitely wanted to bring that up 'cause I think that that's a big portion of this year. It's a big portion. We talked about that a lot. Well, thanks everybody. If you're still listening, uh, we actually just broke into top 200 on Apple podcast, which is really cool.So thank you. Make sure to give us a review. We need it. We're desperate. And, um. Make sure you hit like and subscribe. Appreciate it guys.
