Owned and Operated #111 - Deciding to Buy or Build in Home Services

Buy or build, that is the question. Jack and John talk about the merits of both buying and building your home service business.
Open modal

In this episode, John and Jack discuss the merits of buying versus building a business from their new studios. They emphasize the importance of reinvesting in the business rather than prioritizing personal expenses, and how such decisions impact growth and stability. They also explore the differing skill sets required for each approach and examine the concept of 'personal drag,' illustrating how personal lifestyle demands can affect business growth and strategy.

Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter

Looking to scale your home service business? Service Scalers is a digital marketing agency that drives success in PPC and LSA.
Discover more growth strategies by visiting Service Scalers: https://www.servicescalers.com

More Ways To Connect

The Owned and Operated Weekly Insights Newsletter

John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
https://www.wilsonplumbingandheating.com

Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
https://rapidhvactn.com

Owned and Operated Episode #111 Transcript

John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential, plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.

Let's get into it.

If you like what we talk about on our social media, on Twitter, on this podcast, then you should be signed up for our newsletter. Go to ownedandoperated. com where every Friday we break down our business, we break down insights, things we're learning, things we're working on, and it's good stuff. Check it out, ownedandoperated. com.

Today on Owned and Operated, Jack and I talk about the buy versus build conversation. Comes up a lot. I think about it a lot because I always think it would be easier to build. Whether or not I'm right, I don't know. But we spend a pretty good amount of time diving into that and when people should be thinking about buying versus building.

Enjoy.

Welcome

Jack Carr: Welcome back to Owned and Operated.

That's a throwback. Throwback.

John Wilson: I like that. That's OG. You gotta be a long time listener for that one.

Jack Carr: If you're watching, you're seeing History in the Making, John's first podcast out of his new studio.

John Wilson: Thank you.

Jack Carr: Bow bow bow. Play the Vuvuzelas or whatever they play.

John Wilson: Bow bow bow bow.

Jack Carr: Bow bow bow bow. Yeah. And me at my new studio. Yeah. Which is actually just our storage room that we're converting into a studio, so we'll get there. Milwaukee above me. I told you, I'm going to shout it out. Milwaukee. If anybody knows Milwaukee that wants to sponsor me personally or the show, but mostly just me, if they want to give me tools to talk about how great they are.

I'm a hundred percent down.

John Wilson: Yeah, I really should have done something with that before we bought like a hundred pack outs. And I didn't. So here we are. Yeah, so we're in our first day in the studio. We've had the studio set up for like a few weeks now, but this is my first day of recording in it.

And what's been kind of fun is we're trying to use the studio to record like a lot more than just Owned and Operated stuff. We want to use it for our core business. So like this morning. We had people recording voiceovers for our next radio ad, which was kind of fun because this is like a professional grade studio that we're able to record our own voice.

So, cause we're wanting to use it for voiceover, socials, radio, some voiceover TV, basically anything that we use vocals on. It should be a lot of fun.

Jack Carr: We've talked about it before, but I think that behind every home service company moving forward into the future is going to have some kind of media arm, right?

Just from a standpoint of Google ads, Facebook ads, tick tock, like just the advertising side and then getting your name out there over and over again. So people. who you are branding. And being able to do that, it's going to be huge. So I'm excited to see what the output of the studio. It looks good.

For anyone not watching, it looks good. It's clean.

John Wilson: It looks good.

Navy walls. I'm surrounded by lights. We're recording on a computer right now, but for like, for our YouTube clips, it's just cameras. So like, It's very weird because I'm like, instead of talking to Jack, I'm talking to like a camera.

So, New experience for me. but

Jack Carr: Yeah man, so how's the rest of your week going? We're moving into April Q. One's done.

John Wilson: Q one's done. Q1 is done. We had like an okay Q1. Like I talked about that last week, but it was good. April immediately starting off better.

Like literally everyone feels better. Leads are flowing. So everything's going better now that we're in April. How about you? How's your week?

Jack Carr: All right. So this week has been fun. So we're feeling the effects of slamming those two businesses together. And so it's not a lead issue for the first time. It's one, not having enough people.

Like two, 1. 3 million businesses or two 1. 5 million businesses that now equal a 3 million business. It's not a one for one anymore, right? And so you don't just have one CSR each, you probably move up to three CSRs. So one plus one equals three. And so we're dealing with those systems breaking in real time.

And it has been a nightmare. Not a bad one, but definite growing pains. So we have plenty of work it's coming out our ears and it's getting everyone on to service Titan, getting everyone trained up on service Titan. And then on the back end, it's, Hey, the model of our business has changed because of this.

How do we handle it? And it's been tough. We've been putting in some long hours trying to figure these problems out.

John Wilson: Yeah, I remember maybe October, November, I think it's recorded too. If you were like, Hey, I think I'm going to buy these business sales. Like, Hey, you know what you should do?

You should get a recruiter.

Jack Carr: Yeah.

A hundred percent.

John Wilson: Was it me? I don't know. Like, you know, I know.

Jack Carr: Yes. John, if you want to hear that you were right.

John Wilson: It's okay. We actually, we both knew it.

Jack Carr: Well, and so part of that was actually, we didn't even go with the business. That was the hour away. Like we didn't take that deal. And so the wild part is if I would have done that deal, like these problems would have been 10 times worse just because I'm not on site, you know, the distance.

And so like I took your advice on that and we still had the issue. And so our next non revenue generating hire will be HR recruiter full time.

John Wilson: Make sense.

Jack Carr: Big moves, but yeah, you can really see the pain when you're trying to onboard, eight people and trying to get them all in the healthcare and then get them on like, there's the HR side.

And then from the recruiter side it's like, Hey, well, we lost, we let go of one because it wasn't a good fit. And one plus one equals three on this call center. So now we need a new call center and we changed the model of the business to a sales and service model or service install model.

And so like all these pieces are moving so quickly that it's very difficult to keep it on track. It's just been causing headaches. So with that, the idea today was you've bought businesses. I bought businesses I verse build.

In today's market, today's age, interest rates being what they are the state of the United States being what it is, would you buy or build if you were brand new knowing what you know, now, but without the capital.

John Wilson: Yeah, so we got where we are with a combination of acquisitions and operations. I think we're a pretty decent blend between the two. Like it's dependent on the year.

Jack Carr: It's a hard question.

John Wilson: It is a hard question.

Somebody asked me about it the other day and I'm bringing it up now. I'll start so you can chew on it because there's actually no. Yes, you can buy some of the systems, but there's really no avoiding the build. Like so you could start from scratch and go to 1 million.

So the real question is, would you buy a million dollar company or would you grind to a million on a new company? Because you try to compare like a three or four or 5 million company buying it and starting up, then it's. It's a different, like, it's just not, I don't think it's a fair question ' cause Yeah, if you can buy a $10 million, 15, 20, $30 million company, buy the $30 million company.

Like don't start one up. Yeah. In my mind. But if it was buying to a million or grinding to a million, which one would you do?

I think I would buy if it's that option, I think I would buy just 'cause like you can do it overnight.

Whereas like, why wait a year?

I don't know. But I

do think you said it differently, which is like, you don't get around the build, which I agree. How about I walk backwards So about a year ago, younger, John, he was a whippersnapper, had his ankles out.

So about a year ago, we found ourselves mostly digested with the acquisitions we made in 21. And we combine all these businesses in one location. Obviously we've talked a lot about that here and we kept finding that we didn't know basic things. And I would say that's still the case.

So we're still figuring it. Like we're still finding ourselves in like some very basic stuff, like how we think about this thing on pricing or how we think about this thing on a warehouse inventory. Like whatever it is. And I think a lot of the reason, like it's stuff that I've talked to businesses, like you have stuff figured out and other people in this group that we have things figured out at smaller sizes than us while we're figuring it out in tandem with them.

Or like a few months ahead of like not dramatically. Now, granted, us figuring out how to do 101 stuff at our size is exponential. So, like, the ripples of that are, like, way bigger which is cool. But, maybe the best version of this is outbound calling. Like, outbound calling was not something we did.

Or had a good practice built around until six months ago, five months ago. And now we're really good at it. We have drove like expertise and it helped a lot. And if we had built our way up, we would have known how to do that better. And our quarter ones for the last eight years would have been easier, but we didn't, but now that we're so big, we can afford to do it easier.

So I don't know, it's a catch 22 because sometimes we think about this basic one on one stuff. That we're just now starting or maybe not one on one, but like step two stuff that we're just figuring out and the ripple on the business is absolutely huge and it's like man we really should have known this five years ago. And the only reason we didn't know it is because we bought our way up to like 15 million and then we just pumped past 15 million without like figuring out best in class operations, which is what we're focusing on now.

It's funny you say that because that's actually my GM and I had a long discussion today about that exact thing. It was, Hey, we were realizing we're missing on the basics. And even that, we're expecting like four to 5 million this year, but with our growth and combination, like that's our goal.

But the point being is like the same thing is he said, Hey, we're missing on a few of these like basic one on one items. And we need to make sure that we're getting back like call center one on one and ops one on one and dispatch one on one. It's wild. How right before all those one on one things were handled.

But then when you take that giant leap, it breaks all the systems and you get away from those to try and make up for it. Like, It's a crutch. And then you have to get back to the one on one or step two in your case to really start driving. Cause especially, right, you just slammed two businesses together in your case, a few more.

I think probably the least of your worries initially is outbounding, right?

You're trying to keep the trains on the rails. Yeah. A hundred percent. You're trying to make sure turnovers not bad. You're trying to make sure they're on the software.

You're trying to keep customers on the rails. Like it takes like two years to integrate a business and it takes a long time.

Jack Carr: Yeah. Especially when you make moderately large changes to that business structure. Like you talk a lot about shutting down the electrical new construction side to a business.

Like that is a big move that takes a long time to recover from and restructure the business internally. And I took something to heart the other day. He said, who, not how, who, not how. And it's a good point because when you're looking at these things, yes, I can do a lot of them, but my bandwidth is like moderated in the sense that I don't have the time.

And so it's finding the right person to go into that place and do it. Then with that, what we're dealing with at the moment is trying not to overhire too. Cause it's really easy to just like, we need this go into the summer. And then end of summer comes and we're like, Ooh, we're going to have to cut all this.

Cause that's never fun.

John Wilson: Yeah. A couple of years ago. I think this was a conversation and the phrase that I said at the time was bloat then optimize. And I think I still basically believe that of like things take longer to drive through the organization now than they did five years ago, but there's more resources to do things.

So just like our last episode, we were talking about like, Hey, if I want to hire someone best in class, I can, I probably could have three, four years ago. I just didn't think I could, or didn't think I should. Like, I don't, it's hard to say, cause I wasn't in the mindset at the time. But I do think, like, I would not change how we did things.

I might've changed some of the target acquisitions, but I think being able to like start figuring stuff out at the size that we started figuring stuff out worked for us, but it is a risky play. Like there's a lot of people that this doesn't work. Cause you have to, like, you're building a plane while you're flying.

And there's a lot every day. There's a lot of ways you can mess it up.

Jack Carr: Oh yeah. Yeah. Good times.

John Wilson: Yeah. I think like if I was starting from scratch and there was no money, like I guess I would launch, cause that was the initial prompt. Because if there's no money, like, yeah, what else are you going to do?

Jack Carr: If you say, right, like the same amount, it's not going to be a huge amount, but 50, we'll buy you on an SBA seven, a, it'll buy you a million dollar company hypothetically in the home services industry. And so you could also take that 50, 000, buy a truck by the tools and maybe hire somebody for the first month, put some money in marketing.

John Wilson: Yeah. I think launching sounds interesting. Like as an experiment a year ago or two years ago, I was like, you know, it'd be like, well, Johnny Robinson did this, he built that thing for, and then handed it to his mom. And I was like, we should do that. We should just create the content and like launch something figured out for 90 days or a year.

Can we get it to a million? Document the progress. And then sell it off or hand it off to somebody or like, ideally that person's like an operating partner from the beginning, but. Because I feel like you could.

Jack Carr: Yeah, definitely.

John Wilson: Pretty quick.

Jack Carr: The other thing though is, for us, we'd have to do it completely outside of our normal kind of home service industry.

Cause my worry or what I try to compare this to, right, is we started at that plumbing division, which was pure startup. Right. Yeah. But we had revenue that was paying off service Titan. We had revenue that was able to buy the tools that we needed.

John Wilson: Customers. We had call takers.

Jack Carr: Yeah. And we had a call takers and we had a truck and we like, we had everything, the resources because we had the size we did.

Had we not had that, Oh, that would have been a different story. And so, completely understand that it's not the same, but from like a difficulty and grind perspective, like there was still a decent amount of grind with all that leg up. So I lean towards the just buy because that's what I did.

I bought a company that was too big, but the are too expensive for the size. But if you were to mitigate price the correct way that I should have to get in I think that's a way I would lean. That would be my do different.

John Wilson: Yeah, I think I agree. Like I said a couple minutes ago, I would not change the direction that we did it.

I understand launching as in like, I understand why that's attractive. There's no debt. And by the time you locate a target, you could have launched already six, seven months ago, which would like for many of these companies, like people are buying some, you know, you bought a 7 million company. Like you might as well potentially just launch at that size. I think that size is a little bit like from my take, if it's a million dollars or less of sales, that's a very real argument of like, you could just produce, you could recreate that business in a few months.

Jack Carr: You could definitely recreate the business in a year.

John Wilson: Yeah, so like, but if you're talking about a 10 million business, or even a 3 or 4, I think it's a, more of a decision of like, okay, this is going to shortcut 3 years or 2 years of time if I buy this 3 million business. But if it's a million dollars, like, buying it's not going to shortcut that much time.

You could launch that. Yeah, that is very replicable.

Jack Carr: Yeah, early on I didn't realize that. And I beat myself up quite heavily over that. Now, I mean, it's irrelevant because this is the path that I've taken. So it doesn't matter how much I wish I would have done. But I did realize that at one point, probably around the end of year one.

Was that I could have recreated this business probably with a little bit less headache, different issues, but less headache overall by building it though. I think it would have inevitably been slower to get my second and third acquisition. So this give and take of what that would have, yeah, of speed.

John Wilson: It just depends like what's the game you're playing.

So like, if you're happy with five to 10 million and that's like where you want to end and that's a great life for you and your family, then like, you don't really need speed or maybe you can race there and just chill, we just have a different goal.

Jack Carr: Yeah, we haven't talked about too is the skill set that you need, right?

The skill set that you need to, when you buy at 1 million is different than the skill set you need when you build to 1 million. So when you're building to 1 million, I would say that you probably should at least have the skill set to be able to do the task that your business does, right?

If it's pest control, have your pest control license, maybe have worked in a pest control company versus if you're going to buy a one to 2 million pest control company, you can probably squeak by with not ever running it or like ever running a call.

John Wilson: I think I agree. I do think what would be fun.

I'm convinced that all of this ends in a franchise. I'm just convinced he owns and operated.

Jack Carr: That's why we keep bringing franchisees.

John Wilson: Plumbing franchise.

Yeah. Hey guys, if you want a plumbing franchise, LMK, DM me. But I do think who was it? One Tom plumbing? Like their thing is that they'll get you to 2 million in two years.

That makes sense. And like 2 million bucks, man. That's good. Like owner can probably take a hundred out of that and just slow grow from there on out. And like that sounds like a big win.

Jack Carr: That's the cool part too, is like, for anyone listening out there, who's kind of wondering what the net and what that looks like.

If you were to be in your business every day, not hiring management, not doing hyper growth, I mean, a two, three, 4 million business, it offshoots enough money that you can live extremely comfortably. Yeah. You're looking at 10, 10 to 20 percent net after paying yourself. Yeah. So if you're not redirecting all of that back into the business. It's a pretty little pot that you can, buy your second house on and right off into the sunset. So, I know we talk a lot about here, hyper growth and like these building these monstrosities. They're definitely painful.

There is a path that you grow to a million. The old owner of my company, I hope he's listening to this. He played video games all day. I shit you not played video games, had two techs running and lived in a 4, 000 square foot home that he rented for 3, 800 bucks a month.

John Wilson: That's funny.

Jack Carr: And he had like a brand new lifted truck GMC or Ford or something. But like decked out and like he lived a nice life. Like he lived in an upscale upper middle class neighborhood, played video games all day long, had two technicians. All the vans were paid off. Like there's just enough out of there that an awful 1 million that he's netting, two, 300, 000 bucks and living his dream.

John Wilson: Yeah. I've shared here. I struggle to conceptualize. But that doesn't mean that I'm right. I just like personally have always wanted to build something big. And optimizing for lifestyle doesn't interest me that much, but I know that I'm in the minority, so that's okay.

Jack Carr: This episode is sponsored by Home Service Engine. So, this is a company that I would highly recommend if you are thinking about getting onto ServiceTitan, or if you're like me, and you have to rebuild your ServiceTitan every few months because you set it up incorrectly. So this is my go to team for any ServiceTitan needs, and I really wish I had them from the start.

Give them a call today and start utilizing ServiceTitan to its fullest potential.

What I've been chewing on with you particularly is when you optimize for lifestyle though, does that potentially, is that like the death note for your business?

John Wilson: I mean, I think you run the real risk. So I'll give you, a couple of examples.

So how far do you optimize for lifestyle? Like do you bleed that company dry? Because I think you're just trading one stress for the other. Is my work life balance what I want it to be? No, probably not. Do I wish I had less stress at work? Sure. I got problems.

But I think if you don't have a business that constantly creates opportunity for your team, you lose your team. There's nowhere for them to go and that sucks. So like you're trading one stress for the other, like the people that I know that usually get driven. Like I know people who ran lifestyle businesses for a long time and eventually they were like I can't do this anymore. Like yes, I'm making a lot of money but like my work stress is so great because I can't hold on to anyone and like I want to be playing video games all Day or whatever, but then I have to go fix stuff because I can't hold on to text. Yeah, because there's no upward trajectory.

That doesn't sound like a fun problem to me

Jack Carr: No, definitely not and I know that makes sense. And so that's kind of what I was getting at is, I assume there's a world where somebody is running a purely lifestyle business, takes his, bleeds the company he's able to, or she's able to keep their people in place for, 10, 15 years.

And then they retire and right off into the sunset they sell it. Take a little chunk of money and go. Like, I think at that point, the business is dead though. Cause once that person leaves or takes any bit out more of the company, like in terms of time or money, then it just, they haven't been focusing on branding.

They haven't been focusing on marketing. They might have a customer list of 2000, 3000, but at the end of the day, like those customers are moving away slowly too. So that the list starts to dwindle and I just can't see it being a long term play

John Wilson: I can't either.

Like most of the people that I know, it ends up in business closure or like really close.

And it always seems to happen at 2 million. So at 2 million 2 million is like a tough phase, but I think we talk about that. It's like one of those plateaus where like you have to bring on your first manager. Yeah, but what if you don't bring on your first manager and the answer is you cash flow a lot So like I know people with businesses at two to three million dollars that have nicer cars than me more cars than me nicer house, boats, a lake house, and like, I'll do any of that.

But their business has been at 2 million since my business was at 2 million. Like that business has not moved in eight years. Whereas in that same time, we've gone from that size to our size.

Jack Carr: Yeah. One of our acquisition targets right now, he has the truck and the boat and you look at the truck and the boat and I go, Ooh, you are primed for acquisition because

you need money.

Jack Carr: You need money. That's definitely tough.

John Wilson: Well, and cause like you, they bring on these lifestyle costs and the business doesn't grow at all because you're not reinvesting in any way and, or you're limited I don't know. Maybe there's like a way where it does make sense.

I've only seen it like, yes, I have my stress. And I have my problems. I would prefer my to like, I can't grow this business and I have to, because my boat payment is too much like that does not sound.

Jack Carr: Yeah, and it's got to be industry related to, I mean, don't get me wrong there's some, can't speak today, across business types, but I do have a buddy that I'm thinking of right now who owns he owns three restaurants and he has the boats, he has the cars, he has the house and he's been just opening up one restaurant every couple of years.

And this market and has been doing decently well at it. And so do see that it can work, but like, it really has to be a good business. It's just pumping off extra money. But then again, the argument is he could probably have opened up six restaurants. So I guess it's how fast you want to grow too.

John Wilson: This is like capital allocation, man. What are you going to do with the cashflow that the business creates.

Jack Carr: It's all I can think about in a sense workshop.

John Wilson: Reinvested into property plan or equipment, can reinvest into hiring and reinvest into marketing, you can declare a dividend, you can pay down debt.

There's only like five or six different ways you can spend cash. Then, lifestyle is one of them. I just think it's a bad one. I'm trying, like, not to be judgmental, but like, y'all just reinvest. Always be reinvesting.

Jack Carr: It's personal specific and how much your lifestyle costs.

Yeah. I was going to ask you like, is there a point where you can start pulling out of the business a significant amount more, but that depends if you want to grow a significant amount more or if you don't, and then what is your definition?

John Wilson: Or how big can you get it? Yeah. How big can you get it?

Like, look, if you've got 5 million to be there, then you dripping out a couple hundred grand doesn't matter. Like pop off. Do you think, but if you're making a 200 of EBITDA and you're pulling 180 of it. That's an issue, but yeah, I do think like, when we start talking about seven figures of bottom line, and I think it should be percentage of profits that get pulled.

So like, how do you keep your burden to the company? Like lifestyle is a burden. So how do you keep your drag on the business's cash to under 5 percent of profits or 10 percent of profits? And if that's a hundred thousand dollars of profit, then like you should be reinvesting 90 and like make your personal drag 10.

So, okay, what can I do with 10 grand? Probably not much, but that's probably a good thing. So that's 800 bucks a month. Go buy a boat for 800 bucks a month. I don't know. But like I think what happens is they get a hundred thousand and they spend 90 so they do it the opposite way. Like my drag on the business this year will be 8 percent of profits.

Okay. Salary included.

Jack Carr: I don't know what my drag is, to be honest with you. I haven't looked.

John Wilson: Worth figuring out because then it helps you like figure out how much to reinvest so you can get to the next thing. Like you want to get to 20 and then when you're at 20 you'll have three or four million to beef it up and like series of decisions becomes a lot easier.

Right. Go buy your lake house and go skiing in Colorado.

Jack Carr: That is a ski house. That's what really, what is it?

John Wilson: Ski house. Yeah.

I also need you to buy a ski house and not have to buy my own.

Jack Carr: And not have to pay for it.

John Wilson: Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah.

Jack Carr: Oh, sweet, man. Well, that's, good. So definitely it's not as a clear cut.

It sounds like the buyer's build. It does sound like you're building no matter what, but if you are planning on buying sub 1 million, there is a decent argument for grinding it out, building to 1 million making sure that as you grow that business, keep your drag on the business low. You start making money.

Do not go out and spend that money. Like you got holes in your pockets, put it back in, invest.

John Wilson: To give this like some more color, I paid myself under 60, 000 until the business crossed 15 million a year. So like, lifestyle is a drag.

Jack Carr: Definitely.

John Wilson: And like we've grown our compounded annual growth rate is above 50 percent over the last eight years and like those two things are linked.

We couldn't grow if I consumed all the cash. Yeah. But it just doesn't make sense. Like the business has grown 26 times. Like who cares? Like salary is no longer the thing that matters in my life.

Jack Carr: Yeah. When did that point cross for you? That salary was no longer like you didn't worry about it. Your personal burden was no longer an issue to the company's burden.

As long as you didn't go above and beyond what your salary was.

John Wilson: Yeah. It was about that 15 mark.

Jack Carr: Oh, that's so far away.

John Wilson: Tell you reinvest, bro.

Jack Carr: Damn it. I was hoping you'd be like, ah, it's a four or five, maybe 6 million Jack and I'll be like, okay.

John Wilson: There's always a better use of money than like my personal lifestyle.

So like, I just don't care about it. So like, what can I use with, what can I do with 50 grand. Like with 50 grand, like that's higher. That's a marketing vertical. That's like almost anything that will actually create enterprise value. So maybe it's just like at some point you switch from cashflow to enterprise value, but like now enterprise value is the more interesting problem.

Jack Carr: Yeah. It should be too. Cause right. The your enterprise value is significantly worth a lot more than a boat, right. The 80, 000 boat or whatever. Interesting. I got to think on that. I'm not going to sleep tonight because of that.

John Wilson: Yeah, we got them.

Jack Carr: Yeah. I'm like, what is my burden?

Oh my gosh, I'm way too much. Go to my wife and be like, Hey, so heads up, we're taking a pay cut this year. She's going to say, no, you're not.

John Wilson: So it's like, what do you cost the business? Not what do you make the business? But what do you cost the business? And that would be a decent way to think about this.

And look, a lot of people don't want to think about it. And I get it. A lot of people want to like do the thing, pop off all good. And I'm probably grew faster than you. So I don't know what to say.

Jack Carr: I'm doing the math right now on, our expected net and what I get paid.

80 percent of profits.

John Wilson: Right?

Jack Carr: All right. 15, 15 percent of profits. All right. Not terrible. A little bit high.

John Wilson: I don't know. I mean people have to set their own number.

Jack Carr: No, it's interesting. And the way you phrased it though, it is definitely Interesting portion of that too. It's, Hey, what can I do with that money?

Otherwise?

John Wilson: Well, this was a good one. If you liked what you heard, give us a five star wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. It helps other people find us so that we can be popular on this small section of the internet. Make sure you check out ownandoperated.com. We have another workshop coming up June 4th It's going to be dope.

And make sure you sign up for the newsletter where we're constantly dropping bombs just like this. I think that's it. Tune in Thursday for the next one.

Jack Carr: Awesome guys. Thank you.

John Wilson: Thanks for tuning in to Owned and Operated, the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out. You can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.

I'll see you next time.

Get more Owned and Operated on YouTube, on Twitter, or with our weekly newsletter.

13,000+
Weekly Readers
Stay Ahead of the Curve with Industry-Specific Insights.

Scale your service business faster.

Dive into our exclusive content tailored for Home Services and surrounding niches.