Here’s a test I give every business owner I work with. Before sending your tech out on their first call of the day, walk up to them and ask: if you sell a job today, what will you personally make? If they reach for a spiff sheet, if they start muttering about percentages and...

This is a tough article to write.  Obviously, whenever you buy a company, you want to have it run as efficiently as possible.  The profit incentive is a massive driver and makes the United States economy and almost any free market, capitalist economy very strong.  It...

I bought my first business at 27 years old. I had no money. Literally none. I made a deal with the seller to pay him back monthly — essentially buying the business on a note. I just made payments to him every month while I tried to figure out how to run a company. That business...

Tom Howard did not set out to write a book about becoming a multi-millionaire. He set out to prove that the trades deserve the same respect, the same coverage in business publications, and the same cultural recognition as any tech startup or corporate career path. Because the numbers...

Tom Howard walked into Las Vegas and immediately did math that most of his competitors had never attempted. He calculated the total addressable market for residential HVAC in that city, identified the theoretical maximum market share a single company could realistically capture, and...

Tom Howard built Fetch-a-Tech from zero to a $6 million EBITDA company in roughly 16 months. The exit produced well over $50 million for the shareholders. But the path from “let’s sell this” to “funds are in the bank” was a grueling process that nearly...

Jayne, the accounting lead at Fetch-a-Tech, was closing the company’s books by the 4th or 5th of each month. Tom Howard expected the 10th to 15th and considered that good. Jayne delivered in four to five days. That speed — that clarity — is what allowed Tom to drop over a...

Tom Howard spent $1,600 sending a letter to the recent customers of a plumbing company he had just acquired. That single mailing generated $170,000 in revenue. That is a 106x return on a marketing investment — and it happened because Tom followed a precise playbook for what he calls...