Tom Howard was lying on his back, sick with COVID, watching $9,000 a day drain from a company he had just signed over to himself, all because someone on his team could not resist talking about an acquisition. He lost a second deal months later for the same reason. Two costly,...

Lee’s Air did not add a single truck when they rebranded. But within months, customers were calling to say the company seemed to have tripled in size overnight. Trucks that used to blend into traffic were suddenly visible from a mile away. That is the power of a brand that...

Tom Howard sat alone in a hotel room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas — stuck because of high winds, COVID raging outside — with a laptop, a yellow notepad, and a mission: build a budget for a business that had almost no reliable historical data and a growth rate that would curve like a...

Tom Howard is the first to admit that he did not build Fetch-a-Tech alone. In fact, he gives direct credit to Gerry Finney, Dennis Thompson, and Brent Buckley — three individuals whose specific skills, combined, created something none of them could have built independently. The...

I didn’t expect to walk out of an autism therapy center with the clearest lesson I’d ever received about employee performance. But that’s exactly what happened. The founders of the California Autism Center, Will Forath and Amanda Nicholson, brought me in as an...

Most people walk past a disaster and see only the mess. Tom Howard walked into Fetch-a-Tech — a Las Vegas HVAC company hemorrhaging $9,000 a day — and saw a $50 million opportunity. That gap between perception and reality is where fortunes are made. But it takes a trained eye, a...

I want to push back on something I hear constantly in the trades: the idea that there simply aren’t enough good people out there. Ismael Valdez, who built a significant following in the home services space through his work in marketing and recruiting, had a line that stuck...

One of the fastest ways to destroy the performance of your team isn’t to pay them poorly. It’s to keep changing the rules. I see this constantly. Revenue dips. The owner gets anxious. He tweaks the commission percentage. He tightens the bonus threshold. He adds a new...

I had a sales rep named Bill. In 2017, he sold $7 million worth of HVAC. He was the best salesperson I had. And he was in my office constantly asking for more leads. He was making $700,000 a year in personal income. The average household income in our market was around $60,000....

People talk about culture initiatives. Morning meetings. Training programs. Motivational speakers. I’ve done all of it. I believed in all of it. And I can tell you from direct experience that none of it moved the needle the way a single pay plan change did at Lee’s...