What's Next: My 4 Pillars for Future Growth

This week was the launch of Owned and Operated LEGENDS and it feels especially appropriate to talk about the future.

After all, these episodes are absolutely stuffed with advice and info from the biggest names in home services.

LEGENDS is the right place If you're looking for inspiration to elevate your business for the future.

I’m planning for the future also. Hot off the heels of my State of The Wilson address, here are the four big pillars for future growth on my mind.

Let’s do it.

• Expand the brand's presence through increased visibility.
• Leadership development and internal promotions are key focuses.
• Multi-Market expansion time.
• Optimizing sales performance, taking advantage of all those leads.

What Was; What’s To Come

It’s a privilege to be able to give the whole team an update on the business. I’ve talked about it before, but we didn’t always operate that way.

But part of growing is having your team buy into the goal of growth.

While the State of The Wilson was about the awesome things we’ve done to that point, it was also as much about where we’re going next.

If the goal is to be a $100M business by 2030 then we have to lay out the path ahead.

Here’s that path.

1 - Brand Presence Rules

The brand is a big focus as we continue to drive growth here in our area. The highway corridor from here to Cleveland is jam-packed with businesses.

Everyone is trying to be the brand that gets stuck in your head. The one you remember at 2 a.m. when your basement is flooded.

Part of that presence is attacking marketing avenues that we’ve dipped our feet into but not fully explored.

Things like billboards, radio, commercials. So much of our focus has been on dominating SEO, LSA, and GMB, which has been killing it.

But at some point, you want the brand to be the vision a customer has of you—as something to be remembered.

There are real goals for expanding that presence:

• Partnerships with local and larger sports organizations.
• Attacking home mailing to the tune of 400,000 homes a month.
• Being a dominant force in that traffic corridor for advertisement.

We can get there and I’m pumped to go after it.

But that’s only part one. The other half? A multi-market expansion.

2 - Expansion Time

We went from a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man to a local dominant player in the last 12 months.

HVAC tripled, we added septic and drain, and excavation and plumbing are getting huge.

Part of scaling and growth is knowing when it’s time to expand. That’s a big part of what Chad Peterman talks about today on his Owned and Operated LEGENDS episode.

And I feel it in a big way.

A lot of our employees don’t remember—or weren’t around yet—when we just served Akron.

But we’ve seen a steady and slow expansion into our surrounding areas, including Cleveland in 2020.

Our service area as of now.

This is going to sound very “do as I say, not as I do.” Multi-location didn’t make sense for us as a smaller operation.

But now? Those processes are air-tight, we’re training better, and we have amazing leaders.

And we’ll need those leaders to keep coming from within.

3 - One of Us

Bringing up leadership from within isn’t as simple as an internal hire.

Part of it is having your org chart locked down and knowing who reports where.

The rest? Looking for people to emerge from within our organization and take roles as leaders.

There’s no greater joy with our team than seeing someone rise up. One of our most effective leaders at the moment was a call center worker five years ago.

Apprenticeships and internal hiring are a huge part of continued growth.

And that happened by laying out a career path. It’s time to expand on that.

This includes continued investment in training programs, including daily training and external programs like Nexstar and AI coaching services like Avoca AI.

I can’t stress enough how much Avoca has helped guide and shape techs and CSRs. A literal game-changer.

Part of that training includes new HR initiatives, where we want the department to help career map and navigate what those leadership tracks look like in the future.

Our apprenticeship program and training are growing all the time and will continue. Most apprentices go from hire to graduating into their own trucks in 60 days.

But techs need jobs. So, let’s talk about sales.

4. The Best Sales

I threw a bunch of great numbers out during the address, including those 190,000 phone calls.

It’s time to convert even more leads than before. That means building out a sales team that capitalizes on lead-gen and drives growth.

As with all of these pillars, this boils down to nailing processes and making the operating procedures even better.

When you already drive more leads than anyone else around, the process becomes a refinement opportunity.

It also means some big hires in the sales department, expanding into events, and using daily information to dictate how we attack each day from a sales perspective.

I’m excited for the future and where these four pillars will take us. Every day is as big as the last.

And that feels even better knowing we have plans in place. Start making your owns plans today.

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