As a 23-year-old founder of CoatingLaunch and HVACQuote.ai, I’m obsessed with building smarter systems that scale service businesses. When Lance invited me onto his Exit Rich podcast, I knew it was a chance to unpack what’s actually working (and what isn’t) for contractors who want to explode past the $1M mark.

ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNItWyAvYLwt o explode past the $1M mark.

Marketing Is Your Growth Engine

One thing Lance and I agree on: penny‑pinching on marketing is the surest way to stay small. I’ve been fortunate to manage millions in ad spend for home‑service clients, and every time we pull back, the pipeline dries up. On the show we talked about why serious players treat Google and Facebook budgets like fuel – not a necessary evil.

Mindset Over Hacks: Own Your Success

Lance loves to joke that “nobody wants to look in the mirror and admit they’re the reason their company isn’t growing.” He’s right. Growing from zero to seven figures isn’t about some secret algorithm – it’s about taking ownership of your numbers, your processes and your people. If you’re blaming the economy or your vendor every time leads slow down, you’re giving away your power.

Speed Wins: Follow Up Fast

Here’s something that blew a lot of listeners away: at LB Capital they touch new leads ten times on the first day and seventeen times in the first week. That level of follow‑up isn’t annoying – it’s respectful. It shows you value the prospect’s time and you’re willing to earn their business. In my own companies we’ve baked similar cadences into our CRMs to make sure we never leave money on the table.

Solving Problems with Smart Tools

The agency world taught me a ton, but I’ve always wanted to create assets that make our clients’ lives easier. That’s why we built HVACQuote.ai: to give homeowners an instant, transparent price for a replacement system without waiting for a call back. In the episode I shared how we’re using this tool to lower cost per lead, weed out tire‑kickers and help contractors close more deals.

What’s Next

I’m just getting started. Over the next year we’ll keep adding features to HVAC Quote and helping more contractors see marketing as an investment, not a gamble. If you’re a young entrepreneur or a seasoned operator who wants to talk shop, I’d love to connect. Feel free to reach out via my contact page or drop me a DM on Instagram.

Related Stories

To understand Marko’s full background before this conversation with Lance, read Marko Sipilä: From the Floor Up. Marko also sat down with Dennis Yu to discuss the Dollar a Day strategy for contractors, and shared his experience entering and exiting ServiceLegend. See all of Marko’s industry connections on his connections page.

The fencing industry is one of the most underrated opportunities in home services. Low barrier to entry, strong margins, recurring demand from new construction and replacements, and a customer base that is growing as homeownership rates recover. But getting from startup to a million dollars in annual revenue requires more than good installations—it requires a system for growth.

In this conversation, Zane Laulainen and I outline eight steps for scaling fence businesses to one million dollars and beyond, drawing on strategies from clients like Armor Fence who have used these exact methods to grow rapidly.

Why the Fencing Industry Is Primed for Growth

Fencing is a resilient business. Unlike luxury home improvements that dry up during economic downturns, fencing serves fundamental needs: privacy, security, pet containment, and property delineation. Homeowners need fences regardless of interest rates or stock market performance.

The market is also fragmented. In most metro areas, there are dozens of small fence companies—many of them one or two-person operations—competing for the same customers. There is no national dominant brand in residential fencing. This fragmentation creates enormous opportunity for companies willing to professionalize their operations and marketing.

And the economics are attractive. Material costs for a typical residential fence installation run 30-40% of the project total, labor runs 25-35%, and overhead and profit make up the balance. A well-run fence company can achieve net margins of 15-25%, which is significantly better than many home service trades.

Step 1: Define Your Niche and Service Area

The fastest-growing fence companies are not generalists trying to serve everyone within a 100-mile radius. They pick a lane—residential privacy fencing, commercial security fencing, ornamental iron, vinyl, or wood—and they own it within a tightly defined geographic area.

Armor Fence, for example, focused specifically on residential wood and vinyl fencing within a 30-mile radius. By narrowing their focus, they were able to streamline their estimating process, optimize their material purchasing, train their crews for maximum efficiency, and build a reputation in a specific market rather than being unknown across a wide area.

Your niche should be determined by local demand, your crew’s capabilities, material availability, and competitive landscape. In some markets, vinyl privacy fencing is the dominant product. In others, wood or chain link dominates. Build your business around what your market actually wants, not what you think they should want.

Step 2: Build a Repeatable Estimating Process

When the owner is running every estimate, the business cannot scale beyond the owner’s calendar. A million-dollar fence company needs a repeatable estimating process that can be taught to others.

This means standardized pricing for common fence types and heights, pre-built templates for estimates and proposals, a defined workflow from lead to estimate to contract, and clear criteria for when to walk away from a job.

The goal is for any trained team member to produce an accurate, professional estimate that reflects your pricing strategy and brand. Technology helps here—estimating software that calculates material quantities and labor hours based on linear footage, fence type, and terrain eliminates guesswork and ensures consistency.

Step 3: Systematize Your Lead Generation

Word of mouth will get you to your first hundred thousand dollars. But scaling to a million requires predictable, controllable lead flow. The same digital marketing principles that work for HVAC and concrete coatings apply to fencing:

Google Ads and Local Service Ads capture homeowners actively searching for fence installation. These are the highest-intent leads and should be the first channel you invest in.

Facebook and Instagram ads featuring before-and-after installations, time-lapse videos, and customer testimonials create demand among homeowners who were not actively shopping. The Dollar a Day strategy is particularly effective here—spend a dollar per day on highly targeted local audiences and let the awareness compound over time.

Google Business Profile optimization is free and generates significant organic leads. Ensure your profile has photos of completed installations in various styles, accurate service area information, and a steady stream of five-star reviews.

Yard signs and door hangers remain effective for fencing specifically because your work is visible to neighbors. Every installation is a marketing opportunity—put a yard sign on the property during and after installation, and canvas the surrounding neighborhood with door hangers.

Step 4: Implement Speed-to-Lead Follow-Up

When a lead comes in, you have a five-minute window to make contact. After that, your odds of connecting drop precipitously. Implement an automated text message that fires immediately upon receiving a new lead, followed by a phone call within five minutes.

Then build a structured follow-up sequence: 17 touches in the first 7 days across phone, text, and email. This sounds aggressive, but most fence leads are shopping multiple companies. The company that responds fastest and follows up most consistently wins the job—not necessarily the cheapest.

Step 5: Hire and Train Crews Before You Need Them

One of the biggest mistakes growing fence companies make is waiting until they are overwhelmed with work to start hiring. By then, it is too late—you are scrambling to find people, cutting corners on training, and delivering inconsistent quality.

A million-dollar fence company needs at least three to four full-time installation crews. Start recruiting and training crew members when you are at 60-70% capacity, not 100%. This gives you time to properly train new hires, maintain quality standards, and have capacity available when seasonal demand spikes.

Look for crew leaders specifically. A good crew leader can manage a team of two to three installers, handle on-site decisions, communicate with customers, and maintain quality without the owner being present at every job. Finding and developing crew leaders is the single most important hiring decision a fence company makes.

Step 6: Streamline Your Operations

At a million dollars in revenue, a fence company is running multiple jobs simultaneously across different locations. Without systems, this becomes chaos. Key operational systems include:

Job scheduling and dispatch. Use software to schedule crews, assign jobs, and track progress. Your customers should receive automatic appointment confirmations and day-of reminders.

Material ordering and inventory. Build relationships with two to three fence material suppliers and negotiate volume pricing. Pre-order materials for confirmed jobs five to seven days in advance to avoid delays.

Quality control. Implement a final walkthrough checklist that every crew leader completes before leaving a job site. Take photos of every completed installation. This creates accountability and a portfolio of work for marketing.

Financial tracking. Know your cost per job, profit per job, cost per lead, close rate, and overhead ratio. If you cannot tell me your gross margin on last month’s installations within thirty seconds, you do not have adequate financial systems.

Step 7: Invest in Your Brand

As you scale from one crew to multiple crews, your brand becomes increasingly important. Customers are no longer hiring you—they are hiring your company. The brand needs to carry the weight that your personal reputation used to carry.

This means professional vehicle wraps on every truck and trailer, consistent uniforms for every crew member, a professional website with a portfolio of completed work, active social media presence featuring your work and team, and a review acquisition strategy that generates a steady stream of five-star Google reviews.

Every touchpoint—from the first phone call to the final walkthrough—should reinforce professionalism and quality. The companies that invest in brand-building at this stage create a durable competitive advantage that protects them even when new competitors enter the market.

Step 8: Build a Management Layer

The final step to reaching and sustaining a million dollars is removing yourself from day-to-day operations. This requires hiring or developing three key roles:

Operations manager. Manages crew scheduling, material ordering, quality control, and customer communication. This person ensures jobs run smoothly without owner involvement.

Sales manager or estimator. Runs estimates, presents proposals, follows up with leads, and closes deals using the standardized process you built in Step 2.

Office manager or coordinator. Handles phone calls, scheduling, invoicing, and administrative tasks. This role is the first hire many growing fence companies make, and often the most impactful.

With these three roles filled, the owner shifts from working in the business to working on the business—focusing on strategy, growth, key relationships, and the long-term vision.

From $1M to Multi-Location Growth

Once you have a million-dollar fence company with systems in place, the playbook for continued growth becomes about replication. Open a second location in an adjacent market, duplicate your systems, hire the same three key roles, and scale the same marketing and sales processes.

Armor Fence and other FencingLaunch clients have used this exact framework to expand beyond a single market and build multi-location fence companies. The principles are the same whether you are going from zero to one million or from one million to five million—systems, people, and disciplined execution.

Learn more about Marko’s approach to scaling home service businesses in From the Floor Up. See how these same growth principles apply to HVAC companies and concrete coating businesses. And learn the Dollar a Day strategy that powers affordable advertising for contractors in every trade.

What does it take to go from a first-time entrepreneur with a single client to running multiple businesses in the home services space? In this episode of the B Bright Podcast, Tyler Carlisle and I sit down for an honest conversation about the entrepreneurial journey—from my earliest days running an agency out of sheer determination, to building CoatingLaunch, to the lessons I have learned about leadership, scaling, and choosing which opportunities to pursue.

Starting from Zero: The Ramjet Racing Story

Every entrepreneur remembers their first client. Mine was Ramjet Racing—a local motorsports company that took a chance on a young, unproven kid who was convinced he could help them grow their business through digital marketing.

I had no portfolio. No case studies. No team. What I had was willingness to outwork anyone and a genuine belief that I could figure it out. I walked into Ramjet Racing and made a pitch that was probably terrible by any professional standard, but it was sincere. They said yes—partly because I was affordable, and partly because they could see I would put in the work.

That first client taught me everything that a business school could not. I learned how to manage expectations when results take longer than promised. I learned how to communicate bad news honestly and early. I learned that keeping a client is harder than getting one, and that the relationship matters more than the deliverable.

Most importantly, I learned that getting your first client is the hardest thing you will ever do in business—and once you do it, you know you can do it again.

The Agency Journey: Scaling Beyond Yourself

After Ramjet Racing, I started building what would become my first agency. The early days were chaotic—I was the strategist, the account manager, the content creator, the bookkeeper, and the salesperson. Every new client meant more work for me personally, and there was a ceiling on how many hours I could work before quality started slipping.

The inflection point came when I realized that I needed to stop trading time for money and start building a business that could operate without me being involved in every deliverable. This meant hiring, training, and trusting other people to do work that I had always done myself.

For any entrepreneur, that transition is terrifying. You have built something based on your personal standards, and handing it off feels like risking everything you have built. But it is also the only way to grow. A business that requires the founder for every client interaction is not a business—it is a job with extra risk.

I learned to hire for attitude and train for skill. The best team members I ever brought on were not necessarily the most experienced—they were the most hungry, the most coachable, and the most aligned with the values I wanted the company to represent.

The Pivot to Home Services: Why I Chose Coatings and HVAC

As my agency grew, I noticed a pattern. The clients who got the best results were not the flashiest or the biggest—they were the ones in home services. HVAC companies, concrete coating contractors, fencing businesses. These companies had real demand, repeat customers, and strong unit economics. They just needed help with marketing and operations.

I also noticed that the home services industry was dramatically underserved when it came to digital marketing sophistication. Most contractors were still relying on yard signs, truck wraps, and word of mouth. The ones who were running digital campaigns were often getting terrible results because their agencies did not understand the trades.

That gap—between the massive opportunity in home services and the lack of specialized marketing support—became the foundation for everything I have built since. CoatingLaunch was born to serve the concrete coating niche specifically, with coaching, marketing services, and operational systems designed by someone who had actually run a coating company.

HVACQuote.ai came later, applying the same principle to the HVAC industry but in a different form—a software product that any contractor could implement to give their website visitors instant pricing and dramatically increase lead conversion.

Leadership Lessons for Young Entrepreneurs

Tyler and I spent a significant part of this conversation talking about leadership—specifically, what it means to lead when you are young, unproven, and still figuring things out yourself.

Lead with transparency, not with authority

When you are a 23-year-old running a company, you cannot rely on credentials or decades of experience to establish authority. What you can do is be brutally honest—with your team, your clients, and yourself. Tell people what you know and what you do not know. Share your thinking process. Admit mistakes quickly and publicly. People follow transparency far more readily than titles.

Your energy is your most valuable asset

Young entrepreneurs often have more energy than wisdom, and that is actually an advantage. The willingness to make fifty cold calls in a day, to stay up until midnight finishing a client deliverable, to drive across town for a meeting that might go nowhere—that hustle compounds. You will not always have that energy, so use it strategically while you do.

Choose mentors carefully

The home services space is full of self-proclaimed gurus and coaches. Some are excellent. Many are not. When choosing who to learn from, look for people who have actually built what they are teaching—not people who have only taught. My partnership with Dennis Yu at BlitzMetrics works because Dennis has real experience with real brands at real scale. He has worked with Nike, the Golden State Warriors, and hundreds of small businesses. The advice comes from actual results, not theory.

Build businesses that solve real problems

The most sustainable businesses are not built on trends or hype—they are built on solving real problems for real people. Contractors need leads. They need systems. They need tools that help them close more jobs. Every business I have built serves one of those fundamental needs. When the problem is real, the business is resilient.

Solar Insights and Diversification

Tyler and I also discussed the solar industry and its intersection with home services. The solar market is evolving rapidly, and there are interesting parallels with HVAC—both involve significant home investments, both benefit from transparent pricing, and both have a customer base that is increasingly doing research online before making a decision.

While I am not building a solar-specific product today, the principles are the same. Any home service company that embraces transparency, builds systems, and invests in digital presence will outperform competitors who are still relying on outdated sales tactics. The specific trade matters less than the operating philosophy.

What Being a Future Leader Actually Means

The title of Tyler’s podcast—Future Leaders of Business—resonated with me because it captures something important. You do not become a leader by waiting for permission or by accumulating enough experience that everyone agrees you are ready. You become a leader by starting, by failing, by learning, and by staying in the game long enough to compound your lessons into genuine expertise.

Every contractor reading this who is stuck at two hundred thousand in revenue, trying to figure out how to scale, wondering whether to hire that first employee or invest in marketing—you are a future leader of business. The gap between where you are and where you want to be is not talent or luck. It is systems, persistence, and a willingness to evolve.

Hear more from Marko: building and scaling at 23 with Lance Bachmann, growing a $1M fence business with Zane Laulainen, and lessons from ServiceLegend. Browse all podcast and speaking appearances on the connections page.

What if you could advertise with the same strategy that Nike, the Golden State Warriors, and other billion-dollar brands use—but spend just one dollar per day? That is exactly what the Dollar a Day strategy delivers, and it is transforming how home service contractors approach digital marketing.

In this conversation, Dennis Yu and I break down how the Dollar a Day framework works, why it is especially powerful for contractors, and how to implement it step by step using Facebook ads.

What Is the Dollar a Day Strategy?

The Dollar a Day strategy was developed by Dennis Yu at BlitzMetrics. The core concept is deceptively simple: instead of spending thousands of dollars per month on broad advertising campaigns, you allocate just one dollar per day to highly targeted micro-campaigns. Each campaign has a single, specific objective and targets a narrow, well-defined audience.

At one dollar per day, a single campaign costs approximately thirty dollars per month. Even a contractor running ten simultaneous campaigns is spending only three hundred dollars per month—a fraction of what most agencies charge for management fees alone, let alone ad spend.

But the power of Dollar a Day is not in the low cost. It is in the compounding effect. Each dollar you spend builds brand recognition, trust, and familiarity with the exact people most likely to become customers. Over weeks and months, these micro-investments create a cumulative impact that rivals campaigns costing ten or twenty times more.

Why This Works for Home Service Contractors

The Dollar a Day strategy is particularly effective for contractors because of how home service purchasing decisions work. Unlike impulse purchases, hiring an HVAC company or a concrete coating contractor is a considered decision. Customers research, compare, and deliberate—often for weeks or months—before making a choice.

During that deliberation period, the contractor who stays top of mind wins. And that is exactly what Dollar a Day campaigns do: they keep your name, your face, and your work in front of potential customers throughout their entire decision-making process.

Here is why this matters: a homeowner whose furnace is working fine today does not need an HVAC company. But in six months, when that furnace fails on the coldest night of the year, they will call the company they remember. Dollar a Day campaigns make sure that company is you.

The Three Pillars: Why, How, What

Dennis structures Dollar a Day campaigns around three content pillars, which he calls Why, How, and What:

Why Content: Building Trust and Authority

Why content answers the question: why should someone trust you? This includes personal story videos, behind-the-scenes footage, community involvement, team introductions, and customer testimonials. The goal is not to sell—it is to build a human connection.

For a contractor, Why content might be a sixty-second video about how you got started in the business, a clip of your team volunteering at a local charity event, or a customer sharing their experience on camera. These videos run at a dollar per day to your local community, building familiarity and trust with thousands of people who may need your services someday.

How Content: Demonstrating Expertise

How content shows that you know what you are doing. This includes educational videos, tips and tricks, process walkthroughs, and explanations of common problems. You are not giving away trade secrets—you are positioning yourself as the expert.

Examples for HVAC contractors: a video explaining the difference between single-stage and variable-speed furnaces, a walkthrough of what happens during a maintenance visit, or tips for improving indoor air quality. For concrete coating contractors: a time-lapse of a garage floor transformation, an explanation of why preparation matters more than the coating itself, or a comparison of different coating systems.

This content runs at a dollar per day to people who have already engaged with your Why content—they watched your story video, visited your Facebook page, or interacted with a previous post. They already know who you are. Now they are learning that you are genuinely good at what you do.

What Content: Making the Offer

What content is where you make the ask. This includes promotional offers, seasonal specials, financing options, and direct calls to action. But critically, this content only goes to people who have already seen your Why and How content. They know you, they trust you, and they believe you are competent. The offer is simply the trigger that converts awareness into action.

For HVAC contractors, this might be a fall tune-up special, a financing promotion for system replacements, or a link to get an instant quote through HVACQuote.ai. Because the audience is warm—they have been seeing your content for weeks or months—the conversion rate on these offers is dramatically higher than cold advertising.

How Dennis Used This with Nike and the Golden State Warriors

The Dollar a Day strategy is not some small-business workaround. Dennis developed and refined it while working with some of the biggest brands in the world. With Nike, the strategy was used to amplify athlete content across specific demographics—spending minimal amounts per piece of content but running dozens of micro-campaigns simultaneously to different audience segments.

With the Golden State Warriors, Dollar a Day campaigns turned player interviews, behind-the-scenes footage, and fan testimonials into a sustained brand-building machine that ran year-round—not just during the season.

The lesson for contractors is profound: if this strategy works for billion-dollar brands with unlimited budgets who could spend any amount they want, it works because of its effectiveness, not its cost. The targeting precision and content sequencing create results that brute-force spending simply cannot match.

Setting Up Your First Dollar a Day Campaign

Here is a practical, step-by-step guide for a contractor who wants to implement this strategy:

Step 1: Create three pieces of content. Record one Why video (your personal story or a customer testimonial), one How video (an educational tip related to your trade), and one What video (a promotional offer or call to action). Each video should be sixty seconds or less. Smartphone quality is perfectly fine.

Step 2: Set up your Facebook Business Manager. Create a Facebook ad account if you do not have one. Install the Facebook pixel on your website so you can track visitors and build retargeting audiences.

Step 3: Launch your Why campaign. Create a campaign with the objective of video views. Target your local service area—typically a 25-mile radius around your shop. Set the budget to one dollar per day. Use your Why video as the ad creative. Let it run.

Step 4: Build your engagement audience. After your Why video has been running for one to two weeks, create a custom audience of people who watched at least 50% of the video. These are people who showed real interest—not just a passing glance.

Step 5: Launch your How campaign. Target your new custom audience (people who watched your Why video) with your How content. Again, one dollar per day. These people already know who you are. Now they are learning what you do and how well you do it.

Step 6: Launch your What campaign. After another one to two weeks, create an audience of people who engaged with both your Why and How content. Target them with your What content—your offer, your call to action, your link to get an instant quote. One dollar per day.

Step 7: Rinse and repeat. Create new content regularly—even one new video per week—and feed it into the same three-pillar system. Over time, you build a content library and a constantly growing warm audience that knows, likes, and trusts you.

The Math: Why Three Dollars Per Day Outperforms Three Thousand

Consider two contractors in the same market:

Contractor A spends three thousand dollars per month on Google Ads managed by an agency. They get cold leads who are price shopping across five competitors. Their close rate is 25%. Their cost per acquisition is four hundred dollars.

Contractor B spends ninety dollars per month on Dollar a Day campaigns (three campaigns at one dollar per day). Their leads come from people who have watched their videos, know their story, and trust their expertise. Their close rate is 55%. Their cost per acquisition is sixty dollars.

Contractor B is spending 97% less on marketing and closing at more than double the rate. This is not hypothetical—it is the pattern Dennis and I see repeatedly across the hundreds of contractors we work with.

Getting Started Today

The Dollar a Day strategy is not complicated. It does not require an agency. It does not require a massive budget. It requires three things: willingness to create simple, authentic content; patience to let the compounding effect build over weeks and months; and discipline to stay consistent.

Learn more about the partnership between Dennis Yu and Marko Sipila and how their collaboration drives results for contractors. See how Marko applies this strategy across HVAC companies and concrete coating companies. Before spending on ads, make sure you can hold your marketing agency accountable, and avoid the marketing lie that bankrupts businesses.

Every entrepreneur has a chapter in their story that shaped everything that came after. For me, that chapter was ServiceLegend—my entry into the home services coaching space, my exit from it, and the lessons I learned about scaling businesses through three distinct levels of growth.

In this podcast episode, I share the full story: how I joined ServiceLegend, what I built there, why I left, and how that experience led me to launch CoatingLaunch and eventually build HVACQuote.ai.

How I Got Into ServiceLegend

Before ServiceLegend, I was deep in the concrete coating world. I had built my own coating company from the ground up—literally working on floors, managing crews, running estimates, and handling every aspect of the operation. I understood the trade not from a textbook but from years of hands-on experience.

ServiceLegend was a coaching and education platform focused on helping home service contractors grow their businesses. They needed someone who had actually done the work—not just talked about it—to help develop their training programs and work directly with their clients.

The fit made sense. I had the operational experience, the results to back it up, and a genuine passion for helping other contractors avoid the mistakes I had made early on. I joined and threw myself into building out the coaching program, creating educational content, and working one-on-one with contractors who were trying to scale.

What I Built at ServiceLegend

During my time at ServiceLegend, I worked with dozens of home service contractors across concrete coatings, HVAC, fencing, and other trades. The work was deeply rewarding because I could see the direct impact—contractors who were stuck at two hundred thousand in revenue breaking through to five hundred thousand, then seven figures.

The core of what I taught was operational excellence: how to build systems that did not depend on the owner being present at every job, every estimate, and every customer interaction. This included standardized sales processes, follow-up systems, crew management frameworks, and financial tracking disciplines.

I also developed training around digital marketing for contractors—particularly the principles of transparent pricing, speed-to-lead follow-up, and content marketing that I would later refine into the strategies behind HVACQuote.ai and CoatingLaunch.

Why I Left: The Decision to Go Independent

Leaving ServiceLegend was not about dissatisfaction. It was about alignment. As I worked with more contractors and refined my understanding of what actually moved the needle for home service businesses, I realized that I wanted to build something more focused and more deeply integrated into the tools and technology that contractors needed.

Coaching is valuable, but it has limits. You can teach a contractor what to do, but if they do not have the tools to execute, the knowledge alone does not produce results. I wanted to build products—actual software and systems—that made it easier for contractors to implement the strategies I was teaching.

That vision became CoatingLaunch for the concrete coating industry and eventually HVACQuote.ai for HVAC contractors. Instead of just telling contractors to offer transparent pricing, I built a tool that let them do it instantly. Instead of just advising them to improve their follow-up, I helped them implement systems that automated the process.

The Three Levels of Scale in Any Home Service Business

One of the most important frameworks I developed through my coaching work—and one that I still use with every contractor I work with today—is the Three Levels of Scale. Every home service business, regardless of trade, goes through these same stages. Understanding where you are determines what you should focus on.

Level 1: Zero to $20K Per Month (The Hustle Phase)

At this level, the owner IS the business. You are doing the work, running the estimates, answering the phone, managing the books, and marketing yourself primarily through word of mouth and personal relationships.

The key priorities at Level 1 are skill mastery and reputation building. Your work needs to be excellent because every job is a referral opportunity. Your Google reviews need to be growing steadily. Your local reputation needs to be solid enough that when people ask “who should I call for a fence/coating/HVAC system,” your name comes up.

The mistake most people make at Level 1 is trying to scale too fast. They hire crews before they have consistent lead flow. They invest in marketing before they have a sales process. They expand their service area before they own their local market. Focus first on being the best operator in your immediate area.

Financial discipline matters here too. Many contractors at this level make the mistake of spending every dollar they earn—on equipment, a new truck, or personal lifestyle—instead of building a cash reserve. The companies that make it to Level 2 are the ones that reinvest intelligently and maintain enough cash to weather the inevitable slow months.

Level 2: $20K to $80K Per Month (The Systems Phase)

Level 2 is where most home service businesses either break through or break down. Revenue is growing, demand is increasing, but the owner is becoming the bottleneck. There are more leads than one person can follow up with, more jobs than one crew can handle, and more administrative work than one person can manage.

The entire focus at Level 2 is building systems and hiring people to run them. This is where you need a repeatable sales and estimating process that someone other than you can execute, a structured follow-up system with defined touchpoints and automated elements, at least two to three installation crews with trained crew leaders, an office manager or coordinator handling scheduling, calls, and admin, and financial systems that give you real-time visibility into profitability.

The hardest part of Level 2 is the mindset shift. Most contractors got to where they are because they are good at doing the work. Now they need to be good at managing people who do the work. That is a completely different skill set, and many owners struggle with letting go of control.

Dennis Yu and I talk about this often—the contractors who scale are the ones who accept that their new job is building the machine, not running it. Your value to the business shifts from personal production to organizational design.

Level 3: $80K+ Per Month (The Leadership Phase)

At Level 3, the business runs without the owner’s daily involvement in operations. Systems are in place, people are trained, and the machine produces consistent results regardless of whether the owner is on-site, on vacation, or focused on something else entirely.

The owner’s role at Level 3 is strategic: identifying new markets for expansion, building relationships with key partners and suppliers, developing the management team, monitoring financial performance and making capital allocation decisions, and building the brand for long-term competitive advantage.

This is the level where you start thinking about multi-location expansion, diversification into adjacent services, or building ancillary businesses that serve your existing customer base. For me, Level 3 thinking is what led to building HVACQuote.ai—a software product that serves the same contractor audience but creates a scalable revenue stream that is not tied to my personal time.

The Lesson: You Have to Go Through Each Level

One of the most important insights from my ServiceLegend experience is that you cannot skip levels. Contractors who try to jump from Level 1 to Level 3—hiring a big team, signing an expensive agency contract, expanding to multiple markets—before they have mastered the fundamentals almost always crash back down.

Each level builds the foundation for the next. Level 1 teaches you the craft, builds your reputation, and establishes your local presence. Level 2 teaches you management, systems, and how to scale beyond your personal capacity. Level 3 teaches you leadership, strategy, and how to build a business that creates value independent of your daily involvement.

The timeline varies—some contractors move through all three levels in two to three years, while others take a decade—but the progression is the same. And the contractors who respect the process, do the work at each level, and build genuine capability before moving to the next level are the ones who sustain their growth.

What Came After: CoatingLaunch and HVACQuote.ai

My exit from ServiceLegend was the beginning of the most productive phase of my career. CoatingLaunch took everything I had learned about scaling coating businesses and packaged it into a more comprehensive, tool-driven coaching and growth program. HVACQuote.ai took the principle of transparent pricing and turned it into a SaaS product that any HVAC contractor could implement on their website in minutes.

Both businesses were born from the same insight: contractors do not just need advice—they need tools, systems, and implementation support that make the advice actionable. That is the gap I saw at ServiceLegend, and it is the gap I have spent every day since trying to fill.

Read my full story in Marko Sipilä: From the Floor Up. Learn how the strategies I teach apply to HVAC companies and concrete coating businesses. And see how the Dollar a Day strategy that Dennis Yu and I developed gives contractors an affordable alternative to expensive agency contracts.