What are your top tips for running a successful business?

A few things I would do much earlier if I had to restart from scratch:

• stop second guessing every decision
• offload tasks I am weak at faster
• get around operators who are ahead of me

One of the biggest mistakes I made early on was trying to carry everything myself for too long:

• customer communication
• scheduling
• quoting
• follow-up
• invoicing
• operations

You eventually realize being “capable” of doing everything does not mean you should keep doing everything.

One thing that dramatically helped our admin time and speed-to-lead was building Quote Templates inside Jobber. Instead of rewriting the same explanations, service details, and pricing structures over and over, we standardized a lot of it. That sped up:

• response times
• onboarding
• consistency
• follow-up
• closing leads before they cooled off
  
  

Another thing I would recommend much earlier: always request a card on file and deposits.

That single operational shift reduced a lot of stress in the business:

• chasing payments
• awkward collection conversations
• cash flow inconsistency
• customers ghosting after work was completed

I also think mastermind groups are massively underrated if you join the right kind. Not motivational groups. Not “look how rich I am” groups.

Groups where owners actually break down problems openly and do real hot seats. A lot of the best operational advice I’ve gotten came from owners outside my own industry because they exposed blind spots I did not even realize I had.

One more thing I wish I had done earlier: record and review sales calls.

Using a phone system that records calls changed a lot for us because we could:

• review lost leads
• identify weak objection handling
• hear recurring customer concerns
• find patterns in successful closes

We started saving transcripts from our best calls and building internal scripts from real conversations that actually converted. That helped us improve:

• confidence on calls
• consistency
• onboarding
• objection handling
• closing percentages
  
  

Still learning constantly myself, but those are a few things I’d implement much earlier if I started over.

Great tips above.  For me is staying cool under pressure, breathing when it gets hard.  Trying to say the right thing when faced with conflict.  Getting over setbacks quickly.  

If I had to distill it all down, it would boil down to: 

Tell more people to buzz off.

Sometimes you get a gut feeling and want to tell someone to kick rocks right from the jump. But you're green and you're hungry, and you think it might pan out. The amount of times I had that gut feeling and decided to waste time anyway... If I could reclaim that time, I'd be further ahead. 

At the end of the day, every mistake is a learning opportunity. So I wouldn't trade it. But if I could talk to my younger self, I would say get good at telling people to take a hike and get good fast.

Always be polite and helpful, help animals they are gods angels without wings. Neighbors need help when they can't get things done you help them!