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.