The journey from tradesperson to business owner is filled with unexpected challenges—none more critical than building the right team to fuel your growth. In this candid conversation, we pull back the curtain on the real struggles of running a growing plumbing company and the hard lessons we've learned about hiring, training, and retaining quality people.

What keeps most skilled tradespeople from growing their businesses? Often, it's the inability to let go of control. "No one does it better than me" is the mindset that keeps countless service businesses stuck at the solo-operator level. We share our own struggles with delegation and how we finally broke through this common barrier.

The skilled labor shortage has created a hiring crisis across the trades, with workers able to jump from company to company seeking better opportunities. We discuss proven strategies for employee retention that go beyond competitive pay, including creating clear growth paths and maintaining positive company culture. As we learned the hard way, "You can teach someone the trade, but you can't teach someone to care."

Perhaps most revealing is our discussion about hiring mistakes—the impulsive decisions we made early on and how they shaped our current, more disciplined approach to building our team. We also explore the critical connection between proper pricing strategies and the ability to hire quality people, a relationship many new business owners fail to recognize until it's too late.

Whether you're a solo tradesperson considering your first hire or a growing service company looking to scale to the next level, this episode offers hard-won insights on building a team that shares your vision and can help take your business from surviving to thriving. Join us for an honest conversation about the human side of business growth and the leadership challenges few talk about openly.