Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast

Latest Episodes:

#233 How They Make $7M+ a Year From Their Plumbing Company Aug 14, 2025

Show notes

If you’re building a home service business in a rural market, the playbook looks a little different — and this episode shows exactly why. In this episode of Owned and Operated, John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Plumbing in Ohio, sits down with Laura and Brian Beltz, founders of Beltz, to unpack how they’ve grown from a one-truck startup in 2001 to a 49-person team — all while staying true to their community roots.
If you’re thinking about expanding into multiple markets, growing in a rural area, or taking the leap into acquisitions, this conversation is a masterclass in building a durable trades business from the ground up.
💼 Sponsored by Volca
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👉 Get 10% off all contracts—exclusive for Owned and Operated listeners.
📅 Book a time with the team
💡 Special Thanks to Modernize!
We've been using Modernize for our water quality leads, and it's been a game-changer. If you’re serious about growing your business with better water quality leads, HVAC leads, or home improvement leads, check them out:
🔗 Get Quality Leads Here
💸Sponsored by CFO Made Easy
Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make clear growth decisions.
📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover growth blockers
🎙️ Host:
John Wilson
🎙️ Guests:
Lara & Brian Beltz

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
📌 Disclaimer: Some links may include UTM parameters or affiliate relationships, meaning we may earn a commission if you make a purchase. Episodes may feature sponsors, but all opinions expressed are our own.

Double Your Profit Day #13 How To Get More Done With Fewer Meetings! Aug 13, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to Day 13 of the Double Your Profit Series — the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today’s lesson is short on purpose—because that’s the point: Cut Your Meetings in Half.
🕒 Meetings can be one of the biggest hidden drains on your profit. They pull people out of productive work, rack up payroll costs, and often could have just been an email.
💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
– Why most businesses have more meetings than they actually need
– How meeting time translates into thousands of dollars in payroll costs
– The difference between high urgency, high tactical meetings and “just because” meetings
– How to calculate the real cost of a recurring meeting
– Why leaders need boundaries on scheduling new meetings
– When to replace a meeting with a quick update or email
– How cutting meeting time increases focus on high-impact activities
💼 This Episode is Brought to You By Avoca AI
Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.
🔗 Schedule a demo
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Double Your Profit Day #12 The How to Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers Aug 12, 2025

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Welcome to Day 12 of the Double Your Profit Series — the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today’s topic is one of the fastest, easiest, and most effective ways to increase your bottom line: Using Scarcity to Raise Prices.
📈 Raising your prices isn’t about being greedy—it’s about charging what the market will bear, especially when demand is high and capacity is limited. If you’re fully booked and still discounting… you’re just giving money away.
💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
– Why 50%+ of businesses are underpricing (and that number’s probably low)
– How to recognize when competitors are charging more—and why you should match them
– What dynamic pricing really means (and why it works in both directions)
– How to use scarcity as a premium lever, not just a discount trigger
– When to remove discounts and charge full fees—especially during peak demand
– Real-world HVAC example: from dispatch fee waivers to full-price, no-discount sales
– Why you should give discounts on your terms, not the customer’s
– How to train your team to protect margin and apply pricing logic consistently
💼 This Episode is Brought to You By Avoca AI
Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.
🔗 Schedule a demo
📚 Keep Learning

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#232 Buying $200,000 in Leads - Is It Worth It? Aug 12, 2025

Show notes

If you’re trying to grow a home service business, your marketing budget is one of your biggest bets — and biggest risks. In this episode of Owned and Operated, John Wilson and Sam Preston host a no-fluff Q&A tackling real contractor questions on lead generation, paid ads, and when to actually bring in an agency.

They break down how to allocate marketing spend at every stage — from $1K/month up to $200K — and what it really takes to get traction with LSA, GMB, and PPC. You’ll learn how to play offense with your best-performing lead sources, why spreading your budget too thin kills momentum, and how to ride your winning channels like you stole it.

If you’re struggling to get leads from PPC or Google Ads, they also cover how to fix campaign waste, when landing pages are the problem, and how top operators manage their media vs lead-gen mix to scale past $10M.

Whether you’re just getting started or dialing in a multi-location growth strategy, this episode is a tactical deep dive into what’s actually working right now.

💼 Shoutout to Quick Staffers LLC

Need trained HVAC & plumbing CSRs at a fraction of the cost? Quick Staffers LLC specializes in placing top-tier global talent with the best SOPs and scripts.

🔥 Get $1,000 off your first placement here

💼 Extra Special Thanks to Service Scalers!

We’ve been partnering with Service Scalers to maximize our Local Service Ads (LSAs) and optimize our Google My Business profiles, and the results have been incredible. With hundreds of thousands in sales and 900+ calls in a single week, GMBs are now our top-performing organic lead channel.

Want to learn how Service Scalers can do the same for you?

🔗Check Them Out Here

💸Sponsored by CFO Made Easy

Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make clear growth decisions.

📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover growth blockers.

🎙️ Host:
John Wilson → https://x.com/wilsoncompanies
🎙️ Guest:
Sam Preston → https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampreston/

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Double Your Profit Day #11 The Secret to Maximizing Profit (and Minimizing Stress) Aug 11, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to Day 11 of the Double Your Profit Series — the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today we’re unlocking one of the most powerful, overlooked profit drivers in your business: Optimizing Your Schedule for Profit.
🧠 Every day your team is dispatched inefficiently is a day you’re leaving thousands on the table. The key? Prioritize urgency and opportunity—not just availability.
💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
– Why a $100 faucet job should never block a $2,000 water heater install
– How to build a priority system that makes dispatching profit-focused and clear
– What P1 through P4 scheduling looks like in real-time operations
– How tagging and visual job management boosts urgency and margin
– When to optimize for technician routing vs. technician performance
– Real-world examples of bad dispatch costing you thousands
– Why the “right tech on the right job” is more valuable than a perfect route
– How to train your dispatch team to follow a scalable, daily playbook
💸This Episode is Brought to You by CFO Made Easy
Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make clear growth decisions.
📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover growth blockers.

🔥 Think of this episode as the tactical reset your dispatch board has been begging for.
📚 Keep Learning

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Double Your Profit Day #10 Want Explosive Growth? Link Pay to Performance Aug 10, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to Day 10 of the Double Your Profit Series — the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today, we’re tackling something that’s as obvious as it is underused: Tying Compensation to What Actually Matters.

🧠 If you’ve ever said “I wish we had more sales” — but your sales team is on base salary with no commission — this one’s for you. No incentives? No results. It’s that simple.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Why lack of commissions kills sales motivation
How to instantly align incentives with business outcomes
What Charlie Munger meant by “Show me the incentive, and I’ll show you the result”
How to build a comp plan that actually drives performance
Why the culture you’re building is shaped by what you reward
The cascading effect of bad (or nonexistent) compensation design
Real-world example: how a friend’s lack of incentive tanked her motivation—on a Monday bike ride

💼 This Episode is Brought to You By Avoca Ai

Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.

🔗 Schedule a demo

⚙️ Compensation is a system, and systems create outcomes. If your team isn’t performing the way you want—check the scoreboard they’re playing on.

🔥 Think of this episode as your ultimate “wake-up call” to stop wishing and start rewarding.

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Double Your Profit Day #9 Maximize Your Earnings: The Secret to Efficient Work Aug 09, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to Day 9 of the Double Your Profit Series — the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today, we’re diving into one of the most overlooked drivers of bottom-line success: Training for Profit Awareness.
🔍 If your team doesn’t know the score, how can they help win the game? This episode is about building a culture where everyone—from the field to the office—understands what profit is, how it works, and how they can impact it daily.
💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
Why profit transparency is a superpower—not a liability
The right way to share financials without overwhelming your team
How monthly open-book meetings create alignment and accountability
A hands-on game that turns your P&L into a powerful teaching tool
How “the penny game” reveals the impact of pricing, labor, and overhead
Why daily gross margin tracking transforms team behavior
How consistent training builds a profit-first mindset across every department
💸 This Episode is Brought to You by CFO Made Easy
Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make confident financial decisions.
📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover your pricing blind spots.

📚 Keep Learning

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Double Your Profit Day #8 Fire Your WORST Customers (and make more money) Aug 08, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to Day 8 of the Double Your Profit Series —the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today’s topic might feel uncomfortable, but it’s a game changer: Fire Your Worst Customers. We’re talking about freeing your team, protecting your profit, and finally saying goodbye to the clients who drain your time, energy, and resources.

🧨 If you’ve ever had a customer who constantly calls, complains, escalates, and sucks the life out of your operations—you’re not alone. These clients don’t just cost money—they create chaos. This episode is your permission slip to cut them loose.

💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

Why bad customers cost more than you think (hard costs + hidden soft costs)
Real-world example: how one customer’s complaints eat hours of your team’s time
The surprising danger of having too much revenue from a single client
Why “revenue is vanity, and profit is sanity”
How to de-risk before firing a major customer
Why it’s smarter to shrink and focus on high-margin work
How to build a business around the customers you actually want

💼 This Episode is Brought to You By Avoca Ai

Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI helps teams identify issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.

🔗 Schedule a demo

📚 Keep Learning:

Send Us Mail!

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Double Your Profit Day #7 The Profit First Pricing Mindset EVERY 7-Figure Owner Uses Aug 07, 2025

Show notes

Welcome to Day 7 of the Double Your Profit Series —the go-to profit series for contractors, home service owners, and small business entrepreneurs. Today we break down the Profit First Pricing method, a mindset shift that guarantees you pay yourself first by building profit directly into your prices.
💰 Instead of calculating your price based on cost, we flip the script. This strategy ensures you never underbid, stop discounting, and always protect your margins. If you’ve ever felt stuck selling on price, this episode is your wake-up call.
💡 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
What Profit First Pricing really means and how to apply it
The simple formula: 25% net profit, 20% materials, 20% labor, 35% overhead
Why discounting is lazy selling—and how to stop
How to sell premium packages and win even when you're the most expensive bid
A real-world case study: Losing a sale by being too cheap
Why knowing your margins “frickin’ cold” is the key to staying profitable
How to shift from cost-first to value-first pricing
💸 This Episode is Brought to You by CFO Made Easy
Built a strong trades business? Let’s take it to $10M and beyond. CFO Made Easy offers part-time CFO services for home and trade service businesses—helping you boost cash flow, maximize profit per tech, and make confident financial decisions.
📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover your pricing blind spots.
📚 Keep Learning

Send Us Mail!

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#231 How AI Will Change Home Service Marketing Forever Aug 07, 2025

Show notes

AI isn’t coming — it’s here. And the way people find your business is already changing.

In this episode of Owned and Operated, John sits down with Sam Preston, CEO of Service Scalers, for a deep-dive on how AI is reshaping local search and why HVAC, plumbing, and home service operators need to evolve fast — or risk being left behind.

They explore what it means to “rank” in a world of LLMs, how showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview actually works, and why your SEO and Google Business Profile (GMB) are more valuable than ever. From review mining to AI-mode discovery to early signs of AI agents booking jobs, this episode lays out a real-world, contractor-first roadmap to dominate in the AI-driven search era.

You’ll also hear how Wilson’s early investment in SEO and programmatic content is now paying off — and why operators of every size should focus on backlinks, FAQs, and review quality today to future-proof their lead flow.

Whether you’re doing $1M or $50M, if you want to stay visible and competitive as AI search becomes the new front door to your business, this one’s essential.

💼 Extra Special Thanks to Service Scalers!

Want to learn how Service Scalers can do the same for you?

🔗Check Them Out Here

💼 Shoutout to Quick Staffers LLC

Need trained HVAC & plumbing CSRs at a fraction of the cost? Quick Staffers LLC specializes in placing top-tier global talent with the best SOPs and scripts.

🔥 Get $1,000 off your first placement here

💸Sponsored by CFO Made Easy

📈 Free Offer: Book a 45-min Financial Insight Session to uncover growth blockers.

🎙️ Hosts:
John Wilson → [https://x.com/wilsoncompanies]
Sam Preston → [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sampreston/]

Send Us Mail!

More Ways To Connect with OAO

Leave a Review