Episode 6: Attracting A Players Only

In this episode of The Huge Insider Podcast, Guest Joshua Brown, founder of Brown’s Pressure Washing, shares four key practices for making your company appealing to top talent:

1. Define and live your core values – Align hiring, firing, and promotions with clear, purposeful values.
2. Set and celebrate high standards – Provide metrics, celebrate wins publicly, and reward excellence.
3. Build a leadership development culture – Go beyond training by mentoring your team for personal and professional growth.
4. Create a sense of ownership – Show transparency, encourage decision-making, and link success to team performance.

By putting these strategies into action, you’ll create a purposeful workplace that naturally attracts high-performing individuals who seek growth, clarity, and a chance to make a real impact.

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Show Notes

• Guest: Joshua Brown, Founder of Brown’s Pressure Washing
  • Website: Brown’s Pressure Washing
  • Additional info: pressurewashingpastor.com
• Podcasts Mentioned:
  • The Huge Insider Podcast
  • The Huge Transformations Podcast (available on iTunes and Spotify)
• Events:
  • The Huge Convention (August 20–22 in Nashville, TN)
• Phone: (804) 600-4843 (Leave a message to share wins, lessons, or feedback)

Resources

• The Huge Insider newsletter signup
• The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide
• Foundations platform trial offer
• The Huge Mastermind info page
• Facebook

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Transcript:

Sid Graef:
Welcome back, my friend. This is The Huge Insider Podcast, and I’m your host, Sid Graef. And if you’ve listened to the show, you already know that every week, what we’ve done is we’ve located seven-figure business owners, eight-figure business owners. We just ask them a simple question about the topic of the month.

This month’s topic is hiring. And so we ask them specifics, like, how would you make your business a place that A-players want to come and work? How do you attract A-players? And then we let them give the answer.

And the cool thing about this is, you’re getting—it’s lean. It’s husked. It’s like separating the wheat from the chaff. You’re getting 100% wheat and 0% chaff. You’re getting someone who is an expert, an experienced expert in their business. They’ve grown it to well over a million bucks a year. And they’re just going, “Oh, that’s the question. Here’s how we did it in our business.” And it is—you talk about cutting the learning curve and getting straight to the point—this is the time.

This week, we actually asked that question of Joshua Brown. Joshua Brown has Brown’s Pressure Washing in Nashville, Tennessee, a multi-seven-figure operation, and they focus deliberately on leadership—like helping build leaders within the company. But we asked him, “How do you have a company that A-players want to work at? How do you attract A-players?”

And this is what he had to say. So please meet my friend Joshua Brown, also known as The Pressure Washing Pastor. And I hope you take what you learn and immediately apply it and see the results that benefit your business, your family. We want you to win and prosper.

Joshua Brown:
Hey guys, this is Joshua Brown, founder of Brown’s Pressure Washing and Roof Cleaning, where we don’t just clean houses—we create jobs, make disciples, and serve our city.

I want to talk about a crucial topic for business owners: How do you make your company a place where A-players want to work? The truth is, great businesses don’t find A-players; they attract them by being the kind of place that that type of talent wants to be at.

Here’s how we do it at Brown’s Pressure Washing and how you can implement these same principles inside your business.

The first thing you have to do is define and live your core values. A-players don’t just want a paycheck; they want purpose. At Brown’s, our core values are hiring humble, honest, and hardworking people and “drive it” in everything we do. But here’s the key: core values can’t just be words on a wall. You have to hire, fire, and promote by them. That means if someone doesn’t align with your culture, you have to part ways—even if they’re skilled. You recognize and reward the behaviors that reinforce your values.

If you want A-players, start by asking, “Would my best team members say my company actually lives by what we claim to believe?” If not, let’s start there.

Number two: Set a high standard and celebrate it. A-players want to win. They don’t want to work in an environment where mediocrity is tolerated. At Brown’s, we set clear, high standards—whether hitting that revenue target, earning a five-star review on every job, or setting the standard in our industry.

But we also celebrate performance. That can be as simple as publicly recognizing the top performers in our team meetings, giving real-time feedback—A-players want to know when they’re doing a good job—or offering performance-based incentives that reward excellence. We actually give extra percentages to our best team members.

If you want top talent, create a scoreboard where winners know how they’re doing and get recognized for it.

Number three: Build a leadership development culture. A-players don’t just want a job; they want to grow. One of the biggest reasons high performers leave is because they don’t see a path forward.

We prioritize leadership development by holding weekly leadership huddles focused on growth and business acumen, offering advancement opportunities based on leadership potential—not just tenure—mentoring employees, not just training them for a role but developing them as people.

You don’t have to be a huge company to do this. Start by asking, “Am I investing in my people beyond their daily tasks?” If not, even your best hires will eventually move on.

Number four: Create a culture of ownership, not just employment. A-players want to be owners of the work, not just employees who clock in and clock out. At Brown’s, we create ownership by giving team members autonomy to make decisions in their roles, being transparent about numbers—everyone knows how the company is doing—connecting their success to the company’s success through performance-based bonus pay and revenue-sharing opportunities.

When people feel ownership, they show up differently. If you want to keep A-players, ask yourself, “Do my people feel like they have a job, or do they feel like they have a stake in something bigger?”

In closing, making your business a magnet for A-players isn’t about offering the highest amount of pay. It’s about creating a place that top talent wants to be at. Let me recap:

1. Define and live your core values. Be the “who” you want to see in others.
2. Set a high standard and celebrate it.
3. Invest in leadership development.
4. Create a culture of ownership.

If you do these things, you won’t just have to chase an A-player—they’ll find you. Hope this helps. If you want to connect, you can find me at Brown’s Pressure Washing or pressurewashingpastor.com today. Thanks for listening.

Sid Graef:
Ooh. Okay, great. So what did you learn from Joshua Brown? What did you learn about becoming a company that A-players want to come and work at?

See, because A-players are not just concerned about the money. They want purpose, fulfillment, growth. And if you have a company that provides those things, you’re going to attract people that want those things. How cool is that?

So more importantly, what you learn is—what are you going to do with it? So in every episode like this, we have a downloadable action guide. A great thing for you to do is to go to the show notes, click on the link, download the action guide, and apply what you’ve learned. Apply it to your business now so you can start to see the results. Because as we say often, we want you to win and prosper.

So that’s the thing. You can find the download at thehugeinsider.com, or you can just go to the show notes and click the button.

So a couple of quick things before we go. There are several ways that we work to accomplish our mission, and our mission is simply to help our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a business that serves them—to build a better business so that they can have time and money freedom. As I said before, we want you to win and prosper in the marketplace. We want you to have a better business, better family, more freedom, more time, and be able to serve greater in your community, in your area.

So there are a couple of things that we do to provide information for you. One is this podcast—it’s free. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but man, we’ve got men and women that just give you the truth, and they give you actionable insights. And what’s interesting is, there are a number of people in the marketplace that charge thousands of dollars for the same information that we generously give you for free.

I’m not doing that to virtue signal or say, “Oh, look how cool we are.” But just saying, look, it doesn’t matter where you start. The information is there. What matters is what are you going to do with it?

So we’ve got this podcast. If you haven’t checked it out, check out our other podcast—it’s called The Huge Transformations Podcast. You can find it on iTunes and Spotify. It’s also, when you go to thehugeinsider.com, you’ll find a link to it there. That podcast is interviews with seven- and eight-figure small business owners, and they don’t hold back. They just tell you about the journey, and you can learn from every single episode.

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Every summer, we do The Huge Convention—that’s our big event. That’s the ultimate event for home service business owners like you. This year, we’re back in Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd, and this is going to be our last year in Nashville for a while. We’ve already secured a new location in a different state for 2026. We’ll be announcing that at the conference.

Right now, tickets are dirt cheap—I mean, they’re really inexpensive—so you can grab yours at thehugeconvention.com before prices go up. And this is the event where real breakthroughs happen. It’s the place for networking, for education, and the biggest trade show in our industries.

Oh, and the last thing before we go—thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for investing your time to learn so that you can grow, so you can improve, increase your business. Thank you very much.

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Any of that—if you’ve learned from something that you’ve heard on this podcast and applied it and gotten a result, we’d love to hear from you. You can call and leave a message at 804-600-HUGE. So that’s 804-600-4843. 804-600-4843.

So if you call and leave a message, tell us about your win. Tell us about a failure. Tell us about how you’ve applied something that you’ve learned. We want to hear from you. We might just feature your story on an upcoming episode.

With that, that is it for this week. Don’t just listen—take action. We want you to win and prosper. I’m Sid Graef. This is The Huge Insider Podcast, and we’ll see you next time