The Huge Insider

Episode 12: Performance Based Pay pt. 2

In this episode of the Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef and guest Jared Skinner discuss how to create performance-based pay structures that motivate and reward high-achieving employees without sacrificing quality or compliance. You’ll learn about the importance of setting clear standards, understanding legal requirements (like the 7(i) exemption), implementing base pay combined with commission, and establishing guardrails to maintain quality. By tracking performance with dashboards and scoreboards, you can “gamify” your team’s efforts and ensure everyone is incentivized to perform at their best. These insights are especially valuable for service-based business owners looking to improve profitability, increase employee retention, and maintain high-quality services.
Show Notes
Guest:
Name: Jared Skinner
Owns multiple seven-figure businesses (window cleaning, concrete coatings, holiday lighting)
Topics Covered:
Why performance-based pay boosts production
The 7(i) exemption and legal requirements
Combining a base hourly wage with commission
Setting guardrails to ensure service quality
Tracking and displaying performance metrics (gamification)
Resources (Mentioned & Essential):
The Huge Insider newsletter signup
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide
The Foundations platform trial offer
The Huge Mastermind info page
Facebook Group
The Huge Convention tickets and info
Call in with questions or stories: (804) 600-HUGE (804-600-4843)
TranscriptSid Graef (Host):Welcome back, my friend, to the Huge Insider Podcast. My name is Sid Graef, and this is the Huge Insider Podcast. It is the show for home service professionals that are striving to break the million-dollar revenue mark. If that's you, you're in the right place. Now, if you're already over a million in revenue, guaranteed, you're gonna get even more out of the show.
So why do we say this is the show? There are a lot of people with big opinions and not so much experience. There's a lot of fake gurus out there, and we want to help you skip the B.S. and get real wisdom from experienced business builders. That's why we've gathered wisdom and insight directly from seven- and eight-figure business owners. These folks are running companies doing anywhere from two to forty million dollars a year. We bring you their best insights and experiences, all focused on a single topic each month. These are real owners—no armchair philosophers or fake gurus. They've done it. These are the ones quietly building empires behind the scenes. They're not on social media looking for attention; they're in business making things happen.
Last month, we focused on hiring A-players. This month, we answer the question: What do you do once you hire the right person? When you get your A-player, what do you do about onboarding, pay structure, training, and more? Today, we're diving back into performance-based pay: how do you structure your pay plan to reward, motivate, and retain high performers?
You're gonna meet Jared Skinner today. Jared owns a window cleaning company, a concrete coatings company, and a holiday lighting company, and they're all seven-figure companies. He probably owns more than that, and I don't even know about it. But remember, the goal here is to structure your pay in a way that is motivating to your employees and profitable for your company. This can be a tricky tightrope to walk. Everything Jared talks about is in the show notes. Just to be clear, he’s not an attorney or a tax professional—he’s a business owner speaking from experience. If there's a specific tax or legal question that comes up, talk to a professional. That said, the last thing before we dive in: we’ve got a downloadable action guide for you, and it’s available at thehugeinsider.com. With that, let’s dive into today’s topic.
Jared Skinner (Guest):Everyone, welcome to the Huge Insider Podcast. Today, I'm gonna talk a little bit about pay for performance. There are a lot of different ways to structure pay scales in order to get paid for performance, and a lot of times we don't know exactly how to structure it or if there are rules for it or how it works. I kinda wanna give everyone a little bit of an overview of this structure.
Just to lay the foundation: when we first started, we always paid an hourly rate. The problem I always had was employees would come to me saying, “Hey, I think I need a raise.” I'd look at their performance and say, “Man, if you would clean more windows in a day, then I can pay you more.” And they'd say, “Well, if you pay me more, I'll clean more windows.” It just seemed like this battle over and over—trying to figure out how much people were worth and how much we could pay them.
We decided to shift into a performance-based pay structure, more of a commission base. Once we decided to do that, our employees instantly made an extra four to five dollars more per hour as soon as we shifted, and their production rates went up significantly. The great thing about this structure—what’s really beneficial—is that people, in a sense, are almost in charge of their own pay. They don't need to come to you to ask for a raise. When you structure the right pay system, they place themselves right into the pay structure they deserve. It was better for everybody. We did better as a company. We had way more production, and the guys were making more money. What it really does is weed out people who just want to show up and punch the clock.
It’s important to know how the structure works, and there are a few legal things out there that you need to know about as well. There’s what's called a 7(i) exemption. It basically allows you to pay commission. If you pay straight commission, you don't have to pay overtime if you meet certain criteria. One is that you're in a retail or service-based business, which we are. Number two is that 50% of the employee’s pay is coming from commissions. The other thing you need to know is that, if you're paying strictly commission and not overtime, they need to be making at least 1.5 times the minimum wage in your state. If your minimum wage—for easy math—is $10 an hour, then they need to be making at least $15 an hour (1.5 times) to avoid paying overtime. You have to keep records of the hours worked, the commission earned, the total pay for the week, and whether it meets those criteria.
When you get into commission-based pay and performance-based pay, keep that in mind. What we've found is that people really like it. You start to attract really motivated people, and when you show them the potential, they can get hungry and produce some really nice numbers. One thing I've learned from experience is that if you're not careful, they start to go too fast and compromise quality a little bit. You have to put some guardrails on. If you don't, they’ll do really fast work, get a lot done, but it’s not very good, and you’ll get more callbacks. So you have to learn to put guardrails on.
Let me give you an example of how we do that and how we structure our pay to stay in compliance with the things I've discussed and to keep people on track. Number one, we start with giving our employees a base hourly rate. Ours is almost like a combination: it's a minimum base hourly rate—let’s say $18 an hour—or commission, whichever is more. We give them a few months to get up and going, and if they're not making more than the $18 an hour on commission after a few months, we move on and look for other people. That person doesn't really care and isn’t that hungry, so we don't want them. We have a standard, and that's where it’s set: base hourly or commission, whichever is higher.
That’s not the only thing we do. To qualify for the highest commission rate, we tier our commissions—22%, 24%, or 26%. Then we have guardrails, right? Guardrails might be no callbacks, showing up on time, taking before and after pictures to prove we did everything correctly, completing your full checklist, asking for a customer review, etc. If you do all those things during the day, you qualify for your commission. If you get a callback, you don't qualify for the commission and you get the base hourly rate for the day. That’s the way we structure it to help keep people in check, which works really well because it doesn't take that much longer to do a good job and keep clients happy.
If you haven't dove into performance-based pay, there are a lot of ways to structure it, but this is what we’ve learned. To recap:
Your production rates for all employees are going to go up—a lot—if you do this correctly.
Make sure you are falling within the 7(i) exemption. Research it and set yourself up properly.
Keep really good records. We’ve had the Labor Department called on us, we’ve been audited, etc., but we have detailed records, so we were fine.
Put guardrails on to maintain quality.
Have a way to track it all, with something like scoreboards. When you gamify it—display production rates, upsells, and so forth—people don't want to be the worst. We have a standard: if you’re above this number, you’re in the green; if you’re below that number but above this other number, you’re in the yellow; and below that number, you’re in the red. All our technicians can see if they’re red, yellow, or green, and it really motivates them.
When you start to gamify it, it makes a big difference, and it gets fun. The guys really enjoy it. So if you haven't done performance-based pay, you should definitely look into it. There’s a ton of ways to structure it. These are the ways that I've found to be most successful. Hope that helps everybody. We'll catch you next time.
Sid Graef (Host):So what did you learn about pay structure and performance-based pay? More importantly, what are you going to do with it? These strategies are simple but powerful. The foundation of every successful business is key employees who do great work, who you can retain, so they can continue to perform. That cohesiveness moves your company forward.
So here we go—what are your next steps? Take action. Everything we covered today is in the show notes, but the most important thing is your downloadable action guide. It’s a summary of today’s episode with bullet points and how to implement it in your company. We put together a five-page action guide to help you execute this week’s strategy, and you can grab it at thehugeinsider.com.
Here are a handful of other ways you can level up your business:
Join our free newsletter, also called The Huge Insider. We give weekly insights straight to your inbox, and sometimes feature trusted partners—people with a product or service for home service businesses that we’ve used and find valuable. That’s also available at thehugeinsider.com.
Facebook group: Find it at thehugeinsider.com or search “Huge Insider” on Facebook. It’s a vibrant community where people help each other. We often do pop-up Q&As and ask-me-anythings with our seven- or eight-figure owners.
The Huge Convention is the Super Bowl event for home service businesses. It’s a big celebration and a time to learn how to grow your business. It’s the ultimate event for home service business owners, and a place where breakthroughs happen. This year it’s in Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd. Tickets are not expensive, but the price goes up on May 1st. You can get them at thehugeconvention.com.
This is where real breakthroughs happen. It’s the place for networking, education, and the biggest trade show in the industry for exterior cleaning and holiday lighting. This year, we’re doing something ridiculous the day before the convention—on August 20th—we’re calling it Christmas in August. If you’re looking to add revenue to your business, or keep your team busy in the winter months while adding profit, holiday lighting is phenomenal. We’ll spend an entire day on how to sell, price, install, and profit from holiday lighting. Just come one day early, also at thehugeconvention.com.
The Huge Mastermind: If your company’s already over a million in revenue, you’ve got more than five employees, and you want to grow and scale—like going from 1 million to 5 million or 1 million to 10 million—this is the fast track to a freedom business. You’re going to learn and implement the Freedom Operating System to get time and money freedom predictably. We generally open the doors for the Huge Mastermind once a year in August at The Huge Convention. If you want to get on the waiting list, go to thehugeconvention.com, scroll down, and hit “Mastermind.” All the information’s there.
That’s it. Thank you so much for listening. Really appreciate you taking the time. If you find this podcast valuable, share it with friends, post it on social media, and leave us a review. If you have a topic you’d like to see covered, or a success story—or a failure you learned a ton from—call us the old-fashioned way at (804) 600-HUGE (804-600-4843). Leave us a message, tell us all about it, and we might just feature you on an upcoming episode.
That’s it for this week. Don’t just listen—take action. I’m Sid Graef, this is the Huge Insider Podcast, and we want to help you win and prosper in the marketplace. We’ll see you next time.

Episode 11: Performance Pay for Techs with Ethan Moore

🎧 Podcast Summary: “Why I Love Performance-Based Pay”
Speaker: Ethan Moore, Moore Exteriors (Branson, MO)
Ethan Moore explains the benefits of switching from hourly pay to performance-based (commission-style) pay for technicians. In his system, lead techs earn a flat 20% of the daily revenue from the jobs they complete. This incentivizes speed, efficiency, and quality, because techs earn more when they do more. For example, if a technician like Larry completes $1,000 worth of work in a day, he earns $200. If he becomes more efficient and completes $2,000, he earns $400.
This model encourages:
Efficiency: The faster a job is completed (without sacrificing quality), the more the tech can do—and earn.
Ownership: Techs see a direct link between effort and income.
Company Growth: More work gets done per truck and per day, increasing capacity and profits.
 
Show Notes:
Resources:
Elevate by Tommy Mello
The Huge Insider newsletter signup
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide
The Foundations platform trial offer
The Huge Mastermind info page
Facebook
Call-in line to share wins or lessons: 804-600-HUGE (4843)
 

Episode 10: Hiring - Interview Keys

In this episode, host Sid Graef continues with the month’s main theme: hiring. He introduces Jim DuBois, a seasoned business owner from “Squeegee Pros,” who’s spent over 25 years building a 45-plus-employee team. Jim shares his strategies for creating a company culture that naturally attracts and retains A-players, from designing compelling job ads and hosting engaging hiring events to filtering out uncommitted applicants who don’t fit his team’s mission. His core takeaway: Build a great company first, and great employees will come. If you need to expand your workforce with high-quality team members, Jim’s approach offers fresh tactics and valuable clarity on how to stand out as a top-tier employer.
Show Notes
Guest: Jim DuBois, Owner of Squeegee Pros (Window Cleaning/Pressure Washing, ~45 employees)
Key Topics:
Crafting “magnetic” job ads aimed at your ideal candidate demographics.
Hosting hiring events that reveal real A-players through engagement and Q&A sessions.
Emphasizing the importance of presenting a business that top talent wants to join.
Using your company vision, culture, and “unique selling propositions” to attract and retain the best employees.
Mentioned:
Squeegee Pros (no direct link provided)
WindowWashingWealth.com (Jim’s high-level coaching company; URL mentioned only in passing)
Resources
The Huge Insider newsletter signuphttps://thehugeconvention.com/insider
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guidehttp://www.thehugeinsider.com
The Foundations platform trial offerhttps://thehugeconvention.com/1foundationstrial
The Huge Mastermind info pagehttps://www.thehugemastermind.com/interest
Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/hugefoundations
Transcript
Sid Graef (Host):Welcome back to the Huge Insider Podcast. Hey, my friend, it’s Sid Graef here, and The Huge Insider is the show for home service professionals that are striving to break the million-dollar revenue mark. So if that’s you, you’re in the right place. And if you’re already over a million dollars in revenue, you’re gonna get even more out of this show.
So why is this the show? It’s not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show. It’s not an expert-driven show. Instead, what we’ve done is we’ve gathered wisdom and insight directly from seven- and eight-figure business owners—people that are running companies doing anywhere from 2 million to 40 million dollars a year in revenue. And we’re bringing you their best insights, all focused on a single topic each month. These are real owners; there are no armchair philosophers and no fake gurus. These are the ones that are quietly building empires behind the scenes. They’re not on social media looking for attention; they’re in business, making things happen.
So it’s still the month of March, and we’re wrapping it up. We’ve been diving deep all month long into hiring. If you have a big dream, you’re not gonna build it by yourself—you have to hire people to carry it out and build a team. And today, you’re gonna hear from Jim DuBois. He’s been on this show and shared with us one other time, but Jim is in South Carolina—or, well, maybe North Carolina (forgive me, Jim)—and he’s got a window cleaning company. He’s been in the business for over 25 years, he’s got over 45 employees, and they hire people all the time. They’re constantly screening for great talent. So he’s going to share his experience and how he separates the wheat from the chaff—how he finds A-players and how he sorts them out.
Everything he talks about in the show is in the show notes. Everything we discuss on the program is in the show notes, and we have a downloadable action guide for you regarding this episode available at thehugeinsider.com. So let’s get into it.
Jim DuBois (Guest):I’m Jim DuBois with WindowWashingWealth.com—my high-level coaching company—and Squeegee Pros, which is my window cleaning/pressure washing company. Forty-five employees make up that company.
So today’s Huge Insider tip has to do with the hiring process and dialing in the interview itself. It’s a very powerful process when implemented. The problem is, so many will miss the mark on properly recruiting, and they can’t gain the needed traction to grow. The thing is, you need good employees that stay with you if you’re gonna get to the next level in your company. Most, well, they have a revolving door and they continue to struggle. They get frustrated, and some even put their hands up and say, “You know what, I’ll just go back to doing it myself.” Have you ever felt that way before? I know I have—way back in the day.
So you’re gonna have to know how to find good employees, and then know how to keep them. That’s what we’re gonna talk about here over the next few minutes. And what I want you to do—I want you to imagine that I just flew out to your city, and I say, “Hey, meet me at the nearest hiring pond.” And around this pond are other service providers that are—well, they’re hiring also. And I find you, and I’m walking up to you and I’m kind of shaking my head ‘no.’ I’d say, “You know what, give me your fishing rod, and here, take mine. In fact, use my bait instead of yours. Go ahead, put the rod back in the water, let’s give it five or six minutes, and let’s see what happens.” And sure enough, your fishing rod starts to bend, your back is arching, and out comes a big fish—an A-player! Everyone around this pond, they’re looking at you and they’re saying, “Where in the heck did this guy come from, and how did he get this A-player? I’ve been coming here for weeks!” Well, this is due to a built-out recruiting system. And when you learn how to separate yourself from everyone else by doing what they’re not doing, well, you get attention—kind of like a red Ferrari in a parking lot of white painters’ vans.
So when coaching business owners, I often hear them—well, they have this frustration that they just can’t find good employees to work for them. Their confidence—well, they lose it. And what happens is, as soon as they get good employees to show up, well, they think to themselves that their business will finally run the way that they want it. This is not true. You don’t add good employees and then get a great business; it’s the other way around. You create a great business, and good employees get added to it. Does that make sense?
So before you even start searching for your perfect employee, take a long hard look at your business and ask if your company is a place that good employees want to work at. Because chances are, if you’re not hiring the employees you want, well, your company isn’t structured to attract the A-player. So start with your perfect employee avatar, and think about what you want in a great employee. Then think about what the employee will want in an employer. Now build your company in a way that would attract the very best employees. So that’s the baseline or the foundation. This is the crux of the whole mission of the interview (or leading up to the interview) to hire the right people.
So there’s a couple of hiring points I’m gonna go through with you right now. So one, well, it’s the job post or the ad. Most, well, they do this all wrong. Their job post looks like everybody else’s. So in this example, let’s use technicians, right? So first, determine your job-position avatar—who you’re hiring, what’s the demographic. For technicians, we’re probably hiring those in their 20s, their early 30s, right? So write your ads to speak to that demographic. Speak to the A-player inside that demographic, using language that they can understand and relate to, versus saying what everybody else says. So what are we doing here? I mean, would you prefer to hire the A-player or the D or F player? Excited? And now you’re separating yourself as a company from all the other companies hiring out there in this same pond. With me so far? Now we have a magnet to attract who we want.
So the second part to this is the actual interview, ’cause now you’re ready for it. We don’t do your typical interview—we do hiring events. Why? Well, one, we save a tremendous amount of time, and two, we hire who we need almost every single time, versus one-on-one after one-on-one with the no-shows and the wrong people showing up. We need people now, so you end up hiring the D-player. You hire the person you’re not really excited about, and the revolving door continues.
Anyone can do a hiring event. It doesn’t matter if you’re a one-person operation or a 50-person organization. I’ve done them in parking lots, fast-food places, conference centers; you can do ’em in workspaces or at your own office if you have the space. So our hiring events at my office are not what the typical interviewee is expecting. We have music playing, we’ve got PowerPoint going on with pictures of us working, happy faces, our brand, technician testimonials. We have a basket of drinks and snacks and, of course, applications. And you might not be able to do all of this right now, but you can build up to it just like I did.
So I scan the room—I’m looking to see who’s got what going on, who’s on their phone, who’s looking around. You begin to learn to read people, and you can have an assistant in the room too with a clipboard. I’ve done this—the assistant draws out the room, remembering who was sitting where, right? And then I go around the room, and I ask, “What’s your name? Where do you live? What was it in the job post or the job ad that made you come here?” We’re making notes on this, and the assistant makes these notes and continues the note-taking that I need to know for later, right, when the interviews are done. So it’s just making notes on things like who was on their phone when I was speaking, who was asking me questions, what was their body language like, what was their eye contact—were they looking to me or looking around?
I often use an analogy when I’m doing these interviews—this hiring event—I start off with what I call the “bus analogy.” And I’ll say, “How many have been on Interstate 77 here in town? Ever pass those big, clean, beautiful, unmarked buses? And you wonder, who’s in there? Is it Taylor Swift? Is it 50 Cent? Is it Bon Jovi? No, that’s my bus. It knows exactly where it’s going, and right now it stopped, and the doors just opened. And there you are standing, as I decide if I want to hire you to come onto my bus or not. And if I do, you’ll come in and you’ll take a seat in the back of my bus, and every quarter, the bus is gonna stop and the doors are gonna open; we’re gonna do a performance review. If you’re doing your job well, you’ll probably move up a few rows, and if not, we might boot you off my bus. See, my bus is an A-player company full of A-player employees, and we’re looking for the right fit for you to possibly come onto my bus.” So that’s kind of what I do to set the stage—pretty much word for word, and this is kind of all memory now.
I’ve had several of the D (as in David) players—D and F player types—get up and walk out of my hiring events, and that’s okay, because it’s what I want. Working here is not for everyone, and it’s okay if you get up and you use the back door to exit. You need to be on your game, or you won’t be here very long. But why? Because we’re only looking for—we’re only talking to—the A-players in the room. We’re not talking to the D-player. They know this. So the first 15 minutes, I’m not even talking about the position; I’m talking about my company’s vision—where we’ve been, where we’re going—the company mission, and how we’ll arrive at our company vision, and how the right people will help us get there. I’m talking about my company’s unique selling propositions—the things that make us different, better. This way, they can see we’re world-class at what we do. They’ll see not everyone’s going to qualify, but only a select few. And the A-player, well, they love this. The D-player could care less, and many of ’em just walk out.
See, I’m framing this as not just another job, but elevating it into something that they’ve never heard before. Why? Because this is what the A-player wants to hear. Then I create engagement and dialogue during the event by asking questions while I’m going through the interview process. I’m going around the room—try it yourself and watch what happens. See, the A-players will—they rise to the top with this engagement and dialogue. You begin to see and you begin to notice the A-player and the B-player surface—they just rise above the others. And this is all strategy here. I’m also repeating the points they already saw in the job posting. Why? Well, remember, the ad is what got them there, so keep them excited during the interview process by reiterating what they read in the ad. This way they know it’s true.
Thank you. Jim DuBois, WindowWashingWealth, Squeegee Pros, and hey, we’re here for you every step of the way.
Sid Graef (Host):That’s a wrap on this episode. So what did you learn about hiring—specifically about the screening and interview process—from Jim? But more importantly, what are you gonna do with it? His strategy is simple, but don’t let that fool you—it is powerful. It’s powerful because the foundation of every successful business is high-performing, reliable employees—a great team. You’ve gotta have that.
So here’s the next step: Take some action. Everything we covered today is in the show notes. The most important thing is to download the action guide. We put together a five-page action guide to help you execute this week’s strategy, and you can grab it at thehugeinsider.com. So, thehugeinsider.com.
Here are more ways that you can level up your business. You know, this podcast is just one way that we help you to grow. Here’s what else you can plug into: We’ve got a weekly free newsletter called, ironically, The Huge Insider. You can click here and subscribe. We’ve got a Facebook group and community for like-minded business builders who want to get help and help each other.
Every summer, we have the Huge Convention. Huge Convention is the ultimate event for home service business owners. It’s the largest event of its kind for home service business owners—specifically exterior cleaning, holiday light installation, and guys like you and me, right? And this year, it’s back in Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd. Tickets are still dirt cheap right now, and you can grab yours at the link in the show notes—it’s thehugeconvention.com. Do it before the prices go up. I’m publishing this episode at the end of March for the month of April, 2025. If you click and go get your tickets to the Huge Convention, use the discount code INSIDER—all caps, INSIDER—and you’ll save 50 dollars on your ticket. That discount code will expire at the end of April.
So this event, though—The Huge Convention—this is where real breakthroughs happen. It’s the best place for networking, for high-level business education. We’re not gonna teach you how to use a squeegee or a power-washing wand better; we’re going to teach you how to run a better business. That’s what it’s all about, and we’ve got the biggest trade show in the industry for our industries.
The last thing to make you aware of is The Huge Mastermind. Huge Mastermind—if your business is over a million in revenue, and you’ve got more than five employees, this is the fast track to a freedom business. You’re gonna learn and implement the Freedom Operating System to get your time and money freedom back, predictably, step by step.
And the very final thing I want to mention is we would love to feature you on a future episode of The Huge Insider Podcast. If you’ve had a big win, or if you’ve had a painful lesson—falling flat on your face trying to do something good, and then you picked yourself back up and learned from it—we want to hear from you. So call us and leave us a message at 804-600-HUGE (that’s 804-600-4843). It’s also in the show notes, and leave us a message. Tell us about your victory or your failure or something you’ve learned, or just tell us something you really want to learn about that we can put on a future episode. Then we might just feature you in an upcoming episode of The Huge Insider.
That’s it for this week. Don’t just listen—take action. We want you to win and prosper. I’m Sid Graef. I’m your host of The Huge Insider Podcast, and we’ll see you next time.

Episode 9: Hiring - Ads, Budgets, and Targeting

In this episode, host Sid Graef focuses on valuable hiring insights from expert consultant Chris Dexter, a veteran at recruiting in various trades (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and more). Chris explains how to set a hiring budget, effectively use job posting platforms (like Indeed and BetterTeam), and automate the screening process with tools such as Calendly. He also highlights creative strategies like multi-location job postings, open-house group interviews, and tapping into trade schools. The key takeaway? Building a strong hiring system—complete with a dedicated budget, scheduled phone interviews, and a clear focus on culture—will help you attract and retain the A-players you need to grow past the million-dollar mark and beyond.
Show Notes
Guest: Chris Dexter (private consultant with extensive hiring experience)
Mentioned Resources & Tools:
Indeed: https://www.indeed.com/
BetterTeam: https://www.betterteam.com/
Calendly: https://calendly.com/
Local trade schools and academies
Other Key Resources (always included):
The Huge Insider newsletter signuphttps://thehugeconvention.com/insider
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guidehttp://www.thehugeinsider.com
The Foundations platform trial offerhttps://thehugeconvention.com/1foundationstrial
The Huge Mastermind info pagehttps://www.thehugemastermind.com/interest
Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/groups/hugefoundations
Transcript
Sid Graef (Host):Welcome back to the Huge Insider Podcast. Hey, my friend, it’s Sier, the huge insider, and this is the show for home service professionals who are striving to break the million-dollar revenue mark. That’s you—you are in the right place, and even if you’ve already gotten over a million-dollar revenue, well, you are gonna get even more out of the show.
So why do I say this is the show? This is not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show. It’s not an expert-driven show. Instead, what we’ve done is we have gathered wisdom and insights directly from seven- and eight-figure business owners—people that are actually running companies that are doing everywhere from 2 million a year to 40 million a year. And we bring you their best insights, all focused on a single topic each month. These are real owners—there’s no armchair philosophers or fake gurus. These are the ones quietly building empires behind the scenes. They’re not on social media looking for attention; they’re in business, and they’re making things happen.
So we’re wrapping up the month of March, and it’s all about our main subject, which is hiring. Today you’re gonna hear from Chris Dexter. Chris has been the CEO, he has been the owner, he has been the partner, and now he’s a private consultant. He has been responsible for hiring hundreds, if not thousands, of technicians in electrical, HVAC, plumbing—the trades, the home services. So he knows his stuff, and I asked him, “What are your best practices for attracting and then hiring A players? How do you get them to come to you? How do you sort out the A players from everybody else?” And this is what he had to say.
We’re about to get started. I just want to let you know everything we talk about, or that Chris talks about, is in the show notes as well as our action guide based on this week’s episode. So with that, let’s get into it.
Chris Dexter (Guest):First of all, thank you, Sid, for asking for my input regarding hiring techniques. I’ll keep it brief. When customers first retain my services for human resources counseling, hiring—you name it—I always ask ’em the same question, and I get a number of different responses, but one is overwhelming. I ask them, “So, what’s your budget for hiring?” Employers often tell me, “The most important thing we do, or the most important thing we can do right now, is hiring.” And when I ask how much their budget is for it, they typically don’t have one set aside. I’m not certain if they don’t know how to create a budget for it or if they’ve measured it in the past. I’m not certain, but I think it’s fairly easy to put together, and there are some ways to control the budget as well.
Indeed can be really expensive, especially if you go with their advice. You post an ad on Indeed, and it says, “Hey, in your marketplace, you should spend $65 a day.” That’s just terrific—letting the vendor tell you how much they should charge you. I think it does work, but you certainly don’t have to take that advice. But first things first—definitely have a budget. Make this part of your scorecard if you’re keeping a scorecard in some sort of business management setting, so that you know how much you’re spending.
But let’s just dive right in. Indeed is the biggest and best platform out there. You can access it for free or spend 20, 30, 60 dollars a day, and you will get results. There’s automation: responding to candidates, keeping good records, viewing resumes, et cetera. I use it all the time, and I have great results because that’s where most candidates go.
However, I have found a platform a good number of years ago—it’s probably been 10 years—that I’ve been using something called BetterTeam. I have to say, no one has ever gone to BetterTeam to find a job. Job seekers don’t go to BetterTeam to find jobs. BetterTeam goes to the universe and finds people that are looking for jobs and posts for free on Indeed and other platforms. It puts your ad out there and gives you more flexibility. The number one thing I like about BetterTeam—not to rank in an order—but it’s inexpensive. A year, a year for 10 slots—10 postings—is $834 if you choose the yearly plan. I think if you bump it up to 20, which I recommend even for the smallest of companies because it’s so cost-effective, it’s probably like $1,100, something like that. But then 10 slots for $834 a year, and you can change ’em up daily. You can post for as many different jobs as you want, or you can post the same job 10 times.
That brings up a technique that I use for posting. I post an ad for my customer at their business location—the actual address where they reside—and I make sure that’s in there as the headquarters, and I even put that in the ad. I let the candidates know, “Hey, here’s our location, street address, et cetera.” But I also use the other nine ads—or 18 ads, depending on the client’s choice—I’ll post all those ads, and I’ll see, “Yeah, a few of them, I got zero hits on in a day, but I noticed this ad over here on the service road next to the mall, boy, I got six candidates off of that right away the first night.” Maybe I picked something that’s close by, a different zip code but really close. And the theory behind this is that when individuals go to look for work, they go to look for work on their phone. And so what does your phone do? It pushes the stuff to you that’s closest, so it pushes a job to them that’s in their neighborhood.
Occasionally, somebody will say, “The job’s in Roseville? I thought it was in Buffalo.” And then I explain to them, “No, I knew you were in Buffalo, and I wanted to make sure that I got to you. I post ’em all over the place.” But nope, it’s definitely in Roseville. It’s pretty close by, it’s only like another 20 minutes. Again, seldom have I had anybody question that, so that’s probably my number one technique as far as economics.
Another thing is, definitely make sure you’re available for appointments. I include it right in the ad—I include a Calendly link. Set that up so they can schedule a 15-minute call, and make sure you make the calls. You can tell Calendly, “I wanna take six calls a day, I wanna take 16 calls a day, I want ’em to be 15 minutes long, and I want 10 minutes in between each call—five minutes, whatever it is.” So that’s super flexible, and everybody’s using their phone. Everybody clicks on it, it gets sent right to your inbox, and it takes a look at your Outlook calendar and it’s not gonna schedule over them. So technique number two: make sure that you get those right away.
And again, for a great number of positions, just put it right in your ad. There’s no reason for you to scan through all of these resumes and see who’s qualified. Let them book the appointment for the 15-minute call, and you’re gonna get ghosted part of the time anyway. But I have to say, my experience just in the last few years is that if I use Calendly and the individual actually sets up the appointment, they typically are there on the other end when I call them. It’s at that point that I determine whether or not they’re a good fit. I’ve got the appointment, got it all set up, the individuals have applied, and I’ve had the 15-minute phone call. That screening is a good time to see if you want them for an in-person interview. Depending on the type of position, I’ve hired off the 15-minute phone call as well for certain positions that aren’t rocket surgery. After a 15-minute conversation, I can tell if this person has what I want in an employee: Are they engaging? Do they seem sensible, reasonable? Can they carry on a decent conversation, depending on the position? Relevant experience isn’t that relevant—I would rather hire somebody that I thought was the right person, culturally a good fit, et cetera.
Other techniques—and this is Calendly, too, I think—it works well with Calendly. That is to set up a group interview, have everybody out, open house, I don’t know, buy ’em some donuts or cheeses and crackers—whatever you want to do. But I have one customer, and every Tuesday at 10:45, they have an open invitation. I use Indeed for that. I send out the invites regularly. I have 12 slots open, and we’ve had pretty good success. Eight or 10 people will show up—sometimes it’s less, sometimes it’s all of them—and we use that to screen candidates. Having 12 people in seems like a little overkill, and I would agree with that, and it can be a little more work.
First of all, again, just to review: use Indeed. I think it’s great. Keep your budget low; don’t go up to 60 or 50 dollars a day. Try it out at six bucks, five bucks. I think that’s their minimum to sponsor an ad. Indeed also allows you to post the same ad in multiple locations—give it a try. BetterTeam, all one word: use them because they’re very cost-effective, super flexible, but it’s bare-bones. You don’t get a whole lot of the bells and whistles. There’s no applicant tracking system involved with it. It provides all the details. It’s best to text people. I text everybody; initially it’s gonna be emailed through Calendly, which sends it as a phone invite anyway, or as an email, or both. Gosh, what else can I tell you?
As far as techniques, people say your best source of new employees is referrals from your existing employees. That’s true—ask your employees for referrals. It’s not a technique thing like Indeed or BetterTeam or any of the other sites out there. More active techniques, depending on what you’re looking for—I’m hiring for carpenters, electricians, plumbers, apprentices—I’m gonna go to trade schools and academies. There’s one that I go to all the time. I think it’s maybe 16 weeks long. Have a relationship with them. Set up a relationship with a local trade school, with one of the individuals; they’re always looking for placement for their individuals. If I think of anything else, I’m gonna include an addendum and send it to Sid. Thank you so much, I appreciate your time, and I hope you have a great day.
Sid Graef (Host):That’s a wrap on today’s episode. So what did you learn about hiring and about the hiring process from Chris, and more importantly, what are you gonna do with it? His strategies are simple, but don’t let that fool you—it’s powerful, because at the foundation of every great company is a great team, and that means you’re going to have to hire.
So with this episode and the previous five, you’ve got a really great survey of best practices on how to attract, hire, and retain A players for your team, which is what you need for your business to skyrocket ahead of your competition—because face it, a lot of your competition doesn’t hire anybody that does breath, anybody that can fog a mirror, as they say, and that’s not the way to build a winning team.
So here’s your next step: Take some action. Everything we covered today is in the show notes, but again, the most important thing is to download the action guide. We put together a five-page action guide to help you execute this week’s strategy, and you can grab it at thehugeinsider.com. And remember, that’s in the show notes too.
There are more ways that we can help you level up your business. This podcast is just one way we help you grow. You can also plug into our free weekly newsletter—also called The Huge Insider. You get weekly insights straight to your inbox. There’s no fluff; it’s just straight-to-the-point, actionable insights you can use for your business.
We have a Facebook group just for you. It’s a group and a community where people want to help each other grow and solve problems. Come and join us. The Huge Convention—that’s our annual big show. It’s in August this year. It’s August 20th through 22nd in Nashville, Tennessee, the last year we’re gonna be in Nashville for a while. Right now, tickets are dirt cheap, and you can get them at thehugeconvention.com. This is the event where real breakthroughs happen. It’s the place for networking in our industry, world-class education that’s specifically tailored to the home service industry, and we’ve got the biggest trade show in the industry for exterior cleaning and holiday lighting. It’s a big deal.
Last, I want to mention to you, we have a mastermind. We call it the Huge Mastermind, and this is for folks that have a business that’s already over a million in revenue, and you’ve got five or more employees. This is the fast track to making that a freedom business. You will learn and implement the Freedom Operating System to get more time and money freedom in a predictable fashion.
Last thing I want to say—thanks for listening. I’d love to feature you on a future episode. If you’ve had a big win or if you’ve had a painful failure and lesson that—when you got back up and dusted yourself off—helped you build a better business, I would love to hear about it. Call and leave me a message at 804-600-HUGE (that’s 804-600-4843), and we might just feature your story on an upcoming episode. I look forward to hearing from you.
That’s it for this week. Don’t just listen—take action. I’m Sid Graef. This is the Huge Insider Podcast. We want to help you win and prosper in the marketplace. We’ll see you next time.

Episode 8: Hiring - Crafting your ad to Attract A Players

In this episode of the Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef teams up with Kyle Ray from Geek Window Cleaning in Austin, Texas, to dig deeper into hiring best practices. Their conversation focuses on crafting a compelling job ad that attracts top-tier talent, ensuring applicants fit your company culture, and implementing an effective screening process. By using tools like ChatGPT for ad creation and including small details (like an “Easter egg”) in the job listing, Kyle shows how to filter and find standout employees. From creating thorough candidate “personas” to developing interview q
Sid Graef (Host):Okay, so what did you learn today from Kyle about hiring and how he manages his process? Better question is, more importantly, what are you gonna do with it? Is this something that you can take and implement in your business today to make it better so you can hire more A players?
That’s the goal—to each week and every time, multiple times a week, give information straight from the mouth of an expert—someone who is actually putting it in practice. This is not theory. Take it and do it, so you can have a better, more profitable business.
So here’s your next step: Everything that was covered in the show today is in the show notes, but most importantly, download the action guide. It’s located at thehugeinsider.com. You just go there, download it, and make sure that you are subscribed to our free weekly newsletter. It’s also called The Huge Insider. The same thing goes there—we’ve got actionable tips and strategies that will help you build a better business right now, and it is free.
Other resources that we have for you: we’ve got our Facebook group and community, and that’s the place where, when you join, you can share ideas and collaborate with other people who are in the field in their business, working hard to make it better. You can help each other.
And every summer, of course, we have the Huge Convention. This is the ultimate event for home service business owners. This year, we’re in Nashville from August 20th to the 22nd. Tickets are really, really inexpensive, so grab yours at thehugeconvention.com before prices go up. Prices do go up on April 1st, by the way. But this event is where real breakthroughs happen, and it’s the place for networking, education, and the biggest trade show in the industry for our industries.
If you’ve already crossed the threshold and hit the million-dollar mark in your business, and you’ve got five employees or more, check out the Huge Mastermind. This is a place for the fast track to a freedom business. You can get more information in the show notes on that one.
In the future, if you’ve got a success story, or you’ve had a great learning experience—meaning you’ve tried something, fell flat on your face, had a painful learning experience, and got back up and built a better business because of it—we want to hear from you. Call us up at 804-600-HUGE (that’s 804-600-4843). Leave a message, tell us all about it. We might just feature you on an upcoming episode. We’d really love that.
That’s it for this week. Don’t just listen—take action. We want you to win and prosper. I’m Sid Graef, and I’m your host. This is the Huge Insider Podcast. We’ll see you next time.
uestions that invite real vulnerability, you’ll learn to recruit “A players” who mesh perfectly with your business values.
Show Notes
Guest: Kyle Ray, Geek Window Cleaning (Austin, Texas)
No direct links provided in the transcript.
Mentioned Tools & Resources:
ChatGPT or “Chad GPT”/DeepSea (AI platforms for generating job ads and interview processes)
“Hire Buss” (a final filter for hiring; no direct link provided)
The Huge Convention (annual event for home service business owners)
The Huge Insider newsletter signup
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide
The Foundations platform trial offer
The Huge Mastermind info page
Facebook community
Sid Graef (Host):Welcome back, my friend, to the Huge Insider podcast. It’s Sid Graef, and this is a midweek episode. We’re gonna carry on with this month’s topic, and that is hiring. We’re diving deeper and deeper into the hiring process—how to recruit, how to hire, how to place the ad, where to place the ad, how to craft an ad that weeds out the people that you don’t want working at your company, and how to make sure your company is a place where A players want to work.
This week—or today—we’re jumping back in with Kyle from Geek Window Cleaning in Austin, Texas, and we’re gonna go deeper into how they craft their ad to attract the right kind of person and his process for screening and interviewing. It’s pretty fascinating, and I hope you take notes, download the action guide, and take action. Make your business better. Please join me with Kyle Ray. You’re gonna dive back in.
Kyle Ray (Guest):Hey, Kyle here with Geek Window Cleaning, and I’m gonna give y’all our tips and tricks on how we market to attract top talent to our company using online job boards, since this month’s hot topic is hiring. So let’s dive in.
Yes. Before we get started, we are going to be using ChatGPT or DeepSea to help accomplish this faster. You can definitely do this on your own, but it will definitely be more of a struggle.
All right, so you’re gonna go to ChatGPT or DeepSea, and you’re gonna put this as a prompt—I’m just gonna read this verbatim. You’re gonna say:
“You’re a business consultant, and we’re [insert your industry, so window cleaning, pressure washing, whatever that is]. We’re a [pressure washing] company looking to win Inc.’s Top Workplace for [whatever region you’re in—Southwest, Northeast, whatever]. My current company culture looks like this…”
So put in whatever your company culture currently is or what you want it to be. “Then, what am I missing to win Top Workplace? Be as detailed as possible, break some boundaries, and create a movement.”
So that’s the first prompt you’re gonna put in. Then you’re gonna do the following:
“I’m going to tell you about my company. I don’t want feedback. Just learn it.”
You’re gonna insert everything about your company—your industry, your branding, your culture—just everything you can possibly think of so you can train this ChatGPT about your business. Then after you do that, you’re gonna put:
“These are the top 50 to 100 traits of my ideal candidate.”
And you’re gonna list them for whatever position you’re hiring for. This is hugely valuable: make sure you’re writing out 50 to 100 traits of what your ideal candidate is—do they like to play golf, do they like to go fishing, whatever. Whoever you want to come work for your company, you want to make sure they fit in with everyone else and enjoy the same things, because you want to be working with people that are similar or have similar interests. That will really help increase your company culture.
So after you put in those 50 to 100 traits, then you’re gonna say:
“Build out three to five employee personas that would identify with our company culture based on our ideal candidate traits. Now identify all the problems that these current personas face in their current workplace or previous positions.”
And then you’re gonna tell it:
“Look up the book ‘Building a StoryBrand’ and provide the key takeaways as they apply to my business and company culture.”
Then, using everything you know about our company culture, ideal candidate traits, their problems, and building a brand story key takeaways, create an Indeed-formatted job ad that will attract our tribe and build an empire.
That will give you your Indeed ad that will help attract the top people you want to come work for you.
As a bonus, you can ask ChatGPT then to build out your interview process, and then ask it to insert some highlights about the company and culture, as well as some deep-dive questions that separate us from the industry and invite vulnerability. This will help you with your interview process, and this is what we run.
Another thing that we do is we add a little Easter egg into the section “What we’re looking for in a candidate.” We will put “always wants more cowbell.” The people that actually read it and get the reference will laugh, and then they’ll want to apply because they want to work for a company that has a sense of humor—that’s part of our culture. And if they don’t get it, they tend to look it up, and then the same thing happens. Whenever we are interviewing, we ask if anyone caught it, and if they say they didn’t even see it or they don’t know what we’re talking about, that tells us they probably didn’t really read the job ad and just hit quick apply. We just take note of that, and we start asking other specific questions about the job ad that resonated with them and why they decided to apply and want to come work for us.
This will help you narrow down quickly to the A players that you actually want to invite to come and do an in-person interview. And then on the back end of that, we recently implemented Hire Buss as a final filter. We don’t really have too much experience with it, so I can’t really say too much, but so far what we’ve seen, it seems great and just helps us get a better picture of who we’re talking to. So, hope that helps and good luck hiring.
 

Episode 7: Hiring and Recruiting A Players

This episode of The Huge Insider podcast dives into effective hiring practices for growing home service businesses. Host Sid Graef spotlights Kyle Ray of Geek Window Cleaning in Austin, Texas, who is scaling quickly through a multi-pronged recruitment strategy. Kyle emphasizes the power of consistent, creative outreach, from social media messages to in-person “shoulder tapping,” group interviews, and a culture that highlights career growth and vision for recruits. He outlines how setting up simple yet systematic hiring processes—like pre-screen filters, regularly scheduled group interviews, and leveraging your current team’s network—can help bring in a constant flow of motivated applicants. Whether you’re under or over the million-dollar mark, Kyle’s tactics can help you attract and retain high-quality team members who fit your company culture.
Show Notes
Kyle Ray – Geek Window Cleaning (Austin, Texas)
Frenzy (referral software mentioned) – https://www.frenzy.co/
Brian Gottlieb (keynote speaker at The Huge Convention; built a $150M business)
Marcus Sheridan – Author of They Ask You Answer
Learn more: https://marcussheridan.com/
They Ask You Answer (book mentioned by Marcus Sheridan)
Resources
The Huge Insider newsletter signuphttps://thehugeconvention.com/insider
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guidehttp://www.thehugeinsider.com
The Foundations platform trial offerhttps://thehugeconvention.com/1foundationstrial
The Huge Mastermind info pagehttps://www.thehugemastermind.com/interest
Facebook grouphttps://www.facebook.com/groups/hugefoundations
TranscriptSid Graef: Hey, welcome back to the Huge Insider podcast, my friend. It’s Sid Graef, and if you’ve caught our first few episodes, you already know this is a new show for home service professionals who are working hard to break the million-dollar revenue mark. And if that’s you, you are definitely in the right place. If you’ve already passed the million-dollar mark, you’ll get even more out of this show for sure.
So here’s the deal. It’s not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show. It’s certainly not an expert-driven show where one really smart person shares all their insight. Instead, what we’ve done is gather together a whole bunch of seven-figure business owners and eight-figure business owners—people running companies that do anywhere from 2 million a year to 40 million a year, and sometimes more. We bring you their best insights each week, and it’s all focused on a single topic. This month, we’re focused on hiring. It’s March, and it’s time to staff up for the spring rush.
These are real owners, quietly building empires behind the scenes. They’re not on social media looking for attention; they make their money from their businesses. As I said, this is March, our main subject is hiring, and today you’re going to hear from Kyle Ray. Kyle has Geek Window Cleaning in Austin, Texas, and he is growing fast. One of the things he’s doing is hiring dozens of people every week, running them through a system so they can grow and scale.
I asked him a couple of questions: How are you recruiting? How do you make your business a place where A-players want to come and work? And what would you do if you only had two hours a week and had to hire two A-players every single week? What would you do? Here are the answers he gave us. Let’s get into it.
Kyle Ray: Hey, what’s up? Kyle here with Geek Window Cleaning, and here to answer or give my two cents on this month’s hot topic of hiring, letting you guys know what we’re doing over here. So let’s get into it.
There are four different things we do for recruiting: social media, shoulder tapping, circle, and Indeed/ZipRecruiter.
1. Social media: We look for profiles that seem like the person may be a good culture fit with our company. We send them a DM to generate curiosity, invite them to come learn more about our opportunity. We also run ads targeting college-age students on Facebook and Instagram.
2. Shoulder tapping: No matter where I am—restaurants, bars, parks, grocery stores—if I see someone who looks like they’d be a good fit, I go talk to them, ask them a couple of specific questions, create the curiosity, invite them to learn more about our opportunity.
3. Circle: This is where we get a lot of quality people. Your current employees or reps can give you names of people they think might be a good fit, or connect you to someone they know. For instance, “Hey, my friend has a brother,” or whatever the case may be, so a connector. There’s a software called Frenzy you can use to make this super easy for your employees to do, but you probably don’t need it unless you’re hiring at scale.
4. Indeed/ZipRecruiter: We create job ads that speak to the people we want to hire by crafting job ads that are a bit different than a typical job ad you’d see on those platforms.
Next question: How do you make your business a place where A-players want to work? We spend a lot of time building this out because retention is huge. We create curiosity in people by letting them see that this must be a different type of place to work, right? With our culture and everything we do here, it’s done during the pre-screening process and in the group interview process. We hold group interviews, show them our vision of where the company’s going, and where we came from so there’s lots of room for advancement. We’re seed-planting there for retention.
During this interview, we’re casting a vision for them as well—where they can see themselves in five years. We have a five-year program that we talk about. We let them know we are servant leaders and our success hinges on their success. We’re here to make sure they’re successful. We don’t hire people; we invite them to come work with us, and we only invite people that fit our culture and our core values and behaviors.
In terms of “always be recruiting,” yeah, everywhere I go, if I see someone I’m interested in talking to about joining the company, I go talk to them for five to 10 minutes, create that curiosity, give them my number, and walk away. I invite them to a group interview that we hold.
If I only had two hours a week to hire two A-players a month, what system would I use? Well, we’ve already built this out, and this is exactly what we do. I spend 10 to 15 minutes looking at online applications from Indeed/ZipRecruiter, sending them all a message to run them through a secondary filter, because you get a lot of people that just click “apply.” Anyone who passes that filter is invited to our group interview that we hold every other week on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and those group interviews take about an hour of my time.
I also spend about 30 minutes here and there on Instagram, sending DMs to people I think would be a good fit. Again, secondary filter, invite to interview. I shoulder tap everywhere I go, and this may take an hour a week, probably. My wife really gets annoyed if we’re out in public or at the grocery store and I’m like, “Hold on, I gotta go talk to this person real quick.” But same thing, secondary filter, invite to interview.
Then we also do our reps’ circles, right? Any friends they may have, or new people we’re onboarding—after they make it through our boot camps and training, we’ll say, “Hey, who do you know?” Because that’s where you can get some quality people.
Sid Graef: That’s a wrap. Tell me, what did you learn about hiring from Kyle? More importantly, what are you going to do with what you learned? His strategies are straightforward and simple, and that’s how he gets results: he just devises the strategy, implements the plan, and keeps going, never quitting. It’s really powerful.
Everything Kyle covered in this episode is in the show notes. Especially take time to download this week’s action guide on hiring—how to attract A-players and how to keep them—it’s going to help you build the business you want. It’s located at thehugeinsider.com, or you can go to the show notes and just click the link.
We’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: our mission at The Huge Convention and The Huge Insider is to help our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a business that works for them—a business that builds money freedom and time freedom. Build your freedom business. We help meet this mission and help you achieve that in several ways:
This free podcast.
Our free newsletter, called The Huge Insider (notice a simple name, same as this podcast).
Another podcast called Huge Transformations Podcast, which is all about stories of seven-, eight-, and even nine-figure business owners talking about how they started from scratch to very successful businesses.
We’ve got a free Facebook group, a community where you can share and exchange ideas with peers also working toward their business goals.
Every summer—this year, August 20th through 22nd—we host the Huge Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. This is the last year it’s going to be in Nashville for a while, so come to Nashville and check it out. You can find more information at thehugeconvention.com. Right now, tickets are still super cheap, so get yours before the price goes up. This event is where real breakthroughs happen for folks in home service businesses.
We’ve got incredible keynote speakers this year: Brian Gottlieb, who built a $150 million-a-year home service business and wrote a book about the whole thing, and Marcus Sheridan, who built a $17 million-a-year home service business on the East Coast. He still owns it, and he also published a best-selling book called They Ask You Answer. He’s going to be one of our keynotes. Get your ticket to The Huge Convention.
Lastly, there’s our mastermind, simply called The Huge Mastermind. It’s for folks who’ve already crossed the million-dollar mark in revenue and have at least five employees. This is where we help you go from running a great business to running an exceptional business—one that frees you from daily operations. You’ve got to check it out. Again, all of this is in the show notes.
The last thing I want to mention is, if you have a story of success from something you’ve learned on the show (or otherwise), we’d love to hear from you. If you have a story of failure—where you tried something, fell flat on your face, and learned a painful lesson that set you up for future success—we’d like to hear that too. You can give us your feedback or tell your story by calling 804-600-HUGE (that’s 804-600-4843), and we might just feature your story on an upcoming episode. We’d love to do that.
That’s it for this week. Remember, don’t just listen—take action. We want you to win and prosper. This is Sid Graef, host of The Huge Insider podcast. We will see you next time.

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:
Define and live your core values – Align hiring, firing, and promotions with clear, purposeful values.
Set and celebrate high standards – Provide metrics, celebrate wins publicly, and reward excellence.
Build a leadership development culture – Go beyond training by mentoring your team for personal and professional growth.
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.
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
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:
Define and live your core values. Be the “who” you want to see in others.
Set a high standard and celebrate it.
Invest in leadership development.
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.
We also have a free newsletter. It’s called The Huge Insider. You can find it at thehugeinsider.com. It’s weekly, it’s actionable, and it’s no charge.
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.
It would mean the world to us if you would post a review, subscribe, and share this podcast with your friends and business associates. We’d like to hear from you if you’ve had a big win or if you’ve had a painful lesson where you tried something, you fell flat on your face, and then you got back up and learned from it.
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
 

Episode 2.5: Fill your calendar in advance of Spring

Summary
In this episode of The Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef discusses why they’re publishing more frequent mini-episodes, each featuring valuable insights from proven seven- and eight-figure business owners.
He introduces Jim Dubois, a highly experienced window cleaning entrepreneur, who shares his strategy for getting a jump on the spring “money season.” By proactively contacting customers in January and February with special deals, loyalty rewards, bundled offers, and referral incentives, Jim ensures his company’s schedule fills up before the seasonal rush. He also emphasizes the role of office teams and sales staff in effective follow-ups, upsells, and overall customer engagement. Ultimately, Jim’s tips highlight the importance of proactive planning and marketing to outpace competitors and boost spring revenue.
 
This clear, action-oriented episode is especially relevant for service-based businesses and marketers seeking to maximize seasonal opportunities through organized promotion, team motivation, and early market priming.
 
Show Notes
•Guest: Jim Dubois
•Founder of Window Washing Wealth
•Owner of Squeegee Pros in Charlotte, NC
• References & Resources:
1. Window Washing Wealth
2. Squeegee Pros
3. The Huge Convention (August 20–22 in Nashville)
4. The Huge Insider Podcast Action Guides
5. Phone: 804-600-HUGE (804-600-4843) – Call to share wins or lessons learned
 
Transcript:
Sid Graef:
“Hey, my friend, it’s your host Sid Graef here. Welcome back to the Huge Insider Podcast. We’ve only published a couple of episodes and we’re already starting to publish many episodes that go in between our primary Monday episode. And here’s why we’re doing that. We’ve had so much good insight and feedback from seven- and eight-figure business owners that want to share tactics and strategies that are specifically related to what we’re talking about this week, we decided instead of just doing one a week every Monday, we’re doing a Monday, Wednesday, we may even add a Friday pretty soon because we’re really picking up some steam.
 
So here’s the deal. This is a brand-new show for home service professionals who are stuck trying to break the million-dollar revenue mark. If that’s you, if you haven’t gotten to a million yet, this is your spot. You’re in the right place. And you already know this: if you’re over a million dollars in revenue, you’re going to get even more out of the show because you’ve already experienced some of the breakthroughs and you go, ‘Oh man, I can take that tactic and run to the bank with it.’
 
So here’s the deal. It’s not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show. It’s not expert-driven. We’ve just gathered up a whole bunch of our—literally a bunch of our friends that are seven-figure business owners, eight-figure business owners, and in one case, nine-figure business owners. And we ask them for insight on a specific topic and they roll, we record it, we publish it here, and you get the raw unedited version of what they have to say about how to benefit and grow from a certain strategy or a certain topic or a certain principle. And honest to goodness, I can’t think of any better way to learn and learn fast.
 
So I’m going to stop talking now. I want to introduce you to a legend in the window cleaning industry. His name is Jim Dubois. He gave us a short five-minute recording on how he primes his marketplace to maximize the end of winter and go into spring so far ahead of his competition that they cannot keep up. Meet Jim Dubois.”
 
Jim Dubois:
“Hey, I’m Jim Dubois with WindowWashingWealth.com and Squeegee Pros, based out of Charlotte, North Carolina. We have 45 employees that make up my window cleaning and pressure washing company.
 
So today’s Huge Insider tip has to do with pre-season promos. Lots of things that we do with pre-season to kick off the season. And March, April kind of really mark the beginning of the busy season for so many, and how you prepare now determines how much revenue you’ll generate in the coming months. So I’ll break a couple of these things down with what we do at my company.
 
We look at spring, as most do, as the ‘money season,’ especially for exterior cleaning businesses, and the phone is about to start to ring. And the most successful companies—well, we don’t just wait for leads; we create demand. I want to take a couple of minutes and share with you what works for us, how we maximize sales, marketing, and some of the things that we do to optimize this preseason.
 
We do pre-booking with our active customers, aging customers, prospective customers, and we do this in January and February so that we can somewhat anticipate what March, April, and May are going to look like. And we do this simply by reaching out to our database, and we do this in multiple ways.
 
When we look at pre-season promotions, we really try to work hard to get ahead with pre-season deals. So we’ll do early bird discounts, and what that looks like in my company is we’ll offer a sale to get customers on the schedule before the spring rush. And the word—the takeaway here—is ‘before the spring rush.’ And we’ll offer limited-time discounts for customers who book before the peak season. An example of that is something like, ‘Book before March 15th and save 15%.’ And we’re doing this right now at my office as we speak.
 
We have loyalty rewards where we’ll give top customers, referring customers, an exclusive deal. We have what we call ‘prepay and save,’ where we get customers to lock in their service now with a prepayment discount. A lot of people do bundle packages; we do too, where we combine window cleaning, pressure washing—maybe roof cleaning—but at a discounted rate to increase our average job size.
 
Why do we do this? Well, it gets our schedule full before the season even starts.
 
A couple of other things that we do to get the phone ringing is we’ll do email and text campaigns, where we’ll reach out to our database with a ‘spring refresh special.’ We have referral programs, where we’ll have money-off credits when a customer refers a friend, and we get this out to our database to get the referrals coming in. So there’s a system behind that.
 
We have social media blitz campaigns, where we’re promoting on Facebook, Instagram, and local community Facebook groups or groups in general. We obviously have paid ads and direct mail, where we’re targeting high-value neighborhoods. It could be a message like, ‘Dirty windows? We can fix that!’ And then we combine that with an offer and a call to action. That pretty much works every time. An important side note here is we’re tracking every lead—where it came from and what that conversion percentage is.
 
Another thing that we do, as far as maximizing revenue for this pre-season, is our sales team and our office staff. They play a huge role in this pre-season rush—or pre-season push, might be the better word. Follow-up is everything: upsell and down-sell strategies, and job booking minimums to help us maximize our profits.
 
And the last thing we do is we keep our team engaged. So, you know, your office team is just as important as your field crew in this whole pre-season success that we’re trying to create. So we do things to keep them motivated. At my office, we have sales contests where we’ll reward the rep who books the most jobs in a week. We have team goal bonuses—if the team books X number of dollars in jobs for the week, everyone gets a bonus. We have morning huddles. These are little kick-starts that we do every day with a little bit of training, a little bit of motivation, and goal tracking. And then we have what we call how we kick off the season. We have quarterly events, and we kick it off in March with an employee outing, and this is kind of our way to give back and have some fun with our staff, and it gets them motivated for the upcoming season.
 
So if I wrap this up, a tip for you that are listening: the best and the biggest companies, they don’t just hope for a busy spring; they plan ahead, they market aggressively, they train their teams so that they can capitalize on this pre-season demand. And at my company, spring success is not based on luck, and it’s certainly not based on hope—it’s based on strategy. And this is how a multimillion-dollar window cleaning and pressure washing company stays ahead of the competition.”
 
Sid Graef:
“Wow. So that was cool. What did you learn from Jim? Jim Dubois, the OG, squeegee pro. This guy, he’s got a multimillion-dollar window cleaning company in the Carolinas, and he’s been at it for 30 years. He knows his stuff. And so that’s why I love Jim so much: he speaks from experience, not from theory. Like, he’s been there and done that.
 
So here’s what I want to do. I want to, you know, I want to challenge you—or at least encourage you—to take something that you learned today in this episode and see how you can put it into action this week and apply it in your business so that you can win and prosper in your marketplace. Because that’s the whole deal. We’re not in business just to think about business. We’re in business to win. We’re in business to profit.
 
Our mission here at The Huge Insider Podcast and at The Huge Convention is to help our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a better business so you can have time and money freedom. That’s the deal. I’m certain you got into business because you wanted freedom, not because you wanted to be a slave or in bondage. So we’re getting the best insights from seven-figure, eight-figure, even nine-figure business owners, and we’re asking them questions, and they’re giving us their answer. And we’re just giving it to you straight. We’re not distilling it, we’re not editing stuff out, we’re just going, ‘Here you go. This is what the man said.’ And it’s worked incredibly well for them. Now I want you to take it and run with it.
 
So here’s a quick recap of a few things. One, we’ve got free and paid resources for you. We want to help you win in business. Some of the things we do: we’ve got The Huge Insider Podcast right here. You get The Huge Transformations Podcast, where you get stories and interviews of some of the seven- and eight-figure business builders—some of the same ones that teach on this podcast. And we’ve got The Huge Convention every August; this year, it’s going to be in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd. Tickets are very inexpensive. I don’t know when you’re listening to it right now, but today is the lowest price you’re going to get a ticket. Just go to www.thehugeconvention.com and join us.
 
We also have The Huge Foundations educational platform, and you can find that on www.thehugeconvention.com as well. That has got over 140 hours of specific home service business education and a whole lot more. Every week we have the downloadable action guide from this show. It is at www.thehugeinsider.com and you can download the action guide and put it into practice.
 
We also have an amazing mastermind that you do have to qualify for. You’ve got to have at least five employees. You need to be pushing or past a million in revenue. And this is where we really pour jet fuel into your business, and this is for people that want a 10X and go from a million to 10 and beyond.
 
So that’s it. I can’t thank you enough for joining us. I hope you learned. I hope you put it into action. And we want to hear from you. We want to hear about your wins. Here’s the cool thing: we set up a special phone number for you—804-600-HUGE. 804-600-HUGE. That last four digits are 4843, spells HUGE. You can call in, you can leave us a message, and here’s what we want to hear: we want to hear a victory story. We want to hear your win. Especially love it if you take some of the principles or strategies or tactics you learned here and apply them, and then call us up and say, ‘I did the thing that Jim taught, and this is the result I got.’ And it doesn’t have to be big—like, ‘I did the thing Jim taught, and I got two new customers, and it works.’ Love to hear that. We also want to hear what we call lessons learned. Basically, that means I tried something, I fell on my face, and it hurt, and I got back up, and this is how it made me better.
 
We want to hear from you. Call, leave us a message, check out the website, check out the resources we have, download the action guide.”

Episode 5: Hiring and Recruiting Systems (to always have A-Players ready)

SummaryIn this episode of the Huge Insider Podcast, host Sid Graef brings you powerful hiring strategies from Brandon Vaughn, a veteran entrepreneur who grew his
[Sid Graef]:Hey, my friend, welcome back to the Huge Insider Podcast. This is your host, Sid Graef, and if you've been listening to our podcast, you already know this is a brand-new show for home service professionals who are committed to breaking the million-dollar revenue mark. If that's you, you're in the right place. If you’re already over a million in revenue, you’ll get even more out of the show.
So you already know—this is not your typical podcast. It’s not an interview show; it’s not expert-driven. Instead, we’ve gathered seven- and eight-figure business owners—people running companies that do anywhere from two million a year to 40 million a year—and we’re bringing you their best insights, all focused on a single topic each month. These are real operators, quietly building empires behind the scenes—not on social media looking for attention. They are in their element, building businesses and making things happen.
So it’s March 2025, and this month we’re diving into hiring. A lot of you have seasonal businesses, and you know it’s time to staff up now so you can maximize your capacity to handle the spring rush. Last week, we heard from Michael Dahlke—he talked about the difference between core behaviors and core values, why it’s so important, and how that can be critical for your hiring and company culture.
Today, you’re going to hear from Brandon Vaughn. Brandon started a window cleaning and power washing company as the sole employee (bought it from his dad), grew it to over 70 employees, and sold it. Then he built the Conquer coaching program—coached hundreds of small business owners—and also built Wise Coatings (which is still active). Now he’s building HireBus, a brilliant tool for hiring A-players. We asked Brandon: “What’s your best advice for best hiring practices?” Here’s what he had to say.
[Sid Graef]:So in the world of hiring, there's nobody better for us to ask these questions. We've got Brandon Vaughn on, and the question is: What are the best practices for your hiring process? How do we find and hire A-players?
[Brandon Vaughn]:Happy to dive in—this is one of my favorite topics. I'll share what I'm doing with my home service companies. For example, Wise Coatings has a waiting list of about 260 technicians waiting to join. There’s a major reason: we treat it like a marketing problem.
Imagine your business is a product on a store shelf with many other options. How do you stand out? Most job ads are bland, generic. They don’t capture attention or describe what the opportunity is. We know how to sell a cleaning job to a customer—who our ideal customer is, marketing materials, videos—but if we don’t do that for employees, we fail. If we have no great employees, we can’t deliver.
When writing our job ads, we start with a strong “who you are” opening hook—our ideal candidate profile: “You’re always working to level up in life personally and professionally. You love running toward problems…”—referencing our core values. Then we say who we are, selling them on us: “We were awarded Top 100 Emerging Franchises by Entrepreneur, one of the fastest-growing floor coatings companies…” Then we include a quick video: “See what it’s like to work here.” Future-pace them—what would it be like being part of our team?
It’s about selling the opportunity. If your business isn’t big, it’s still “sexy”: a family-owned business with big dreams. Cast that vision. If it’s big enough for their dreams to fit inside, that’s how you attract A-players. Also, clean up your shop—fix the flickering light. Make it a place they want to work. Think about onboarding, training, job descriptions, so they have clarity.
Second, we keep ads running all year. “Always be recruiting,” as it’s a lot of work. That’s why we built HireBus—an AI fractional recruiter that posts the job ads, messages candidates, and interviews them, 365 days a year, to build you a talent pool. That’s how we keep a waiting list. So if I have someone perpetually late or underperforming, I can tap a candidate from the pool. You’re never a hostage to a bad hire.
Third, the difference between a good salesperson and a great salesperson might be $200K a year in sales vs. $1.5 million. Keep upgrading your bench. If you have a strong “always hiring” pipeline, you can be picky, release underperformers, and attract real A-players.
[Sid Graef]:Great. Within that process, you built HireBus to handle it. People apply, there's a screening. What’s the outcome you want from screening, and best practices for interviews?
[Brandon Vaughn]:We focus on behaviors, experience, and skills. For behaviors, we use a “right seat” score—a single-question, five-minute assessment that outputs 21 behaviors. We benchmark them for each position: the ideal production manager, salesperson, etc. Everyone takes it, we ask deal-breaker questions, then we do interviews. I like situational questions to see if they’re lying, exaggerating, or hiding something. People come in showing their best side, so we dig deeper to see if there are any hidden issues.
The cool thing is, HireBus can auto-generate interview questions you should ask based on their behavior profile. You don’t have to guess.
[Sid Graef]:Okay, friends—what did you learn from Brandon, and more importantly, what will you do about it? How can you apply these ideas to your business this week? Everything Brandon mentioned is in the show notes. Most importantly, download the Action Guide—we’ve created a five-page guide to help you execute Brandon’s strategy right away. Grab it at thehugeconvention.com/action. Of course, that link is in the show notes. If you want to take a look at HireBus, go to hirebus.com/huge.
There are more ways to level up your business. One, keep listening to this podcast—it’s free, and the insights are priceless. You’re hearing from people at 2, 5, 10, even 50 million in revenue, telling you exactly how they do it. Also, our free newsletter, The Huge Insider, is at thehugeinsider.com. Each week you’ll get more strategies delivered straight to your inbox.
The Huge Convention—the ultimate event for home service business owners—is this August 20–22, 2025, in Nashville, Tennessee. Tickets are still very affordable. It’s the best networking, education, and biggest trade show in our industry.
Lastly, we want to feature you on the show. If you’ve had a big win—especially if you applied something from this show—or if you had a painful failure that taught you a powerful lesson, call and leave a message at 804-600-HUGE (804-600-4843). We might feature your story or even play your message.
That’s it for this week—don’t just listen, take action! I’m Sid Graef, and this is the Huge Insider Podcast. We’ll see you next time.

Episode 4: Core Behaviors vs. Core Values

This episode of The Huge Insider Podcast centers on hiring and the power of establishing “core behaviors” to shape company culture. This segment from Mike Dahlke (who owns or invests in 11 blue-collar businesses), emphasizes using “core behaviors” (akin to core values) to hire, fire, and regularly coach employees. By identifying the best traits of your top performers—and inverting the worst traits of your underperformers—you create a concise framework for consistent, behavior-focused hiring and feedback. This core-behavior method is straightforward, repeatable, and ensures everyone on the team embodies a clear, cultural standard.
 
Show Notes
Mentioned in the Episode:
Core Behaviors (or Core Values)
Charlie Munger’s “inversion” concep
Resources:
The Huge Insider newsletter signup
The Huge Insider podcast downloadable action guide
The Foundations platform trial offer
The Huge Mastermind info page
Facebook
Call-in line to share wins or lessons: 804-600-HUGE (4843)
Transcript
Sid Graef:Welcome back to The Huge Insider Podcast. Hey, my friend, it's Sid Graef here. If you caught our first few episodes, you already know this is a brand new show for home service professionals that are striving to break the million-dollar revenue mark. And if that's you, you're definitely in the right place. If you're already over a million in revenue, you're going to get even more out of the show.
So here's the deal. This is not your typical podcast. It's not an interview show. It's not an expert-driven show. Instead, we've gathered seven- and eight-figure business owners, people running companies that are doing anywhere from 2 million a year to 40 million a year and beyond, and we're bringing you their best insights, all focused on a single topic each month.
And these are real owners. These are people that are actually running businesses. They're quietly building empires behind the scenes. They're not the people that you would see on social media looking for attention. They're in business to run a business and making things happen.
So this month, it's March. We're diving deep into our main subject, and that is hiring. Today, you're going to hear from Mike Dahlke. Mike owns or is invested in 11 blue-collar businesses, and they all use this framework as the foundation for all of their hiring. Let's get into it. Let's hear from Mike.
Mike Dahlke:Hey, this is Mike Dahlke from Nashville, Tennessee. We own and operate and control 11 different businesses, mostly in the blue-collar trade space and home services space, and I'm sending a message about core behaviors or core values.
So it's coming up to hiring season. We're getting real close to where we're going to have to really ramp up, especially in our northern climates where the snow's starting to melt, and we're going to be really, really focused on hiring. So we have core behaviors standardized across all of our organization. So most people would know these as core values. We've changed the wording just a little bit, but most people use their core values to hire and fire.
Most people use them to discuss that in an all-hands-on meeting. What we do is a little bit different. We use our core behaviors at every single coaching meeting. So if you're set up on a review system where we're going to review the team member every 30 days or every 90 days, we're going to go through those core behaviors every time.
Now, this is one of the reasons why we call it core behaviors and not core values. It's really hard to tell somebody in a review, “Your values aren't good,” or “You need to improve your values,” or “Your values aren't aligned with ours.” It's a lot easier to say, in a review, “This is how you're behaving in a way that's going to help us accomplish our mission and goals, and this is what you can do better.”
So our core behaviors are really an outline of how you have to behave when you are a part of our organization. It doesn't mean you can't value integrity or have other values that are different than ours, but you have to behave this way in our organization. And that makes it a really, really easy hiring conversation, coaching conversation, firing conversation.
So, how, if you do not have core behaviors or core values, the easiest way to come up with them is to take the top five employees that have ever worked for you or that you've worked with. If you're new to business and you're just getting started, think about a job that you had where you had excellent employees that worked with you, excellent team members.
How did they behave that was so attractive to you or that you really, really enjoyed? Maybe they were ultimately responsible. Maybe they owned up to their mistakes. Maybe they were humble, hardworking, hungry, smart. What are the things that were consistent between those five? And those are things that are hopefully consistent in you as well, so that you can put them on your list of core behaviors.
The other side of that is to invert it. So Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett's partner, one of the wealthiest men in the country, he had a famous line that said, “All I want to know is where I'm going to die, because if I know where I'm going to die, I'm never going to go there, and then I'll never die.”
And so he used that philosophy of always inverting, looking at the negatives and saying, “Okay, let's just go the exact opposite of that.” So if we take a look at those inversions and say, “Okay, well, what about the five worst employees I've ever had, or the worst members, or the worst that I've ever been with? What were those core behaviors, and what would be the opposite positive of that?”
So maybe they were dishonest, so that would be honest. Maybe it was that they were lazy, so that would be hardworking. So take the five that are just awesome and the five that were terrible and use that to come up with your core behaviors, your core values, if you haven't had them.
Once you've got them, you can hire them and bring it up in the—you should hire people and bring it up in the hiring process: “This is how we behave,” or “This is our core values, and if you want to work for us, this is what our expectations are.”
And then my very, very strong encouragement for everybody is to have one of the questions that you think through before every review: How is this team member behaving in a way that's going to help us accomplish our mission and value our mission and vision this year? How can they do better? So giving very consistent, real feedback on what they're doing well and what they can do better is awesome.
So again, for core values, core behaviors, the two most important things are: get them—get them dialed in with the top five and the worst five. Secondly, use them when you're doing your hiring this spring so that you get the right people up front, and they know if they're not going to value or behave the way—that they're just not going to get what they need, or they're not going to be able to work for you in a positive way.
And then lastly, bring it up in every review: “How are they behaving in a way that's consistent with these behaviors and want to make you better?” Hope that's helpful. Enjoy your spring. Talk to you soon.
Sid Graef:Okay, that's a wrap for Episode 4. What did you learn about core behaviors? More importantly, what are you going to do with that information? So Mike's strategy is simple, but don't let that fool you. It is powerful. Why? Because at the foundation of every successful business is one core truth: Culture is king, and culture is predicated by core behaviors. That's how you can define it.
So your next step is to take some action. Everything we covered in today's show is in the show notes, but most importantly, you can download the free action guide that goes with today's episode. We put together a three-page action guide to help you execute this week's strategy. Grab it at thehugeinsider.com.
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That's it for this week. Don't just listen—take action. I'm Sid Graef, and this is The Huge Insider Podcast. We'll see you next time.