Your Business Is Growing. So Why Are You Still Broke?
Your Business Is Growing. So Why Are You Still Broke?
Most home service owners who feel stuck ask the same question: how do I get more leads? According to contractor coach Lee Miller, that’s usually the wrong place to start. More leads on a leaky business just means more work, not more profit.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Phil Risher sat down with Lee, founder of Brave Academy and the Conquer Contractor Chaos program. Lee spent years as a corporate trainer turning around struggling restaurants for one of the UK’s biggest hospitality groups. He then owned and operated franchise painting and moving businesses that, combined, reached around $10 million, before selling and moving into coaching full time.
His process for $1M–$10M contractors follows the same order every time:
- Fix profit first, before chasing scale.
- Get the owner off the tools and into the CEO seat.
- Build copy-and-paste scalability once the foundation holds.
Here’s how each stage works, with the specific exercises Lee uses with the 175+ contractors in his program.
Stage 1: Fix your profit before you chase growth
Lee’s first session with a new client is a four-to-five-hour planning call that maps a five-year vision down to a detailed 90-day plan. Then the work goes straight to profit, relearned “from scratch.”
He speaks from experience. The first time he pushed for seven figures, his business netted more profit at $750K in revenue than it did at $1 million. Revenue grew; the business got worse.
Phil saw the same pattern as an operator. One home service company he worked with had been stuck around $2.7M for two years at roughly 10% profit. A big reason: about 20% of every job went to referral partners. By shifting the mix toward direct, organic residential customers, the company grew to about $4M the following year, and profit reportedly rose from around $300K to $900K.
Lee also cautions against using the P&L as your main profit tool. It’s a historical record. By the time it reaches you, the money was spent weeks ago. Profit has to be managed upstream, where decisions actually get made.
The four gatekeepers of profit
Lee’s framework assigns profit to four “gatekeepers,” each controlling specific levers. In a small company, one person may wear all four hats. What matters is that each game gets played.
Gatekeeper 1: Sales (price and volume)
Sales is the only gatekeeper that makes money. Its two levers are pricing and volume, through inbound marketing and outbound relationships like referrals and networking.
Start with price. It’s the fastest lever you control: raise it today and it applies to your next quote. Lee pairs higher prices with a better experience, using Disney as the model. Disney doesn’t sell theme parks; it sells the look on a child’s face at the gate. Ask how you can raise the level of service enough to justify a higher ticket.
Upsell where you already are. A job site is one of the highest-ROI places to grow revenue, because the customer has already said yes. Three examples from the episode:
- A one-line CSR script. At Phil’s duct cleaning business, average tickets were around $600. CSRs started asking on confirmation calls whether the customer wanted the dryer vent done too, since it should be cleaned yearly. Phil says combo jobs jumped noticeably almost overnight.
- A no-pressure add-on menu. Lee’s estimators noted possible add-ons during the walkthrough and listed them on the quote as options A, B and C, without pitching them. A follow-up call two weeks before the start date revisited them: adding now avoids extra truck, travel and setup costs later.
- Incentivized crews. Lee’s painters earned 10% of the profit on anything they upsold on site. It worked so well that his operations manager once sold a $13,000 popcorn ceiling removal in the middle of peak season, more than the schedule could absorb.
Own the lifetime value. Lee coaches general contractors to map out a homeowner’s next five to ten years of projects (bathroom, then kitchen, then patio) and call each year when the next one is due. You stop competing for every job from scratch.
Gatekeeper 2: Production (labor and materials)
Whoever runs production controls two costs: labor and materials. Their job is to keep money the sales team already brought in. As Lee puts it, sales makes money; everyone after sales keeps it.
- Labor efficiency comes from the right incentives, training, onboarding and people development. Lee recommends lean principles and kaizen, the mindset of continuous improvement. Name someone on your production team as the “lean implementer” and give them time each week to study it. He suggests The Toyota Way as a starting point.
- Route density is a quick win for service businesses. Phil’s company ran 13 routes, and tightening them meant less windshield time. Today, he notes, you could hand a screenshot of your dispatch board to an AI tool and ask it to optimize the routing.
- Materials cover both what you pay suppliers and what you lose to damage, waste and miscuts. Push both numbers down.
Together, these two gatekeepers determine your gross profit.
The 50/30/20 rule: nail gross before you talk about net
Lee tells clients not to worry about net profit yet. If you don’t make gross profit, there’s no way to make net. His target split:
| Bucket | Share of revenue |
|---|---|
| Gross profit | 50% |
| Fixed expenses | 30% |
| Net profit | 20% |
In Lee’s view, 50% gross is a floor, not a stretch goal, for most home service trades. He compares profit to an NFL game played in stages: teams that lose the first half can regroup at halftime and win. Win each stage and you reach the Super Bowl of net profit.
Gatekeeper 3: Your bookkeeper or admin (budget and cadence)
Once gross profit is healthy, net profit depends on what you keep. That’s the bookkeeper’s game, and Lee urges every owner to have one. Their two levers:
- A budget that someone holds you accountable to.
- A meeting rhythm, with a set agenda for reviewing the P&L.
Lee runs this every Friday with his wife Danielle, who is also his operations manager. Because she comes in with no assumptions about his work, she highlights every line she doesn’t understand and makes him justify it. Most weeks, they find something to cut.
Gatekeeper 4: Your accountant (partner in profit)
Your accountant can only work with what the first three gatekeepers hand over. But Lee finds most owners underuse theirs. His test: do you feel your accountant cares about the growth of your business?
A good one acts like the company’s financial planner. They help you forecast, flag local grants, and tell you when you can actually afford that next Sprinter van, even if the answer is “September, not now.” If yours doesn’t, it may be time to find another.
Stage 2: Get yourself off the tools
In the $1M–$3M range, the owner is often still the top salesperson and the first one called to every fire. Lee knows the pull well. He used to be in the tech room at 6:30 a.m., ready to go to war with his crew, because that felt like the way to add value.
His reframe: the least valuable thing an owner can do is swing the hammer. When you’re on site, vision planning stops, team development stops and your growth as a CEO stops. That isn’t laziness; it’s a signal you need a new way to contribute. Lee also stresses it’s a choice. Staying small and profitable is a valid path. But you can’t scale from behind a ladder.
The “revenue responsibility per hour” exercise
To make the trade-off concrete, Lee has owners put a dollar value on their time:
- Estimate the hours you’ll work in a year. Forty hours a week with two weeks off is roughly 2,000.
- Divide your revenue goal by those hours.
- List your current tasks and flag every one worth far less than that rate.
| Revenue goal | Hours per year | Your time is worth |
|---|---|---|
| $2M | 2,000 | $1,000/hour |
| $3M | 2,000 | $1,500/hour |
| $5M | 2,000 | $2,500/hour |
At $1,500 an hour, answering routine email makes no sense when someone else could do it for a fraction of the cost. The same logic points to hiring a production manager rather than running every job-site fire yourself. Lee has sat with owners whose number was around $30,000 an hour. Nobody at that level is driving to Home Depot.
There’s a personal payoff, too. Many owners are parents. Being home for dinner without staring at your phone is worth something, and that’s an argument for making your eight working hours count more.
So what does the owner do instead?
Phil admits this was his own sticking point: if I’m not on sales calls or client calls, what exactly am I supposed to do? Lee says that fear is common, and that the answer is the best part. You get to write your own job description. He breaks the CEO role into three parts.
1. Visionary. Like a ship’s captain, you can’t run the vessel alone, but you set the destination and keep checking how many degrees off course you are. Lee points to 1-800-GOT-JUNK? co-founder Brian Scudamore, whose “Can You Imagine” wall lists hundreds of big goals, from landing on Oprah to appearing on Starbucks cups, most now checked off.
2. High-level decision-maker. Not every small call, just the ones that move the needle. Instead of “how do I land the next client,” ask “how do I land the next hundred?” Instead of buying one more van, ask what it takes to add five.
3. Developer of your gatekeepers. Lee’s turning point came when he decided to run “a people development business that happened to do it through home services.” He taught his managers finance, marketing and sales. Four of them, two production managers and two salespeople, now own successful painting companies of their own and still send him referrals. That commitment built a strong culture while they were with him.
It also takes humility. Eventually you need to hire people who are better and smarter than you at their jobs, and be comfortable with it.
Building toward scale: work backwards
With time freed up, the owner can step back, find the current bottleneck (booking rate, close rate, capacity) and fix it, then move to the next one. Lee uses one technique for both vision and systems: start at the end.
The three-year letter. Lee asks clients to close their eyes and “verbally write” him a letter dated three years out. What just happened? “We added our fifth truck.” What happened before that? “We took the family to the Maldives after hitting our profit goal.” They keep walking it back until they reach tomorrow, which often turns out to be something like finally letting go of the poor culture fit they’ve kept around only because they needed the extra hands.
The reverse customer journey. Ask an owner to describe their process front to back and you’ll get five steps: meet, estimate, book, do the job, collect payment. Run it backwards (we asked for a review; before that, we sent the request; before that, we called to say thanks) and the same journey often turns into 65 to 70 distinct steps. Going backwards forces you to see each handoff, which is what you need to document before anything can be copied and repeated.
Where AI fits in
Lee uses AI “for pretty much everything,” and even gives his clients access to his own AI tools so they can get answers between coaching calls. But he’s clear about its limits.
- AI amplifies what you already have. Broken systems plus AI just gets you more of the same. Still, he compares sitting out entirely to skipping a website because you’re in the Yellow Pages.
- Define the outcome before you prompt. Owners often start with one idea, get told they need five other things first, and end up building at 2 a.m. Lee’s rule: if you can’t define the outcome you want while typing the prompt, you probably don’t need it.
- Point it at your vision. Once you’ve done the planning work, tell the AI that everything it helps with should lead toward that vision. Lee also suggests giving it access to your calendar and asking where you’re wasting time.
- Know your scripts cold. Phil notes that sales scripts you write and drill yourself stick in a way generated ones don’t. Lee calls scripts a toolbox: you don’t need them in the same order every time, but you need the right one memorized.
Your checklist
- Review your pricing and decide what experience upgrade would justify a higher ticket.
- Add one add-on question to your CSR confirmation script.
- List optional add-ons on every quote, then revisit them on a pre-start follow-up call.
- Set a field incentive for on-site upsells.
- Name one person to own lean and continuous improvement in production.
- Check your gross margin against the 50% target before worrying about net.
- Set a weekly P&L review with a fixed agenda and a budget.
- Ask yourself whether your accountant cares about your growth.
- Calculate your revenue responsibility per hour and flag tasks below it.
- Write your three-year letter and walk it back to tomorrow.
- Map one customer journey backwards, from the review request to first contact.
Where Growth Begins
Growth doesn’t start with another lead source, ad campaign or AI hack. It starts inside the business: tighten profit through the four gatekeepers, buy back your time, then use that time to lead. Once the foundation holds, more leads actually turn into more profit.