Three home service operators. Three very different trades. One shared operating system. If you're a $1M to $10M shop staring at the ceiling wondering how anyone gets to $50M, here's what the public record actually says they did.
Tommy Mello · A1 Garage Door Service
Garage doors, Phoenix AZ expanding to 19 states
Before
2010. Two trucks. $50,000 in personal debt. One employee.
After
2022 sold a minority stake at reported EBITDA near $30M. By 2023, roughly $200M in revenue, 700+ employees, 26,000 calls per month, about 20,000 new clients per month.
What they do that you can copy
- Scorecard every CSR weekly on call booking rate, average ticket, and membership conversion.
- Track time from lead created to lead contacted, by source and by CSR.
- Run an operating cadence: daily huddle, weekly scorecard, monthly L10 rhythm.
- Never stop buying and testing leads. Never stop watching the cost per booked job (not cost per lead).
Source: Arkona / Adviza; Owned & Operated Legends. See references.
John Wilson · The Wilson Companies
Plumbing, HVAC, electrical, restoration, septic. Northeast Ohio.
Before
2016. Inherited a ~$1M/year single-location family plumbing shop.
After
2024 targeted $26M in revenue across five acquisitions. January 2024 alone did $1.7M. Publicly stated goal: become the largest licensed home service operator in Northeast Ohio.
What they do that you can copy
- Acquired five shops, then layered a shared operating rhythm and shared brand.
- Invested in digital lead-gen earlier than his market, then ran response time as a discipline.
- Runs a weekly number that every role in the business can see.
- Publishes his operating rhythm openly on podcasts so his team and peers can benchmark.
Source: Acquiring Minds; ServiceTitan Toolbox for the Trades. See references.
Chad & Tyler Peterman · Peterman Brothers
HVAC, plumbing, electrical. Indianapolis, IN.
Before
2011. Around $4M revenue. 21 employees.
After
2022 at $88.2M in revenue and about 700 employees. 2023 publicly targeted $175M. By late 2024, around $120M.
What they do that you can copy
- Built an in-house training academy that became the hiring flywheel. Techs stayed longer, performed higher, sold more.
- Shifted service mix toward higher-ticket install work and tracked membership conversion as a single top-line KPI.
- Ran weekly operating reviews across every department so the numbers never went stale.
- Expanded via locations rather than acquisitions, templatizing the playbook each time.
Source: PHCP Pros Contractor of the Year; IBJ Podcast; Owned & Operated Legends. See references.
The three habits that show up in every one of them
Strip the personalities, the trades, the state lines, and the acquisition history, and three habits keep showing up. These are the ones you can steal today, without hiring anyone, without buying another tool.
- Every number is owned by one person. Booking rate has an owner. Average ticket has an owner. AR over 45 days has an owner. The owner is the person whose weekly scorecard has that line on it.
- The numbers update weekly, not monthly. Monthly is too late. A dispatcher whose booking rate dipped three weeks ago has already cost the shop 60 jobs before anyone notices on a monthly P&L.
- Every number is comparable across tools. This is the one almost nobody has in the small shop. Peterman, Wilson and Mello all built or bought their way to a shared view of the business. Leads from any channel sit next to calls sit next to jobs sit next to invoices. One scoreboard.
They do not have better salespeople than you. They have a scoreboard their salespeople can see.
Why the average shop can't run this playbook yet
Not because the owner is lazy. Because the data is in 10 tools and no one owns the job of joining them up. Jobber has the jobs. QuickBooks has the revenue. CallRail has the calls. Google Ads has the spend. The homeowner emails are in Gmail. The crew chat is in Slack or on the truck radio.
Every week the owner picks two of those tools, pulls a report, copies it into a spreadsheet, and looks at it on Sunday night. Two weeks later the spreadsheet is out of date and nobody looks at it anymore.
Mello, Wilson and Peterman got around this by either building internal tooling, hiring an analyst, or adopting a platform that consolidated the picture for them. None of them are running their business off a dashboard they built themselves in Jobber. They run it off a view across every tool.
What to take from this, starting Monday
- Pick one number that would change your week if it moved. For most shops it is call booking rate or lead response time. Write it down. Pin it to the wall.
- Give it an owner. Not a committee. One person.
- Look at it weekly for four weeks. Talk about it in the huddle. Ask why it moved. Trends show up fast.
- Connect the data underneath so the number is real. Half the reason shops stop running scorecards is the number turns out to be wrong, because the source tools disagree. That is the problem we built Sully to solve.