Build to Win

Your appointment set rate is 36%. Someone at your last mastermind said theirs is 45%. Now you are up at night wondering what you are doing wrong. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan Weinberg and John Kolbaska explain why that comparison is the wrong thing to lose sleep over. The same business at a different size, with a different lead mix, produces completely different numbers. A 45% set rat...

Every contractor wants a million-dollar sales month. Almost none are ready for what it does to their backlog. Stephen Pisulak just booked his first million-dollar month at Lehigh Gap Exteriors, up from around $300,000 a month back in March. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan and John dig into how he turned it around, from the daily sales training that reset his team to the new sales manager...

Wait three minutes to call a new lead and you're 70% less likely to reach them. Your competitors already dialed. By the time you get to it, you're the fifth call, and the customer is gone. We pulled the highlights from our speed-to-lead conversation, the parts that help you turn more leads into booked jobs. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan and John walk through automated follow-up...

Home improvement contractors are having a down year, but Stephen Pisulak is growing. He took his exterior contracting business from $4.2 million to a projected $7 million by fixing his production capacity and tightening his sales margins. When Stephen first joined the show a year ago, he was the answer to every question in the building. He is back as the first returning guest, and his team now han...

New leads are harder to come by, and the ones you do get cost more. Close rates are down five to six points from where they were. If business has felt tougher these past few months, you are not imagining it. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan and John talk through the summer slowdown hitting home improvement right now and what it means for specialty contractors doing $10M and up. Material c...

You closed the job. The customer is excited. Then they hear nothing for weeks while the order sits with the manufacturer, and that cold stretch is where jobs cancel and referrals dry up. In part two of their email and SMS series, Jonathan and John pull up John's live Men With Tools account inside Builder Prime and walk through every automated message it sends. You will see the exact emails and...

Growing fast feels like winning. Then you check your profit and your cash. Alosha Pederson built Endless Poxybilities from scratch into a $10.5 million concrete coating company in just four years, with five production offices and 65 people on the team. But hitting that number surfaced the problems most owners run into on the way up, from profit that stayed too thin to a sales team that could book...

Most contractors plan from the top down. They set a sales goal, run the marketing, and hope production figures itself out. John Kolbaska did it that way for years. This episode is about what changed. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan and John break down the two most important numbers in your business: your break-even point and your production capacity. He breaks down how he uses his crews&...

Your pricing is right. The margin is built in. Your reps still give it all away. In Episode 34, Jonathan Weinberg and John Kolbaska sit down to break down a $4M home improvement company that was losing $600K to $700K a year. The fix took two weeks and one set of controls most owners never run. John also walks through the launch of Core Ignite, his new remote marketing team and call center installe...

Eight to ten percent of sold contractor jobs cancel, and most go silent before they do. In this highlights episode, Jonathan Weinberg and John Kolbaska open up John's live Builder Prime account and walk through the customer follow-up system running behind every Men With Tools project. John runs three locations doing eight figures in windows and doors, with over 1,000 five-star reviews and 30 t...

Most contractors are running their sales reps into the ground and wondering why their closing rate keeps dropping. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan Weinberg and John Kolbaska break down the lead distribution change that lifted John's net closing rate from 27% to 37% in 60 days. John caps his reps at 5 to 7 leads a week instead of the usual 10 to 15. Every appointment gets full effort,...

A lead aggregator rep told John straight up: send you 100 leads at $75 each, you'll close one job. That's $7,500 in marketing spend for a single $14,000 sale. Fifty percent cost of marketing. She said it with a smile. That conversation kicked off the playbook Jonathan Weinberg and John Kolbaska break down in this episode. John walks through the exact terms his team puts in front of every a...

Most contractors know they should be offering financing. In this episode, Jonathan and John break down why it's the most powerful tool in your sales process, and exactly how to use it. The average home improvement job is $14,000. The median household savings account has $8,000. They walk through the math, the mindset, and the exact three-option pricing structure that makes payment options the...

Hiring sales reps from your competitors feels like a shortcut. It's not. In this episode of Build to Win, John Kolbaska breaks down how he grew his sales team from 7 to 12 reps — and why the best candidates aren't coming from inside your industry. You'll hear how he built a full-time training program, what it actually costs to onboard a bad rep, and the two things he tests in the first...

Most contractors trust their reports. But if the data going into your CRM is wrong, every decision you make from it is wrong too. In this episode, Jonathan and John break down what bad CRM data is actually costing you. John found that 64 of his 300 zip codes drove 90% of his business. He also cut his speed to lead from 44 minutes to under a minute — and his appointment set rate doubled. If you&#39...

Some builders scale to millions fast while others stay stuck for years. The difference is not luck. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan and John share the biggest lessons from Accelerate LIVE! 2026 and reveal why certain contractors grow from zero to five million and beyond in just a few years while others never break through. They break down the real playbook top operators use including pro...

Most home improvement businesses are missing out on what AI can actually do for them. In this episode of Build to Win, Jonathan and John break down how contractors can use AI the right way to save time, close more leads, and run a smarter business. From using AI for content, emails, and texts, to designing lead follow-up sequences and analyzing your data, this episode shows how to treat AI like a...

Most business owners are already behind on their 2026 plan, even if they don’t realize it yet. In this high-value snippet of Build to Win , John walks through exactly how he builds a data-backed business plan for the year ahead, using real CRM numbers instead of gut instinct. From forecasting revenue, to planning marketing spend and headcount, this episode breaks down how to reverse-engineer a 202...

What if the one thing holding your contracting business back was sitting right in front of you, but you just weren’t tracking it? John Kolbaska reveals the huge impact of overhauling his call center, slashing speed to lead from 43 minutes to under 60 seconds. The result was a 50% increase in appointment set rate and the company's best December ever. You’ll also get a behind-the-scenes look at...

Josh Blickley launched BathWorks of Michigan just before the pandemic. Fast forward, and he's built on pace for $44.8 million in 2026. Part of the reason for his huge success is his forecasting, budgeting, and hiring strategies. In this episode, he reveals exactly how he plans his year, starting in Q3 of the previous one. You’ll learn how he builds alignment across departments, sets aggressive...

Stop me if this sounds familiar. You run a home improvement business. You know your busy season, it’s spring. March, April, May. The weather is warming up, and people are thinking about home projects. That’s what John thought, too. However, his assumption was based on gut feeling, as it has always been. Then he looked at three years of his CRM data. He fed it into a simple spreadsheet tool from th...

When Kirk Koskiniemi launched his roofing company, he thought hustle was enough. He sold every job himself. Worked builder leads and took whatever came his way just to keep the lights on. Within five years, he hit $5 million in revenue, but profit was another story. It wasn’t until he stepped back, built a real sales system, tracked every lead source, and implemented EOS that the business truly be...

Struggling with rising lead costs and unpredictable sales numbers? Chances are, you're not working your numbers backwards. In this episode of Build to Win, we sit down live in Las Vegas with Tim Brown from RGS Exteriors and Construction to break down how he’s planning to hit $18 million in 2026 despite rising lead costs and a tougher market. He walks us through the exact budgeting process he u...

Too many reps walk into a home and start pitching before they’ve even earned the right to, and that’s exactly where the sale falls apart. In this episode of Build to Win, we break down one of the most overlooked yet most important stages of the sales process: the needs assessment. We’ll walk you through our full discovery doc, from the exact questions we ask to what we’re listening for and everyth...

Ever had a customer go radio silent after they signed the contract, and wondered what went wrong? Well the answer is simple: Your follow-up (or lack thereof) might be the issue. In this week’s episode of Build to Win, we share with you the exact systems and strategies we use to keep our clients informed, excited, and on schedule from the moment they say “yes” all the way through install, warranty,...