Builder Stories

Everyone tells you to network. Almost nobody tells you exactly how to do it. Rachel Simon figured it out over a 31 year career at AT&T, 15 of them as a vice president. She's also seen the crucial role that workplace relationships play in retention, job performance, and company culture. In this episode, she breaks down the eight relationships everyone needs at work and the one people overlook the m...

After a key team member left and took a major project with him, Casey Laughlin was ready to refund every deposit and shut down Texas Outdoor Oasis for good. Then a retired carpenter walked through the door and saved the company. His influence over Casey's entire approach to business is the driving force behind the company's growth to 23 team members. Casey reveals how he rebuilt from the brink and...

Brian Javeline launched an online estimating and invoicing platform in 2005 and ended up teaching marketing to contractors. Now he sees another shift coming in how homeowners search. The builders who prepare today will pull ahead of their competitors. Brian shares where to start. In this episode you will learn: The surprising reason a page full of FAQs may still miss AI search Why publishing gener...

Stephan Sardone was planning to move to Papua New Guinea when he started doing tile work to get through seminary. He had no business training and wasn't worried about making money. Then his company grew 10X in a single year and he admits he had no idea what he was doing. Hear what he wishes he'd known before the business outgrew what he could keep in his head. In this episode you will learn: The o...

Steven Ross and his brother Ben started Renovating KC in 2020 and "did everything the wrong way." One early mistake cost them $90,000 on a single project. Five years later the Lenexa, Kansas firm landed at No. 139 on the 2025 Inc. 5000. In this episode Steven reveals the secrets behind that explosive growth. He also shares how his team uses AI to move faster than ever while delivering an experienc...

Jillian Childs went from running field marketing at Tesla to owning a South Florida pool company with her husband, Christian. They took over 150 open projects on day one, and every single one lived in a manila folder. In one year, Jillian rebuilt the operation inside JobTread with robust processes and streamlined automations that wipe out hours of tedious admin work. Now she's using AI to recover...

Ashley Wainscott built Simply Home for years on referrals and relationship marketing alone. In recent years she made a real investment in SEO, paid ads, and video content, even without a clean way to prove any of it was converting. She talks about the shift from scripted, robotic video to something rawer, and what her content looks like today. In this episode she breaks down her current lead mix a...

Morgan Thomas spent 15 years in commercial and residential construction before launching Homestead Builders Group in Healdsburg, California, with her business partner. Her promise to every client is a project with no surprises. Morgan believes most construction mishaps can be caught with upfront investigation before anyone picks up a tool. In this episode, she shares how she built her new company...

Jared Davis left Stripe to take over a family business that sells house plans to builders across the US and Canada. Today Architectural Designs represents 28,000 plans from around 200 designers and sells to tens of thousands of builders every year. In this conversation he shares what that buying data reveals about regional growth and shifting design tastes. He also makes the case that a stock plan...

An agent is just a program that runs on a timer and does one job for you. IT Director Jeremy Wood has about 30 of them working inside of a large, 80 year old design build firm that handles projects from handyman jobs to whole-house remodels. They sync the CRM, process AP, reconcile vendor invoices, check estimates against scopes of work, and much more. Here, Jeremy explains what agents are, how to...

Todd Milton inherited his father's sterling reputation as an Appomattox, Virginia home builder, then nearly ran the company into the ground. He then attended a two-day conference that exposed how badly he had been pricing jobs, and that same year he closed the books $100,000 in debt. He rebuilt his pricing, rewrote his contract into something that protected him, and slowly turned a business run of...

Canon Baldridge started Integria in 2023 with no connections in California and no book of business to fall back on. Every hire since has forced him to redefine his own role, from hands on tools to project management to marketing and sales. He has assembled a stack of software and outside partners piece by piece, adding each one only when the last version of the business stopped working. Three year...

Dan Flansburg started his New Jersey remodeling company in 2011 with a truck, a set of tools, and no business plan. For three years in the middle of that run, several of his employees took home more money than he did. Around 2018 he stopped treating marketing as an expense and hired a real web team, an SEO company, and a professional photographer. Three years ago he added video, and he now calls i...

Tyler Hunsberger has won a NARI Contractor of the Year award and earned a spot on Pro Remodeler's 40 Under 40. He is a fourth-generation contractor who has spent nearly 15 years on the sales and design side of remodeling. Now he is bringing that playbook back to his family's company after 25 years with no marketing, no estimating, and one single customer. This conversation is a masterclass in how...

Mike Coffey grew his social media audience from nothing to more than 120,000 Instagram followers. Here, he reveals how contractors can use social platforms to build trust, show their humanity, and turn finished-project beauty shots into real sales opportunities. He also shares how suffering a stroke last year changed his priorities. Instead of feeling consumed by the less inspiring parts of his bu...

Kelly Kirk took over Greymark Design + Build a few weeks after her mother, who founded the company, passed away. Leslie King was a larger-than-life figure and a well-known industry leader. Kelly chose to honor that legacy while also finding her own voice as a leader and bringing in fresh processes and a new approach. The journey wasn't easy, but today Kelly heads up a thriving company with a stron...

Bryan Sebring didn't just grow a business, he rebuilt one from scratch. After running his company in Chicagoland for over two decades, Bryan moved to Franklin, Tennessee and relaunched as a design build only firm serving a completely different market. He shares the controversial 15 day pricing window he uses to qualify leads and close faster, along with a "power of three" approach to budgeting ran...

Vince Nardo helped grow his family's cabinet refacing shop into the largest home improvement company on the West Coast with 700 employees. The company operated in multiple states and even landed a partnership with Costco to sell their products. In 2022, he sold the business to private equity firm Audax. Two years later, the acquiring company went bankrupt and the 40-year legacy the Nardo family bu...

Jane Dzielski has spent nearly a decade at Google turning massive datasets into answers about how consumers make decisions. She knows what people type when they need a contractor, and that behavior is changing fast. In this episode she breaks down search, reviews, ads, and AI for the home services industry. Contractors will walk away seeing their own marketing differently. In this episode you will...

Dustin Hippensteel spent years convinced he had to do everything himself. Then three decisions quietly changed how his entire business runs. None of them cost much, and none were the flashy fixes most owners chase first. In this episode he breaks down what they were and why they mattered. In this episode you will learn: The hire he was sure wouldn't work that now handles the load he used to drown...

As the leader of Versa Homes, Felipe Freig builds multimillion dollar homes for executives and entrepreneurs. He dialed in the systems behind those builds so completely that he was able to step back from the daily grind. So he launched Versa Method Coaching to hand that same playbook to other contractors. In this episode he gets specific about what actually keeps a building business profitable. In...

Corey Plourde spent eighteen years climbing the corporate sales ladder before walking away to build his own remodeling company. Years later he hit a wall he could not see past and finally admitted he had run out of answers. In this conversation he opens up about the moment everything turned around and the year that followed became his most profitable ever. He also reveals why the change he feared...

Todd Dawalt spent more than 30 years in construction learning expensive lessons the hard way. In this episode, he reveals the one stage of every project where the most profit slips away, usually long before work even begins. He shares the counterintuitive shift that helps companies make more money without adding to the team. Todd also explains how one builder was leaving $400,000 on the table ever...

Jake Gosselin built Churchfront into one of the most innovative AV firms in the country, all fueled by a 300,000 subscriber YouTube channel and a relentless drive to automate the work that used to drain his time. In this episode, he pulls back the curtain on the AI agents now running his business behind the scenes, including budgeting, procurement, and payroll. Jake also gets real about the securi...

Liz Davies built a "small but mighty" luxury building and remodeling firm in Atlanta, and she did it without ever letting a project run on guesswork. In this episode, she pulls back the curtain on the pre construction approach that puts the right people in charge of the right decisions long before the first wall goes up. She reveals the one thing she says to hesitant clients that finally gets them...