Our handyman business hit $1.2M in revenue and we still felt broke. Revenue went up, stress went up, profit didn't. We fixed that…but first, the story that lead us here.
My background is in digital marketing — specifically in healthcare and legal lead generation. Not the most fulfilling work but I was good at it. I'd always dreamed about putting my skills toward more meaningful work.
I had several friends with local service businesses, and I saw how many struggled to do the work and run the business.
Several years back, I consulted for free with one friend who had a small martial arts studio. I spent just a few hours helping him set up lead generation campaigns and basic digital infrastructure. About a month later, he texted me saying he wasn't just filling his classes, he'd needed to add more to make room for the new students. Turns out he was great at teaching jiu-jitsu but didn't have time to run the rest of his business and teach.
Something clicked. The tools, systems, and strategies I'd been using for national healthcare companies and attorney groups could help local businesses too.
So I convinced my father-in-law, a retired general contractor, to start a handyman business with me. The first year we did about $80k. The next year, over $100k. Then he asked me a pivotal question: "How many more leads could you actually get?"
My answer was simple. "Probably a lot."
The following year, we did $1.2 million. Crazy. But we barely made any money beyond what we paid ourselves.
Then we realized we had all kinds of issues:
- Our invoicing was slow → cash flow was brutal.
- Our organic ranking started dropping → we didn't have a consistent system for reviews.
- Our lead response got sloppy → conversion got cut almost in half.
- Our "billed to paid hours ratio" was horrendous → incentives + tracking were broken.
- We lost money on materials → no consistent markup system.
Then… we fixed it.
So we started building simple systems that made the business run like a business—not a constant emergency.
- We built an entire lead handling system that automated the annoying work and gave us more time to have the meaningful conversations with potential customers.
- We started using a full customer management platform that we spent a year customizing.
- All of our scheduling moved into this platform so scheduling became simple.
- We built an AI estimator bot that turned 30-minute estimates into 2-minute estimates.
- We built reporting that showed which jobs were profitable and which weren't.
- We rebuilt our website with AI to rank better for the services we wanted to do.
- We switched our payment processing and saved thousands a year on fees.
It wasn't easy or quick, but we systematically fixed each problem.
In the next 60 days, we did $42,000 in profit. Same lead flow. Same market. We just stopped leaking money and time everywhere.
The point isn't that you should scale to this size.
The point is that we were where you are.
We made the mistakes, learned the lessons, and solved the problems you need to solve—to achieve financial stability, schedule flexibility, and the ability to impact your community for good.
If you're a local service business owner doing over $5k/month in revenue but feeling stuck—cash flow weird, follow-up messy, jobs harder to manage than they should be—let's talk.