How to Grow Your Business with Sales Process and Technique
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Release Date: 07/08/2026
Winning the Messy Middle: Home Services Marketing in the AI Era | MarketStorm
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Home services marketing has a hidden battleground, and most owners never fund it. It is the messy middle, the 40 to 100 days a homeowner spends circling a project before they ever search your name. Rick Brown and Carole Lawson of MarketStorm have spent years mapping that window, and what happens inside it decides who gets the call. In this episode, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Rick, CEO and co-founder of MarketStorm, and Carole, its co-founder and chief data officer and a Harvard-trained data scientist, to break down how buyer behavior changed after the pandemic and why the...
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How One Focus Every 90 Days Scales Your Business | Josh Zolin
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Doing more does not scale your business. It stalls it. Diluted focus gets you diluted results, and the owners who grow fastest are usually the ones doing fewer things, not more. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Josh Zolin, CEO of Windy City Equipment Service and author of Blue is the New White, on how one simple shift, a single company wide focus every 90 days, took the guesswork out of hitting his goals. Josh breaks down how he points his entire company, from himself to the parts runner, at one goal each quarter, why focusing on less...
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Why Your Techs Are Losing Sales in 2026 | Justin Riley
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Service Scout (14 day free trial): This is the toughest year to close a sale in home services since 2008. Equipment costs more than ever, credit is tighter, and the customers calling for a replacement are the hardest ones to sell. The problem usually is not your leads. It is what happens when your technician walks in the door. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Justin Riley, CEO and founder of UpFrog, for a straight read on the 2026 home services market and how the best companies are still closing jobs hand over fist. Justin breaks...
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Systems That Outlast You: Building a Trades Business for Generations
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most companies do not last. A huge share of the biggest names in the world vanish within a few decades. The Smith & Oby Company has been running since 1898. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Jake Wattenbarger, president of Smith & Oby, a Foundral brand, a Cleveland mechanical contractor that has stayed relevant for 125 years by reading the market before it forces the issue, and by building systems and a culture that outlast any one person. Jake spent nearly a decade as an Army logistics officer before the trades, and it shows....
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How to Beat Private Equity Without Selling | Zach Cooper-Vastola
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Private equity is buying up home service companies and quietly gutting the good ones, and most owners think their only options are to sell or get outspent. There is a third one. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Zach Cooper-Vastola, co-founder of Hickory, who has bought and built home service companies across the tri-state to roughly 350 people and 80 million dollars in revenue, without ever running them from an ivory tower. Zach breaks down how he keeps technicians from walking out the door after an acquisition, why he...
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How Home Service Pros Hit 20% Net Margin | Profitability Partners
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most home service businesses keep just 5 to 12% net profit, and most owners have no idea that is where they are. The best run HVAC, plumbing, and electrical shops keep 20%, and the gap almost always comes down to a few fixable mistakes. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Josh Crouch sit down with Matthew Mooney and Raymond Gong of Profitability Partners, a fractional CFO firm that spent years on the private equity side of the table and now helps owners find the profit already hiding in their business. They break down the real gross profit benchmarks for every...
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How AI Is Changing HVAC (Without Replacing Techs) | Chris Plunkett
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
AI is not coming for your techs. It is coming for the busywork, the missed calls, and the guesswork that quietly eats your margin. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett sits down with Chris Plunkett, a Tucson HVAC owner who has been in the trade since he was eight years old, to talk about what using AI in an HVAC business actually looks like day to day. They get into how Chris turned home inspections from a loss leader into one of his highest paying jobs, why his AI voice agent books calls so well that customers swear they were talking to a person, and the simple pay...
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Stop Missing Calls: The Real Reason Home Service Leads Disappear
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most home service companies do not have a lead problem. They have a missed-call problem. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Joshua Crouch sit down with Chris Nelson, Senior Manager of Vertical Marketing at CallRail, to talk about why home service leads disappear, how missed calls turn into lost revenue, and what contractors can do to better understand what is happening inside their call flow. This conversation is not just about answering the phone faster. It is about understanding where your leads come from, how they move through your business, and where good...
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How to Grow Your Business with Sales Process and Technique
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most contractors want more leads, more booked calls, and more revenue. But if your sales process is inconsistent, more leads will only expose the problem faster. In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Joshua Crouch sit down with Josh Martin, Director of Revenue Strategy at 3Four Labs, to talk about how service businesses can grow by building a stronger sales framework, improving technician coaching, and using AI-powered tools the right way. Josh explains why AI and automation are only useful when your company already knows what “good” looks like. If your...
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The Moneyball for Home Services: How You Can Catch the Jobs You’re Missing
Service Business Mastery for Skilled Trades: HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical Home Service
Most contractors think they need more leads. But what if the real problem is that you’re already missing the jobs you paid to generate? In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Joshua Crouch sit down with Shaun Ritchey from Breezy to talk about Moneyball for home services and how contractors can use AI, better data, and smarter systems to uncover the jobs hiding inside their existing business. Just like Moneyball changed baseball by finding overlooked value in the data, this conversation shows how contractors can find overlooked revenue in missed calls, slow follow-up,...
info_outlineMost contractors want more leads, more booked calls, and more revenue.
But if your sales process is inconsistent, more leads will only expose the problem faster.
In this episode of Service Business Mastery, Tersh Blissett and Joshua Crouch sit down with Josh Martin, Director of Revenue Strategy at 3Four Labs, to talk about how service businesses can grow by building a stronger sales framework, improving technician coaching, and using AI-powered tools the right way.
Josh explains why AI and automation are only useful when your company already knows what “good” looks like. If your technicians, comfort advisors, or salespeople do not have a clear framework, the software cannot magically make them better. It needs to understand the questions you want asked, the information you want collected, and the way your company expects customers to be served.
The conversation also breaks down why recording field conversations should not be seen as “Big Brother,” but as a coaching tool. Just like athletes watch game film, technicians and salespeople can use call and visit recordings to improve their communication, tone, positioning, and close rate.
They also discuss:
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Why every growing company needs a repeatable sales framework
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How AI ride-along tools help coach technicians and salespeople
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Why technicians act differently when a manager is physically in the truck
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How recording customer conversations can help your team improve
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Why “sales” feels uncomfortable for many technicians
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The importance of teaching technical experts how to communicate value
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Why companies need clean data before they rely on AI
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How AI can create noise when it is used without a clear outcome
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Why automation must be monitored instead of set and forgotten
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How to avoid overwhelming your team when adopting new technology
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Why sales tools must be customized to your company’s process
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How asking for the sale is often the missing step in the home
If you are trying to grow your service business, improve close rates, coach your team better, or make AI useful instead of confusing, this episode gives you a practical look at how sales process and technique create scalable growth.
Timestamps
00:00 Clarifying platform's role and use case
05:22 Getting started in the industry
09:22 AI ride along software discussion
10:53 Optimizing service call efficiency
16:07 Watching sales recordings for improvement
18:37 Identifying AI-generated resumes
21:01 Efficiency with Technology Tools
24:08 Understanding mismatched business language
29:17 Demo: Claude's PowerPoint integration
31:10 Human oversight in automation
35:23 Challenges of Team Growth
39:35 Understanding customer communication skills
42:31 Introducing Execconnect tool
43:31 Explaining the 34 Labs name
Follow the Host and Guest
Tersh Blissett: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tershblissett/
Joshua Crouch: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-crouch/
Josh Martin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuadarrenmartin/
3Four Labs: htps://www.linkedin.com/company/3fourlabs/
Connect with Us
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This episode is kindly powered by:
UpFrog: upfrog.com
MarketStorm is an AI-powered advertising platform. Results vary by market, budget, and campaign configuration: https://marketstorm.ai/
Get Your 14-Day Free Trial with CallRail!: https://www.callrail.com/sbmpod
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Breezy: Capture 25-30% more clients with Breezy AI Agents. Use code “SBM” to book a demo and get $500 on us: https://getbreezyapp.com/schedule-demo
PhoneTAP: Your calls hold the key to growing your business. PhoneTAP gives you instant AI analysis, real customer lifetime value, and tools to coach your team. Learn more: phonetap.ai/demo