The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - $0 to $60k in 30 Days: How to Land Your First High-Ticket Jobs ⏐Ep. #265
Episode Date: January 13, 2026Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com�...� and join my community at https://TKOwners.com━I sat down with Jameson to break down how he went from a high paying finance career to building a multi million dollar home services business from scratch. We talked about why testing ideas matters more than overthinking, how he validated demand before committing, and why simple high ticket services like deck building can be incredibly powerful when done right. Jameson also shared very tactical advice on branding, pricing, lead generation, and why speed to lead and social proof matter more than most people realize.You can find Jameson on X here: https://x.com/jamesonhaslamEnjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
The first month, I closed $60,000 in business.
Three jobs.
Like a small one and then two medium-sized jobs.
We've probably done $7 or $8 million of revenue, all organic driven.
That's basically free.
Yeah.
These are $50,000 jobs.
Yeah.
I didn't want to do super high volume, low ticket, something like custom home building,
where there are literally maybe four or 500 decisions that need to occur.
The ratio of average order value to number of decisions that reduces the opportunity to
screw things up. You can go and do a one meeting close for a $50,000 deck with three decisions
in an hour. Yeah. You're in an hour. So I come across this guy on Twitter named Jameson and he is my
brother from another mother. He worked on Wall Street, private equity, making a lot of money. And then he thought,
you know what, I'm done. I want to own my own business. So he goes to Southern California and he
starts a deck business called West Coast Dex. His first month, knowing nothing about Dex, having no
experience, he does $60,000. His first year, he does just under a million bucks.
So this is a playbook.
This is tactical.
How to get your first home service customers to pay you a lot of money.
Doesn't have to be decks, any local trade or home service business.
This is the playbook for you.
We talk a lot about how to find customers and how to close those jobs.
When you quote the jobs.
Oh, and he talks about VAs at one point, that means virtual assistance.
Please enjoy this conversation with Jameson.
I wanted to do something with a relatively large average order value.
And that's not really necessarily the term we use in construction, but it's like a
new home term.
I didn't want to do like super high volume low ticket.
It didn't want to do something like custom home building where there are literally
maybe four or 500 decisions that need to occur.
Yeah.
And this is just me.
But I think it's actually like a pretty good statistic,
which is like the ratio of average order value to number of decisions that the client
needs to make reduces the opportunity to screw things up.
You're still going to screw tons of things up, right?
You're still going to have tons of mistakes.
But if you only have five variables, you know, if you hit on four out of five, you're doing great versus whatever.
So with a deck, you've got the shape of the deck, you know, is it square 10 by 20?
You've got the type of material can get nuanced, but it's basically like, is it wood, is it composite?
Is it, you know, which brand?
Which color, yeah.
What type of railing?
And then that could be it, right?
You could get into lighting and outdoor kitchens and it could get more complicated.
but really like you can go into a sales meeting and do a one meeting close for a $50,000
deck with three decisions in an hour.
Yeah.
It's not that easy, but you know what I'm saying?
Like it's pretty good.
You know, I don't want to compete with every chuck in a truck, Tom Dick and Harry,
that can sort of say like, yeah, I can do that.
And decks are just intimidating enough to deter the handyman who can build a fence.
So there's a little bit of a barrier or two entry of,
kind of complexity and project management.
You know, now we have to do some decks that are like half a million dollars and have
$200,000 of foundation work and are very complicated and there's a big barrier.
That was my thought process at the time.
We're very similar because I use the analogy of our tree trimming business and like a custom
home building business, just like you said.
I call them binary outcome businesses.
Yeah, I've heard you talk about.
Yeah, our tree trimming business is not nearly as high ticket as yours.
I wish it were.
It's like $1,500 average order size.
But we come in, we remove the tree.
we get a five-star review.
Like there's one decision.
You want that gone?
The branch or the tree?
Cool.
All right, cool.
That's it.
And we get it like,
we've never had less than a five-star review.
And it's not even because we're amazing operators.
It's just that type of business.
Yeah.
Whereas a custom home builder,
you have like the emotional aspect of it,
like the homeowner.
Like,
it's just,
there's so many ways you can screw up.
Like,
I would never want to be in that business.
Look,
we're not binary outcome,
but we're not close to the custom home building.
But still,
like,
anytime you have a B,
to see business. You're going to have scenarios where you do something that you think is good,
but is a mismatch in client expectations. And there's a big skill as an operator and kind of managing
that, right? A lot of times it'll be like, we install literally half a million square feet of decking
per year. And then you'll get a client, a Karen or whatever. And she'll be like, well,
this cut doesn't, I don't think the cut's supposed to be that way. Right. And you can't say to her like,
no, like, I mean, you can. You can say like, you're an idiot. It is supposed to.
to be that way. But, you know, that's not how it works. It gets you nowhere.
Yeah. Anyways, we're closer to the binary outcome than the custom home build equation,
but there's still a fair bit of craft. Complexity. Yeah. Well, the tradeoff is, it's, you know,
10 to 30 times bigger of a job. Sure. You know, that's the tradeoff you're making. So you decide
in your mind, I'm doing this. What does your first month look like? Yeah. So this is a tactically
different answer that I'm guessing you're going to get from most of your people. So that you ask
about starting businesses. So for me, and brand and emotion and design is so, so, so,
so important. Brand is the tool that you have as a business to create an emotional connection
with your customer. You do that through the way that you look, the way that you present yourself,
the words that you use, the tactical tools are, what is your logo, what are your colors,
what are your fonts, what does your website look like, what are your uniforms look like,
what are your vehicles look like, what is your print collateral look like, what is your
signage, all of that stuff. When you start at zero, you don't want to like, especially if you don't know if your
business will work, you don't want to dump a bunch of money into that. But I can promise you that
if you can intelligently invest in those things and create a six out of 10 brand or a seven out of
10 brand out the gate, then you will be, it's like starting with rocket fuel instead of like.
So a couple things I would say. And these are going to be very specific to like trades and service.
right? It's, this is not Econ, this is not whatever. But the simple equation for what you name your
business is your service area and your service. So you don't want to call it Chris's construction
company or Chris's corner construction company, right? You want to call it Dallas Decks.
Yeah. Like impossible to misunderstand what you do. It sounds like it's strong, right? Dallas Decks.
You could come up with a really cool wordmark and logo. Somebody searches, I was going to say, calls you
on the phone or picks up the phone book, but like they're going to Google, right? Like, they know
exactly what you do, Dallas Decks. Another thing is in name selection, and if somebody's listening
to this and wants help picking their name, literally call me or DM me, like, I will help you. I love
this stuff. So for me, when I was coming up with the brand, I had a few names, right? Like San Diego Dex,
San Diego Dex, California Decks, I can't remember at this point, but West Coastdeck.com was available.
And it was like, boom, done. The dot com's available. That's it. From there, you, you,
You want to spend a little bit of money on the physical presentation and we'll call it like
the graphic design assets that you have in the way that you present your business.
And I have a little bit of a cheat code to like get a seven out of 10 result that you'd get
if you paid like an agency a decent amount of money for like less than $3,000 total.
And what you do is you spend a lot of time browsing and you look for cool brands that resonate
with you.
And just do this on Pinterest.
There are places like Behance, dribble, you could go on agency websites where they have their portfolios.
But for most people, they understand how to use Pinterest and a lot of design work is now posted on
Pinterest.
Just go on there and search for like not necessarily like deck branding.
That's not going to give you what you want, but like construction branding or like maybe you say like,
look, I really like DTC shampoo branding right now.
And I think my construction company would look really cool.
So like that's actually a good place to start.
and you pull like these shampoo branding.
And then what you do is you go on,
you can do it on Upwork,
you can do it on fiber.
And you say,
okay, my brand name is Dallas Dex.
Here's an example of some shampoo branding
that I really like.
And you post a job and you say,
for $200,
I want 20 design concepts for my brand.
Okay?
And what happens on those sites
is you'll get proposals from people
and some of them will do like preliminary design, right?
and you're going to actually hire five of them.
So you're going to get 100 permutations out of that process.
And you're going to, and you've spent $1,000, okay?
Out of those 100 permutations, you're going to pick three that you really like and resonate
with you.
One of the things that is expensive for a design agency to produce is that ideation phase,
and you're just kind of short cutting it down, right?
You're short-circuit.
And then you go to a designer.
Again, you can do this on Upwork.
you can probably get a really good result for under $1,000.
I know the design community is going to get really mad at this.
We're working with Ethan Driscoll at Outer Block right now to rework our branding,
and I'm paying him significantly more than that.
So close your ears, earmuffs for all the designers.
But my point is, like, you're going to pay somebody in Ukraine or Vietnam to do this design for you,
okay?
And you're going to spend $500, $750,000.
And they'll give you a full kit, right?
So you basically say like, here's the three concepts that I like.
Here's my name.
And then their output is going to be a professional kit.
It's going to be, you know, logo, typography, colors, uniforms, that kind of a thing.
So you've spent, you know, two grand at this point.
And you look way more professional than 99 out of 100 service businesses.
And so when you show up without a track record, you've never built a deck before.
You have no background in this.
you don't have any social proof, but you look nice, you're well spoken, you took a shower that day,
you know, you show up and you kind of pitch yourself and you have good branding, that's enough
for people to trust you. And it gives you a basis on which like, okay, there's a new entrant in our
market. They look good. Clearly like they're thoughtful about this. It's not some chuck in a truck.
It's not Chris's construction company. You know, on the margin, I kind of like these guys. I want to work with them.
So that's before you even do anything, actually there's an asterisk on that.
Like you need to be action oriented.
You need to be able to go out and sell a deck.
Like you need to tell everybody you know under the sun that you are going to build a deck
and have them hire you.
But my point is that if you really want to do this well, like invest in branding early
before you think you need to.
So branding set.
And now you need to, the next two steps in the process are one, you actually need some sales.
Like you need to sell some decks.
and then you need to start gathering social proof. And these can occur in tandem. So social proof is so
critical for any business. It's the most important currency. This is what gets people to buy. And this is,
you know, your Google reviews, your Yelp reviews, that kind of a thing. When you start,
you don't have customers that will say, like, Jameson built a deck for me and he's really good at it.
And here's the pictures of the deck. But you do have people, you know, even if you're 50s,
15 years old. You've got to have people who you've known in your life. You can go ask your
English teacher and she'll write you a review that says like, you know what? Chris is a pleasure
to have in class. No idea if he can build decks, but he worked hard. He does his homework. He's got a good
family. And that type of stuff, that's social proof. That helps you. So my point is, go to your
friends, go to your neighbors, go to previous coworkers, go to strangers on the internet who follow you
on Twitter and basically say like, hey, can you help me do this? And, you know, they will. So you'll
get a little bit of social proof. And I'll also say the branding expenses that you're undergoing
helps kind of overcome some of that as well, that lack of history. They see that you're serious
about this. Right, right, right, right. After we talk about getting the initial work, I want to talk about
like your, like the ecosystem that exists around you that wants you to succeed. But getting your
initial job, there are lead services that you just pay. So,
When I started, it was Angie's List and Home Advisor.
This was five years ago.
But if I were doing it today, I would do Thumbtack.
I would do TaskRabbit.
I would do Angie, which is the combined Angie's List and Home Advisor.
You can't necessarily qualify for Google LSA.
Because you don't have a history yet.
Well, it depends on licensing and things like that, right?
So, like, it depends on your market.
But that's like step one B is like getting on Google and getting leads.
But my point is all these other services, like, you can start doing handyman jobs or like deck repair jobs or fence jobs.
And there is just not enough people providing that service.
You can get those jobs.
And you literally just go sign up for these lead services.
Now, maybe this is like a cheat code or something that needs to remain consistent from day zero to day infinity.
But like speed to lead and immediate responsiveness and picking up the phone, if you cannot do that,
Do not do this, right?
Like you just...
Don't do any home service business.
Don't do any, don't do any like entrepreneurial thing at all, right?
You need to respond to a lead within 30 seconds.
We have it like a five minute rule upon pain of death, right?
Like, but you respond to that lead within 30 seconds.
You're doing a site visit or you're doing a qualifying call immediately right away.
If it's a qualified lead, you're doing a site visit within a day.
And then you're delivering your proposal within another day.
It's like, and in a lot of times, depending.
and what your service is, that timeline could even be compressed. It could be immediate.
But past two or three days, like, you have to have the capability to be able to do that.
And I can, I could do a post on Twitter talking about, like, the specific tactics of how to do those
things. But honestly, it's like, leave your phone ringer on full volume and keep it with you
all the time and always answer. Like, that's it. These are $50,000 jobs.
Yeah, crazy and have crazy. Like, it's so funny because my professional kind of like grooming or
background was like if you didn't respond to an email within five minutes, like you would lose your
job and like or or at minimum like get, you know, yelled at in a profanity lace tirade by your managing
director. So like I carry this anxiety with me of like I will respond. Like I just that is like the most
important professional training I've ever had. And like that continues to maybe be the most valuable
thing. Like good, good news, bad news, whatever. Pick up the phone and talk right away. And so
with the leads, it's like you just got to respond right away and talk to people right away.
Like speed to lead is mission critical.
Now, as you scale and as you grow, a bunch of really cool tools around automation and
like extra touch points and like using AI and technology to do that.
But like when you're first starting, like, dude, just pick up the phone and respond.
Yeah.
I know this varies by market and by industry.
But for for decks in the Southern California market, what are you paying Thumbtack or Angie
or Home Advisor per lead?
And what is your close rate?
I haven't done this in a long time.
But when I remember very specifically, so like we, I had $15,000 in this bank account that I was like, okay, I'm allocating this to like do this thing, West Coast deck. But that that's everything. Like, and I didn't, I didn't end up spending the $15,000 on like investing it. I just sort of like used it as working capital, whatever. But at the time, a deck repair lead was like 60 bucks and a deck build lead was 120. That's pretty good.
And the first month I closed $60,000 in business.
Three jobs, like a small one and then two medium-sized jobs.
Now, it's funny because part of the reason why I closed them was because my pricing was so low, right?
But when you start a business, that is part of the journey.
Like your pricing is just off.
Yeah.
And you're trying to get social proof, right?
So that's what you're paying for.
Some of it is like it's a lost leader.
But like, it's important to price your stuff appropriately unless you have a bunch of cash that you
could just afford to burn.
How many of those $100 leads, new build leads, would you say it took to close one back when you were doing it?
I closed the $60,000 in like three days. So it's probably like, I probably spent $1,500 on marketing to close $60. Now, I feel like that your mileage may vary, I guess, right? Yeah.
But the reality is this is with home services, you should have a very high close rate. Again, these are brutal, rough jobs. They're not, this is not cushy. So like,
The market is begging for good service providers.
So it's like you're going to be able to close stuff.
The question is not, yeah, I understand.
Like, maybe I am uniquely good at getting out of bed and generating leads and finding
business.
But like, it's not rocket science.
It's not, this is not open AI level research scientist work.
Like, you can do it.
Okay.
So did those first three jobs come from the Angie's and the home advisors of the world?
They were all Angie's list.
Home advisor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What about the next 90 days after that?
So what did that look like?
At that point, and if I could go back and what I would do also, we kind of did this, but, but
reader, listen to me, the other thing that I would have done on day one is I would have,
so we had our, we have our cohesive branding, right?
Set up your website, set up your Google page, set up your Yelp, set up your house page,
set up your Better Business Bureau, set up your Chamber of Commerce, set up your, did I say
Instagram, like this laundry list of things.
have them all be the same.
Again, same phone number, same address, same brand.
And then you want to hire a VA, which I know your audience already knows about,
like they've heard about that.
You want to pay above market for a VA.
So it's your first VA.
You're not, you don't have a system that's organized.
You don't have like a plug-in-play system where you can hire a maybe a lower wage person
and kind of plug them into something that works.
You need somebody who, what I always tell people is like,
if you hired an entry-level employee and what,
What's minimum wage in Dallas?
Like, or what's like...
Eight bucks.
Okay.
Well, you'd probably hire somebody for 15 bucks in Dallas, right?
Yeah.
Here it's 20.
Here it's 20.
Like, you could hire somebody for 20 bucks in Dallas.
What I tell people is pay 12 or 15, which feels like a lot.
And then pay that to somebody in Central America, South America.
Philippines.
Philippines.
You're going to get somebody with a master's degree with five, 10 years of work experience
who is really good, right?
and they're going to that wage, you could, you could pay four or five dollars. You're paying maybe
three X or two X, but your return on that is like 50x, right? And you need that. And again,
this is if you're serious. This is not like you're like for me, it was like I burn the boats.
I'm jumping in. We're doing this. Like I sold 60 grand the first month, like probably 100 in the
second. Like we are pregnant with this business. I need. This is not a, this is not an experiment of like,
let me build one deck and see how it goes, right?
Like, I'm contractually guaranteed to deliver on these services and I'll be in really hot water
if I don't.
So you get that one VA.
You've got all of these billboards set up.
You've got your Facebook set up.
You've got your Instagram, all these things.
And you're posting every single day.
You've got your email newsletter.
Like, you're posting every single day.
So that's the other thing that's happening.
And then there's this stoic concept pro noia, which is like the universe conspires in your
behavior.
It's the opposite.
It's the opposite of paranoia, right?
pro-noia, paranoia. And what I often tell people is that, you know, capitalism is the greatest
force for pulling people out of poverty and making good things happen for people and raising their
standard of living. And your local economy is conspiring in your behavior. Like, they want you,
it wants you to be successful. And what that looks like is your material suppliers in your area
want you to be successful. The customers want you to be successful.
employees want you to be successful so you can provide the market with jobs.
Adjacent trade professionals want you to be successful.
Like if you are a deck builder and a landscape architect is hiring you to do a good job,
like they're depending on you to be successful.
So there's this whole ecosystem that is actually conspiring in your favor that wants you
to be successful and is kind of this like virtuous system.
So but they need to know that you exist.
So part of how what that looks like today is,
you put up all these digital billboards. Another thing that's really important for this,
like, lead flow is you need to go meet all these people. So, and that could happen digitally.
It could happen in person for your material suppliers. These are your lumber yards. These are
the sales reps for different products. Like, you call them, you go meet them in person and you say like,
hey, I'm Jameson. I'm new. I'm doing this thing. It's going to work. It's going to be awesome.
Like, how can we help each other? And they will send you leads. They will send you business.
you know, it's going to happen in every, every industry.
There's some flavor of that that exists for what you are doing.
Instagram and Facebook, kind of think of them as the same thing, very effective, not for B2C,
but for adjacent referral networking.
So for any trade, there's this, like, you want to increase your surface area of people
knowing who you are.
So for us, what happens all the time is like a roofer, they're doing a roof, and maybe it was
a storm that damaged the roof and damage the deck. And they call the roofer first because their house
is leaking. And then while the roofer's there, the client's like, hey, do you know any good deck guys?
And because we are super active on all the, like social media, blah, blah, blah, the roofer is
interested in what we're doing. And the client's probably not on the day to day basis,
like looking at deck building, whatever. But the roofer is. Like, you like seeing like interesting,
cool stuff. And they know who you are. So we, I think in our first year,
from Instagram driven referrals from other trades did around like 400 grand and then I think
the second year was like 600 grand and these are like mostly landscaping guys who follow us
and like would send us stuff that's basically free that's organic it's yeah it's it's sweat
marketing like it's just you pick up your phone it's the gary v like you just talk into your phone
like the only marketing that we have ever paid for was in that first month doing angie's like
Home Advisor, and then we've done a couple of Yelp promotions, but we've probably done like
seven or eight million dollars of revenue, all organic driven. Another asterisk is like,
advertising works. Don't be the dumb contractor who's like, all you need is word of mouth and
like just doing good work is enough. It's not advertising works. Yeah. So like that's a big
initiative for us in 2026 is like winning at, you know, PPC, Google LSA, you know, meta ads,
that kind of a thing. But, but, you know, our first three years, like, we spent nothing on ads.
That's incredible. Have you ever heard the quote, 50% of advertising works? You just don't know which
50%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there's better tools about, like, attribution and things like
that. But yeah, the important thing is that it's funny, like, you do run into a lot of contractors
who will tell you, like, advertising doesn't work or we tried Facebook ads and they don't work.
Like, they do work. You're just doing it wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Or you don't know how.
You're not testing enough. Yeah.
So yeah, so you've got to get that system going where you have your digital billboards.
You're posting a lot and you're off to the races.
Well, what I love about what you say, which is different than what I say in this podcast
a lot.
Like a lot of times I'm like, you know, head your bets.
Don't quit your thing yet.
You know, just start testing it on the side.
Go see how it works.
Go quote some jobs.
And you're like all in like digital billboards everywhere.
No pride, no shame.
This is who I am.
Face of the camera.
Real, authentic.
Like, what do I have to hide and good things happen?
Yeah, I think I've like not skilled enough to do something and hope that it works.
And only with 150% effort will it work.
I'm just not smart enough and talented enough.
So for me, and that's how I've been my whole life, I just know that like I have to do it.
I have to be all in.
Otherwise it won't work.
And also like, look, this is a really hard business.
What did your first year look like with regards to revenue and profit?
We got close to the million dollar mark.
It's been a minute.
Your first year?
In the first year.
Wow.
Profit is a hard number because it's like, you know, what is owner pay versus the thing is like it depends on how you want to measure the hours that the owner puts in the like labor hours versus all the other stuff.
There are a lot of guys who are, you know, one man on the tools with two good helpers who gross, you know, 1.5 consistent.
year in, year out, and their probably take home is 25% like SDE margins, which is like somewhere
between, it's like not exactly net margin, you know, like a little bit, a little bit of that.
But most trade businesses guide to a appropriately run trade or service business is going to guide to like 15% net margins.
If you do more than that, you're underinvesting in something.
And if you do less than that, you need help with something.
All right.
So first year, just under a million.
And how many years has it been?
Four years in February.
We'll complete four years.
Okay.
And what do you expect to do this year?
Yeah, this year or last year.
Something north of four and something less than eight.
Wow.
When I first started like talking about the business online,
it was like pretty comfortable like talking about revenue numbers.
And now I'm like, eh, I really need to or want to anymore.
And like, I'm not trying to spawn a bunch of stump grinding competitors or tell my local
competitors what we're doing.
Yeah.
But it's very interesting because I think that for me, it depends on what your personal
motivations and goals are, right?
Like working in a high paying W2 is very much on the table for me.
I'm only interested in entrepreneurship if it is something that reduced, that is like an
appropriate risk, return reward, right?
And I think that you don't really get to a place where you reduce key man risk until you get to like seven, eight million dollars in revenue.
And we're not there yet.
But we will be in the next two years.
That's the stage where you can have capable leaders working on a management team, right?
The journey from like, call it $3 million to $8 million is a lot of times they'll call it like the death zone in small business because you don't really have the resources and profit to, you know,
invest in elite elite leadership, but you need it.
And you need it, right?
So it takes a capable captains during the ship and really good people.
And I mean, look, everything that we have been able to accomplish is 100% a function of the people
who work for me and who work around me and the ecosystem that we've built, right?
Like, we have really amazing people.
And my job is to find them and nurture them, give them the tools they need to grow.
and most of it is encouragement and sometimes I carry a stick, but a lot of times it's just, you know,
encouragement and pumping up. And I really do believe in this idea of like this kind of ecosystem
is conspiring in our favor and wants good things to happen for us. And at this point,
I have this big team who I work with and like, they're wonderful people and it's impossible
for us to lose because of how good they are. So. Yeah. What do unit economics look like on an average
job? Because you're subbing out the work, aren't you? Well, no. So,
the sub versus in-house is tricky in California. There's a lot of California is,
I'm from here, but I had spent a lot of my professional life in other states. The complaining
and grief that California gets for being a difficult place to do business is if anything
understated. It's very challenging. You can do well with subs, but you have to be, it's like
anything. You have to be good at what you do. You have to be good at managing subs or you have
to be good at having people in-house. The way that I think about margins is that every service
business should be bidding at around 50% gross margin. That will guide you to 15% net. Now, you go on
Facebook groups and you start asking people what they charge and like people just don't know or
they think they get confused between margin and markup and it's like, I always simplify it for people and
I say, look, margin is or what you need is 2x your cost of service, right? So you measure
your labor inputs and your material inputs, and then you multiply it by two, and that's your price.
In reality, you don't hit the 50% gross margin because you miss something on your bid or
some accident happened. But if you don't price a 50% gross margin on all your jobs,
the anomalous jobs where you lose money will sink your business, right? So it's like, you know,
you do 10 jobs, you price them all at 50% gross margin, two of them you're going to lose money on,
And that is what guides you to 15% net.
One thing that sucks about this life and this business, when I was doing investing,
we would have this term of like asymmetric upside where you'd have like five value drivers.
And you would, you said like, okay, if if one of them goes well, we make our money and we hit our base case.
But if four go well, then there's this optionality for upside.
With construction and service business, there's asymmetric downside.
So it's like, you have.
the amount of revenue that you can earn, and if everything goes well, this is what your cost
will be. But things never go perfectly to plan. So this is always getting compressed. So the skilled
operators, what I have learned in this space are you push this as high as possible in the
beginning of the process, and then you hold the line on margin during the execution of the process,
which a lot of times happens through, you know, rigorously enforcing agreements with subcontractors
or writing your own labor budget really hard or, you know, aggressively negotiating supplier agreements
or fighting for change orders with clients and like sticking to scope.
And that's what I have found as I've grown as an operator.
Like those are the areas where the real talent lies.
It's like, how do you push the top line as high as you can in the initial setting of it?
Because it doesn't ever go higher once the job starts unless the client requests scope change.
and then how do you hold this line on costs?
But yeah, I think that just as a rule of thumb, bid at 50% gross, which means 2x your coxed, right?
Some people get that confused.
Yeah.
And that's what you, yeah, you need to guide to.
I love it.
Is there anything else you wanted to give advice on that you might have missed before we wrap?
It's like, I'm very online and very reachable.
If you are thinking about doing something in home services or are doing something in home services
and, you know, want to bounce ideas off of or have me look at something.
Like, I love that stuff.
So please, like, reach out.
You can find me.
I'm not, Chris can give you my info, but, like, not hard to find.
And I love kind of sharing ideas, spitballing.
We're always hiring.
We're always looking for great people, either, like, full time or to, like, project,
work on, like, random projects for us.
So if you're in California or not, like, we've got people who've done a bunch of cool
remote projects for us, hit me up.
And if you're in the broader,
Southern California area and you need a deck, we are very good at building them and build more
decks than anybody else and have the best team. So hit me up for that. Of course, sure. I mean,
statistically, I think like three percent of the listeners will be in Southern California. So something. Perfect.
Well, thank you, Jameson. Thanks, Chris. This has been great. All right. What did you think? Please share it
with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.
