Mandie maintains steady growth: $14M to $16M to $17M to $20M in 2026
Episode 340 · 50 min · September 15, 2026

Mandie maintains steady growth: $14M to $16M to $17M to $20M in 2026

Mandie shares how hiring a GM and controller in 2025 helped push her family-founded trades business from 14 million toward 20 million dollars.

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About this episode

Mandie runs a multi-trade home service company in New Hampshire that her parents founded in 1983. After her father passed away unexpectedly in 2001, she and her husband moved back from Colorado in 2003 to take over the business and grow it from a small septic and drain cleaning operation into a company covering HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and excavation. The business has grown steadily from roughly 14 million dollars in 2023 to a pace of 20 million dollars in 2026, with septic and drain cleaning making up about 40 percent of revenue, HVAC around 30 percent, and plumbing and electrical accounting for the rest.

One of the more useful stretches of the conversation covered the cost of growing too fast without the right leadership in place. Mandie added multiple trades simultaneously around 2018 and went through four or five leadership changes in those divisions before finding the right fit. She also ran the business with a very lean leadership team until early 2025, when she hired a general manager and a controller. She credits those two hires with helping drive the stronger growth from 2025 into 2026.

On the marketing side, Mandie keeps her budget at roughly four percent of revenue and relies primarily on pay-per-click advertising and a database of 35,000 existing customers. Chad raised the value of cross-trade referrals set by technicians in the field, including incentivizing techs directly, as a low-cost lead source that builds on existing customer relationships. Mandie noted she plans to test increasing her marketing spend to see what additional growth it might produce.

Mandie also spoke about the personal challenge of growing a well-known local brand and dealing with community criticism as the company gets larger. Her plan for 2027 is to lean into storytelling, specifically bringing back the history of her father and the founding of the company, as a way to reinforce the independent, family-owned identity of the business and connect with newer customers who never knew that story.

Key takeaways

  • Hiring a general manager and a controller before you feel ready can unlock growth that a founder-led leadership structure will eventually cap.
  • Adding multiple trades at once is manageable only if you have the right person in a leadership seat for each division before you launch.
  • Shifting focus from top-line revenue to bottom-line profitability is a transition worth making deliberately, not by accident.
  • Incentivizing technicians to set cross-trade referrals is a low-cost lead source that converts well because the customer already trusts the company.
  • A database of tens of thousands of existing customers is a marketing asset worth tapping before increasing paid advertising spend.
  • Documenting and sharing the founding story of a family business can strengthen brand identity and help differentiate from larger competitors and private equity-backed operators.

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