Blue Collar Ballers

Matthew Rathgeb is the founder of Groovy Hues Painting, the national franchise brand that just awarded its 100th territory — and the flagship location is his own shop in Philadelphia, PA.

But it didn't start anywhere near there. Matt is a high school dropout who's been in recovery for 21 years. He left the Philadelphia Painters Union twice to start his own business — and ran back twice when the work dried up. In March 2011, he finally burned the boats: traded in his Honda Accord for a white Chevy cargo van with $6,500 in the bank and exactly two bedrooms to paint. He bootstrapped from there — never borrowed a penny — until Horsepower Brands (led by past BCB guest Tony Hulbert) flew him to Omaha to build a national painting franchise on his playbook.

In this episode, Matt breaks down:

• Why "being in the action, not the theory" — a principle straight from his recovery program — became his entire growth philosophy

• The burn-the-boats rule: why he tells aspiring owners that if you're keeping a plan B, don't even start

• What "systems and processes" actually means when everyone on LinkedIn claims to have them — marketing playbooks, sales processes, and industry-specific CRMs

• Why Groovy Hues grows 10–15% a year almost entirely on referrals and community relationships instead of paid lead sources

• The rented-Rolex problem: what social media gets wrong about small business, and why the boring daily reps are what compound

• The books that built him — from The E-Myth to Emmett Fox — and what "weed the garden between your ears" means

If you're a home service operator grinding through the unglamorous middle — or wondering whether your shop could ever become something bigger than you — this conversation is proof of what compounds when you go all in.

Sheryl Knight is the co-owner of Aire Serv of the Woodlands Heating and Aire Conditioning, a family-run HVAC company in Conroe, Texas — about 40 miles north of Houston — that she and her husband Mike have built into a nearly $3M business over 35 years.

What started in 1991 as Mike and one helper crawling through Houston-area attics stayed a half-million-dollar operation for almost two decades. By 2009, Mike was in his fifties, the two of them were spinning every plate, and the conversation in their home had shifted to how much longer can we keep doing this? Then one phone call from a stranger pulled them into a franchise system they almost said no to — and reshaped everything that came next.

Sheryl breaks down how they went from a husband-and-wife shop to a team-run business, what they learned about scaling on faith, and the year that tested every system, every relationship, and every belief they'd built the company on.

In this episode:

• Why Sheryl drew a line down a legal pad to talk herself out of franchising — and what changed her mind

• The fears around adding the first trucks, the first technicians, and the first managers

• How they crossed from $550K to $1M, then $1M to $3M — and why that second jump is the hardest one in the trades

• The dreaming exercise Sheryl runs with her team to find out what her people actually want out of life

• The year they walked away from the business for months — and what the team did while they were gone

• Why "integrity is everything" isn't a slogan to Sheryl — it's the operating system

• Passing the company to her sons, and what the next chapter looks like for the Knight family

If you've ever wondered whether a business can be built on something deeper than hustle — whether faith, family, and integrity can actually scale — this is the conversation.

Meet the Guest: Sheryl Knight

Visit: Aire Serve of the Woodlands

Tyler Taunton is the co-owner of Texas Roof Repair, an Austin-based roofing company that has spent the last decade deliberately transforming from an 80% residential business into a 75% commercial operation. He runs sales and marketing alongside his partner Joseph, who runs operations — two owners, one EOS-driven accountability chart, and a clear-eyed mission to become a world-class commercial roofing company in a market dominated by five or six incumbents who have held the property management relationships for decades.

Tyler got into roofing the way a lot of trades guys do — a sales interview right out of college, coaching travel baseball on the side, and a college coach who told him he'd end up in politics or sales. He spent six years at another Austin roofer learning the business before partnering up to start Texas Roof Repair. For four straight years, Tyler personally generated over 60% of the company's revenue. One day he looked at the next fifteen years and realized he didn't want to carry that weight anymore — and the company started the slow, expensive work of building a real commercial sales team so it could grow without depending on him.

Tyler breaks down:

• Why the residential-to-commercial pivot is a barge, not a U-turn — and the years it actually takes to move the numbers

• What it cost to replace himself in sales, and the 18-month investment in commercial reps with a 6–8 month onboarding cycle

• The real difference between selling a roof to a homeowner and selling one to a property manager — features and benefits vs. approved vendor, building engineers, and "respond, deliver"

• How a brand-new commercial roofer breaks into a market locked up by five or six incumbents — networking orgs, committee work, and the opening private equity acquisitions create when service quality slips

• How EOS and the weekly L10 meeting forced them to attack the biggest, hairiest issues first — fifty weeks a year — instead of defaulting to easy wins

• Why faith and stewardship sit at the center of how he and Joseph run the business

If you're a residential operator wondering whether commercial is the right next move, a roofer trying to figure out how to stop being the bottleneck in your own business, or anyone running a trades company on EOS who wants a real example of what disciplined leadership looks like — this one is for you.

Meet the Guest: Tyler Taunton

Visit: Texas Roof Repair

Matthew Mahoney is the owner of Limestone Moving in Austin, Texas — a company he's on track to grow to roughly $5 million in revenue this year. But the path here wasn't a straight line.

Matthew started Limestone moving people in and out of dorm rooms while he was a student at UT. After building it past seven figures, he walked away — leaving the business with a buddy, buying a 42-foot sailboat, and sailing it from San Francisco to Australia over a year and a half. By the time he came back in 2024, the business had nosedived to under $400K. So he sold the boat in Sydney, flew home, and started rebuilding from the ground up.

In this episode, Matthew breaks down how he rebuilt Limestone back to $5M — and why he did it without buying a single ad:

• Why he "nosedived" a seven-figure business to sail the Pacific, and the lesson that pulled him home
• How he grew from under $400K to ~$5M by betting on being the best product in Austin, not the cheapest
• The community-and-partnerships growth engine that replaced paid ads — and his referral program math
• Why realtor and leasing-manager relationships became his most valuable lead source
• How he staffs every role to a scorecard (and runs the business EOS-style with the right people in the right seats)

• His framework for offshore hiring — why he'd rather pay $40K for someone who managed 200 people than $60K stateside

If you're a home service operator stuck around the million-dollar mark and wondering what actually unlocks the next stage of growth, this one's a masterclass in building a category-of-one business on relationships instead of ad spend.

Patrick Murphy is the owner of Cascade Home Cleaning, a residential cleaning business in Bellingham, Washington that he's built to $1M in annual recurring revenue — entirely remote. He's never met a cleaner. He's never met a client. He started the company as a side hustle while working as a product manager at Amazon in Seattle, and now runs it from Chicago, 2,000 miles away from the market it serves.

Cascade operates in a town of 100,000 people, with a total addressable market under 250,000 across the surrounding county. Patrick built it over four years on the back of a Big Four accounting career and a decade in product at Nordstrom and Amazon — and he's importing the operating discipline of trillion-dollar companies into a blue collar service business.

In this episode, Patrick breaks down the internal hiring playbook he wrote himself — a recruiting system any home service operator can run, whether they're hiring cleaners, technicians, or office staff.

We get into:

• The tenets for hiring he adapted from Amazon's doc-driven culture, and why writing them down is what makes them stick
• Why "always be hiring" is non-negotiable — and how to run an evergreen job post and a bench of candidates before you need them
• The 50% rule for every new hire, and how it constantly raises the talent ceiling on your crew
• How he sponsors Indeed posts for $5–$7 a day and what he spends in total on recruiting per year
• The W-2 transition from 1099 contractors and what it changed about retention and quality
• Why most operators don't find good people — and what they're actually doing wrong

If you've ever told yourself you can't find good people in your market, this episode will challenge you. Patrick isn't in a hot labor market. He's in a small town in Washington, running it from Chicago, and his recruiting bench is deeper than most operators' active rosters.

Chapters

00:00 — Intro03:43 — Meet Patrick: $1M cleaning business, built 100% remote06:54 — From Big Four accounting to Amazon to cleaning08:04 — How he started Cascade as a side hustle17:15 — The tenets for hiring (stolen from Amazon)19:28 — Tenet #1: Always be hiring22:21 — What "always be hiring" actually looks like day-to-day24:01 — Recruiting spend: $5–$7/day on Indeed26:09 — The 50% rule: every new hire raises the average

Visit: Qualified Hires

Trey McWilliams is a third-generation HVAC operator from East Texas and the founder of Blue Cardinal Home Services, a platform group now operating in over 20 locations across the home service trades.

Trey grew up riding shotgun with his grandfather — a Navy retiree who started the family business because he loved taking care of customers and didn't want to deal with employees or back-office work. Trey started drawing a paycheck at 14, ran a truck by 16, and by 22 he made the call that would change everything: he told his dad the lifestyle business needed to become a scaled business, and he'd pay the price to make it happen. From 2010 to 2019, he took McWilliams & Son Heating and Cooling from $1.2M to nearly $30M in revenue — then built Blue Cardinal Group on top of it to give other operators a home to take chips off the table without selling out to private equity.

In this episode, Trey breaks down the exact playbook he ran to scale:

• The first hire that broke his $1M ceiling — and why it had to be a salesperson, not an operator
• The math teacher who built his entire ops backbone from the call center up
• The "rule of four" that governs every new market and trade he enters
• Why he runs the business in groups of four crews so techs never miss their kids' baseball games
• How he added plumbing without compromising the HVAC standard — including the academy model for homegrown technicians (95% of his field staff)
• The mindset shift from "I'm in HVAC" to "I'm in the people-building business"
• Why he built Blue Cardinal as the anti-private-equity platform for operators who care about culture and the long game

If you're an operator stuck between $1M and $5M and you can feel the ceiling — or if you're a second or third-generation owner wrestling with whether to scale past what your dad built — this one's for you.

Chapters

00:00 Intro00:40 Growing up in the family business — riding with grandpa at 1404:30 The 2010 turning point: "If not me, then who?"06:38 The exact playbook from $1.2M to $30M16:35 Hire #1: Why sales had to come before operations20:15 The math teacher who built the ops backbone23:30 The rule of four: how Trey enters new markets and trades27:00 Scaling is a journey of personal evolution30:00 Why he built Blue Cardinal Home Services36:00 Going from operator to capital allocator1:02:00 What's next for Blue Cardinal — and the operators he's looking for

Robert Wolf is the owner of Wolf HVAC, a $1M+ HVAC operation based in Kotati, California, serving Sonoma, Marin, and Napa counties — right in the heart of wine country.

Robert started his career doing odd jobs as a teenager before falling in love with the trades. After 11 years in the field — including a stint as a lead installer where he first learned the customer service side of the business — he took the leap and started Wolf HVAC in June 2021. Just under five years in, he's broken seven figures, built a team that includes his childhood best friend, and recently expanded the business by adding electrical as a new service line.

Robert breaks down how he built a seven-figure HVAC shop in one of the most competitive markets in the country — without paid ads, without aggressive sales tactics, and without a massive team:

• Why his customers name him personally in his Google reviews — and what most operators get wrong about customer service

• The "small business vibe" he refuses to grow out of, and how it's become his biggest competitive advantage

• How he hires from his personal network — including a team member he's known since kindergarten

• The decision behind adding electrical as a new service line, and how he's thinking about expansion

• His honest take on the revenue rollercoaster — and why year four hit different than year three

• Why his current obsession isn't growth — it's becoming a leader his team never wants to leave

• The delegation fears every craftsman-owner has to name before they can scale

If you're a trades operator trying to grow a real business without losing what made it work in the first place, this one's for you.

Contact: Wolf HVAC

In this episode, I sit down with Philip Crutchfield, co-owner and founder of Camber Brands in Sarasota, Florida — a portfolio of three home service franchises doing $11.5M in 2025, with a target of $17–18M in 2026.

Camber houses Mighty Dog Roofing (where Philip was the very first franchisee), Blingle holiday and landscape lighting, and Varsity Zone HVAC — which he founded from a dead acquisition with zero employees and built into what is now the founding location of a 30+ unit franchise system under Horsepower Brands.

Philip breaks down:

• How he cross-promotes three trades to one customer and wins commercial work his competitors can't

• Why he acquired an HVAC business with zero employees — and how it became a nationwide franchise

• The 500-person annual "Camber Party" that started as a one-off thank-you and became his best marketing channel

• How he hit $1.4M in his first 7 months by hiring heavy early when most franchisees bootstrap

• Why his salespeople are called "relationship managers" and are never on straight commission

• The mistake of "drowning an opportunity" — and the gutter line that cost him money

• The biggest transition moving from B2B software to trades

• What he'd tell any first-year home service franchisee who wants to make money faster

• If you're an operator thinking about a second service line, a portfolio play, or just wondering how to stand out in a crowded home service market — this one's for you.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

02:30 Meet Philip Crutchfield and Camber Brands

05:00 Why acquire an HVAC business with zero employees

08:00 The cross-promotion mechanic — how 3 brands win 1 customer

11:00 The condo complex story: 40 HVAC units, one flat roof, one contractor

13:30 The Camber name story and the 500-person annual party

18:00 How the party pays for itself through supplier sponsorship

20:30 $1.4M in 7 months — why Philip hired heavy early

23:30 Tennis vs. golf: which builds a better network

25:00 The residential-to-commercial split and why you have to earn commercial

27:00 Working with Horsepower Brands as the founding franchisee

35:00 Working on the business vs. in the business

40:00 Why his sales team is called "relationship managers"

43:00 From B2B software to home services — the biggest personal evolution46:00 The path from $11.5M to $18M — pricing and process

47:30 "You can drown an opportunity" — the gutter service mistake

52:30 Advice to first-year franchisees: throw out your KPIs54:00 The "just ask" philosophy

55:30 Best dinner spot in Sarasota + where to find Philip

Meet the Guest: Philip Crutchfield

Visit: Camber Brands

Meet the Host: Faiez Rana

Brought to you by Offshore Launch

Your shop is leaking profit. In 14 days, we'll show you exactly where, then put a full‑time operator in place to run the fix inside your tools.

In this episode of Blue Collar Ballers, Nate Austin, founder of Austin Brothers Fence Company in Austin, Texas, shares how he and his brother started a fence company with $2,500, a financed truck, and zero experience installing wood fences — YouTubing their first 10 builds. Fourteen years later, Austin Brothers is one of the most recognized residential fence brands in the Austin market, peaking at $3.7 million in revenue with a reputation for white glove service that clients say feels more like a design firm than a fence contractor.

Nate was a college dropout who spent seven years gaming his way through school with no degree to show for it. After bouncing through jobs — AT&T retail, door-to-door pest control, vacuum sales — he realized he was a terrible employee and moved to Austin to start something of his own.

Nate breaks down:

• How he built a consultative, online-first sales process in an industry where everyone just shows up and measures

• Why he intentionally filters leads through an upfront qualification process — and still can't keep up with demand

• The real story behind growing to 30+ people three separate times and deliberately downsizing each time

• How 40% of his revenue comes from referrals and repeat clients without paying for ads for nine straight years

• What a $78,000 historic home fence project looks like from estimate to completion

• Why he's launching a budget sister brand to serve first-time homeowners who can't afford premium fencing — without sacrificing the service model

Whether you're a trades owner trying to figure out how to sell without being a salesperson, or you've hit a growth ceiling and can't figure out why scaling feels like suffocating, this one's for you.

00:00 Intro

02:46 From college dropout to starting a fence company

06:15 Getting the first customers with $7.50/day Google Ads

10:23 YouTubing how to build the first 10 fences

15:34 Building a premium sales process around self-awareness

19:47 Why the customer journey feels like a design firm

23:19 Managing lead volume without a sales team

26:23 Nine years of growth without an ad budget

29:11 The $78K historic home fence job

34:25 Growing and downsizing three times on purpose

39:51 Launching a budget sister brand

41:40 The one restaurant you have to hit in Austin

Meet the Guest: Nate Austin

Visit: Austin Brothers Fence Company

Meet the Host: Faiez Rana

Brought to you by OsL:

Your shop is leaking profit in the office. We’ll show you where and how to fix it in 14 days.

Will Sarver spent 10 years building a moving company in Austin, Texas. One phone call changed everything — a past customer told him she'd just moved again, but couldn't remember who she'd used last time. That was his company.

So Will dropped $78,000 on a complete rebrand. New name, new logo, new trucks, new website. Boxer Buddies was born — and within 42 days, people were calling just from seeing the trucks drive by. Something that never happened before.

Will breaks down the real math behind his rebrand — what Kick Charge Creative charged, what the wraps cost per truck, and why he sees it as a foundation investment, not a marketing expense. He also walks through the incentive system he built to drive Google reviews: $30 per crew member, per review, but only if it includes a name, a photo, and hits Google. One of his drivers was pulling a 73% review rate on every job he touched.

Beyond branding, Will gets into the operational engine behind Boxer Buddies — Friday crew trainings, nightly driver calls, a three-round hiring process that starts with a VA-led Zoom screening, and a recruiting motion that runs every week whether they're hiring or not. He and Faiez also go deep on open book management, why most employees don't care as much as you do (and whose fault that really is), and the math behind going from $1M to $2M in revenue.

Topics covered in this episode

• The rebrand decision — from Sarver Movers to Boxer Buddies and the book that started it
• Why branding that appeals to women drives more initial calls
• The full cost breakdown of a $78K rebrand across logo, wraps, and website
• $30 per Google review — how Will built the incentive structure and the labor math behind it
• Friday training sessions and how they prevent damage claims
• The three-round hiring funnel — VA screening, dispatcher interview, owner final call
• Why recruiting should run like marketing, not HR
• Open book management and tying crew incentives to the P&L
• The weighted-average revenue model for hitting $2M
• VAs handling recruiting screening, marketing attribution, and sales QA

00:00 Will's background and how Boxer Buddies started in college04:03 Business size — $1.05M last year, targeting $2M05:06 The rebrand decision and Branded Not Blended by Dan Antonelli07:41 Why branding is the foundation, not a marketing line item10:23 Kick Charge Creative — research, owner calls, and the $78K total cost12:11 Tommy Mello rebranding at $17M and why that's scary at any stage16:16 Operational changes over the past 12–24 months18:15 Friday training — what they cover and why it prevents damage claims22:00 The $30 Google review incentive — name, photo, Google only24:18 Adrian's 73% review rate and how Will benchmarked the team26:01 The labor math — 34% target, 28% actual, and allocating 3–6% to review bonuses28:30 Book recommendations — Never Split the Difference, Ultimate Sales Machine, Atomic Habits31:15 Open book management and The Great Game of Business38:54 Weekly recruiting cadence — Indeed, 6th Street, referrals, Meta ads44:38 The screening question that filters candidates instantly46:09 VA team — recruiting, marketing analysis, sales QA49:36 The path from $1M to $2M — Google ads, mailers, capacity53:02 Advice for owners one to two steps behind54:23 Austin date night pick — North Italia + Cosmic Beer Garden

Meet the Guest: Will Sarver

Visit: Boxer Buddies

Meet the Host: Faiez Rana

Brought to you by OsL:

Your shop is leaking profit in the office. We’ll show you where in 14 days.