Sabrina talks with Patti Beres, owner of Be Green Pro, about building a 16-year lawn and landscape company rooted in something bigger than grass...

What you'll learn in today's episode

- How a walk down a small street on a frozen February afternoon led to a business she never planned to start...

- The words her own kids said that turned "if only we had a lawn care company" into an actual company...

- A tick bite on a family trip that sent her searching for an answer no ordinary insect spray could give...

- An ingredient the ancient Egyptians used thousands of years ago that ended up in her own product line...

- The one assumption people still make about her the moment they learn who owns the company...

- A cash flow lesson from her earliest years in business that she says almost breaks every new owner...

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*Connect with Patty: begreen.pro or @begreenpro on Facebook and Instagram*

In this episode Sabrina solves problem every owner feels but rarely names... And why becoming the "CDO" of your business is slowly killing you and your company...

What You'll Learn In Todays Episode

- The real reason you're exhausted isn't a lack of discipline — it's how many times a day you're re-making the same kind of decision

- A weekly meeting format one owner uses to run 3 locations and 140 employees without ever losing the pulse of the business

- The unexpected, personal story about two siblings raised in the same house who ended up on completely opposite paths — and why she brings it up here

- A three-day, 30-minutes-a-day rhythm that replaces constant "quick questions" in the hallway with actual control of your week

- The specific meeting structure that turns "whose fault is this" into "how do we actually fix it" or never have the problem to start with...

Sabrina sits down with Michelle Schwindler, co-owner of Sandy Beach Lighting and Design in Lafayette, Indiana, to talk about building a design-led, high-end outdoor lighting business from the ground up — and the life events that pushed her and her husband toward it...

What you'll learn in today's episode

- The unexpected, reason she and her husband walked away from a 15-year outdoor construction business to go all-in on lighting...

- Where the name "Sandy Beach" actually comes from — hint: there's no beach anywhere near Lafayette, Indiana...

- The client ritual called the "nighttime reveal" — and why it still brings her to tears every time, years in...

- A rude phone call from a competitor that accidentally handed her one of the biggest institutional accounts in her market...

- How a single $3,000 charity donation turned into a $40,000 client project

- The networking approach she's leaned on for almost 20 years instead of paid advertising

- Her blunt advice to any woman starting a home service business...

Episode Summary

Here's the uncomfortable truth about hiring: the good ones aren't applying to your Indeed post. They already have jobs. In this solo episode, Sabrina tells the story of Mike Homer — a quiet computer guy from her Gonzaga days who walked into her office years later, mid-divorce, and asked to move furniture. She hired him mostly on instinct. He became a driver, then took over dispatch, and transformed the entire department. Seven years later he's one of her most important admin hires — and he never once appeared on a job board. From that story, Sabrina lays out five places to actually find office hires in home services: your own customers, your vendors and reps, friends of your good-standing employees, your local networking groups, and career-changers coming out of teaching, nursing, and admin work. She also gives you the one question to ask in every intro conversation — and it's not "are you looking for a job." Practical, story-driven, and a needed reminder that your best hire is probably already in your contacts.

Episode Summary

Ziara Arden was a successful insurance broker with a horse farm and a 7,000-square-foot house in Tennessee. Then came a divorce that dragged through four years of court, and she walked away from all of it. Sabrina sits down with her to hear how a woman in her fifties rebuilt from nothing and became a licensed roofing contractor — a job she'd have laughed at anyone for suggesting. Today Ziara owns Arch Roofing and Repair near Clearwater, Florida, plus a roofing and construction company in Idaho, and she answers her own phone at 5 a.m. She talks candidly about being white-knuckled on a swinging ladder, about the mentor who told her to get licensed so she wouldn't be left with nothing, and about her favorite trick when a group of men are standing around waiting for "the contractor" to show up. She also redefines success entirely: not the diamond ring or the toys she once had, but time freedom, integrity, and helping the next woman get her license. Deeply honest about starting over — and proof that it's never too late.

Episode Summary:

Stuck at the same revenue ceiling for a year or two? Sabrina has bad news, and she learned it the hard way — three times. Sometimes the problem isn't that you need one more person. It's that your business has outgrown the way you lead. In this solo episode, Sabrina looks hard in the mirror and shares the mistakes that forced her to level up: hiring a friend's friend and letting her invent her own job, and the painful sales-department restructure her team flatly refused to go along with. She also shares the line from Carrie Kelsch — founder of an eight-figure garage door company with 140 employees — that stopped her cold: "I don't want people to line up with me. I want them to align with me." Then Sabrina delivers her 3P approach, three questions asked in order that tell you exactly what kind of problem you're actually facing. Only one of them is solved by hiring. The other two are on you. Candid, practical, and a little uncomfortable — in the best way.

Episode Summary

Ericka Stewart has a psychology degree and was headed for a doctorate — until she got pregnant, went to help out at her husband's family roofing company, and discovered what everyone in the trades already knows: once you're in home services, you never get out. Sabrina sits down with her to trace an unlikely path from door-knocking roofing sales, to running one of the industry's biggest conferences, to owning her own digital marketing agency at 33. Ericka is refreshingly plain-spoken about an industry that loves to overcomplicate itself — why marketing doesn't need to be that confusing, why the right agency is the one you actually feel comfortable talking to, and why she'd rather spend an extra 40 minutes learning who you are than pitch you a package. She also gets candid about the things women in this industry rarely say out loud: postpartum depression, the self-worth reckoning that follows leaving a comfortable job, and finding your way back to yourself after kids. Funny, warm, and full of practical marketing advice for owner-operators who'd rather be fixing roofs than fighting Google.

Episode Summary

It's Mother's Day 2012, and Sabrina is elbow-deep in an oven that has never once been cleaned. Then she and her business partner Jerry slide the refrigerator aside and find a fossilized mouse — tail and all — welded to the linoleum. In this solo episode, Sabrina uses one of the grossest days of her career to ask a question every home service owner eventually faces: how do you stop being the person on the roof, in the attic, or in the toilet at 8:47 p.m. on a Wednesday? Her answer is three tactical moves for making your next best hire. The counterintuitive core of it: you don't hire for the job you're bad at — you hire for the job you hate. She walks through identifying your three most draining tasks, drilling down into a specific role instead of a vague "assistant," and the unglamorous discipline of making sure the new person actually follows your system. Practical, funny, and honest about how long buying your time back really takes.

Episode Summary

Ann Danielson has lived in Malaysia, Shanghai, Ghana, and the Philippines — and somehow runs a land company in middle Tennessee with a sister she wasn't even close to before COVID. Sabrina sits down with her to unpack one of the most unlikely entrepreneurial paths on this show. Growing up, Ann and her sister Mary hated the family land in northern Wisconsin — digging outhouses, clearing trees, butchering deer, walking the perimeter until they knew every corner. Decades later, after their dad died on that very land, they turned that reluctant education into Danielson Land Co, buying acreage and carving it into "mini farms" for families who want country life within commuting distance of Nashville. Ann is refreshingly candid about the first deal they completely botched, the "little lady" phone calls that quietly end without a callback, and why they've bought every single property outright with zero debt — even as the industry tells them they're leaving growth on the table. She also shares how they deliberately built the business to fit the life they wanted, not the other way around. Warm, funny, and full of permission to start before you feel ready.

In this solo episode, Sabrina tackles the fear that keeps so many women business owners stuck: the terror of making that first office hire. The worry usually sounds like "if I get busier, I'll have to hire someone — and I'm not sure I can afford it." Sabrina reframes it: you're not paying for hours, you're paying for the hours you get back. Drawing on the story of Cindy Williams — a divorced mom who built a $2M cleaning company by paying above market when the men in her industry told her to use employees up and throw them away — and her own beloved first hire, Carrie, Sabrina makes the case that cheap hires are the most expensive hires you'll ever make. Then she delivers a simple, proven pay structure: a base at or slightly above market, a bonus tied to just one metric, and a rhythm of weekly, quarterly, and annual check-ins. Candid, practical, and encouraging — this is a permission slip to invest in the person who buys back your life.