Every year, hundreds of veterans across the country live with a bathtub they're afraid to step over, doesn’t meet their needs, or is just too difficult to manage. For some, mobility injuries have turned a routine shower into something they either skip or risk. Baths for the Brave exists to fix that, one home at a time. Baths for the Brave is a nationwide movement of home improvement companies that each install a free, safer shower for a veteran in their own market. On this episode of The TruCoach Podcast, Brian Gottlieb, who founded Baths for the Brave, is joined by Senja Spelman, founder of Sisu Synergy, who has spent the last two years helping bring Baths for the Brave to contractors across the country. They walk through how the program works, what's involved for participants, and how to get started. Brian and Senja share the stories that have stayed with them and what this work does for the veterans receiving it and the teams doing the installs. The mission is simple: improve the lives of those who have sacrificed so much for our freedom. We invite you to join us this year - visit bathsforthebrave.com and apply to be a partner. We also get into Senja's work at Sisu Synergy, where she helps home improvement companies build trust through TV and storytelling before a salesperson ever walks in the door: how to buy spots so they run in front of the right people at the right time, and why an owner willing to put their own face on camera beats a polished ad.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Most home improvement operators don't think about their legal exposure until a problem lands on the desk. A customer who wants a free house over a cracked tile. A cold call that turns into a lawsuit. A contract they copied off the internet that falls apart the first time it's tested. Attorney Heather Macklin spends her days on the other side of those problems. Macklin runs Macklin Law and acts as outside general counsel to home improvement companies across the country. She and her husband Rob also co-own a concrete coating company and a one-day bath business, so she reads KPIs, backlog, and a labor shortage the same way her clients do. On The TruCoach Podcast, she joins Brian Gottlieb for a working tour of the legal issues that catch contractors off guard. Some of them might surprise you. There’s the customer who threatens to sue over a defect, and why the damages you're on the hook for are usually far smaller than the threat sounds. Macklin makes the case that a few negative reviews can actually read as more credible than a wall of five stars, and that how you respond counts for more than the rating itself. She walks through consent and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act: why buying lists and rehashing old leads can carry real risk, and what an internal do-not-call policy needs before it protects you. And she gets into the paperwork most contractors get wrong, from terms and conditions to state-specific rules like Wisconsin's Home Improvement Practices Act and its right-to-cure notice. Plus, she and Brian talk through whether non-competes still hold up after the federal ban that never took effect.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Dave Azer, Vice President of Marketing at Jacuzzi Bath Remodel, generates over 4,000 leads a day for the company's dealer network. Not a month or a week. A day. That comes to 1.5 million leads a year across roughly 40 sources. Leads run anywhere from $20 to $425, and Dave will tell you the cost of any single one is almost irrelevant. What he watches is net sales. On The TruCoach Podcast, Dave joins Brian Gottlieb in breaking down the system behind one of home improvement's biggest lead operations: how he vets a new source, why he pulls one vendor out for every one he adds in, and the $3,000 market test that tells him whether a source is worth scaling. He explains why he confirms appointments by listening to the recording of the first call instead of chasing a second confirmation call, and what that did to conversion on his highest-performing leads. Plus he gets into where AI voice agents earn a place in the call center and where operators run to them too fast. And he lands on the advice from an early mentor that still runs his operation: always follow the data.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Most home improvement operators answer the growth question the same way: get more leads. Scott Berman thinks that's how you go broke. Berman is the founder and CEO of Florida Window and Door, which has grown into a window and door business billing north of $100 million a year. He tracks revenue per lead by source and knows what each source is worth before he spends a dollar on it.

In this episode of The TruCoach Podcast, Berman joins Brian Gottlieb to break down the math he watches every night: high-intent versus low-intent leads, why a Google lead and an aggregator lead can't carry the same cost, and how he backs into what he can pay per lead from the revenue each source returns. He explains his "liability light" model for opening markets, the smallest location with the fewest people, installation and service centralized at corporate, and a branch that turns a profit at three to four million in revenue. He also gets into what he found inside the companies he bought from private equity: good people with no leadership, overhead nobody would cut, and a structure that was there but unfed.

Berman also walks through his new platform Heavyset, the scheduling tool he built after watching his own call center take too long to set a single appointment. It lets customers book by text against real-time sales availability, confirms the appointment with AI, and now sets more than half of Florida Window and Door's leads. Berman's experience and proven track record make this episode a master class in leads management.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Megan Beattie grew a West Michigan home improvement company to around $10 million in about four years, building it on door knocking, special events, and a database she mined for everything it had. No inbound leads, no aggregators, no fancy website. The industry calls her the lead queen, and she’s part of Tony Hoty Consulting, who advises more than 500 home improvement companies on building the lead sources most operators have written off.

On this episode of The TruCoach Podcast, Megan joins Brian Gottlieb to break down why canvassing fails and what winners do differently. She names the two things that have to be in place before a single canvasser knocks on a door, why bringing in an outside canvas leader usually backfires, and the 90-day path from entry-level canvasser to van leader to canvas manager. Spoiler alert: a well-run program runs under 10% fully loaded, a packed van writes three to five appointments a day, and one Minnesota client did close to $400,000 in April sales from two canvassers.

There's also call center hours, AI's real role on the phones, hot-setting appointments at shows, DISC testing for new hires, and why the word 'door-to-door' in a job ad scares off the exact people you want to hire. Plus Megan makes the case for canvassing the products everyone else ignores - fences, garage coatings, decks - where the field is wide open.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Brian Kaskavalciyan rebuilt his career at 40 after watching five companies crash. That experience became the foundation of everything he runs now: The Wealthy Contractor podcast and its nearly 300 episodes, Accelerate Live, and Success Society, the mentorship community for home improvement operators who don't want to figure it out alone. He's also a TruCoach mentor and a Truvolv investor.

In this episode of The TruCoach Podcast, Brian gets into why most operators stay stuck despite knowing exactly what they need to do, why "who you have to become" matters more than the next marketing tactic, and the difference between low-leverage and high-leverage work inside a home improvement business. He tells the story of John O'Leary, a contractor who ran a $600,000 business for 20 years before climbing down off a roof one afternoon, telling his foreman he wasn't coming back, and going to learn how to be a businessman. Seven years later, he was financially free.

Brian also gets into the tension between running the day-to-day and building something that doesn't need you, the promoted-to-admin trap that buries managers in paperwork, and why most home improvement owners are the bottleneck inside their own business without seeing it.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Vince and Anthony Nardo, Truvolv investors and TruCoach mentors, spent forty years building a family home improvement business with their father. Vince ran it as president, Anthony as CFO. They grew it past a thousand employees and multiple states before selling to private equity.

In this episode of The TruCoach Podcast, Vince and Anthony unpack what they learned along the way. They start with what their mother drilled into them early: business stayed in the office, family stayed at the Sunday dinner table, and they were a family with a business, not a family business. That distinction shaped how they made decisions. They get into where most home improvement operators get stuck: making decisions without a real financial plan, confusing cash with profit, and expanding into new markets without modeling the cash requirements first.

They cover why they simplified their product mix when they realized they were spending 80% of their time on 20% of their profit, and why dollars per crew day became a more useful number than margin for everything from staffing to forecasting. They also get into what they say was the pivot point in their growth: getting outside their own four walls and learning from operators who'd already been there - or were right there with them. Peer groups, mentors who shared what they knew early on, the questions you only think to ask once you've heard someone else ask them first. It's the same belief TruCoach is built on: the business can't outgrow the team, and the team grows fastest by learning from people who've already done the work.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Chris Behan has been in digital marketing since before Google was a thing. He was generating leads online while most people were still figuring out what the internet was. He's generated tens of millions of leads for home improvement companies, built and exited a business focused entirely on this industry, and now he's the president of Truvolv.

He also has a very specific point of view on why your leads are getting more expensive and your results aren't keeping up - and spoiler alert,  it has nothing to do with how much you're spending.

In this episode of The TruCoach Podcast, Chris joins industry legend Brian Gottlieb in breaking down why website speed is the most overlooked conversion lever in home improvement marketing, why the agencies telling you to spend more are selling you old technology. 

There's also a conversation about something most home improvement companies never think about: the difference between brand story and direct response, and why leaning too hard on one without the other turns your marketing into a barking dog your customers eventually stop hearing. 

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.

Brian Gottlieb built a home improvement company from $3,000 on a plastic folding table to a $150 million exit. Eric Bohner has spent 27 years inside this industry, across hundreds of businesses, watching owners get stuck at the same walls over and over.

In this first episode of The TruCoach Podcast from Truvolv, Brian and Eric lay out the founding vision behind TruCoach and the problems it and Truvolv exist to solve. Home improvement owners are exceptional at their craft. Running and scaling a business is a different skill set entirely, and most people are learning it the hard way.

If you're in the home improvement or home services business, congratulations - you're already committed. If you want to thrive in this business, TruCoach is built to shorten the road to scaling, growing and sustaining it. The right answers, from people who've actually been there.

The TruCoach Podcast with Brian Gottlieb is where you’ll find industry-specific, actionable methods to help you build a supercharged home improvement or home services business. From leads to leadership, we exist to help you and your team successfully grow. TruCoach is your single source of truth for organizations looking to scale. Brought to you by Truvolv, you’ll get exclusive access to leaders who have been there and done that - and the wisdom that only comes from experience. No fluff, no noise. Just proven strategies for you and your team to implement. Learn more and have your lightbulb moment at truvolv.com.