Trent and Friends Podcast

Let's Find You An Extra $10k on us!: https://gonextlevelpros.com/?page_id=5405&preview=true Most owners look at a $100 shirt and see an expense. Your techs see something else. So do your customers. And what they see is costing you more than you think.I sat down with Brian from Vox, the team behind the custom apparel and swag for the Utah Jazz, Vivint, and some of the biggest names in home services. We got into why the typical swag box does more harm than good, what your team hears when you hand them gear they toss before the drive home, and the one gift Brian says beats everything else in his warehouse.Then it gets personal. Brian has trained Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for 24 years and holds a third degree black belt, and he makes the case that the safest move in your business might be the one that gets you beat. I also share the moment a coach took away my favorite move, and why losing for a few months made me better.Cheap is a choice. Watch this before your next uniform order.Learn more about Vox and get in touch with Brian at voxmg.com.

The buyer pool has completely changed. Boomers used to hold most of the buying power in home services, and they expected to haggle. Now a huge share of the homeowners calling your shop are millennials, and in my view, most shops are still selling to them with a playbook built for their parents.Michael Lloyd went a different way. He and his business partner Jess started Paradise Heating and Air in Salt Lake City in 2021 with $3,000, while both kept their day jobs. Michael came from tech, not HVAC. Today the company does $10 million a year.In this episode of Trent and Friends, Michael asks me to beat him up, so I do. We get into the one step in the sales process almost everybody misses, the decision he admits is suffocating his growth, and the form that changes your close rate the moment a customer fills it out. We also talk about why he passed on the cheaper bid for his own fence, why great people fail in the wrong company, and the recruiting line that sounds like the worst pitch in the trades.If you own an HVAC, plumbing, electrical, or home service business and the old way of selling isn't landing like it used to, this one's for you.

I sat down with Wyatt Hepworth, founder of Any Hour Services. Wyatt started as a 19-year-old grocery store manager making $6 an hour. Today Any Hour is closing in on $500 million in revenue, and Wyatt is the guy who invented the $29 tune-up that every HVAC company in the country has tried to copy since. We get into why that price point works when everyone told him it couldn't, how he built a culture where technicians actually want to put in the extra mile, and the philosophy behind Any Hour's 30,000 plus five-star reviews, every single one of them real. Wyatt also breaks down how he identifies a "winner" when he's hiring, why putting the right person in the wrong seat can cost you a great employee, and the one piece of advice he'd give any struggling owner watching this right now. If you run a trades or home service business, or you're trying to figure out how to build something people actually want to work for, this episode is packed. 

Let's Find You An Extra $10k on us!:https://gonextlevelpros.com/?page_id=5405&preview=trueApply To Be On Trent And Friends Here All Expenses Paid!: https://gonextlevelpros.com/pnl-audit-application/Carrie Kelsch spent $150 on a bell, and it turned into $12 million in new revenue for her company. I had to know how that actually works, so we broke down the entire bonus structure she built around it, and why her team tracks it like a thermometer instead of a paycheck stub.We also got into how she hires, the interview test I ended up talking her into trying on camera, and the $3 million she once carried in informal payment plans with almost nothing backing them up except trust. Carrie also opened up about her daughter, and what it taught her about being present with the people you love.By the end, we got into why she thinks the entire garage door industry has been underpriced for years, and what she'd change about it if she could.Carrie Kelsch is the CEO of A-Plus Garage Doors, a $55 million home services company.Trades for Wishes: https://issuu.com/makeawishutah/docs/trades_for_wishesKailee Brynne Foundation (Carrie's charitable fund in her daughter's name): https://kaileebrynne.com/

Let's Find You An Extra $10k on us!:https://gonextlevelpros.com/?page_id=5405&preview=trueApply To Be On Trent And Friends Here All Expenses Paid!: https://gonextlevelpros.com/pnl-audit-application/What does real perseverance actually look like when life repeatedly pushes you to the brink of survival?In this deeply personal and powerful episode of Trent & Friends, Trent sits down with his best friend of 14 years, Nelly Chu. Long before building independent wealth in New York hedge funds and real estate, Nelly grew up in the raw survival trenches—evading loan sharks in Queens who threatened to sell her family, working manual labor at age 13, and buying her first house at 20 just so her mother would never face eviction again.Her story didn't get easier with financial success. From battling thyroid cancer after doctors ignored a massive goiter for seven years, to navigating devastating stillbirths and life-threatening miscarriages, to delivering her miracle daughter while hemorrhaging on the streets of New York at the height of the pandemic—Nelly's life is a masterclass in radical responsibility, mental toughness, and refusing to adopt a victim mindset.Now facing a Stage 3 cancer battle in the midst of intensive chemotherapy, Nelly shares the raw, unfiltered mindset that keeps her smiling, working, and showing up every single day.

Let's Find You An Extra $10k on us!:https://gonextlevelpros.com/?page_id=5405&preview=true

Apply To Be On Trent And Friends Here All Expenses Paid!: https://gonextlevelpros.com/pnl-audit-application/

Joe Gatto (Impractical Jokers) sits down for one of the most layered conversations we've done on this show — a fear he's never fully shaken, the moment that changed how he sees embarrassment for good, and the sales lesson he picked up years before anyone knew his name.Trent and Joe get into it all: the two hours Joe spent trapped in a glass elevator, the difference between bombing on stage and bombing in a pitch meeting, and why he says the second one hurts worse. Joe traces his embarrassment origin story back to a fall in a packed Italian restaurant as a kid, then breaks down Trent's "Godmode" framing of business as a game you're built to win. From there, Joe tells the story of selling jeans to Vince Vaughn, getting a handwritten note from Brittany Murphy, and the improv rule that reshaped how he handles a customer's "no" — including a live roleplay where Trent plays the customer.The conversation goes deeper from there. Joe talks about the leap he took walking away from a steady paycheck with nothing lined up, the coin flip that decided a major turning point in his career, and the stretch where he was providing for his family and still felt like he was failing them. He's honest about what it cost him, what he learned rebuilding after the show, and why he doesn't call any of it a sacrifice.

What does it take to survive the brutal zero-to-one grind of business and come out on top?In this episode of Trent & Friends, Trent sits down with former UFC and Bellator Lightweight Champion Eddie "The Underground King" Alvarez in a bare-knuckle facility ring for a raw, unfiltered conversation about elite performance.If you're a home service entrepreneur, trades business owner, or operator grinding out of your truck, this episode is a masterclass in mental toughness. Eddie breaks down why motivation is a myth, how to separate your emotions from your execution, why suffering is the origin of consciousness, and how to weaponize losses to build an unbreakable mindset.

Ed used to work under me. He started as a technician, moved into sales, and we butted heads more than once along the way. Now he owns his own electrical company, and he built it with no debt, no Google leads, and no idea if it was going to work.

In this episode we talk about the jump from W2 employee to owner and  why he named his company after his late father. We get into commission structures, what it's like training someone who used to sit across from you at the shop, and the customer story that changed his perspective.

This one is personal. Ed was in the room for years before he ever ran his own truck, and this conversation is proof that the path from technician to owner isn't a straight line for anybody.

Jered Williams, known online as The Wealthy Plumber, built a plumbing company from a one man show with a beat up truck into a $5 million operation, in a town of 60,000 people in Fairbanks, Alaska. He did it with no training program, no playbook, and a CSR he still calls the best hire he ever made. Trent and Jered sit down to break apart exactly how he did it, from the water heater call that changed how he priced every job after it, to the review policy that means he won't always give an angry customer their money back, to the sales philosophy he says most technicians completely misunderstand. If you run a trades business and you've ever wondered what actually separates the guys who scale from the guys who stay stuck, this one is worth the full watch.

Ryan Lee ran an outdoor lighting business for twelve years before he figured out what was actually working. In this episode he breaks down the three things that changed everything for him, starting with a pricing mistake that's quietly wrecking margins for landscape lighting companies everywhere. We get into what he charges per light, why the old time and material math doesn't work anymore, and the exact order he tells business owners to fix things in before they ever think about buying another lead. Ryan also opens up about selling his business in 2019 and what that exit actually looked like once the dust settled. If you've ever wondered why some home service niches print money while others struggle to get off the ground, this one's for you.