In this episode of The Huge Transformations Podcast, Sid Graef, introduces holiday-lighting entrepreneur Steve Hunsaker. Steve shares how he built a thriving Christmas light installation business—starting from scratch by leveraging sales skills, proactive marketing, and high-end positioning to differentiate from cheaper competitors. Despite nearly going under in his third year, he refined his operations, hired strategically, focused on profitability, and now generates more than 800,000 in annual revenue from Christmas lighting alone. Steve also discusses his newer ventures in permanent and landscape lighting, along with his “Home Service Accelerator” coaching program. This episode provides valuable lessons on systems, hiring, marketing, and mindset for home service professionals looking to reach six, seven, and even eight figures.
References:
Jason Geiman (mentioned as a YouTuber in holiday lights)
Jobber (CRM)
Go High Level (marketing & automation tool)
Tommy Mello (nine-figure home service entrepreneur)
Transcript
Gabe Torres:
“Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. I’m Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee.”
Sheila Smeltzer:
“I’m Sheila Smeltzer from North Carolina.”
Sid Graef:
“I’m Sid Graef out of Montana. We’re your hosts and guides through the landscape of growing a successful home service business. We do this by interviewing the best home service business builders in the industry—folks that have already built seven- and eight-figure businesses, and they want to help you succeed.”
Gabe Torres:
“Yep. No fake gurus on this show, just real-life owners that have been in the trenches and can help show you the way to grow profitably.”
Sheila Smeltzer:
“We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100 percent experience, 0 percent theory. We’re going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
Gabe Torres:
“Our guests will share with you the pitfalls to avoid and the keys to winning. In short, our guests will show you how to transform your home service business into a masterpiece.”
Sid Graef:
“Thanks for joining us on the wild journey of entrepreneurship. Let’s dive in.”
Sid Graef:
“Welcome back to the Huge Transformations Podcast. This is Sid Graef, and today you get to meet Steve Hunsaker. Steve was a young man in Arizona, and he started a junk removal service about six years ago, kind of struggled his way through it. And then he started hanging Christmas lights. He spent time getting educated on marketing and systems.
In four or five short years, he built that to 800,000 revenue last season. He did really well. And now he’s got a partner, and he also spends time teaching other people how to start up their business. So Steve’s an interesting guy. He has really worked his way through struggles and challenges and just doesn’t quit. He’s doing a great job, and he’s a great example of a transformation from bootstrap to seven figures—he’s almost there. And I’m excited for you to meet him. So without further ado, meet Steve Hunsaker.”
Sid Graef:
“Hey everybody, I’m glad you’re here. This is Sid with the Huge Transformation Show, and I’ve got Steve Hunsaker with me. And did I say your name right? Hunsaker?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Oh yeah, Hunsaker.”
Sid Graef:
“Hunsaker. Close enough. Okay, cool. So, interesting story. I’m really glad to have you on the show, and I’m glad to meet you because, in full transparency, I actually stalked you online just a little bit. You came across my Instagram feed—I was like, ‘Oh, this guy’s got good... you know, like you’re articulate, and you had some good content for the home service industry.’ You’ve got a holiday lighting company, a landscape lighting company. I think you had another service business beforehand. And now you coach people. And I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to pay attention.’ And I start paying attention, and I’m like, ‘Ooh, content’s good. You actually know what you’re talking about. I’m like, I gotta get you on the show because this is The Huge Transformation Show, and you’ve shared a lot of your story online.’ So before I just introduce you forever... how’d you get started in home service business, Steve?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, no, I appreciate the intro. Yeah, I started—it was 2020. I was working at Paycom, which is like a human capital management payroll software company. And I was just miserable. So like, you know, the big sickness, if you’re putting this on YouTube I can’t use the C word apparently—so the big sickness or whatever happened in 2020. Basically, I was an outside sales rep wearing a suit and tie every day, like doing decently well. I was a career sales guy for five years, something like that.
Then they did this stay-at-home order, and I was calling CFOs of these massive companies to try to get in the door because they were forcing us to when the whole world shut down. And from a guy who was selling in person to getting told essentially, ‘How effing dare you call me? I just laid off 400 people?’—this is like April of 2020, worst time ever—and I was just miserable. I thought, ‘This is not ending anytime soon. I’ve got to find some other way to make money.’
So I went on Reddit, typed in like, ‘Cool ways to make money,’ and I found a Sweaty Startup Reddit post about hanging Christmas lights. It linked to one of those Facebook groups. I went into the Facebook group and was like, ‘Oh, it’s October...’ or at that point, it was maybe April, May when I started—kept looking at it. And then by October, I was like, ‘Oh, okay, it’s October, this’ll work.’ Then I just started looking at the Facebook group and found some dudes with, you know, a 10th-grade education ripping six figures hanging Christmas lights. And I was like, ‘I’ve got to talk to some of these guys.’ And so that’s how I started. Day one was just from Reddit to Christmas light company. That was the first thing I did.”
Sid Graef:
“Okay, and then, so I mean, clearly you did it for a season, and it was interesting enough or profitable enough to say, ‘I’m going to keep doing this.’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, the cool thing for me was—and this is what I tell a lot of like the people that join the Home Service Accelerator too—it was really interesting because I have a different journey to home services than most home service guys, where I came from a sales and more techy background first, and then I had to learn the trade. That was pretty interesting to me because my first year, when you run a Christmas light business, if you want to make it profitable, you have to be high-end; you have to be selling to million-dollar homes most of the time. Because to do it—to be the cheap guy—you have to be so good operationally that first-year guys will not be.
And so typically, to start out and actually make money, you have to go after the high-end, custom-cut, all that stuff. The sale part came naturally to me. And so we did, like, I want to say it was 98K in revenue our first year. But the issue was, I wasn’t very profitable. So that sounds all cool, and that’s classic internet goober, right? ‘Oh, 100K my first year!’ But we made very little once the tax man was paid and everything else. It was very little money. But that was the start point: sales background was natural. I ran a little bit of Google Ads, a little bit of Instagram, Facebook ads, and then just, like, sold, sold, sold all myself, installed myself until maybe Thanksgiving. Then I had two buddies help me, and then we just kind of ramped up from there.”
Sid Graef:
“Right. Did you—aside from that Facebook group of holiday lighting installers, or whomever—did you have any other type of coaching, instruction to figure out, like, how do I price, who do I get suppliers from, or did you just glean it all off of that group?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“There’s a little bit of the group. I didn’t pay for any coaching—sorry, I can see my camera’s out of focus, let me just tap real quick. Sorry about that, I didn’t want to ruin your video. Yeah, so I started just talking to the guys in the Facebook group. The funny thing is, like, even in 2020, there was very little coaching out there for Christmas lights—maybe Jason Guymon was making some YouTube videos. Other than that, it was pretty minimal. I would just call dudes from the Facebook group—I’d message them on Facebook Messenger and say, ‘Hey, do you have some time to chat?’ And most of these dudes would be like, ‘Yeah, absolutely,’ and they would just give me the keys to the castle for free, which is something I’m always like— that was really interesting, because if someone calls me now and they want to talk on the phone for two hours, I’m usually not super thrilled to do that. So it’s always—I always have to remind myself, like, when I started, dudes did that for me, so I’ve got to kind of keep doing that.”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, true. But, you know, so often that kind of stuff just leads into coaching, because people call you up, like, ‘Hey, can I pick your brain?’ And ordinarily, from someone that’s gained a level of success, there’s a willingness to help because you remember where you started. But at some point, you’ve got to account for your time, too. You’re like, ‘I don’t have two hours; I’ve got 10 minutes, 15 minutes maybe.’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, the thing that frustrates me a little bit in that scenario is, like, I never on any content say, like, ‘Do this because this is the only way.’ Most of the tone of everything I make is like, ‘Hey, I don’t have all the answers. I am by no means a guru. I’m not Tommy Mello with a nine-figure business that everything I say is essentially gospel at that point. I’m not that. I’m just in the thick of it right now. I’ve shared my growth year by year, and I just share based on what’s worked for me.’
So, you know, when guys call me, what happens when you start making content or when I started the Accelerator is every high school buddy and friend, everyone’s cousin is like, ‘Oh, I have a buddy that does home services. Let me give you his phone number, and you guys can talk for an hour.’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s great.’ And it’s kind of weird because now I have a monetized thing for it. So I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m happy to talk with you.’ But what gets frustrating is when I talk to somebody for two hours, and then I talk to them three months later, and I’m like, ‘Hey, how’d you do? Did you implement all those things?’ And they didn’t do any of it. And I’m like, ‘Okay...’”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, exactly. So I’m going to tie two questions together—maybe it’s just a concept. So you’ve had five seasons in your holiday lighting company, is that correct?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Five, yeah. 2020 was the first year, so going on the fifth year.”
Sid Graef:
“Well, congratulations—you’ve beaten the majority of the statistics that say 80 percent of new businesses are gone in five years. So good job on that.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Isn’t it the three-year mark that makes the difference? Because we almost went under at year three, so I was almost a statistic.”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, well, it’s like running an ultramarathon. A lot of people drop out. It’s not like they got hit by a car; they just don’t have the gas to make 50 or 100 miles, you know—recognizing that business is just a freakin’ marathon.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, exactly.”
Sid Graef:
“But you’ve grown each year, grown that. But do you find that people pay attention to what they pay for? Meaning, you’ve got the buddy of a high school friend that calls and gets all this advice, and then three months later, you go, ‘Hey, did you do anything with it?’ You get that no. Was free, so maybe they treated it like it was free. But now, you have people that pay you, and they take a lot more action.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, it’s actually a really good point. There is definitely something to, like, if you are selling any product that requires work still—like the way we describe it is, ‘We steer the boat, but you still have to row.’ We just put the boat in the right direction. You still have to row. It’s a lot different than what a lot of these guys are used to buying, which is agency services where it’s like, ‘I’m going to give you 1,000 a month; make my phone ring.’ And so when guys come into it, a big thing for us is, ‘Hey, these are systems and processes that have worked for me—now 200 other home service business owners. We know they’ll work for you, but you still have to do the work.’
If you don’t charge enough... in terms of the market for selling info or coaching or anything like that on the internet, we’re pretty cheap—full transparency. Our thing is anywhere between 2 and 3,000 for 90 days. We’re not that expensive given how good our testimonials are. But what’s interesting is, the times I have—earlier in the business—let people in for free, like friends of friends, they are the worst results, pretty consistently, because they don’t have that buy-in to actually do the work. But somebody who pays full price, they’re like, ‘Okay, I invested 2,500. I better do something with it.’ They’ve got skin in the game, and that makes all the difference.”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, for sure. So we talked about the holiday lights, and we’ll transform out of that, but you mentioned your accidental entrance into the industry, which is really interesting. Most people start in service business because they’re a good technician. They don’t like their boss, or they think they can do it better. ‘I’ll go start my own.’ So they start as a technician and then try to figure out business or sales. You came at it from a different direction—sales first, which I think is a big benefit on your end.
But year one, 98,000, two, three, four—you’ve grown each year. I’d like to ask you: what did you have to learn to progress from year one to two to three to now?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Oh, I love this question because I remember it year by year. Okay, so year one: 97 or 98K in revenue. If you’re looking at the skill quiver—sales skill, marketing skill, operations skill, people management skill, maybe accounting skill if that’s the five main skills of a business owner—year one, I maybe had ‘sales.’ That’s it.
So year one was like, ‘Okay, I can white-knuckle myself to about 97K doing all the sales, because I at least know how to have a conversation with somebody.’ Then year one was 97, 98, something like that—terrible margin. Year two, I went, ‘Okay, if I look at these five skills, year two: what’s the thing that has the biggest return on my time to offset this?’ And of course, in Christmas, it was operations. So in year two, I brought on somebody to help with operations. I was like, ‘Okay, if I can train somebody to be 80 percent as good as I am at installing—which, in hindsight, I was terrible at installing, but I thought I was really good—so if I can do that, that’s helpful.’
So year two, I hired an operations guy, which meant now I have ‘sales’ dialed in and I have a semblance of ‘operations’ dialed in. That gave me two of the five. We jumped from 97 or 98K to around 253K or something that year, because all the time I was spending on operations, I could now pour into sales and the other three that I was bad at, right? So that was a big jump, but also all the new problems that happened from scaling up a team—vehicles, everything else—that was year two.
So then year three, I was like, ‘Okay, how can I expand again?’ The third biggest thing was, ‘I can’t teach someone to run Instagram and Facebook ads for my company that well. I can’t teach somebody how to hire Google Ad agencies or anything else, so I’m going to keep doing that. I hired two sales guys in year three.’ So then year three became what was supposed to be the year where we actually had a full system, right?
What ended up happening was a classic case of, you know, bad things happen in twos or threes. My brother died on October 10, which was terrible—back in Seattle. So I had hired two full-time sales guys, cranked ad spend infinitely to make sure they were busy enough, had an operations guy, maybe 15 or 20 crew members part-time, full-time, all that. My brother died, and I obviously had to go to Seattle; my parents are a mess, all that. Essentially, what I thought was ‘Okay, I have people in each position’ completely fell apart. My main operator basically just— for lack of better terms—ran the business into the ground. All my employees hated their lives; but again, I’m the owner, so it’s my fault. It was a bad situation, so that year three we almost went out of business entirely. We did like 350-something K in sales, and I could barely make payroll at the end of the year—really bad.
So then year four, I replaced the operations person, got the salespeople systems and automations to help them sort leads. So year four, the big thing was systems and processes. Then we jumped to 500K at good margins. And it was like, ‘Okay, now we have a system, we have leadership positions in place, everything like that.’ Then year five, I expanded the office staff and all our tech systems. So the big jump that year—we did 808K in sales. Our average ticket has gone up every single year substantially. Our close rate has gone up every year. The better you start doing in these richer areas, typically, the more they tell their friends. Your close rate goes higher the more organic leads you get. Because it’s more word-of-mouth, so they’re primed on your pricing. Versus if you do all cold traffic, that’s where you get people who thought it was going to be 200 bucks, and you’re like, ‘Add a zero.’ Yeah, so that’s kind of the difference.
To sum it all up, year one was white-knuckling, year two I offloaded ops, year three I offloaded sales, year four I got systems, and year five I optimized the systems.”
Sid Graef:
“Okay, good. Really good. So what’s your projection for year six? I mean, do you anticipate—what’s the skill you need to add to continue to scale?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, that’s a good question. Year six is we need to get better at hiring mid-level management. That’s the big emphasis this year. Even at 800K in two months, we still had certain crew leads that ran circles around other crew leads. One crew lead can consistently install six, seven, eight grand in revenue a day. Sometimes we have another crew lead doing three or four grand, and the good crew lead will take that third job because the other guy hasn’t finished his second. So that’s a big emphasis for us this year: hiring and talent. The bigger our brand got locally, it seemingly has gotten easier to attract talent because we pay pretty well. That’s the big emphasis this year.
But outside of that, too, we’ve finally taken the black pill on permanent lighting and are going all in on that—the permanent Christmas lights. We’re going to start doing that. We’ve been completely temporary lighting for these five years—none of that revenue has been permanent Christmas light jobs. And so now we’re expanding into landscape lighting and permanent lighting, because that’s married to our existing clientele. Versus—I’m selling off the junk removal company, because I was just robbing from Peter to pay Paul as the businesses got bigger, subbing out junk in Q4 because I needed everybody I could for Christmas. At a certain point, I looked at the five-year plan and was like, ‘That’s not going to work.’ But this permanent and landscape lighting is definitely a bolt-on to the business. It’s going to take us to the next level.”
Sid Graef:
“Okay, cool. I’m not super familiar with the permanent or landscape lighting or their margins, but it doesn’t appear that that’s a recurring business model the way temporary lights is. I know—I see that look on your face, maybe it is?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“It is if you’re smart. The issue is most of my competitors won’t be able to do it because they’re not profitable enough. But you can do a permanent product that’s year-round and give people some pretty juicy lease terms on commercial buildings. So you can do permanent product, but instead of forcing a company to fork over a five-figure invoice that three different levels have to approve for the permanent lighting display, if you can front it, you can rent it and have a recurring model. Then you become an MRR business with an actual exit potential. But most guys can’t do it— that’s why I’m not afraid to talk about it, because most guys can’t do it: they can’t front the cost of installing a product that costs 12 dollars a foot for 7- or 800 feet, and they’re not going to even break even for nine months, ten months. Most guys can’t do that, especially in the Christmas light world, because most of them are fly-by-night.
But on the residential side, you gotta sell it. Because there’s too many variables, you’re cutting tracks, all that jazz. But there is a recurring model there, which is what I’m more excited about.”
Sid Graef:
“That’s really interesting. Let me ask you this: in your growth time, year three was desperately sorry about your brother—really brutal— but lessons learned along the way. I love to ask people, ‘What was either a mistake you made or a landmine you stepped on that you think, “Oh, geez, if somebody had just told me, I could have avoided this whole mess?”’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, I would say hiring is number one. So, like, everyone tells you to get off the truck, but they don’t really put an emphasis on, like, ‘It matters who’s on the truck for you.’ That’s a big one. The other thing—and this is a Hormozi, Alex Hormozi quote that basically sums up the situation with employees and all that— ‘Most of your business’s problems are probably going to be solved with the conversations that you’re avoiding.’ And so I had this kind of passive-aggressive relationship with the person essentially running the entire business. You know when you just know that someone doesn’t really like you? You just know, even if they don’t say it. The way the interaction is happening, you just kind of know in your gut, ‘Oh, this isn’t always a fun interaction.’ Typically, a good rule of thumb is if you’re dreading your one-on-ones with that employee, you should probably ask yourself... yeah. And so that was kind of the scenario, but I was like, ‘Oh, the entire business is tied there. I can’t do anything right. It is what it is.’ I just shoved it under the rug. Then when push came to shove, I’m three states away, not coming back anytime soon. The workload’s falling on one person, and it got pretty hairy.
So for me, the main lesson was that: the magic in your business is probably coming from the conversations you’re avoiding. That’s number one. Then two: hiring specifically, and knowing that if I’m truly giving full control of my business to this person, I better be able to trust them to do me right and I’m going to do right by them. But the trade-off is they also have to trust you. So if you’re going to pay somebody peanuts, you’re going to get peanut results. If you’re going to hope somebody clocks in and cares as much about your business as you do for $15 an hour... I’ve got beachfront property in Montana where Sid lives to sell you, you know?
So those are probably the two big lessons. The other one, too, is that revenue is vanity and profit is sanity. When you’re new to business, you start hitting six figures. You’re brand-new, you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, 100 grand, 200 grand, I’m invincible.’ Then you start realizing that means nothing if you’re at 20 percent margins, 15 percent margins. That means nothing. So in my earlier days, it was so much about revenue, and now I’m like, ‘I don’t give a rat’s... you know what... about revenue; I care about profit.’ That’s the actual skill, which again ties into: now that I’m in the influencer space with Home Service Accelerator, it’s funny because I see all these dudes that just shell out their revenue numbers everywhere. I’ve talked to a lot of these coaches privately, and when you know what to ask about these guys’ businesses—like, ‘Oh, okay, tell me about that. How many crews do you have? Okay, well, how many—what do those crews average per day?’—when they start not being able to answer those questions very clearly, you start going, ‘Oh, okay, this is an influencer cosplaying as a business owner, not a business owner cosplaying as an influencer.’”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, that’s really interesting. It was either Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett that said, ‘When the tide goes out, you see who’s swimming naked.’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, it’s definitely true. It’s funny though, because I speak at conferences now a lot for Christmas lights. I speak at, like, Christmas Light Contractors, HBL, a lot of the vendors that put on conferences. They’ll have me come out because I’m younger, so if they’re selling product, obviously that helps. But it’s funny, even though I’m saying that to you here, what happens when I go at 28—now I’m 29—and I speak at these conferences, the old heads all say I’m lying. All these dudes who’ve been doing it 20, 30 years say I’m lying about my numbers. And the same way I talk about it in my Instagram videos—like, even in my presentations, I’ll pull up Jobber and, like, live, pull it up, show my payroll. I’ll show everyone my payroll liability for the year. Yeah, I’ll even show basically a blueprint—I can basically show my P&L. And the old heads still accuse me of lying.
I think that part of it is—I do the same thing. If somebody does something that’s better than what I’m doing, I instantly meet it with, ‘There’s no way,’ instead of, ‘Oh, maybe there is a better way that I’m unaware of.’ It’s just funny, because even though I’m talking about the internet gurus that are lying, which they are—most of them—it’s funny that I get met with that at the conferences too, even if I show my numbers, sales, P&L, and everything.
I think that’s because there’s this weird world of content creation now, everything else, where I feel like I have to overshare my numbers because there’s so many bad actors in the space, I feel like it’s my fiduciary responsibility to say, ‘I don’t care if one out of 10 people thinks it’s douchey—this is our sales, this is how much my payroll was, this is how much I spent on ads, this is real.’”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, that’s valid. Especially with the old heads, we’ve seen this transition. With The Huge Convention, we’ve got a couple thousand people every year. We see it all the time. There are guys who’ve been in business for 10, 20, 30 years, and it took them 20 years to break seven figures. Now we see a lot of guys like yourself—fourth year, they’re crossing the million-dollar mark, third year once in a while. It’s pretty rare. But doing in five years what took you 20, you think, ‘No way.’ But the fact of the matter is the information flow is so fast right now, and you’ve got a lot of people teaching stuff that took them 20 years of trial and error, and a wise next guy just goes, ‘Instead of trying to figure it all out, I’ll just do that. You built the wheel, I’ll spin it.’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, my entire story was picking the brains of guys in Facebook groups who had already done it. If I had to figure it out all by myself, I’d be paying the ‘incompetency tax’ for probably 10 years. So it’s like if you go talk to people and get proximity to people who are killing it, that 10 years of trial and error is squeezed into probably six months. Don’t use those engines, hire more carefully, you have to charge 9 a foot, 10 a foot. All these things I would never have done—I would have bought Home Depot lights and done that route for five years until somebody told me otherwise.
But that’s funny you bring that up, because that’s exactly why Home Service Accelerator’s exploded: it’s a mix of young guys going, ‘Okay, Steve’s gotten his businesses here; it’s not guru style, it’s just pure systems and processes. I just want to copy and paste into my business.’ But the other half is these older cats with bigger businesses who are like, ‘Okay, hold on, this kid got a Christmas light business to 800K, a junk removal business to two or three hundred K. We’re all just kind of messing around with it. He did it in two, three years. There’s gotta be something I don’t know about that’s a faster horse.’ Then those guys come in—and, again, those guys’ businesses are way more stable because they were built largely off of word of mouth. If they have that social proof combined with what the young guys are good at— GMB, Facebook, Google Ads, automations, all that stuff—then those guys will print more money than their wildest dreams because they have the baseline. It’s been funny for me, because now there’s like 200 people in the Accelerator, about a person a day comes in five days a week. It’s really interesting, because I have guys in the Accelerator doing a million dollars a month. I’ve got garage door repair guys that sold 30 percent to private equity this year, doing mid-six figures a month. Then I have new guys who have a 5,000-a-month window cleaning business just getting off the ground. It’s really funny to see that mix, because they’re all buying for different reasons, but it all comes down to the same thing: they’re just trying to compress that incompetency tax timeline. It’s like, ‘Yeah, you can figure it out on your own. Just tell me how much that’s going to cost and how much time that’s going to take.’”
Sid Graef:
“Yeah, I’ll tell you how much it costs. It costs 18 years. That’s what it cost me. I built slow and steady for 18 years. It served its purpose; we provide for our family, we’ve been successful, we’re very comfortable. Then after that, I was like, ‘Wait, this is not a business, I own a freakin’ job.’ So my story, I’ve got to turn this into a business, and I started learning all the skills to run a business. Now it’s a much larger seven-figure business that runs on its own. I do my two weekly meetings, which doesn’t seem like a lot of work, but it feels like work when we’re doing them. Some days I think, ‘22 years... I could have done this 18 years ago and painted a different picture.’ Anyway, that’s interesting, especially with the Home Service Accelerator—having so many different levels gives you an opportunity to meet the needs of others but also learn from others as well.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, it’s pretty clear. We teach people how to run Facebook ads, how to set up automations, how to do an organic signage strategy that actually works. It’s pretty basic: if you’re not doing it, it can help you. That’s funny, because I don’t need to hone in and force some $10,000 course down the throat of a $2,000-a-month window cleaner and say, ‘He won’t grow without it.’ It’s just, ‘Hey, these are the systems that work for me. It’s been documented on YouTube and Instagram for five years.’ There are YouTube videos of me starting the junk removal business from scratch—fully documented. So that’s also been really helpful, because my sales guys—if someone comes in with skepticism, they go, ‘You don’t need to join. Go watch the YouTube videos from 2020 or 2021. Steve’s fatter, has long hair, looks like a schmuck, and is buying or picking up people’s trash for 100 bucks five years ago. It’s all documented along the way.’ Now you go on my page, and there are team dinners, leadership positions being interviewed. That’s how I fight the ‘guru’ allegations: ‘No, no, no, it’s been documented the whole time. I’ve never pretended to be something I’m not. You see the worst part.’ It’s funny because my girlfriend watched those videos before our first date. So that’s also been a challenge—she got to watch Fat Steve buy a junk removal trailer five years ago and still decided to go out with me, so that was a win.”
Sid Graef:
“That seems like a pretty big sale right there. Good job.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“I just had to get her to date once. Once we got to date one, we’re good.”
Sid Graef:
“That’s good. All right, so you touched on it briefly. You teach marketing and systems. Before we started the call, you said sometimes you have to tell guys, ‘You gotta get an EIN, you need to set up your business structure so you don’t get hosed later.’ What are some of the very basic things—because business is just like, if you dial in and repeat the basics, you’re going to succeed, because the basics work. You mentioned, in rapid fire, GMB, or ‘Go set these up.’ What are the basic things that people just need to have dialed in? They don’t have to be great, they just have to be doing it.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, first thing: ‘I am not my customer.’ That’s number one. Before they do anything else: ‘I am not my customer.’ Just because you wouldn’t pay at your position—starting a business from scratch with probably no money—because you wouldn’t pay somebody 500 to clean your windows, doesn’t mean there isn’t an entire market who would. So you are not your customers; you can’t sell out of your own pocket. The second thing is, it’s much easier to sell 10 more expensive things than a thousand super cheap things. There’s a benefit to being the cheapest, and there’s a benefit to being the most expensive. There’s not a lot of benefit to being in the middle. So that’s the second part. Those are more mindset.
The third part is you just have to document the business. In 2025, if you’re starting from scratch, you will die if you’re not comfortable on camera. The cheapest, most efficient way to crank a business from scratch right now is using an iPhone for Instagram, Facebook, a little bit of Google Business, everything like that, so you don’t even have to get on a computer. If you get comfortable on camera—filming ads, filming organic content of yourself as the business owner, talking about the business day in the life—you will crush the guys who refuse to. A lot of pushback I get is from people who’ve been in business 5, 10, 15 years. But if you’re brand new, you need it. I could build any home service business from scratch right now with just an iPhone. I’d never have to get on a computer, and I could do it pretty well. So that is number one: if you want to stand out early in a crowded trade, put your face on camera and talk about the business, 100 percent.”
Sid Graef:
“Yep, we do an exercise every year. I’m in a small market, 70,000 people. We own about 25 percent of the marketplace, so that’s comfortable. But every year, I think, ‘If I was brand new coming into this market, how would I beat my existing company?’ It’s always video. Because if you don’t keep running, you’re not going to stay in first place. The new guy could come in with video and just take a lot of mindshare. That’s the type of content people want to see. Not the guys that are over 60—my clients that are over 60 still want to pay by check, and they’re not going to change. But homeowners now, new homeowners, are not 60—they’re 35.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, and I think what people neglect to realize is every year that passes, more people who buy electronically are getting into homes, and the check payers who want to call you five times on the phone are phasing out. So every year, the gap for content and social media presence is getting bigger and bigger. For example, in my own business—just to show how powerful it is: we run Facebook and Instagram ads, but we also have organic content because we know people do their homework. So they get an ad, but they’re also going to click our Instagram page, right? They’re not just going to fill out the form. We had a 30,000 residential Christmas light job this year come from an organic piece of Instagram content. Organic.
When my sales guy went on site, it’s hard-coded in our system that it came from our website, right? So we think it was just an SEO sale. My sales guy gets on site, and the lady goes, ‘Oh, you’re not the guy from the Instagram?’ She goes, ‘Oh, I saw you guys on Instagram.’ He’s thinking, ‘Oh, I gotta tell Steve the reporting is wrong.’ She’s like, ‘I saw you guys on Instagram, and then I was doing something else, so I Googled you.’ So what sold that 30,000 job? Did my SEO sell it, or was it the fact I made an organic piece of content that was really engaging? That’s been interesting: how can you afford not to do that? The new guys say, ‘I only have 20 or 200 followers on Instagram, so what’s the point?’ You post the organic as a billboard, and then you run ads to actually generate leads, but the organic is a billboard for your business. So it’s like, the ads drive them there, but the organic has to be there because they do their homework.”
Sid Graef:
“For sure. I gotta ask you this: one of the things we teach, when I have the opportunity, is we’ll say to contractors in the home service space, ‘Who’s your competition?’ Is it the other guys that serve your county? And basically it’s, ‘Yeah, kind of, but your real competition is Amazon.’ Because the friction to buy is zero. You go click-click, order, it’s on your porch tomorrow, no friction. That’s why I spend too much money on Amazon—there’s no friction. So what do you do in your business—because you use Go High Level with Jobber as your CRM, you have follow-up systems, you have organic and paid ads—to remove friction from the buy process? Where do you see friction points, and how do you remove them?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Number one: speed-to-lead. Speed-to-lead is the number one thing that took us from half a million to 800K year-over-year. I got a system—this is how it works: someone comes in and submits a form—website, Facebook ad, Google ad, whatever—to get a quote. Instantly, my system takes their info, calls the sales rep that’s assigned to it, and says, ‘You have a new lead; press 1 to get connected immediately.’ Zero manual data entry. The rep presses 1, instantly calls the customer. You know what happens? That customer didn’t get a chance to go to competitor two or competitor three to get a second or third quote because they got called instantly.
The data on that is if you get to somebody within five minutes of them submitting a form, you have, I think, an 80 percent higher chance of closing. But if you get to them in under a minute, it’s like 340 percent higher than companies that take more than five minutes. So if you know that, you know that speed-to-lead is everything. We give them the answer so fast, they don’t get the opportunity to quote out somewhere else. Because we know, if we’re the highest-end people out there, the most important thing is giving them what they want as fast as humanly possible. Instant automation. If they don’t answer, we send a text, a voicemail drop, follow-up nurtures, etc. Then my sales guys see who replied to the nurtures. That’s who I call first to get an appointment. So speed-to-lead is number one. That’s everything.
A good rule of thumb: if the first thing out of the customer’s mouth is, ‘Wow, that was fast,’ you’re probably going to be winning a lot more than the guy who— because you know, most guys are so busy on job sites, they’ll get back to it. Every minute that passes is another minute for them to call your competitor. The competitor that’s not insured, or the competitor who’s thrilled to install Christmas lights at 3 a foot. And you’re giving them that opportunity. So speed-to-lead is number one.
Then the second thing is: I don’t price for the ‘no’s’ I get; I price for the ‘yeses’ I get. If that makes sense. Guys go out, they give 10 quotes for a roofline, let’s say. They bid 700. Five people say, ‘That’s ridiculous, I’d never pay that, that’s crazy.’ Two ghost them, so we have three people left, and they said yes. So they closed three out of ten. Those three probably valued something other than price. They valued the speed that you came out with, the way you delivered, or something else. If they value something else, you can charge more for that. The reason is, if they value something else more, your job is to deliver that something else at a high level. So you do a better job, and when you do a better job, your customers are more thrilled, they go tell their friends. That’s how you grow a profitable business.
It’s so funny. I go in these Facebook groups and see these one-crew operations bragging about being booked out for the year in September. I’m like, ‘That’s not a flex at all; that just means one of two things: you’re too cheap or you’re too afraid to expand.’ That’s it. Don’t be the cheap guy; be the most expensive. But to be the most expensive, you actually have to be better. You can’t just charge premium prices. Speed-to-lead is huge. If I started from scratch again, I’d focus on that. Then if you do that, you better go on the USPS EDDM website, sort your zip codes by the highest earning neighborhoods, and start your advertising campaigns there. Don’t try to sell 2,000 products to people on a 40K fixed income. Go sell it to people on 180K average income in those areas.”
Sid Graef:
“Amen. I get frustrated trying to help people—they’re like, ‘Go where the money is; stop trying to serve everybody. Just go to where the money is.’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, it’s like you’re not Amazon, you’re not Walmart. Do you think you have the operational efficiency to serve that many people cheap? There’s zero chance. A good example: I always tell guys in my group, ‘Go look up Walmart’s margins. Do you want Walmart’s margins?’ I think it’s 2 percent or 1.8 or something. Same with Amazon. They’re not that profitable—often operating at a loss for years. It’s a lot easier to run at a low margin when you’re doing billions in sales. These guys aren’t. You need to be a good margin. So if the low margin is ‘volume’ and the high margin is the sniper rifle approach, we should do the sniper rifle approach, not be a shotgun approach.”
Sid Graef:
“For sure. So let me ask you this: you talked about valuing outside of price. Did you, at some point, do anything deliberate, like, ‘I want to make my value proposition not about price’? And do you package that in your advertising, your brochure, your website, etc.?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah. The big thing for us: number one, all of our ads and everything show my face—clean-cut, explaining what we do, why we do it, how we do it. But more specifically, every piece of advertising content we have explicitly says, ‘We’re not the cheapest.’ It says that, but it also says we are the best. We’re heavy with testimonials, heavy with that stuff. So that’s number one.
The other side is one of the things that’s actually an anti-friction point—kind of the opposite of what we were talking about, but hear me out— all these guys who do 200, 300K in these Facebook groups say, ‘You can’t do in-person quoting, it doesn’t make sense.’ I say, ‘Hold on. These are the people that shop at Chanel, the people that will spend 4,000 at a steakhouse, they don’t want just a roofline. They want the best in the neighborhood. So we force-feed our process: we’re going to go onsite and design something specific for you. Because that’s what you’re used to. You can meet us if you want—it helps close if they’re there—but if they don’t want to meet us, we’re still going onsite, taking videos, telling them what we think we should design. If your average ticket is 800 dollars, in-person might not make sense. My average ticket is 3,800 on residential, so it makes sense because we know how to squeeze every drop of juice out of that lemon when we get there. We’re selling off something bigger than just, ‘We’re one of three quotes on a piece of paper, and the couple picks the cheapest.’ You’re going to lose.
There’s a reason IMEs (Hermès) or a coach can charge 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,000 for a bag, and there’s a reason Wal-Mart sells a 30 dollar bag. The utility is not a thousand times better, or a hundred times better, for the 3,000 dollar bag. There’s something else at play. You have to figure that out. For me, it was always super clean branding, super aggressive with my face everywhere, super aggressive on ad targeting, unbelievably aggressive on getting customer testimonials, reviews, and photos. We’re big on that. When a prospect calls us, my sales guys text them three to five of our best photos right away, so they know they’re in the big leagues. All those little things help. If the other guys aren’t doing that, who’s going to win?”
Sid Graef:
“For sure, man. That’s rich. All right, we could keep jawing about this stuff and having fun, but we’re going to land the plane and finish up for the sake of time. So two questions to wrap it up: one is, ‘What’s the most common mistake you see from guys who are actually trying to do it right?’—not your $99 house wash guy, your $3-a-foot guy who’s stuck in his ways— but the ones who are actually trying, what’s the biggest mistake they make?”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Most common mistake from the ones who are trying is that they think their first employee has to be a 40-hour-a-week, full-benefits, fully insured hire. They think the first employee has to be a full-time employee. That’s not true. If you’re an owner-op and you want a little bit of help, you can find someone. There are people out there that want 15 to 20 hours a week. So for the guys right on the edge of scaling, they’re booked out five days, or if they hired a helper, maybe they’d be booked out three. It’s that they can start fitting more revenue in per day. Number one is you don’t have to have your first employee as a 40-hour-a-week with benefits. You can get a helper, W2 them, get them on your general liability, everything else, but you don’t need to bite off a full-time salary. That’s probably the biggest piece of gold.”
Sid Graef:
“That by itself is gold. I have a funny story about that, but I think I’ll have to wait. All right, last question: what’s the advice you’d give to the guy just starting out—let’s do better: ‘What’s the advice you’d give to fat Steve, younger Steve, five-years-ago Steve?’”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, I thankfully understood that you have to not be the cheapest because of my background. For the guy who’s starting out: there’s no benefit to being the cheapest, because you’re not a good enough entrepreneur to be the cheapest. If you find yourself consistently losing on price, either you’re not getting enough lead volume—like me, we get three no’s for every yes in my business—or you’re not differentiating yourself from someone else. So I’d say for new guys: richest areas, start there. Imperfect action beats a perfect plan 100 out of 100 times, so just go do something instead of sitting there on YouTube feeling like you’re working. Eventually, just do it. And the other side: the earlier you get comfortable on camera, the better your business will scale from a marketing and sales perspective.”
Sid Graef:
“Pure gold. Well, Steve, thank you. Thanks again for your time and jumping on. This is super valuable for everybody listening, because our objective with The Huge Convention and with this podcast is to help our blue-collar brothers and sisters build a business that will let them be financially and time free. Good money, good time, so your business supports your life, not the other way around. Thanks for sharing your insight on your pretty rapid journey. You’ve got a great learning curve going here, man.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“Yeah, you know, we almost went to zero in year three, so I don’t ever forget that, that’s for sure. But I appreciate you saying that, man. It’s because of guys like you, doing stuff like this. I was able to learn from folks who had experienced a lot more pain than I did, so my learning curve was faster. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do with Home Service Accelerator—accelerate that for other people too.”
Sid Graef:
“Cool. Thanks again. I’m going to end the recording, but I want you to hang on for a second—I have another question for you.”
Steve Hunsaker:
“All right, cool.”
(Recording ends, then resumes with Sid’s sign-off.)
Sid Graef:
“Hello, my friend. This is Sid. Thank you again so much for taking your time to listen to today’s episode. I hope you got some value from it. And listen—anything that was covered, any of the resources, any of the books, any of the tools, anything like that is in the show notes, so it’s easy for you to find and check it out.
Also, I want to let you know: the mission for The Huge Convention and for this podcast is to help our blue-collar business owners, like you and I, to gain financial and time freedom through running a better business. We do that in four ways. Number one is our free weekly newsletter, it’s called The Huge Insider. I hope you subscribe—it is the most valuable newsletter for the home service industry, period, paid or otherwise. And this one’s free.
Next is The Huge Foundations education platform that has over 120 hours of industry-specific education and resources for you. And every month, we do a topical webinar and do Q&A with seven- and eight-figure business owners, and it’s available for a 1 trial for seven days.
Next, of course, is The Huge Convention. If you haven’t been, you gotta check it out. It’s every August—this year, it’s in Nashville, Tennessee, August 20th through 22nd in 2025, and it is the largest and number-one-rated trade show and convention for home service business builders. We’ve got the biggest trade show so you can check out all the coolest tools, meet the vendors, check out the software to run your business. We’ve got world-class education and educators and speakers that will teach you how to run a better business, and it’s the best networking opportunity you can have within the home service business.
Lastly, if you want to pour jet fuel in your business, check out The Huge Mastermind. Now it’s not for everyone—you’ve got to be over 750K in revenue, building toward a million, five million, ten million in the next five years. It’s a network, a mentorship, and a mastermind of your peers, and we help you understand and implement the Freedom Operating System. We can go into more detail, but you can get all the information on all four of these programs and how they’ll help you advance your business quickly by going to https://www.thehugeconvention.com and scrolling down to click on The Freedom Path. Or, of course, you can find the links here in the show notes.
Sorry, I feel like I’m getting a little wordy, but I just want to let you know of the resources that are available to you to help you accelerate and advance your beautiful small business. So keep on growing, keep on learning, keep advancing. And if you like the show, go ahead—if you would—take 90 seconds and give us a review on iTunes, then subscribe and share it. Man, it would really mean the world to us; it would help other people, and as we continue our mission to help people just like you and me. So thanks again for listening, we’ll see you on the next episode.
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