Sunday Jan 26, 2025

1: The Michael Dahlke Episode

In this episode, host Sid Graef interviews Michael Dahlke, who took a failing $60K window-cleaning business and transformed it into multiple service companies now surpassing $40 million in annual revenue. Dahlke shares how he went from “chief firefighter” to a true leader who empowers others through structured growth opportunities. He dives into the mindset changes at each revenue milestone—overcoming the early chaos of 100-hour weeks, developing a people-first culture for scaling past $2 million, and focusing on accountability at the executive level once in the eight-figure range. If you’re aiming to grow beyond seven figures and want a leadership philosophy that prioritizes long-term thinking, personal development, and relentless learning, this conversation is packed with actionable insights.

SHOW NOTES

TRANSCRIPT
Sid (Host):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Huge Transformations Podcast. I’m Sid Graef out here in Montana.

Gabe (Co-Host):
And I’m Gabe Torres here in Nashville, Tennessee. We are 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 and owners in the industry—folks that have already built seven and eight figure home service businesses, and they want to help you succeed. You have 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 profit. We get insights and truths from successful business builders, and every episode is 100 percent experience.

We are going to dig deep and reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly. 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. Thanks for joining us on the Wild Journey of Entrepreneurship. Let’s dive in.

Sid (Host):
Hello, my friend, this is Sid with Huge Transformations Podcast and honestly, I couldn’t be more excited to start off this podcast with this particular interview today. I got to interview Mike Dahlke. Mike and I have been friends for about seven years. We first met at the Huge Convention, I think in 2017, and Mike is one of those guys that speaks with a quiet wisdom. He doesn’t like to be on stage; he likes to be behind the scenes, and he’s a very wise and astute business operator. And he’s wise way beyond his years.

Interesting story, fun fact: he started his company when he started a—he purchased what would be considered a failing window cleaning company, literally on its last gasp of air. And it was a company that had done about $60,000. And that’s not a ton, as we both know. In a few short years, he built that up to a company with multiple locations with over $5 million in revenue. And in the few short years that have passed since then, he and his partners have built their companies from zero to over $40 million in revenue. That’s not—I don’t say that, and he would never say that to brag because he likes to be behind the scenes. But the fact is, it’s important for you to know who you’re listening to during this interview with Mike. Again, he’s been incredibly successful. He’s very wise. And one of his greatest strengths is finding and building leaders. He’s a great business operator, owner, investor, and teacher. And he’s also a big part of the Huge Mastermind, which you’ll hear more about as we go along. I appreciate you joining us today. Please meet Michael Dahlke.

Sid (Host):
All right, I’m here with Michael Dahlke. Michael, of course, business partner of mine. You’re part of the—you’re primary owner of the Huge Convention, you’ve been in window cleaning, you’ve been in house cleaning, you’ve been in all kinds of services, electrical, and more probably—dozens of businesses that you’ve been invested in and currently own. But I want to hear just the story in transition from starting with literally a box of index cards like, “Here’s the business you just bought,” to flying on private jets with a billionaire in 12 years. Now that’s a broad spectrum, but origin?

Michael (Guest):
Well, the origin is way more exciting than the ending. We got a call from a business broker that we had done a previous conversation with, and they said, “I’ve got this amazing window-cleaning business for sale. Would you be interested in something like that?” And I said, “Yes.” They said, “It’s so awesome that it’s lost almost all of its revenue, and it’s down to about $60,000. Of course, they didn’t say that, but that’s what’s going on. It has two employees, one who will never show up to work, and the other that will be 350, 400 pounds, so large that he’s not able to get on a ladder for safety reasons. And to make that a little bit better, there’s no CRM, there’s no phone number, there’s no physical office space, and about six years later the owner will go to jail for flying marijuana across straight lines in a skydiving plane. Of course, they didn’t tell me that or know that either. So I thought, “Hey, what could go wrong?”

We bought a window cleaning business, at that time it was doing $60,000 in revenue and it had lost its biggest account. It was down to almost nothing. And the—I met with the, call the employee that was 350 pounds, didn’t know that at the time, and he showed up for our very first meeting so I could meet him with a cut-off T-shirt, cut all the way down the sides, and it said, “This is my beer drinking shirt.”

So what’s the thing about first impressions? It was awesome. So he didn’t last long. The other employee never showed up, never came to a meeting. And I remember walking out of the business—I had just bought it—and I got a box of index cards with people’s names on it and a price and whether it was in and out or outside only, and a thumb drive. And I still don’t know where that thumb drive is or what happened or if there’s anything of value on it. But as I was walking off, we had the phone number forwarded to my personal cell phone, and somebody called to get their windows cleaned, and I didn’t know how to book a job, I didn’t know how to clean a window. I had no idea. And so I had to say, “I’ll call you back.” And so that first year was the window cleaner, the bookkeeper, the phone answers, the whole shebang. So there was no silver spoon in my story. There was no big business education. It was literally, I had to do everything and I learned every key component of the business and took it to where it is today.

Sid (Host):
Well, all right, “This is my beer drinking shirt” is still my favorite story. It’s unbelievable; it’s special. So you’re kind of thrown to the wolves at the beginning, and you had to learn everything. Let’s talk about how your mindset changed as you grew. What was your mindset when you started, when you crossed like your $2 million, and your mindset when you got into eight figures, like?

Michael (Guest):
Yeah, so the mindset in the beginning was, I thought it was going to be easy, if I’m being completely transparent and candid. I thought, “Oh, it’s just window cleaning, it’ll be super easy. It’ll be scalable.” Then from a competition standpoint, it wasn’t super challenging, but what I didn’t account for was having to do 100-hour weeks, learning how to schedule, dealing with employees. So that scaling from $60,000 to $2 million was 100-hour weeks, it was nights, it was weekends, it was answering the phone, grinding your teeth so bad that you gotta go to the dentist and have holes filled, it was super stressful. So the candid answer and the true transparent answer is it was really hard and I thought it was going to be a lot easier.

From $2 million—my mindset at that time was no longer that it was going to be easy, but I was deathly afraid of staying at $2 million forever. I was completely afraid. I think partly was that I wouldn’t reach my God-given potential. I had done this because I had felt like I was being called back into leadership and business, and I wanted to realize and be the best I could possibly be in business. And so if I stayed at $2 million and that was the best, that felt like I didn’t quite get there, or it was really disappointing because that’s all I was going to be able to do. And so I was driven by that fear of not realizing the potential, and it sounded worse to me to stay at $2 million than it did to go through the pains and all of the extra work that would take to get to the next level.

So that was one mindset I had. The other mindset at that time was that I was starting to understand systems and processes. I was starting to understand leadership better. I was starting to understand that you can’t scale human behavior, and you needed to really treat people and love people well. So instead of being a steward of the business at that time, I started to realize that my job was to be a steward of people, and if I could help them escalate, we would go. And that was kind of the secret sauce to the company scaling. We invest in the people more than anybody else that I know and still do.

And we’ll get to the eight-figure mindset. When you’re in that spot, you’re like, if it’s investing in stewarding people, which is really unique perspective, did you build core values around that, or was it like…?

Sid (Host):
How were you…?

Michael (Guest):
Yeah, so we were hiring a lot of people out of addiction recovery. There was a faith-based addiction recovery center, and we were seeing that people are coming out with tons of talent that had to get through different things, and they were in a program that was designed to get them to this point where they could come back in and hopefully stay clean. That program was over a year, and then there was other programs at that time that were 30 days. And the success rate of somebody who was in a program for a longer period of time was better than the 30 days. So in talking with a lot of people, we decided to invest in three different programs. We created them from scratch. One was called the Personal Development Program. They read three books. They listened to some podcasts. They met with me each week and we helped them talk and learn about basic things. E-Myth was a book they had to read, Raving Fans. The second level was the Leadership Development Program—or, sorry, the LDP we called it—and that was growing people into leaders. So they read 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, we took them to one of our other locations, we took them to other businesses to open their mind and expand their horizons. And then the last one was what we called ELP, the Executive Leadership Program. And we didn’t do a great job at that time; we do better at it now. But there was other books and investments we would make. We’d take them to conferences and different things so that they could grow. And so some of those employees are still with us, still in management roles, or they are now leadership roles, and to see them grow from a technician with a squeegee to running a $2 million business, there’s nothing better. So it was a really cool experience. So that’s really what we did. It wasn’t core values; it was a program that takes someone from here to there. And sometimes they said, “I don’t want to keep going on that path.” And sometimes they said, “I’ll go as far as you’ll let me.”

Sid (Host):
Okay, so then we start up mindset, $2 million mindset in it, we’ll just say $8 million when you crossed into the eight-figure mark, like, what’s the mindset at eight figures or now?

Michael (Guest):
I think there’s still a bit of trying to make sure I realize the potential that I have and that I could grow, and I don’t ever want to stop growing. So that’s still definitely there. But I think the big thing now is that it’s more about the people and even less about me than it was when I was running a $5 million business. I’m not operating in all of our businesses; I’m not going—I’m still going there, but I’m not going and putting nails in the cabinets in our cabinet manufacture. I am leading leaders and developing people that run whole businesses and go through sizable change. So that is probably the biggest mindset is, I’ve got to be really good at leading leaders. And I’ll tell you that the one thing that is probably the biggest struggle is I love those people, I care about them, and when they’re not doing a good job, it’s really, really hard to let them go. And it is the biggest struggle that we have right now is leaving people in roles too long. So we’re trying really, really hard to get great at selecting those people, great at developing those people, but also really, really good at saying, “This might not be the right fit for you.” And we’ve really struggled with that.

Sid (Host):
Yeah, well, I mean, when you’re emotionally tied to something, it makes it really difficult. But there’s that saying: what got you here won’t get you there. So at some point you…?

Michael (Guest):
The snake has to shed its skin.

Sid (Host):
Yeah, the eagle has to renew his feathers, like you’ve got to let things go—people, what else? Old belief systems?

Michael (Guest):
Yeah, so much. And you and I have talked about this offline. In the last year, my biggest study has been King David in the Bible going from being a warrior to a king. I also studied Marcus Aurelius. He went from, not necessarily a peasant, but he became a king, and he had all these meditations, and there is so much wisdom in that. So David took down Goliath, he was a warrior, probably the best warrior ever in history, and then there’s this gap where he doesn’t go to a battle, doesn’t take responsibility, and then he’s king. And in that gap, he makes this huge moral failure with Bathsheba, and he abdicated responsibility and all that stuff, and then later he becomes a king, he has forgiveness, and all those types of things. And there’s a big difference from being a warrior and a king. And I don’t want to use that word “king” like that’s something that I’m trying to be, but there’s a different mindset, there’s a different position that being on the battlefield making sure that every window is cleaned and that all the trucks are running on time, versus where we’re at now.

One of the biggest things about that is, there’s parts of you that you can’t take into the season; it’s just got to die. One of the ones we’re talking about right now is, at this level you face a lot of criticism. You’ll make a lot of decisions that are unpopular because you’re in charge of making really big, hard decisions, and you can’t get offended no matter what. Both Marcus Aurelius and King David, no matter what insult came their way, they never took it out on that person. They looked at that person way above what that insult was. And so that’s one of the things is, you can’t get emotional at insults or little things like that. The highs and lows have to be about your people, and they can’t be about you. So there’s a whole bunch more there, that study I’m doing right now, more than we have time to talk about, but it’s something I’m passionate about and something I’m learning.

Sid (Host):
Right, yeah. With, you know, having a grounding framework or foundation, because King David wrote so many of the Psalms. So his anchor was God and the Almighty, and Marcus Aurelius had a lot of Stoicism and wisdom. Then some people—like, I interviewed somebody earlier today, and their directional controls for making those kinds of changes, because they’re hard. You realize, like, “I’ve got to let somebody go who’s been with me for 20 years and has done a good job, but now they’re ballast. And the vision and direction of the company is so precise or so clear it’s like, in order to go there, we have to make these changes.” So all of those… I guess the question in here is, you’re really good at taking things and putting them into principles. Have you developed a principle, or do you have generally a method, where if I have to let somebody go just because we’ve outgrown them, how do you do that?

Michael (Guest):
Yeah, so I don’t know that we have a principle for it. We have a ton of principles. You’ve seen a lot of them as a friend and a business partner. But when it comes to CEOs that we have to let go, or even just people that we have to let go because the position has outgrown them, our typical move is to let them know well in advance. We’ve had this conversation, we’ve tried to grow. You’re familiar with our principles of the wise, the foolish, and the evil. A wise person, you tell them the truth, they change, they adjust themselves, and they grow, and they become something different. A foolish person is someone who you tell the truth, and they shoot the messenger, like “Well, you did this or you did that,” or they externalize the problem. And then an evil person we don’t even need to talk about—they’re easy to let go. We’ve all been foolish, and there’s some challenges there, and we’ve all been wise, and there’s an awesome chance for growth and things. So while somebody is growing in that category, you’re resourcing them, you’re developing them. And then all of a sudden, if they stop growing but the organization keeps going, if you’re in regular communication from a leadership standpoint, you can say, “Hey, Sid, we’re going real fast right now, and it seems like the business is outpacing you. Here’s what I need out of this position from a core-value standpoint and a performance standpoint. Right now, we’re not achieving that. How can I help you? How can I serve you?” You work with them, and by the time that it’s three months, six months on the road, and those things still can’t get done, the conversation isn’t as hard if you’ve been doing the work up front to say, “Hey, Sid, we’ve had some performance expectations, and for the last six months we’ve been working really hard. We haven’t been able to do that, so we’re going to have to eliminate your position here or we’re going to have to move you to a different seat.” If we have to move someone out of the organization, we’re going to have to move them out of the organization. We’re going to let you stay for a while, we’re going to make sure you have a generous severance. We’d like you to stay, we’d like you to be here for as long as you need to be, but we want you to know that we’re going to have to make a change. And if you’ve got a great relationship built on trust, those conversations aren’t hard.

Sid (Host):
Right. And what about the idea—I’ve heard plenty of people say, I’ve experienced it too—like, you’ve got to let somebody go, but you stress and struggle, you know, but then once you do it, I’ve never heard anybody say, “I should have waited.” They’re always like, “I should have done this a long time ago.”

Michael (Guest):
Yes, oh yeah.

Sid (Host):
So you alluded to it, but what are some of the keys?

Michael (Guest):
We’ve all done that, right? And that’s usually because you haven’t had the conversation, you’ve just been avoiding it. And you haven’t lifted up the rock and seen all the squiggly things under it, and you just put the rock back down. That’s when it’s problematic.

Sid (Host):
Okay, so let’s shift gears. In the context here is going from seven to eight figures, a home service business. Let’s just talk about growth mode. How do you balance growth versus stability? How much money are you putting into marketing and sales? Because you’ve got to feed your family, so…?

Michael (Guest):
Two separate answers. First, for many years, I took a $40,000 a year salary, and I didn’t always get the salary because I had to pay payroll. We lived a very humble, frugal life; we didn’t go out to eat, we didn’t do anything because we were building this business. Second part as far as how do you do that: the two keys that I would say we were really good at are, every single 90 days for the last probably 10 years, I reviewed what I did the previous quarter and looked at the next quarter and said, “How can I make sure I’m eliminating the things that no longer fit the vision for my life, and how do I do more of the things that do fit the vision of my life?”

In the middle of that is how do I delegate various different things. There’s someone sitting in the room who’s taken a lot of that delegation and been amazing and completely life-changing for me. So as I did that, I did less stuff that wasn’t going to help achieve the vision and more stuff that was. Whether it became I used to negotiate media contracts with radio stations—now somebody else does that. Now I might negotiate a deal to purchase a company or to have a great strategic partnership or larger economic events. So taking every 90 days, I’d say, “What doesn’t fit my vision? What can I delegate, and what do I need to do more of?” That was one of the key things to help me personally. The other thing was realizing that if you align the incentives and the KPIs of the organization top to bottom, and everyone hits their goals, you hit your goals. If one of our goals might be to grow revenue by 10 percent, well, the technician should have an upsell goal of 10 percent. The manager should have a goal that ties to achieving revenue. So if you lay out the math to accomplishing those objectives and everyone hits them, so does the business. I used to just say, “Oh, we’ll get to $5 million someday, we’ll get to $10 million, we’ll get to $20 million,” but there was no plan. It was just my feelings and my emotion. And if I just cast that vision enough times, it’ll magically happen. Then once you do the math and say, “These are the resources I need. I need to get this many jobs, I can pay this amount for a job, I have this amount of money, I can do it, I need to have the technicians upselling.” If you do the math and then hold people accountable to the math, the business stuff takes care of itself.

Sid (Host):
That’s great. Last question, so we wrap it up, and you’ll see where I’m going with this. You’ve done acquisitions, you’ve done turnarounds. Think of it like a turnaround. Anybody watching, say they’ve got a strong seven-figure business, they want to go to eight, but you’re the turnaround guy stepping into their business. What do you look at first, and what are the key areas that either have to change or be strengthened?

Michael (Guest):
Yeah, so we could talk about this for a full hour. It’s surprising, but factory turnarounds are factory work. It’s the same formula almost every time. The very first thing you look at is the cost structure: are my costs of goods sold in line, is my marketing in line. I’m going to look at the cost and say, if I compare my window cleaning business to Sid’s, where do my key categories on my P&L—how do they align. How is he beating me? Sid’s not that good at business; how could he beat me in this? Well, there’s a really easy way to find out: I can call Sid and say, “Hey, Sid, so when we did a turnaround in the electrical space or the cabinet space, we would call friends and friendly competitors and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing in marketing, how are you doing in cogs?’ We’d go to industry events, and you figure out, is my business aligned, and what are the ways that they’re growing, and then we would test those different things.”

So every turnaround starts with that. The second thing immediately is getting critical mass around new thinking. There’s almost always some stinking thinking that’s going on, where people are kind of a groupthink around crazy things. There’s a really good book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds about when people were selling tulips for $30,000 a piece and all these things. But once a crowd gets groupthink, it starts to happen. In a turnaround, it’s usually not that bad, but if your whole organization isn’t thinking about going from seven to eight, you’ve got some of that groupthink. If your P&L isn’t optimized, you don’t have the cash to reinvest. So those are the first two. The last one, I would say there’s seven things that we always did, is aligning the accountability chart and the incentives top to bottom in the organization. Here’s the CEO’s bonus metrics. Everybody down the line has something that ties to that same metric. So we align the KPIs all the way through the organization and the incentives so everybody’s drawing in the same direction.

Sid (Host):
Perfect. Yeah, that’s a great way to end and wrap it up. Thank you for your time.

Michael (Guest):
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.

And 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. And we do that in four ways: number one is our free weekly newsletter, it’s called 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 is, we’ve got over 120 hours of industry-specific education and resources for you, and every month we do a topical webinar and we do question and answer with seven- and eight-figure business owners, and it’s available to you 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, that’s 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 and meet the vendors and check out the software to run your business, and it’s got education—world-class education and educators and speakers that will teach you how to run a better business, and it’s the best networking opportunity that you can have within the home service business. And then lastly, if you want to pour jet fuel into your business, check out the Huge Mastermind. Now it’s not for everyone; you’ve got to be at over $750,000 of revenue and you’re building toward $1 million, $5 million, $10 million in the next five years. And it is a network and a mentorship and a mastermind of your peers, and we help you understand and implement the Freedom Operating System.

We’d go into more detail, but you can get all the information on all four of these programs and how we’ll help you advance your business quickly just by going to thehugeconvention.com and scroll down and click on the Freedom Path, or, of course, you can find the links here in the show notes.

So sorry, I feel like I’m getting a little bit 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—I mean, if you would go and 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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