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#14 Stop the Bleeding: Our Fix for Leaking Profits

#14 Stop the Bleeding: Our Fix for Leaking Profits

In this issue of The Path Less Traveled, we dive into the unglamorous (but mission-critical) work of collections—and how we keep AR write-offs below $50K in a $100M+ business. Plus, we share updates on our shift to GreenSky financing, a game-changing tweak to our capacity strategy, a spotlight on ServiceTitan’s Tom Howard, and a personal note on committing to sustainable health in 2025. These are the small hinges that swing big doors.

Christopher Hoffmann
December 18, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 16 minutes

In Today’s Newsletter

How We Keep AR Write-Offs Below $50K in a $150M+ Business
Things you should do…
A Shoutout to Tom Howard at ServiceTitan
My Fitness Commitment in 2025
Precision Capacity Management
Why We Went All-In with GreenSky Financing
Favorite Tweets from the past week

All of your leadership problems. Solved with the right hire. Uncommon Elite.

My friend and former Army 160th pilot, Christian Ruf, is helping business owners build high-performing teams by placing special operations veterans - think Navy SEALS, Army Rangers, Green Berets - in senior operations roles inside of businesses like yours. Check out his business, Uncommon Elite, and let him know that Chris sent you.

What’s on my mind?

Are You Chasing Checks? How We Keep AR Write-Offs Below $50K in a $150M+ Business

If you're in the home service business, and you're carrying a growing receivables balance, this one's for you.

In a residential service business, accounts receivable (AR) should be minimal. If your balance is growing, it's likely not a revenue problem—it’s a collections process problem.

Here’s how we manage AR across a $150M+ residential service business, and keep bad debt write-offs under $50,000 per year.

It Starts Before the Truck Rolls

Our collections process doesn’t start after the service is done. It starts when the customer picks up the phone.

Our Customer Experience team is trained to say:
“We accept check or credit card. Do you have a payment preference I should note for our service professional?”

This simple line sets the expectation: payment is due when the job is done.

If the customer won’t be home during the visit, we don’t leave it to chance. Instead, we say:

“Payment is due upon completion of service. If no one will be home, we can take a card on file now, and with your approval, process payment once the work is complete.”

Get ahead of the objection. Set the tone early.

In-Home: Confirm and Collect

When our field professional arrives, they confirm the payment method before they get started:

“My notes say you’re paying by [insert method]. Still good?”

When the job wraps up, our field pro conducts a walk-through with the customer to confirm satisfaction. Then—still on-site—they collect payment.

Service work? Full payment is due at completion.
Installation? We collect 1/3 up-front to schedule, and the remainder immediately after completion.

We embed collection language and lien rights into all install proposals. (Important: check state-specific lien laws.)

No Pay = No Leave

Our mobile software enables in-home payment processing. If a tech finishes the job and leaves without collecting, the chances of getting paid decline sharply.

That’s why we train and coach relentlessly on this point: don’t leave the home until the balance is zero.

When Collection Becomes an Office Job

In rare cases where payment is still outstanding:

Our accounting team runs weekly AR reports.
Any balance not associated with a BFO (bill-from-office) account gets a call right away.
If we notice a pattern—say, certain techs not collecting on-site—we escalate to the appropriate manager for follow-up and coaching.

Our Final Line of Defense

We use a third-party collections firm for larger outstanding balances. If a customer is ghosting us on a $1,000+ invoice, it goes to collections. The firm takes a cut (~40%), but it’s better than writing it off entirely.

The Bottom Line

If you’re constantly chasing payments after the work is done, you don’t have a collections problem—you have a process problem.

Fix it at the source:

Set expectations at the time of booking.
Reconfirm and collect while on-site.
Follow up quickly and consistently.
And if necessary—escalate it.

Great companies aren’t just good at generating revenue. They’re great at collecting it, too.

Already preparing for hunting season 2026 with these awesome new blinds from Redneck Box Blinds in Missouri!

Even horses like beautiful sunsets.

One of my favorite family events we do at HBSG each year - Breakfast with Santa.

My friend, Chris Yano, throws THE industry’s best event, and it’s fast approaching in February. If you run a home service business, you don’t want to miss it (tix sell out every year)

Things you should…

1. ...Listen to One Sales Call This Week
It’ll tell you more about your customer experience than any dashboard will.

2. ...Eat Dinner With No Phone
Protecting one hour of family time might do more for your clarity than any podcast.

3. ...Set a Sleep Alarm, Not Just a Wake-Up Alarm
Recovery is your best performance enhancer.

Can you do me a favor?

To help me create the best content for you, can you answer this quick (4 question) survey? I promise it won’t take more than 30 seconds :)

Technology Corner with ServiceTitan

The Vendor Every Contractor Wishes They Had: A Shoutout to Tom Howard at ServiceTitan

One of the things I’ve come to value most in business—especially as we’ve grown—is working with vendors where the relationship isn’t just transactional. I want to work with people I trust, respect, and genuinely like. People who get our world.

That’s why I’m especially grateful for Tom Howard at ServiceTitan.

Tom’s not your typical tech exec. He didn’t come up in SaaS. He came up with a toolbelt. He’s built businesses from scratch, turned around underperformers, acquired and sold companies—for serious money. Before ServiceTitan, Tom was a contractor. A real one. He’s walked a mile in our boots.

That context matters. Because Tom’s role at ServiceTitan is to represent the voice of the contractor. And who better to do that than someone who’s lived it?

What makes Tom stand out is that he’s the same guy behind closed doors as he is in a conference room. He’s a straight shooter. He’s honest. He asks hard questions. Most importantly: he never forgets who the customer is.

I’ve watched him in real-time challenge decisions by asking the simple—but powerful—question: “Is that best for the contractor?”

In a landscape where every software company is fighting for relevance in the trades, it’s this kind of principled leadership that will separate the winners from the noise.

So here’s a thank you—to Tom, and to ServiceTitan—for doing something that every tech company should be doing: putting the contractor’s voice at the table, not as an afterthought, but as a direct line to the CEO.

Well done.

#grateful to have ServiceTitan sponsoring this section of TPLT

CEO: Growth Mindset

From Binary to Balanced: My Fitness Commitment in 2025

If you know me, you know I tend to operate with a binary switch: I’m either 100% all-in—or I’m not in at all.

That mindset has served me well in business. But when it came to my personal health, it created a boom-and-bust cycle I couldn’t ignore.

For years, I bounced between extremes.

I was either training for a marathon, eating clean, and hitting the gym seven days a week…
Or I was skipping workouts, eating whatever was fast and easy, and convincing myself that “work’s too busy” or “my kids need me more right now.”

Sound familiar?

But in 2025, that pattern broke. And for the first time, I’ve committed to sustainable health—not as a side hustle, but as a permanent priority.

Minimal (if any) alcohol
Clean, high-quality food
Prioritizing sleep
Lifting heavy
And mixing in plenty of cardio

Why? Because I finally stopped viewing fitness as optional.

I started seeing it for what it really is: a force multiplier.

Since making this shift, I’ve noticed real, measurable differences:

More mental clarity
More energy
Better memory
Better mood
Greater confidence
Waking up feeling like I can take on the world

And here’s the kicker: I’m better at my job. I’m better with my team. I’m a more present husband and a more energized dad.

This lifestyle change didn’t take anything away from me—it gave me more of everything that matters.

I only wish I’d made this commitment sooner.

So if you’re stuck in the “all-in or all-out” trap, I’ll say this:

You don’t need perfect. You just need consistency.
And if you get the foundation right—sleep, nutrition, movement—everything else gets easier.

CyberNetic Labs - bringing powerful Agentic AI tools to the trades

The Overlooked Superpower in Service Businesses: Precision Capacity Management

If you’re running a service business, here’s one of the most underappreciated (but critically important) levers for growth and performance:

Capacity management.

Dial this in—and you unlock two massive advantages:

You prioritize incoming service requests with intention, based on real availability—minimizing reschedules and customer frustration.
You ensure the highest-priority, highest-revenue calls get on the board, giving your team the best shot at hitting (or beating) revenue goals.

At our company, we’re in the middle of a major shift in how we manage capacity—and I wanted to share what we’ve learned so far.

The Old System: Priority Buckets

Previously, we used a 1–5 priority level system. Every job type got assigned a priority score (1 = urgent, 5 = low), and our booking engine would open or close time slots based on how much daily capacity had already been consumed.

Example:

A Priority 5 job (think: maintenance tune-up) could only be booked if less than 40% of daily capacity was used.
A Priority 1 job (think: a 20-year-old broken HVAC system) could be booked up to 150% of daily capacity—we wanted those calls no matter what.

And if a high-priority job came in and we were already full? We’d move a low-priority one. Simple as that.

This system wasn’t bad. It gave us more control than most service businesses have. But we wanted more precision.

The New System: Percent-Based by Job Type

Instead of assigning each job type to a priority level, we now assign a specific booking threshold to every single job type.

No more “priority 3 means 70% capacity.”

Now it’s:

“This specific job type can book up to 85%.”
“That other one only up to 50%.”
And that high-value sales lead? Let it book to 150%.

Why does this matter?

It eliminates an entire layer of abstraction. We no longer need to translate from job → priority → threshold. We map directly from job → threshold.

Why This Change Matters

More precision. You’re not guessing at what “priority 3” really means across dozens (or hundreds) of job types.
Better revenue optimization. You can always make room for the calls that matter most.
Less rescheduling. When your booking engine is aligned to your true capacity model, you stop overcommitting and underdelivering.

At the scale we operate, even small improvements to our capacity strategy have a big impact.

Bottom Line

Capacity isn’t just a scheduling tool—it’s a growth lever.

If you don’t have an intentional, dialed-in system for how calls get booked, you’re either:

Leaving revenue on the table, or
Burning trust with customers and techs by constantly reshuffling the calendar

Neither is acceptable in 2025.

#grateful to have Cybernetic Labs sponsor this section of TPLT

Consumer Financing¹

Why We Went All-In with GreenSky (and How It’s Paying Off)

A few months ago, we made the decision to partner exclusively with GreenSky for all of our consumer financing.

The goal was simple:
Improve customer approval rates and offer more competitive financing programs to the people we serve.

We’ve all seen how big of a role financing plays in residential services—especially on higher-ticket installs. If customers can’t get approved, you’re losing sales that should be won.

So this week I emailed our sales leader and asked the question:
“Are we happy? Are the results what we hoped for?”

The answer?
A resounding YES.

We’re now consistently tracking approval rates of 85%+. That’s not just a metric—that’s a meaningful improvement in the number of jobs we’re closing.

More approvals → more completed projects → better service for our customers and better outcomes for our team.

What I appreciate most about the GreenSky team is that they’ve stood behind their word. The commitments they made during the sales process weren’t just slides in a pitch deck—they’ve delivered on them.

This move has helped us sell more, serve more, and simplify the experience for our team and our customers.

Grateful for the partnership—and excited about where it goes from here.

#grateful to have GreenSky® Home Improvement sponsor this section of TPLT

¹ The views and opinions expressed here are owned by The Path Less Traveled and its author and may not reflect the views of GreenSky®

This Week’s Favorite Tweets

Friends of The Path Less Traveled

Who are the VENDORS that fuel our success?

MARKETING

Choosing a marketing agency that is both (1) competent and (2) CARES about your specific business is hard. Over the last 5 years, I have become great friends with the founder of RYNO Strategic Solutions, Chris Yano, and can say with confidence that his agency is among the few that I would trust with my own brands. If you are searching for a partner, send a note to Jeff Bowab at [email protected] and tell him that I sent you.

PAYROLL & HR

Inova Payroll & HR has been a partner to our companies for over 10 years. They have provided us with a payroll technology platform that has been able to keep pace with the demands of our fast-growing organization (now serving team members across 4 states). Inova’s platform works seamlessly with our CRM, ServiceTitan, and with our accounting back-end, Sage Intacct.

COACHING & TRAINING

If there is one organization - perhaps more than any other - that has fueled our growth over the last 10 years… that organization would be Nexstar Network. I like to say that Nexstar Network has built & refined a “process playbook” that touches on so many facets of our business. Don’t try and re-create the wheel… come and learn from the best. Reach out to my friend Kara Schuster at [email protected] and tell her that I sent you.

#grateful for the “Friends of TPLT” sponsors in this section

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