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#28. The One Meeting I Won't Delegate

#28. The One Meeting I Won't Delegate

How you onboard people and how you grow without renting every lead from Google turn out to be the same argument, told twice: the advantages that compound are the ones you build yourself, not the ones you buy. This issue makes that case once in how we bring new hires into a culture where safety and standards aren't negotiable, and once in why the cheapest lead you'll ever get is one you already earned from your own customer base. Same argument, two fronts.

Christopher Hoffmann
August 03, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

In Today’s Newsletter

A Framework for Building the Lead Engine Google Can't Tax
Things you should do…
Founding Sponsors
The One Meeting I Won't Delegate
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?

The Google Toll Road: A Framework for Building the Lead Engine Google Can't Tax

Every operator in this industry is fighting for the same click, and the toll keeps rising. Blended cost per lead for HVAC and plumbing on Google Ads is running around $104 as of early 2026, per SearchLight Digital's benchmark of nearly $15 million in tracked ad spend, and non-branded search averages closer to $149. Local Services Ads adoption has climbed from roughly a quarter of markets in 2021 to a large majority today. The road isn't just tolled. It's getting more crowded, and the toll rises with the traffic.

Most leaders respond the only way the playbook teaches: bid smarter, write better ad copy, chase cost per booked job instead of cost per lead. All worth doing. None of it changes the underlying problem: you're renting attention from a landlord who raises the rent every year and answers to no one.

Here's the question almost nobody asks: if you operate more than one trade, why are you paying full price for a lead you may have already generated for free?

The advantage single-trade competitors don't have

A single-trade plumber has one path to a new customer: win the click, win the call, win the job. A multi-trade platform has a second path competitors structurally can't access: convert a customer you already have in one trade into a customer in another, at close to zero incremental cost. That path never shows up on a CPL report. It shows up in your cross-sell data, if you're tracking it.

We recently pulled that data across our own service lines, and it validated something we'd believed without fully proving. Appliance, our smallest trade by first-purchase revenue, produces the highest cross-sell rate in the portfolio: nearly two dollars of revenue in other trades for every dollar of appliance revenue itself, more than four times the company average. An appliance customer is the customer most likely to become an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical customer down the line, and that second job cost nothing beyond trust already earned on the first.

That's not a fact about appliance. It's a fact about what happens when a customer trusts you once and the door to trade number two is actually open. Is that door open by design in your business, or by accident?

Why it doesn't happen on its own

Most conversations about cross-selling stop at "we should sell more to existing customers," as if that were a strategy instead of a wish. It isn't automatic, and it isn't a marketing problem. It's an operating problem with three levers.

Process. Does your CSR see a household's full service history the moment a call comes in, or does an existing appliance customer look like a brand-new lead? When a tech spots something outside their trade, is there a defined next step that captures it as a job with an owner and a follow-up date, or does it disappear the moment they drive off? Most cross-trade opportunities aren't lost to inattention. They're lost to missing process.

Training. Your appliance tech doesn't need to become an electrician. They need enough literacy to spot a few warning signs, the language to say so without overstepping, and confidence that flagging it is part of the job, not a distraction from it. That confidence comes from how you train and recognize it, not from a poster in the break room. If a cross-trade flag never shows up in a scorecard or a 1:1, you've told your team it doesn't count.

Membership program design. This is the multiplier that turns a single job into a standing relationship. A one-time repair gives you one shot at trust. A membership gives you a recurring, scheduled reason to be back in that home, and every visit is a new entry point for every trade you run, not just the one that sold the plan. It's not a coincidence that the teams pushing hardest for memberships tend to be the same teams generating the strongest cross-sell numbers. The membership is the mechanism. The cross-sell is the output.

The metric that actually matters

Every operator tracks CPL. A growing number now track cost per booked job. Real progress. But per Jobber's 2026 data, referrals and repeat customers are each cited by roughly six in ten contractors as a top source of new business, well ahead of any paid channel. What almost nobody tracks with the same discipline is cross-sell rate by trade and lifetime value per household, and that's the number that should matter most to a multi-trade operator, because it's the only lead source Google can't tax.

The toll road isn't going away, and for a real share of demand, you'll keep paying it. But the operators who win the next decade won't be the ones who bid smartest on Google. They'll be the ones who built a second road, inside their own customer base, that gets cheaper every year the toll goes up on the first one.

That's the path less traveled. Most of the industry is still standing in line at the toll booth, arguing about the price. The better argument is about the road nobody's paying to build.

Chris

Preparing for her first hunt this Fall. Watch out, boys!

Annual trip with the whole gang down at Tablerock Lake. Grandparents, siblings, cousins— it’s one of my kids’ favorite trips of the year.

“Dad, I’m workin. Get out of your office.”

August… the beginning of text message threads that look like this…

Things you should…

1. You should sit through your own new hire orientation like a stranger would. Not the deck you signed off on. The actual room. If you wouldn't want to start your career in that room, don't send anyone else into it.

2. You should ride along on a call with your newest technician instead of your best one. Your top performer shows you what's working. Your newest hire shows you exactly where your training program has a hole in it.

3. You should compare what you spent on paid leads last month to how many memberships you sold in that same period. Whichever number moved you more is the one that should get next month's budget.

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 :)

The Path Less Traveled - Founding Sponsors

Founding Sponsors… that WE USE in our companies.

When I wanted to launch The Path Less Traveled, I didn’t just want to take any sponsor who would write a check.

On the contrary - I continue to turn down a ton of sponsor inquiries because of one reality: I want my sponsorships to be authentic, and be companies that I work with AND believe in.

Software: ServiceTitan - THE leading software platform for residential and commercial service providers; to be blunt - there is no alternative for scaled enterprise platforms - and that is why it is incredibly rare to find any company over $100M who is NOT using ServiceTitan.

Agentic AI: Netic - Netic has built transformative AI tools that execute end-to-end workflows across speech, text, and data, powering entire functions inside of HB Solutions Group. Elevating the customer experience while reducing friction and cost.

Consumer Financing: GreenSky Home Improvement - helps HB Solutions Group to delight our customers AND grow our business by giving us one of the most powerful tools we can possess: the ability to increase our customers’ buying power.

Final thought: we publish TPLT on/around the 1st and 15th of each month, and we will incorporate a deeper dive into our relationship with each of the partners above on the release on/around the 15th while including this abbreviated section on the release on/around the 1st of each month.

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®

CEO: Growth Mindset

The One Meeting I Won't Delegate: Why Every New Hire at HB Solutions Group Still Gets an Hour With Me, Every Monday

For a stretch of years, we were growing so fast that I would walk through one of our shops and pass someone in a Hoffmann Brothers or Ferguson Roofing shirt I had never met. Not vaguely met. Never met. I would nod, say hello, and realize on the walk back to my truck that I had no idea who that person was, what trade they worked, or how long they had been with us. For a company built on the idea that we win by taking care of our people first, that bothered me more than almost anything else happening at the time. So I asked our People team, led by Nicole Philips, to put me directly into new hire onboarding. Not a video message. Not a slide with my name and title on it. Me, in the room, every single week.

Here is what that looks like today. Every Monday at 8 a.m., I spend the first hour with every new employee starting that week, across all four of our brands: Hoffmann Brothers in St. Louis, Hoffmann Brothers in Nashville, Ferguson Roofing, and Blue Sky in Denver. Technicians, CSRs, warehouse staff, install helpers, whoever walked through the door that week. I meet every one of them now. It sets a good tone. It tells people that someone at the top of this company cared enough to show up. More than once, it has confirmed for someone, right there in the room, that they made the right choice taking the job. But I don't use that hour just to make people feel good. I use it to say three things, every week, without exception.

One: We All Win Together, or We All Lose Together

I tell every new class that our ability to drive wins for our customers is inextricably linked to our ability to drive wins for our team members and for our company. I say it plainly: we all win together, or we all lose together. There is no version of this business where the customer gets a great outcome and the team doesn't, and no version where the team does well while customers get mediocre service. It is one system, not two. And it is everyone's job, mine included, to do our part every single day, on every single service call, to deliver a win. I take real pride in the compensation and benefits we offer. They are industry leading, and I mean that specifically, not as a talking point. But that pride carries an obligation. If we are going to pay like the best, we have to perform like the best, in every regard, every time. That is not a threat. It is the deal.

Two: We Are Not the Cheapest. We Are the Best.

The second thing I tell them is about how we want to be seen in the market. We do not want a customer thinking, "call Hoffmann Brothers, they're the cheapest." We want them thinking, "call Hoffmann Brothers, they're the most skilled, the most professional, the highest integrity, the best communicators, the most responsive." If we actually deliver on that premium positioning, in how we show up, how we communicate, how we solve the problem correctly the first time, customers will happily pay a premium for it. That premium is what funds the wages and benefits I just told them I'm proud of. Point one and point two are really the same argument, told from two directions: you cannot have industry-leading pay without industry-leading performance, and you cannot charge a premium without being worth every dollar of it.

Three: Complacency Kills

The last thing I tell them is about safety, and I borrow a line from the Marine Corps to make the point: complacency kills. Here is the analogy I use. You could run the same patrol route a hundred times. The first ninety-nine go fine, and because nothing bad happens, you slowly let your guard down. You stop checking your gear as carefully. You stop cleaning your rifle the way you were trained to. You stop preparing for the worst case, because the worst case has never shown up. Then, on run one hundred, it does. And because you were not ready, it goes very wrong.

The trades work the same way. You have done the same HVAC maintenance call or the same sewer line repair a thousand times. Nothing has ever gone wrong, so it starts to feel routine, and routine breeds shortcuts. That is the exact moment someone decides they do not need their PPE today, or that the trench does not really need shoring this time. That is the moment something goes wrong, and in this line of work, when it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. You can lose an eye. You can crush a leg. You can lose far more than that. So my ask of every new hire, every single week, is simple: fight complacency. Use the PPE we give you. Do not cut corners. Work safely every time, not just the times it feels like it matters.

That is the hour. Three points (among a few others), repeated every week, to every new class, across every brand we operate. It costs me time I could spend on a dozen other things, and it is still the best hour of my week.

So here is the question for you, if you lead a business of any size: how are you curating the experience for the people walking through your door for the first time? Not the offer letter. Not the handbook. The actual experience, in the first hours and days, of what it feels like to have just joined your company.

It matters.

Chris

This Week’s Favorite Tweets

Friends of The Path Less Traveled

Who are the VENDORS that fuel our success?

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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.

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