I recently sat down with Blake Katone, who co-founded an attic insulation company in the Dallas area and helped grow it to a $6.4 million service business before he left. You can watch the full conversation here: Interview with Blake Katone
I'll be honest, I went into this one already having a decent picture of how a business like this runs. I talk to home improvement companies every week, and most questions about how to run a successful service business come down to the same handful of things: focus, structure, communication, and staying in the game long enough. So a lot of what Blake said confirmed things I already believed.
But a few things genuinely clicked for me in a way they hadn't before. One was how he structured his field roles, including a $20 an hour hire that let them absorb a $250,000 sales week without blowing their turnaround times. Another was the way he talked about the friction between sales and production, which changed how I think about that tension entirely.
Here are the five that stuck with me.
What Makes a Service Business Successful
If you only take five things from this article, take these:
1. Get one thing perfect before you get anything else. Running one service means your problems repeat, and repeating problems are solvable problems.
2. A good subcontractor can become an actual partner. Blake's best sub went from two guys to eight crews, and became part of their marketing along the way.
3. The tension between sales and production is supposed to be there. You don't eliminate the fight. You structure it.
4. Split your field roles by cost, not just by function. Stop paying senior wages for junior work. This one's the most useful thing in the whole article.
5. Make people want the job, but know your labor market. A hard hiring process builds stewardship, if your market can support it.
The rest of this article unpacks each one, with the actual numbers behind them.
Lesson #1: Get One Thing Perfect Before You Get Anything Else
When I asked Blake why insulation of all things, he didn't hesitate.
"It's easy, man. It was easy. You learn one thing, you get one thing perfect, you'll be a millionaire, man. Very easy. Just learn good at that one thing. Tile, learn it. Be good at tile. Insulation, learn it. Get good at insulation. Get good at one thing and you'll go."
This is the pattern I've seen across hundreds of home service companies that actually grow. When you run one service, the problems repeat. And repeating problems are solvable problems.
Blake made that point himself. You hit a problem, you fix it, you build a process around it, and you never hit it the same way again. He actually described running into problems early as a good thing, because each one permanently improved the business.
That only works if you're doing the same type of job over and over. Spread across five services and you're solving five separate sets of problems, all of them for the first time, all of them slowly.
So the question isn't really whether you should specialize forever. It's whether you've gotten your core service dialed in tight enough that the problems have stopped being surprises.
Lesson #2: A Good Subcontractor Can Become an Actual Partner
This was the part I didn't expect.
My assumption with subs has always been that the division is clean. The company handles the marketing and the sales. The subs handle the work. Everybody stays in their lane.
Blake's approach went a lot further than that. When I asked him how he ended up with that many contractors, he didn't talk about recruiting at all. He talked about growing the ones he already had.
"Building people is so much better than just trying to find more people, because you're training these people to be the best for you. That's the best way to do it, man."
One of his contractors started as just him and his brother. By the time Blake left, that same sub had eight crews and six trucks. He kept buying materials and equipment to keep up, because Blake's company kept growing and he was growing right alongside it.
Here's the part that actually reframed this for me though.
Because they were feeding him that much volume, Blake was able to go to him about working exclusively for them, and about putting company branding on his trucks and trailers. He offered to pay for it himself.
Think about what that means. Those trucks become rolling billboards for the company, driving around the metro every single day, and none of them are on the company's balance sheet. Branding like that also opens up content: drone footage of branded trucks and working crews is the kind of marketing material most contractors have to stage.
So this wasn't just a sub who liked them. This was a marketing asset the company didn't own and didn't pay to maintain.
Now, I'd be careful here. It's probably rare to find a sub you can trust this much, and you shouldn't force it with someone who hasn't earned it. But if you find one, they might be able to help you grow more than you'd imagine. If you're the one supplying the majority of somebody's work, you've got a lot more leverage to build something real there than most contractors ever use.
Lesson #3: The Tension Between Sales and Production Is Supposed to Be There
Every company with a sales side and a field side has this fight. Sales wants to sell. Production wants to deliver cleanly. Sales sells something production doesn't really want to do, and now everyone's annoyed.
For Blake's company it showed up in the numbers. Production had to hit a 50% cost target, so a $1,000 job meant getting labor and materials done for $500. Sales would come in under that, or the square footage would be off, and suddenly the job doesn't work.
Their fix was partly structural. They built buffer line items into the sale, things like an attic inspection or a sanitize charge, that cost them nothing but gave production margin room and gave sales something to leverage. Later they used solar attic fans the same way, adding a $1,000 line item on a $400 cost.
But the bigger fix was just constant contact. Weekly meetings between Blake and his partner, every week, the entire time he was there. And once a week, a sales rep would ride along with him in the field so they could see exactly what selling a job actually commits production to.
His take on communication is the thing I keep coming back to:
"You got to relay every time. Even if you think you're annoying them, communicate. Repeat it. Even if you think you're annoying them, do it one more time. If you don't think you're annoying them, you're not saying it enough."
Here's what clicked for me though. I'd always thought of this tension as a problem to eliminate. It isn't.
If sales had their way completely, production would drown in complicated jobs. If production had their way completely, you'd only ever sell the easy stuff and leave money on the table on anything slightly harder, even when it's worth doing.
The pull in both directions is what keeps the company producing as much as it can, and as complex of work as it can, without overloading itself. It's the same reason tension makes structures strong in engineering. You don't remove it. You just make sure it's held in the right places.
The communication isn't there to end the fight. It's there to help the company grow as much as it can without breaking.
Lesson #4: Split Your Field Roles by Cost, Not Just by Function
This was the single most useful thing I picked up from the whole conversation.
They started with a project manager model, where one person got the job, scheduled it, sourced the contractor, ran it, and closed it out. Everything on one person.
What they moved to was a split:
The production manager handles the back end. Scheduling, calls, dealing with contractors, solving problems. This is the expensive skill set, and it never leaves the office unless it has to.
The field supervisor handles the customer. Shows up on site, nice polo, nice truck, texts the homeowner that morning to introduce himself, stays available all day, vacuums up insulation in the hallway so the crew doesn't have to slow down. Blake was paying about $20 an hour for this role.
The field supervisor doesn't deal with the contractors at all. That's the production manager's job. The field supervisor's job is that the customer feels taken care of.
And that's the insight. Most of what a homeowner needs on job day isn't technical. They need somebody present, friendly, and reachable. Putting your expensive problem solver on site to do that is paying a premium for something a much less expensive role can do just as well. Blake's line was that if the job is going fine and nobody's falling through a ceiling, that's all the client actually needs. If somebody is falling through the ceiling, then yes, send the production manager.
Now here's why this also solves the seasonal problem.
Their busy stretch ran roughly May through mid-November, and it was normal to do $150,000 a week in sales during it. So when a week spiked, say to $250,000 against a normal $115,000, they still had to hold a two week turnaround.
The answer was that the production manager would go out and cover as a second field supervisor, three days a week, still making his calls from the field. If that pace held for three months, that's when they'd hire another field supervisor and pull him back inside.
That's real flexibility, and it costs nothing to have available. You're not carrying a supervisor you can't use in January. You're just borrowing capacity from a role that already exists.
If you've got one person doing scheduling, contractor management, and customer hand holding all at once, this is worth looking at. It's usually cheaper to split the role than to keep paying senior wages for junior work. In a seasonal service business, that flexibility is the difference between growing through a spike and getting buried by one.
Lesson #5: Make People Want the Job, But Know Your Labor Market
Blake's hiring process was deliberately hard to get through. A minimum of three interviews before anyone was seriously considered, even though he said they usually knew by the second.
The first was positional. Are you actually qualified, and do you even know what you're interviewing for? He said the number of people who couldn't articulate the job they were applying for was telling on its own.
The second was a full emotional intelligence interview, and he's done more than 200 of them. How do you handle anger. How do you handle a bad day. How do you celebrate a win. For management roles they'd go four or five interviews deep, sometimes bringing in a friendly business owner from another trade who'd hired for that role before, on the logic that you shouldn't interview for a position you've never held.
His reasoning for making it hard was that people don't steward what they didn't work for. They paid well, guys straight out of high school at $22 an hour with a company truck and a card for gas, so they wanted people who wanted it, not people who just needed something.
This one surprised me, and I want to add a caveat.
Being able to filter that aggressively is a luxury, and it's downstream of two things. One is reputation. If your company is known in your market, you get applicants who are already excited to be there and you can afford to be picky. Two is your local labor market. In some areas there are simply enough people looking that you can run a five stage process and still fill the role.
If neither of those is true for you yet, an extensive process will just mean you filter everyone out and hire nobody. So pay attention to what your market is actually giving you. In a tight labor market, a lot of your energy has to go into selling and marketing the position itself before you can start screening for it.
The principle still holds though. You want people who want the job. You just may have to earn the ability to demand it.
The Thread Running Through All of This
None of what Blake talked about was really about insulation. Almost none of it was about marketing either.
It was about structure. Who does what, what it costs, who talks to who, and how often. That's what running a successful service business actually looks like up close.
Even the marketing side of their business came down to that. They tracked every lead by source, what it cost, and what it closed at, then moved money accordingly. When their networks leads were closing at 10%, they pulled the $2,300 and put it into Google, which was both their cheapest lead and their best closer. Facebook was their number two source behind Google, and if that's a channel you're trying to crack, we've broken down 7 proven ways to capture attention with Meta ads.
That's not a marketing insight so much as an organizational one. If you can't see your numbers by source, you can't make that call at all. If you're still tracking jobs and leads across notebooks and text threads, a CRM built for contractors like Builder Prime exists for exactly this reason. You can also see our full list of recommended CRMs in 7 Best CRMs for Remodelers.
And when I asked Blake what he'd tell someone just starting out, he didn't talk about any of the systems. He said this:
"On the slow days, don't let those take you out. Let that one win, or that one potential win, fill your tank for the next eight nos. Those days that you're on your face with nothing to do and crying your eyes out because you're about to lose everything, stick with it. Because you will regret not sticking with it more than you will regret sticking with it."
Get the structure right, then stay long enough for it to compound.
And if the marketing side is where your structure breaks down, that's the part we live in. Service Allies runs Facebook ads and exclusive lead generation for home improvement companies, and you can see how we do it at serviceallies.com.
FAQ: Running a Successful Service Business
What makes a service business successful?
Based on this interview and the companies I work with, it comes down to four things. Focus on one service until the problems stop surprising you. Structure your roles so expensive skills do expensive work and cheap roles cover the rest. Keep sales and production communicating constantly, because that tension is productive when it's managed and destructive when it's ignored. And stay consistent through the slow seasons, because that's where most owners quit.
What does a field supervisor do in a home service company?
In Blake's company, the field supervisor was a customer-facing role, not a technical one. They texted the homeowner the morning of the job to introduce themselves, stayed reachable all day, showed up on site in a company truck and polo, and handled small things like vacuuming up stray insulation. They didn't manage contractors at all, which is what made the role affordable at around $20 an hour. The job was making sure the customer felt taken care of.
How profitable is an insulation business?
Blake's company ran a 50% cost target on production, meaning a $1,000 job had to get done for $500 in labor and materials, before any overhead. After trucks, payroll, admin, and sales commissions, the business landed around 22% net profit margins. That's one company's numbers in one market, but it gives you a realistic picture of the spread between gross and net in a home service business.
How should a service business decide where to spend marketing dollars?
Track every lead by source, cost per lead, and close rate, then move money toward whatever combination closes cheapest. Blake's company cut a source with a 10% close rate and reallocated that budget to Google, their best performer, because the numbers made the decision for them. If you want a rundown of which channels are worth testing in the first place, see our guide to 10 types of marketing for remodeling that work.
For the full conversation, including more on lead source ROI, pricing buffers, and how they managed roughly 50 subcontractors with only 12 employees, watch the interview here: Interview with Blake Katone
