The Revolving Door Problem – My First Battle as a Service Business Owner
When Chaos Was My Business Partner
Running a service business looks simple on paper. You get jobs, you do the jobs, you get paid. Easy, right?
Wrong.
In reality, it felt like I was running a daycare for grown adults with car keys. Every day was a new circus:
* Trucks breaking down on the way to a job.
* Employees calling in sick the second the Texas sun hit 100 degrees.
* Contractors calling me every other morning—not for work—but for gas money.
* HR problems that made me wonder if I should’ve just opened a taco stand instead.
And don’t even get me started on employee phone calls. I got to a point where every time my phone buzzed, I felt my blood pressure spike. Because it was never good news. Nobody ever called to say:
Hey boss, just wanted to let you know everything’s going smooth today!
Nope. It was always:
“Truck won’t start.”
“I don’t have the right ladder.”
“I think I left the drill at the last job site.”
By the time I got off the phone, I wanted to throw it in the nearest lake.
The People Problem
Let’s talk about hiring. Trying to keep a reliable crew was like playing musical chairs—but instead of music, it was the sound of my sanity leaving my body.
Some guys would last a few months. Some lasted a week. And some didn’t even last the first lunch break. I had a literal revolving door of employees, and I was the one stuck holding it open.
The Texas heat didn’t help. You’d think I was asking them to shovel snow uphill barefoot. Half of them looked like they were melting within the first hour on the job.
The Fork in the Road
At one point, I had two choices
1. Quit. Go get a 9–5, cash a paycheck, and actually spend time with my newborn without losing hair over gas money requests.
2. Double down. Crack the code, figure out how to tame the chaos, and basically accept that I’m either building a business or building an ulcer.
I picked option #2—the miserable route. Don’t ask me why. Probably because I lost my mind somewhere between job site #100 and gas money call #500.
The Honest Truth
Even today, 13 years later, I won’t sugarcoat it: I haven’t “made it.” I’ve just survived. And that’s already beating the odds—most small businesses don’t even make it five years. I’m still here, still swinging, still drinking coffee like it’s a lifeline.
But survival isn’t success. And if I wanted to move past babysitting grown men with tool belts, I had to start tackling one problem at a time.
The first problem I went after? That damn revolving door of employees.
What’s Next
In the next blog, I’ll walk you through how I finally cracked it. How I went from wasting hours repeating the same training to building a self-running training system. One that filters out the lazy ones before they ever touch a company truck, and actually gives me employees who are ready to work.
Read Blog 2: How I Built a Self-Running Training System That Stopped the Employee Revolving Door.
