Build a Business Where Stakeholders Win

01

Define a win each stakeholder can recognize

Tommy frames Elevate around a business where employees, clients, owners, partners, vendors, and the industry can all win. That is a useful alternative to treating growth as a contest in which one party's gain must come from another's loss. It is still only a direction until each word has an observable meaning.

For employees, a win might mean safe work, clear expectations, fair pay, skills, and a credible path. For customers, it might mean a solved problem, informed choice, reliable arrival, and accountable follow-through. Vendors need honest forecasts and payment. Owners need a durable return and an organization that does not consume every waking hour.

Write those outcomes side by side and look for hidden transfers. A customer discount that makes safe delivery impossible is not a win. An employee bonus based on a metric they cannot influence is not a win. The framework becomes useful when tradeoffs are admitted and the operating design is adjusted.

02

Lead with care and measurable responsibility

Tommy says leadership is more than tracking key performance indicators. Relationships and care matter because people need context, trust, and a reason to bring judgment to work. Metrics still matter; they reveal whether the intended customer, employee, and operating outcomes are actually occurring.

The balance is to connect each score to a human and operational purpose. A callback rate is not just a red number; it may mean a homeowner lost confidence and a technician needs better diagnosis or installation support. A slow hiring funnel may mean the role promise, screening, manager follow-up, or workplace reality is misaligned.

Leaders should be able to explain both sides: what the measure protects and how the person can influence it. Care without accountability leaves problems untouched. Accountability without care turns the dashboard into surveillance.

“Leadership is not just about tracking KPIs; it's about building relationships and it's about caring.”

Tommy Mello, episode timestamp 3:18

03

Learn people management as a second trade

Jim points out a common home-service transition: a capable technician starts a company, hires people, and discovers that technical ability did not automatically create management ability. People are not machines, and they do not share one motivation, learning speed, communication style, or response to feedback.

The owner needs a second apprenticeship. Learn how to define a role, interview consistently, set expectations, coach an observed behavior, document a decision, handle conflict, and apply policy fairly. Use qualified HR and legal help for employment questions rather than improvising from a podcast or a founder's instinct.

Technical credibility still helps. It gives the leader context for the work and the customer's stakes. The shift is accepting that doing the repair faster than a new employee is not the same as building a team capable of serving every customer next year.

04

Run recruiting with marketing discipline

Tommy compares recruiting with marketing. Both begin by understanding who should respond, what truthful promise will matter, where that audience pays attention, and what experience follows the click or conversation. An occasional job post is the hiring equivalent of running one advertisement and waiting for a permanent pipeline.

A recruiting system can track source, response, screening, interview, offer, start, training completion, early retention, and manager quality. The counts are not universal quotas; they help the company see where good candidates disappear and whether the role message matches the work.

Employees also become a distribution channel when the experience supports the promise. Tommy describes team members noticing potential recruits in daily life. A referral cannot repair a weak workplace, but it can compound a strong one because the employee is willing to attach their own reputation to the invitation.

05

Install structure after the candidate says yes

Tommy moves quickly from attraction to structure: handbook, paid-time-off process, scorecards, and regular one-on-ones. That sequence matters. A magnetic recruiting message can bring people in, but unclear policies and invisible standards teach them that the message was only advertising.

Build the employee journey the way a service company builds a customer journey. Confirm the role and schedule, prepare access and equipment, teach safety and standards, assign a trainer, define the first scorecard, and schedule feedback before the employee has to chase it. Keep policies current and legally reviewed.

Scorecards should be small enough to use and broad enough not to distort behavior. Pair results with leading indicators the employee can influence, and include quality and customer protection beside speed or revenue. The objective is a fair coaching conversation, not a ranking board detached from context.

06

Check the system before blaming the person

In the companion Service MVP episode, Tommy describes becoming less angry about missed work when he began examining the owner's part in accountability. His answer starts at 16:19, and at 16:51 he asks whether the expectation was written down. Before treating a miss as defiance, verify the procedure, trainer, deadline, acknowledgment, tools, and exception path.

The episode later offers three diagnostic branches: the system does not exist, the system is wrong, or the system is not being followed. That sequence begins at 23:37. Test them in that order. First document the expected result. Then ask whether the process can produce it under real conditions. Only then inspect adoption with a small set of relevant evidence and let the employee explain gaps or constraints.

The recording also mentions driving-record checks, call review, images, and automated grading. Those examples are historical speaker claims, not a monitoring prescription. Use a legitimate work purpose, current law, required notice or consent, data minimization, limited access, a defined retention period, and human review. High-volume surveillance is not proof of strong management, and an automated score should never be the sole basis for discipline.

When the process is missing or wrong, fix and retrain it. When the process is workable but not followed, coach the observed behavior and apply written policy consistently. Feed verified exceptions, callbacks, and customer complaints back into the documented operating system so the same defect does not return under a new employee or manager.

07

Praise publicly and correct with precision

Tommy criticizes meetings that consist of public complaints about everything the team must do better. His alternative is to recognize strong work publicly and reserve individual correction for a private conversation. The distinction protects dignity without pretending the performance problem does not exist.

Private feedback still needs evidence. Name the specific behavior, the standard, the impact, and the next practice. Ask what obstacle the employee sees and what support is missing. Document serious or repeated issues according to policy; do not use privacy as an excuse for inconsistent accountability.

Public recognition should be equally concrete. “Great job” fades. “You stopped the installation, rechecked the measurement, and prevented a bad outcome” teaches the whole room what the culture rewards. That is how a value becomes an operating example.

“You should only be saying the great things in public.”

Tommy Mello, episode timestamp 10:46

08

Delegate outcomes with guardrails

Tommy describes the founder reflex: move aside, I can do it better. That may be true today, especially with a new hire. It also guarantees that the founder remains the ceiling. Development requires the owner to coach, let another person attempt the work, and tolerate some recoverable inefficiency while capability grows.

Delegation works when the leader receives an outcome, decision rights, information, authority limits, and a review time. The owner keeps nondelegable responsibility for law, safety, cash controls, and major promises while allowing choices inside the lane. A vague “own this” is abandonment, not delegation.

Inspect the result without reclaiming every step. Ask the leader to show the evidence, reasoning, exception, and next action. That rhythm connects Tommy's point to using coaching to break an owner bottleneck and to building systems before franchising.

09

Reinvest to make growth less founder-dependent

Tommy attributes part of his path to repeatedly putting resources back into the business instead of treating the first surplus as proof the machine was finished. The article cannot prescribe an investment or spending level, and the episode's financial examples are not current advice. The operational principle is to fund the bottleneck that keeps the founder indispensable.

That bottleneck might be recruiting capacity, training, dispatch, inventory control, quality assurance, finance, or a capable leader. Define the expected operating change before spending, set a review date, and measure whether the investment transferred useful responsibility or merely added software and payroll around the same founder decisions.

Tommy also emphasizes peers, mentors, tours, and learning. Those relationships can shorten the path to a tested system, but they require judgment: compare context, verify the claim, and adapt rather than copy. The goal is a company where more people can make good decisions—not a company that borrows another owner's scoreboard.

A practical review can keep the stakeholder promise attached to that reinvestment. Before approving the next hire, system, or program, name the bottleneck, the person who will own the new capability, the customer or employee outcome expected to change, the evidence that will be reviewed, and the date for a keep, change, or stop decision. Then check for displaced costs: a faster sales process that creates callbacks, or tighter scheduling that burns out technicians, has moved the problem rather than elevated the organization. This does not make every party win on every decision. It makes the tradeoff visible enough for leaders to correct it.