By Eric Sprague C & R Magazine 09/23/2025
The reality in the cleaning and restoration industry is that the majority of companies are smaller, Mom & Pop type organizations. Most of us start our business because we are good at the technical work of our trade and we desire more freedom and more money by not working for “the man”. However, we also find out very quickly that the skills of being a great technician are not the same skills and mindset of being a great entrepreneur. So, we slog along each day, each month, and each year doing an ungodly amount of work ourselves and never really seeing the return we desire. And we certainly don’t have the amount of freedom we envisioned when we started the business. That is why when I started business coaching I decided I wanted to work with the smaller companies to help them see a different way of operating and help coax them to run their businesses in a different way. I use the word “coax” very intentionally. Most owners have a set of patterns and beliefs systems that need to be slowly changed over time to get what they really desire, and as we all know, looking in the mirror and changing is hard for all of us. Jeff Jones of Violand Management Associates jokingly calls me “the Dr. Phil of the restoration industry” as such a large part of my coaching is set around my client’s beliefs and mindset.
All of this said, I have identified the 5 fatal flaws I see over and over in the smaller business owners that keeps them from getting to the next level, and getting them closer to the goal they had for themselves and the business when they opened shop.
Fatal Flaw 1: Inability to Let Go (Ego)
“Nobody can do it like the owner”, “I am the only one who cares around here”, “If you want something done right, you need to do it yourself”. I hear these phrases all of the time from potential clients and my newer clients. They are trapped in Hero Mode. They have convinced themselves that nobody can do anything right except for them. This creates a scenario where they have high turnover and the people who do stay rarely make a decision on their own for fear of owner disapproval. This creates a company where the owner is actively involved in every aspect of the business. They end up being the marketer, the bookkeeper, the janitor, and the technician all in one and they wonder why they can’t grow. Until that owner can recognize that there is no future growth due to their actions and learns that there are many competent people in the world who want to be good employees, they are stuck. This is not why any of us ever went into business.
Fatal Flaw 2: Inability to Trust and Delegate
Closely tied to not letting go is failing to delegate effectively. Many owners who cannot free themselves from the day to day tend to be micromanagers because they don’t trust that their employees can do work to their standards. This management style drives away the best and most talented employees because they care about their work and wanted to be trusted to do a good job on their own. This leaves the owner with less driven or less qualified staff that just needs a paycheck and are willing to endure the owner’s micromanagement. For the owner to move forward and grow, they first need to look inward and ask themselves where this lack of trust comes from. What are they afraid of. Why do they feel the need to insert themselves in every aspect of the business? Until that is addressed and work is done by the owner to overcome these feelings, they are stuck. It’s truly an inside job for the owner to figure this out to be able to start growth.
Fatal Flaw 3: Not Slowing Down to Train Staff and Invest in Employees
I am so busy!!!!! I hear that everyday from contractors who are struggling to scale. However, I rarely hear it from my more accomplished clients. The difference? My larger clients value accomplishment more than busyness. They are on a constant quest to be effective. Author Tim Ferriss wrote my favorite quote in the book The 4 Hour Work Week. Ferris writes, “busyness is a form of laziness. Lazy thinking and indiscriminate action.” Contractors who are failing to grow of seem to value busyness over accomplishment. They love the endorphin rush of checking off boxes on a checklist.
Because of this need for activity they rarely invest a lot of time or resources in training their team members to have the skills to take the load off of them. They are stuck on a hamster wheel of doing it, doing it, doing it because they don’t slow down enough to teach others the skills to take some of the work off their shoulders.
Fatal Flaw 4: Lack of Business Systems
You can’t scale chaos, and that’s what most small businesses deal with every single day. Due to lack of business systems, the owner is too heavily involved in every aspect of the business. The owner relies on a few key “rock star” employees to help he/she get the business through each day. The problem is this is a business totally reliant on certain people and not instead on process. This is a recipe for disaster in most businesses. A key employee gets burned out and leaves. The owner spends all day putting out fires instead of working on the business and how to grow. I know personally how this feels. I operated this way for years until I finally decided to take action. I stayed late, often exhausted, at my desk for 2 years building and implementing systems. If I had access then to all of the cool tools like ChatGPT, Trainual, and Loom I would have had it done in a few months. There is no excuse for any contractor to install process flows and standard operating procedures anymore. It has never been easier or quicker.
Fatal Flaw 5: You Run Your Company on Emotion, Not Data
“I feel like we are making money.” “I think we have enough work to hire another tech.” These are the statements I hear all the time from contractors. I have seen companies nearly make catastrophic decisions based on what the “think” or “feel” opposed to tracking information and making solid decisions based on current facts. Once, I had a coaching client tell me they were going to fire their newest business development rep because they didn’t feel like he worked hard. My question was, how much revenue has he brought in? They said they didn’t know, but he seemed to work slowly, so he needed to go. I asked them to go gather the data to see where he really was before just going off and firing him. The next week when we met they presented me the revenue number and it was 3X the average of a first year business development rep in our industry. Just because they didn’t like the speed with which he moved or felt like he took too many long lunches they nearly fired one of the top producers they will ever find. Remember, Data > Feelings.
Conclusion
Here’s the hard truth: most restoration shops don’t stay small because of the market, or competition, or luck. They stay small because of the owner.
- The ego that won’t let go.
- The lack of trust that kills delegation.
- The refusal to train.
- The absence of systems.
- The bad habit of running on feelings instead of numbers.
These are the five killers. And every one of them can be fixed. But you’ve got to choose to fix them.
So be honest with yourself: which one of these flaws is keeping you stuck?
Because at the end of the day, being stuck isn’t an industry problem — it’s an owner problem. And the only person who can fix it is staring back at you in the mirror.