Harmony of Hustle
Jump into the World of Justin Shoemaker aka "The Waterboy" . From Business, to music, this is the inside look of the world of the hyper-driven and their Harmony of Hustle.
Harmony of Hustle
5 Money Making Lessons.
Behind every impressive revenue figure lies a deeper story of business transformation. When my water treatment company hit $114,000 in monthly revenue with just four employees—after previously doing $105,000 with 18 staff members—I knew I had to share the counterintuitive wisdom gained from this breakthrough.
The journey to this milestone wasn't about working harder or implementing complex systems. Instead, it came from stripping away what wasn't working and focusing intensely on fundamentals. After helping scale a solar company from $600K to $25M in under a year, I wrongly assumed growing my own business would follow the same playbook. This misconception led to painful but valuable lessons.
My greatest revelation was realizing I'd removed myself too quickly from sales—my personal strength—in an attempt to "act like a CEO." By returning to what I excelled at while maintaining a lean team structure, our profitability skyrocketed. Similarly, segmenting administrative responsibilities sharply rather than having staff juggle multiple roles transformed our operational efficiency. Meanwhile, avoiding government contracts with lengthy payment cycles protected our cash flow, and focusing on profit over vanity revenue metrics kept us financially healthy.
Perhaps most importantly, I learned to have difficult conversations with underperformers immediately while generously rewarding top talent before they asked. This approach has built a culture where excellence is both expected and celebrated. Whether you're struggling with growth decisions, team structure, or prioritizing where to focus your energy as a founder, these hard-won insights might save you from making the same costly mistakes that nearly derailed my business journey.
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My water company did $114,000 last month and I want to share with you the five key takeaways that can hopefully help you make more money and keep more profit. What's going on, guys? My name is Justin Shoemaker. For those of you who don't know me, I am the CEO and founder of Clearwave Water Solutions. We are a water treatment filtration company out of Virginia, dc and Maryland.
Speaker 1:I started the company about two years ago after I decided to venture off doing my own thing, after I helped build a solar company from 600K to 25 million in about 11 months. Obviously, I wanted more pain, so I became a small business owner. So if you're a struggling small business owner, I'm sure you understand how stressful it can be, and I make these videos to try and share my wins, my losses and hopefully give you guys some tidbits or things that maybe can help you avoid the mistakes I made. And if you find any value from this, please like, share, subscribe Helps out a lot. So my first key takeaway from my record month was do what you do for as long as you can do it. Until you just can't do it anymore, find whatever it is that makes you the badass of the business. So for me, I'm really good at sales and I'm really good at building the team. You may be really good at product or software or development, or you might be a really good operations guy which, by the way, I am fricking horrendous at and you want to just do that thing for as long as you can, because the reality is that one thing that you are just above average and good at, which you are probably the best in that industry or in your field at, that's probably why you decided to start a business in the first place. That is what's going to be your competitive advantage, and this is a mistake that I made way too early.
Speaker 1:I actually brought some of the team that I had from the solar company over and tried to build a business that way. As the company grew, I have had a lot of employees, not a lot of employees, and last month I had the least amount of employees ever. I had one sales guy, which was me, and I only had my back operations team, which was two people, and an installer three people. My company. Prior to that, when we had our last biggest month, which is around 105 grand, that month we had about 18 people. Hmm, so I'm paying 18 people, making less profit and the reality is more on marketing spend to try to feed all these people, to try to have them run leads and do all that nonsense. So had more overhead, yet the same revenue numbers kind of insane when you think about it. So I made the mistake of trying to grow the business too fast and I wanted to get myself out of the sales role to try to help my team grow and give them all the leads so I could focus on what I thought was business development.
Speaker 1:The end result of this was just me burning money. As a result, the business didn't really grow. It got stagnant. The only thing that was actually nice about this whole thing was it did give me some cash to hire on better admin people who could do the stuff that I am just absolutely terrible at. I, looking back, should have stayed in the field longer, because then I would have had way more consistent revenue months. Not only would I have sold more clients, I would also sold them at higher ticket prices compared to some of the other reps who maybe weren't as confident in the homes, because obviously I've been doing this long time, I know what I'm doing in the homes. I know how to get the most out of the least.
Speaker 1:I think there's a lot of opportunity cost wasted because I could have been stacking cash, saving money, and if I had done that from day dot, coming now into year three, I would have way more cash reserves to probably do more things, have more inventory, which would have obviously saved me money. I would have been able to hire even better talent and I wouldn't be stressing as much about being broke all the time. If you are good at sales me money, I would be able to hire even better talent and I wouldn't be stressing as much about being broke all the time. If you are good at sales, sell until you actually physically cannot sell anymore. Okay, and what I'm actually trying to do now is switch over to more of a virtual model to increase my sales capacity. So, instead of trying to give off the things I'm good at, I'm just going to stick with it.
Speaker 1:And I know for some of you, you've heard this before, probably, and you're like, okay, this seems like common sense. Yeah, it seemed like common sense to me too, until I built a big team and I thought, ooh, I'm a big business owner. Now look at all my 20, 30 employees. I own a big business. Yay for me. Yet the revenue numbers were the same. So take that for what you will not to mention.
Speaker 1:When you can isolate whatever the thing that you're the best at, you don't have to pay for that thing. So if you're an operations guy, you don't have to pay a lot of money for a very good operations person. You can do all that yourself. If you're a really good sales guy, well guess what? Now you don't have to pay commissions, which is just going to fuel that business. You should just get to a point to where, especially in home service, where you have enough cash reserves on hand, where you can afford full-time employees and not have it stress you out, while still be able to buy equipment at bulk. I really should have just taken the time to build that cash so I could have had a surplus of equipment, a surplus of materials, a surplus of vehicles and then start building from there. All right.
Speaker 1:My second key takeaway is stay away from really big jobs that have really long payback periods, and I think this was more of an ego thing for me, you know, when I got into this, like I said, before I started my own business, I had helped build a solar company to 25 million in less than a year and it was only doing about 600K in revenue. So when I got into my startup that it was now mine, my ego was like, oh, this should be easy. You can just put gas on it. Just copy the model you had at the solar company two separate industries, two separate investments. The owner had way more money in the business had been around longer. Can't just model it.
Speaker 1:I really wanted to go after big government federal jobs, especially being a veteran, I have certain federal grant access that allows me to bid on certain types of bids and I thought this would be a huge selling point for the business, especially because at the time residential sales were a little bit slow. What I failed to realize is when you do these big jobs and you're really not built for it yet, you're going to spend a lot of money money you don't have to do the jobs Well. Federal government city take a long time to pay you back. So you've got to front all this money and so if cashflow is already constricted because you're not that big yet and you don't have a ton of revenue coming in and, yes, you might get this 50, $60,000 job you may not see that money for a long time. I'm currently in a job which I can't talk about specifically, but I have not been paid the full amount yet, and this is over a year ago, all right, so what does that mean? Well, to still run the other side of the business, you still need cash.
Speaker 1:So what I had to do was take out loans For my small business owners out there who have been in business less than two years. You know where I'm going with this. You get the worst loan packages available because you don't have a ton of business credit built up yet and a lot of times your personal credit is lower because you just fronted all the money to start the company in the first place, which is what happened to me. So now you have these loans, which are current interest, which is burning more money, and, yes, you will get these big gigs which can lead to more. But right place, right time.
Speaker 1:What I should have done is just slowed my role, focus on one division at a time, build up the residential side and maybe, like the low end commercial before I went to big federal residential side, and maybe like the low end commercial before I went to big federal, big scale. Now I will say they have been a lot of fun to execute on and I have learned a lot. So, although the money side might've been a bad decision, this also isn't the worst decision at all, because in business I do feel like if you're not earning, then you are learning, and sometimes if you can make more mistakes quickly, well, then you can make good decisions even faster. You can learn from them. If I can just survive the bad decisions, then my business will be bigger and stronger later down the road, and so I think in this scenario the big positive is I've learned a lot about the federal government process, the city process, all the way these things work. So now in the future, I'll be way more better suited to execute on them. Funny enough, that did happen and we were able to bid on a new project that ended up making us a lot more money because I knew how to bid it properly, I knew the timelines better, I had prepayments built into the actual project itself, so that way I wasn't eating all the costs and overall it was a less stressful endeavor.
Speaker 1:Takeaway number three is segment out your admin team. It is very tempting when you have an admin team and maybe only have one or two people to try to have them do a bunch of different things for you. What I have found is this never actually works out, even if they are super capable at their job. Instead, you want them laser focused on one, maybe two tasks max, and the reason for this is, as you probably understand the more distractions you have, the least you can fulfill on the things you want. What you wanna develop, especially as a startup owner, is talent. One thing that you don't have as a startup owner is you don't have the money to bring in the top tier talent that $100 million, $20 million or $50 million of your business can attract. You don't have the benefits. You don't have the pay structure nothing. What you have is a promise of growth. So what you want to do is find someone that's competent, that can follow your instructions, give them one segment of the funnel to do, and then let them grow into an expert at that by giving them constant feedback, performance reviews and then just consistently checking in on them.
Speaker 1:So what I've done in my business, I have my main admin person who only handles customer success and calling leads. That's it. The whole job is just managing clients and calling leads back. That is controlling the funnel and they also help me when I start losing my mind on anything admin related. We also work together on the payroll. That just takes some of the stress off me, but that's a low time task that all they need to do is be able to work an Excel sheet and we are good to go. My other admin individual only handles installation, so they're only worried about parts, materials and install times and just making sure that if there are any technical questions that they can call and answer that to the clients. So I have two basically heads of department both doing separate things, hyper focused, and that has allowed me to actually have a company that runs way more efficiently. They can exchange clients back and forth and just focus on what they're really good at.
Speaker 1:This has actually been the biggest reason why I think we had such a record month. Last month I had way more leads coming in that were qualified that I was able to run. I was able to close them at a high level. We had bigger touch points. We were able to put data back into my marketing. That was way more efficient and overall I was actually able to understand which marketing was working, which wasn't, and there's all these downstream effects from this that I didn't even realize. I was able to really find holes and have accurate data in my CRM because the admin is actually putting in the effort they're supposed to be. Shout out, michelle, you rock.
Speaker 1:As many of you understand, data is the only thing you should be making your decisions off of, and if you don't have good data, you can't grow the business. But if you're like me, where I'm at now, and you are taking over the entire process of one part of the business, which is sales, you need someone that can get you reliable data so that way you're not spending hours and hours and hours focusing on that when you should be focusing on, like I talked in the first thing, the skill that makes you the best. Takeaway. Number four is do not grow for the sake of revenue. Grow for the sake of profit, and this was a big ego mistake that I made in the first two years Because of my last history being a killer salesperson in water treatment. Prior, I was doing about 30, 40k a month and then with the solar company, I was making around 70, 80k a month and grew that thing to 25 million.
Speaker 1:I just had revenue stuck in my head. I just said, I need to hit a million, 2 million, 3 million, and I need to do it in X number of time. So I created these really constricting, arbitrary timelines for arbitrary numbers. What I didn't think about and this is such a basic thing which I know a lot of people fall into is what was my profit on this? Because that's really all that matters, and we all know profit is what matters. My mistake was I just assumed that the outcome would correlate with the thing that I wanted. For example, if I make a million dollars doing my quick back of napkin math, I'll make 300K Perfect 30% margins. I'll make 300K in profit. We're doing good. When I hit 2 million, I'll make 600K in profit we're killing it.
Speaker 1:And then when I hit 5 million, so on and so forth, that's what I was thinking, not taking into account the cost of that growth, the cost of when mistakes go wrong, when your van breaks, when you got to put someone up in a hotel, when you got to pay back a client for an install it doesn't go good, all these things. And when you're trying to grow, it costs money to grow. You got to buy licenses, you got to buy more equipment, you got to pay for recruiting. There's all these ancillary costs that go into that profit that you think you're going to make, and when you're trying to grow you're going to be losing that money. So instead, kind of going back to my first point, you should just focus on what are the most profitable moves I can make, even if it means getting less deals, less total revenue, what is actually going to bring me back the best return, and then you grow to fit better returns.
Speaker 1:Let's say I stay in one location, keep it super centralized, I only have four deals a month, but in those four deals a month I'm making, let's just say, 10 K in profit compared to, let's say I'm doing 10 deals a month but I'm in four locations and I'm only bringing back, let's say, three K in profit. Okay, because I've expanded too quickly and I'm not making any money, which yeah, spoiler alert it's kind of what happened to me for the first year. If you stay localized and you stay really small and you just stack that 5k, 4k, that small profit, month over month over month over month over month, well then by the end of the year you actually have a decent amount of money to now use to expand without having to rely on the small what you thought was going to be big margins in that localized area. This was a mistake that if I could do it all over again, I would have definitely started off slower. I would not have set these arbitrary numbers. It doesn't matter if you make a million dollars a year if you don't get to keep any of it. Which guess what? Our first year we did do a million in revenue, but guess what Did I make that money? No, it went into growth and into mistakes and all these other things. And if you don't think you're going to make mistakes or bad decisions in your business, you are well mistaken. So give yourself that buffer. Start off slower than you need, because if you can just stack the cash, it really will allow you to accelerate faster. Which, because I just had a record month with such a smaller team with marketing spend the same. I am now seeing those downstream effects. I will say the only benefit that came from me growing too quickly is I did develop a pretty big footprint over the entire area that I service. So now my referral base is bigger. I'm able to actually target more people. I've also been able to segment the different areas in the States that I service, so I know where to target to make the most money. However, if I could take it all back, I would have preferred to go slower, because I think my gut tells me I probably could have done way more than what I've currently done If I had just slowed down a little bit.
Speaker 1:Takeaway number five, which is probably the most crucial for team management, is have those hard discussions early and then over deliver or over give for your top performers. I have always been someone that has been very generous and I really like to help people grow. The mistake that I made is when you're in a smaller business type of model and you have all these people around you that you're trying to pay things for or give them raises or give them incentives. I got into a scenario where I just wanted everyone to succeed and win, and so I gave people way too much trust early on. I didn't have the hard conversations that I needed to have, being like, hey, john, you kind of suck at your job and this is what we need to do to get better. Instead, I would kind of tiptoe around it. I would try to gently enforce them, try to go out with them and knock doors with them or go into the homes with them, and it never actually worked.
Speaker 1:And there needs to be hard lines that you draw in the sand in business, where if they don't perform, you need to have that conversation with them ASAP. And If they don't perform, you need to have that conversation with them ASAP. And sometimes you just need to be able to have a very honest and direct conversation and I have kept losers around way longer than I should have and I've also not given the attention to winners as much as I should have. Unfortunately, if you have a bunch of losers around you and you bring a couple of winners in, even if you cut all the losers, it sometimes looks like the business is almost losing anyway because you're losing people.
Speaker 1:Now, what has helped me have these hard conversations now is I just set that expectation when I bring people in, I let people understand the standards that we hold here and that if they are falling from those standards, that they will get one-on-one counseling, but that it's not a personal attack against them. In fact, I would do it because I want them to succeed, I want them to win, and a true leader doesn't care about what other people think. A true leader does not care if they're liked. A true leader actually just wants their team to grow and sometimes for someone to grow, they need the mirror put up to them, even if it's your best salesperson or your best employee. People are humans, so they're going to make mistakes and if you really care about them, you absolutely need to make sure you have those tough conversations and say dude, this is why you're doing this wrong and this is how I'm going to help you improve and I need you to follow this because I want you to win and you're not going to win like this.
Speaker 1:Sometimes the people you're having these counselings with don't even know they're doing it. I've had so many times where my best salespeople actually start killing the culture because they get a little cocky, a little ego driven, they're not filling out the CRM like they used to, they're not making the calls like they used to and they end up setting a bad example for the people downstream of them because they see this guy who's crushing it and when they go to talk to them or we do meetings, they see, hey, this guy's not putting stuff in his CRM. Why should I? This guy's complaining about the leads. I should complain about the leads, whatever it is. You need to nip that shit in the butt as soon as you can, because that's the person they're looking towards. And a lot of times that person has just gotten comfortable and they don't actually know that they're messing up. So you need to check them and say bro, you're the leader here, I need you to act this type of way. And if you don't do that or you're afraid to have that conversation, you're doing such a big disservice to them and your business.
Speaker 1:On the flip side, if you have someone that's an absolute savage, don't wait for arbitrary raises or terms or anything like that. Give them that reward as soon as you actually can. I recently just gave a notice out to my two top people that they will probably end up getting equity in the business, and in fact I will give equity to anyone that helps me build my company. All right, I think that, especially as a small business owner, is the one chip that you have for hardworking individuals. You may not have the money, you may not have the compensation, but if this business can grow, then guess what? They should have a piece of it. And here's the crazy thing Any business, if you keep it along long enough, you do it the right way and you actually put all your effort into building it. Almost any business has the potential to becoming a $5 to $10 million a year business, which, at a moderate exit especially if you're doing, let's say, two to three X EBITDA you might be able to sell for two, three, 4 million. And guess what? That means? Everyone that helped you, or at least your core few people, can cash out with 500, 600 K and have a really nice payout for the time they put in.
Speaker 1:So please don't be afraid to shower your best people with paid promotions, equity, whatever it is. Maybe it's taking them out to dinner, or maybe it's going out for a gambling night, whatever it is. Just make sure that your core people understand that you care, because, too many times, because they are your best people, they're not going to bring those concerns to you until they are at a point where they're just fed up with everything. No one wants to have to ask for raises. No one wants to have to ask for promotions or gratitude. That should be something innate in your business.
Speaker 1:And, the way I look at it, if I have one of my top performers coming to me to ask for a raise, then I obviously haven't been doing something right, cause they should always feel like they're compensated fairly, that they should, that they know that there's growth if they perform and that I genuinely care about them. Now, when this has happened, the conversations are always gone really well. So not a huge deal, but it's one thing that I feel like I did really well and that also builds you a lot of goodwill whenever you do have dips in the business. Because guess what, guys, if you're a startup, you haven't been in business very long, you're going to have dips in the business and the key is you want to keep those A players around that you were able to bring in so they don't go somewhere else.
Speaker 1:Because I'm going to tell you something, you being in a startup isn't super sexy for a players, all right, so you got to give them something more than compensation, because I can promise you, unless you're funded by some sort of an equity fund or some sort of really nice series, a investment, you don't have the money to pay these people what they're worth. So you better give them something they want to stick around for. And if you like this video and you want to see more content like this, please leave a comment below. Let me know what you liked, what you didn't like, and I'll go ahead and make more of that content.