Handle The Sh!T

#11 - Kick Off To 2026 - Alignment over Hustle to Build a Scalable Septic Business

• Tanya Wilson & The Crew at HomeField East Valley • Episode 11

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0:00 | 25:03

 📍 OVERVIEW 

In the first Handle the Sh!t episode of 2026, Tanya Wilson pulls back the curtain on one of the most impactful leadership practices she has implemented in nearly 17 years in the wastewater industry. This episode is a deep dive into how intentional team alignment, transparency, and shared ownership thinking can completely transform a septic business. 

Fresh off a powerful annual team meeting, Tanya walks listeners through exactly how she reviews financials with her team, celebrates wins, builds accountability, and aligns personal and professional goals across the company. This is not a theory. These are real systems, real conversations, and real results that have helped HomeField East Valley grow, scale, and build a culture people are proud to be part of. 

If you want a septic business that runs with clarity, buy‑in, and momentum, this episode is a must‑listen.  

🧠 TOPICS WE COVER 

  • Why your mindset as an owner sets the tone for your entire team
  • How transparency around financials builds trust and buy‑in
  • What an annual alignment meeting should actually look like
  • Using reviews and data to reinforce culture and performance
  • Why team goal setting fuels retention and accountability
  • How alignment creates scalable growth, not burnout

✨ 5 THINGS YOU’LL LEARN

  1. How to run an annual team meeting that drives real alignment and ownership
  2. Why sharing revenue, profit, and expenses reduces resentment and confusion
  3. How to use reviews and wins to reinforce culture and pride
  4. Why measuring performance is non‑negotiable for scaling
  5. How personal goals tied to team goals increase engagement and retention

🔗 RESOURCES & LINKS

💬 QUOTE OF THE EPISODE

“Alignment is what allows you to scale. Hustle alone will never get you there.

🎧 Thanks for Listening to Handle The Sh!T!

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🌐 Website: HomeFieldOnsite.com/East-Valley
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🐦 X (Twitter): @HomeFieldEastValley
💼 LinkedIn: Tanya Merritt Wilson
📧 Email: Tanya@homefieldonsite.com

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 Tanya Wilson (00:02.466) Hey y'all, welcome back to Handle the Shit. It's our first new episode of 2026 and we are so excited for this new year that is coming up. I have to tell you that we just came off of such an incredible team meeting and I've been dying to share it with y'all so that you can take notes from this and implement some of the stuff inside of your business. Now this isn't just like, it might work or it might not. I really want you to understand I have worked in this industry for almost 17 years now. And this is one of the most impactful things that I have ever done with my team is what I'm about to share with you today. So definitely get a notebook, take some notes, figure out how you can implement some of this inside of your septic business so that you can continue to grow. You can continue to expand. And you know, a lot of times we think right off the bat, growing means more revenue. And that's the only thing that really matters. I want to be a seven figure business. Okay, that sounds cool. And you know, that's a really great thing to aspire to. We say inside of Home Field, everybody has a million dollar separate company. You why? Because it's really not that hard to hit a million dollars in this industry. There's so much work, like there's more work than there are contractors to actually do it. But what's really important is number one, your team. You don't want to do this job by yourself. No one wants to be a lone wolf out there by themselves doing this day in, day out, all by themselves. There's so many businesses here inside of the Phoenix area where you'll call them on the phone and the guy that answers the phone is the guy that's like pumping the tank at the same time. We want to elevate and the whole purpose of this podcast is to help you all elevate your septic company to the next level where it's a no brainer that you're obviously the best pick in your entire town because of the things that you're doing. And I truly believe with all my heart, and this makes me so emotional because I'm so passionate about it. It all starts with your team. Tanya Wilson (02:24.237) But you as a business owner, if you're listening owners, it really starts with you. And the first thing we got to look at is our mindset. As owners, I'm going to speak to you for a moment. If you don't have the right mindset, your team will never develop the right mindset because you're the leader. You're the one that sets the tone and the tempo in the way things are done. If you drag your feet, or drag your ass into the office, a grump, yell at people, don't really care. Do you think anybody that works on your team is gonna care? Hell no. They'll be like, this fucking guy doesn't cares. This lady doesn't care. So why should I care? Why should I care more than the boss does? And I know we've all been in positions before where we probably felt that way. Could have been the reason why you started your business in the first place is because you worked for someone that behaved that way. We're not gonna do that. No, no, no. Even if 2025 was kind of a shit year and you didn't do real great in this area, you can always turn that around. There are these amazing things called books that you can read that can teach you all kinds of stuff or you'd stay tuned to this podcast, because I love this. This is my most passionate thing that I... love about building a business is building the team. Now, many people that I talk to in this space, it's their least favorite. I'm sure you probably hear, or if you're part of any of the Facebook communities, y'all know what I'm talking about, where people are just not very courteous or not very kind, or they don't share a lot that can make you successful in this business, even though they may have done it. I say, okay. Don't learn from them because it's probably not done in a great way. And that's the purpose of this podcast. But if you want to build something substantial, something that's going to make an impact on your community, if you want to build something you're proud of when you lay your head down at night and you're helping people in their families build a career, you have to have an incredible infrastructure. Tanya Wilson (04:44.211) Around what you do to train the people that you bring on to your team. So What I do at the beginning of every single year is I? Have a whole day on a Friday that we hang up the trucks We take them in for maintenance one of my trucks got some new shoes Got some new brakes They get washed up really nice and it's kind of just a day off for the fleet And it is a day where we all come together in an outside space. We're part of a co-working space here in Gilbert. So we go to a conference room and we sit around a table and we learn together and we plan together and we dream together. I love this so much. The last part of that is the most important part. And I'm going to tell you why. So we come in at the very beginning and we learn what What did we do in 2025? What were our numbers like? How many reviews did we get? What were some of the notable progressive things that we did inside of the business? We sat down and looked. We were up 35, 37 % top line revenue last year. But the most important part is allowing the time for your team to ask questions. about top line revenue, they understand that. They see how much money we're bringing in. How many of you have team members that the mentality is like, Joe goes home with a million dollars in his pocket every year because we made Joe a million dollars. That's not how business works. And the more you will be transparent about your numbers and the more you know about your numbers and the more you're willing to educate your team on how a business works, the less of that shit talk you have going on within your team. I'm extremely transparent with my numbers. It's where we are top line. I educate them on what cost of goods sold are and what goes in that line. Okay, here's your gross profit. You guys know what gross profit is? Now you do, right? Now we take out our expenses. Then we have our bottom line revenue. Now we use this money to pay off loans and equipment and all the other things that you don't see here. Tanya Wilson (07:06.21) And it really helps with the buy-in of the business of them understanding, know, like last year we did just over $2.9 million. Damn it, we were so close to our $3 million goal. I digress. But at the end of the day, you look at it and you're like, fantastic, we have a $500,000 profit. So people naturally would think, well then the owner gets $500,000. Well, that's not how that works. And we both know that the bottom of the P &L is not the amount of money that's in your bank account. Can we all agree there? I wish the IRS would get behind that, but sadly they haven't caught up yet. Anyways, explaining to them what we have, explaining to them what those notes look like on that equipment. We're celebrating the fact that two of our pump trucks They'll be paid off this year. That's a really cool thing because now we can use that money and reinvest it into some other places, which gets them thinking about what we can do next. What do we want to buy next? What can we do next? Do we need to stockpile some cash for a few months so we have a better cash supply if in our shit hits the fan fund? That's a good thing to have. I don't know about you, but I had a truck that went down this year. with the transmission that blew out that I didn't even have for an entire year. It was an older truck, but it was out of warranty, right? So that really sucked. That sucker was $17,000. If I didn't have those funds put away, that truck would have been down even longer than the 37 days it sat at the dealership to get the transmission in the first place. Get where I'm going here? So it was really about communicating with your team financially. Where are we at in this business? Where do we need to be to be more comfortable in this business? It helps them get behind why they sell extra out in the field, why they get paid $25 an hour plus commissions, why don't they get more per hour and still get the commissions? Why, why, why? You can address all of these things if you create an actual environment where people feel Tanya Wilson (09:25.493) like it's okay to speak up and ask questions, which is a very, very important thing to do. That's why I do it at an offsite where it's a little kind of jolt anyways. They don't feel like they're inside of the business. They're actually outside and we're not like people inside of the business, but it almost gives you like the real human feel of we are real people outside of here that work together as a team inside of a business somewhere. We're working on that today. That's our big focus today. The next thing that we talked about in the meeting was reviews. Who were the review stars? Call them out. I actually had chat GPT go through our reviews on Google and pull out the most impactful reviews for everybody. And my gosh, like I got so emotional reading them. even told my team, I was like, this is like reading like a really good report from somebody about my kids. Like I'm just so proud of them. Not that they're my children. but I'm just so proud of the progress that they have made and who they've become working at Home It's just so cool. So many great things. I mean the words that were actually used inside of these reviews just literally made me want to start crying a little bit because I was like how is this possible that we've taking an industry Well, I know how it's possible because we've worked our asses off and had a game plan, but we've taken an industry where most people think, you know, Joe Blow in the overalls is going to show up, pump a septic tank out, and they don't really expect over the top service or anything amazing to happen during this time. Well, it does with our team and they're pleasantly surprised until they say so many good things. I'm trying to pull up here. Okay, here's my list. So the top 10 words customer used to describe Homefield East Valley was number one, great. Could you get a better word? Holy hell. Two, recommend, which is amazing because that's what you want. They're not only writing you a review, they're recommending you. Holy crap. Professional, friendly, helpful, knowledgeable, quick, reliable, efficient, and the best one, honest. Tanya Wilson (11:51.47) What an amazing thing. We got 183 new Google reviews last year. That's incredible. Today, we set at 599 reviews. I'm so pleased with this. We have more reviews by double, triple, quadruple companies in this valley that have been around for 40 years. It's all about the automation. if you haven't listened to that podcast episode, I'll link it down here. Go get yourself set up on some automations. Chirp is fantastic. We love them. There is also a link to them in the show notes as well. But some other things that we talked about this year, like you have to celebrate the wins of what your business has had in 2025. We were featured in both top industry magazines in one year. We were on the cover of pumper or on the cover of installer in March and on the cover of pumper So cool It came out for the July issue on June 30th, which was our eight-year anniversary of the company If the stars didn't align there I don't know what the hell happened. Like to me, that is just God confirming good job. Good job with sticking to it. Such a cool thing. We started this podcast in the last year. We created three new positions. We only have nine full-time positions as it is. So we were, created three new positions this year. We bought a new excavator. We bought a new service truck. Like you really have to celebrate these things so that your team understands. You know what it actually means to you. We really have a team of owners and that's so, so, so important. Many times in the trades it's like, I'm not going to tell them my secrets because then they'll go start their own business. Trust me, they won't. If you give them a good place to be. Also, when you explain all the steps that it takes to run a business, that's going to be a challenge for some. Fantastic. Promote them. Maybe they'll buy your business and you can have a life again. Tanya Wilson (14:08.465) Or in my case, I love for them to be able to learn all about this company and move to a new area and be able to start their own home-filled franchise. That's the ultimate goal for everybody. I think that would be amazing. But everybody just expanded personally and professionally so much. And it's so refreshing when you hire people in that have worked for other neighboring companies. and they just can't stop bragging or being so excited about the fact that they're part of this team. All the validation in the world. It's just so cool. Last year's word that we picked was high intention. And it really did mean a ton to us, like high intent and getting the right people in the right seats, which I think we've done a great job of in 2025. High intention of getting our name out so people knew who the hell Home Field was. We did that with a podcast. We did that with the magazines. But this year rolling into it, felt like there needed to be, you know, so much was cast out that now we bring it back in and we get an alignment. And alignment is what helps you scale a business. Alignment is what helps you get to the next level. Not 30 % greater, but we're 2X in this beast this year. No question. That's the goal. That is the goal this year is to 2x our revenue. And how are we going to do that? Because if we show up the exact same way as we did last year, there's no way possible for that to even happen. But what we can do is make sure that we are measuring the proper things inside of the business, that we have scorecards for everybody inside of the business, so that the accountability is there so everyone knows what is expected of them and they know if they're doing a good job. How many people at your company are like, I guess I'm doing a good job because I answer the phones. I mean, I guess I'm doing a good job because I got my jobs done today. And I guess I'm doing a good job because my boss told me, thank you. But how do they really measure it? How is it tangible? First of all, whatever you are not measuring, it is not getting managed. Tanya Wilson (16:24.204) You can't manage things when you have no data. Data is everything. So that was something that we did this past year too, is that we got on a program that could spit us out some data. Service Titan. It's a transition. It's a learning lesson. But this year's data is going to be absolutely phenomenal. And we're so excited about that. We really praised the team about the communication that we've been able to create inside of the business. It has been Absolutely incredible. We adopted Slack about three years ago inside of the business and have specific channels for specific reasons on our team. So we have a technician's channel. We have an office staff. We have a whole team one. We have one for marketing. We have one for installs. We have for installs referrals for the guys on the pump trucks. See new systems need to go in. We have so many channels set up, but it keeps your communication organized. It keeps it out of this phone. And it literally anybody could be anywhere. I can be at a conference with blue collar success group in Florida, pull up Slack. And I know exactly where my technicians are out at and what they're doing. And if they've had any issues today without even pulling up the GPS, that's pretty damn cool. So if you have any questions about Slack, there's also a link down in the show notes. Would love to hear, would love to expand on that in a podcast coming up this year. just to give you some ideas of how we actually use it. We'll do like a screen share. That would be a really good one. But some of our biggest business goals in 2026 is to continue to expand with more franchises, more people getting into this field, more people coming in. This last year, we had seven new teams join us in the state of Texas. Seven! That's a lot of little businesses to start. And we're so proud of them. We're so proud. to be one of the hubs where people come to learn and train and do cool things. So it was really, really exciting to see what we've been able to turn up there. But the most important part of our meeting is really the investment in our team and their goals. You can have work goals all day long, but do the team actually see themselves inside of those work goals? Tanya Wilson (18:47.457) Do they see themselves inside of another pump truck? Do they see themselves inside of having a salesperson or a HR person join? Sometimes they have a hard time wrapping around that. So what I've done every year for the last four years is we have a goal board. It's in our foyer, in our office. And every year at this meeting, we challenge everyone on our team to pick. five personal goals that they have and five professional goals that they have and they have to jot these down on Post-it notes. And then we put them up for display inside of our foyer. So not only do they see them every day when they come in, but also there's great accountability. Sometimes I'll just walk by and if someone's sitting in the office, Twila is in there, I'm like, hey Twila. How are doing with this goal that you said you were going to take more personal time for yourself? What'd you do recently? They're great talking points with your team. Especially if you have someone on your team that maybe you don't relate to a lot, maybe they're a little bit quieter, maybe you have a little different personalities. This is so great for this. And it's true accountability for them with their team members. Last year, it was so cool the things that they were able to actually achieve. Now we have team meetings once a month where we go, we pull these off, we celebrate each other. And it's really cool to see the progress of how some people come into the business and what they've been able to do for their families. Now these can be sales goals. I want to buy a house. I want to go on a cruise. I want to get married. I got two guys having babies this year. there was a lot of financial goals that were presented during the meeting from almost everybody on the team, which tells me as a boss and a leader, I need to invest in some kind of financial education course that we can do as a team meeting that can help kickstart what everyone's trying to do. Because a lot of people said, this is what I want to do with my money. I want to make my money work for me instead of just saving it in savings account. But I don't know how, I don't know what that means. Tanya Wilson (21:08.046) That challenges me as the leader of this company to make sure that I provide that for them. Again, you all know my philosophy at this point that the more you invest in the people in your team, up here and in their hearts, the better team you are ever going to have. And I stand by that forever. Now, these Post-It notes and these goals. are also read aloud by everyone inside of the meeting. They have to stand up and read them. Some of them can be as simple as, wanna go shootin' more. That was a goal. I wanna get to the gym more. I want to go, I want to have adventures with my kids. My goal this year is to visit three new countries. I actually just went to the passport office and filed for my passport. I'm 43 years old and I've never had a passport. Like shit's about to change. We're going to do cool things this year and really dream big. And you as the owner of this business, you have to participate in this. big goals. One of my big goals is to go to a live Tony Robbins program. One of my big goals is to take my girlfriend somewhere fun for my birthday this year and just celebrate and have so much fun. taking my kids on a cruise. Like what can you do to celebrate your life? We're all here grinding. We're all here doing amazing, amazing things for our business. And that's phenomenal. But we have to remember that there's a reason why we did this. There's a reason why we started this shit literally in the first place. It was for time freedom. It was to make great finances for our business or for our business. Yes, but also for our families. to provide an opportunity for other people to come on and make great money so that they can take care of their families. We want to help people that come into this company change their family tree. Tanya Wilson (23:08.277) Lots of times you'll hire people in this industry that don't come from a lot. There may be some scarcity mindset that they really have to get over when they come in. Be that person for them. Be that coach for them. Help them understand what is possible. And that starts with you having a big dream. know, big goals don't get achieved because you're talking louder or because you put them on a damn post-it note. They get achieved. by getting clear. They get achieved by having accountability and they get achieved by doing this together as a team. If you have any questions about this, I'd love to help you. But until next time, keep handling the shit.