6 lessons for home service success from ‘This Old House’ host Kevin O’Connor

Kevin O’Connor, host of PBS’s “This Old House,” knows his way around a remodel. With an ensemble cast of tradespeople, he’s been renovating old homes around the country for more than two decades. Along the way, he’s learned a lot about the home service industry—and the hard-working, knowledgeable professionals behind it.

As host of one of the first home improvement shows on television, Kevin has worked with countless professional contractors: plumbers, landscapers, carpenters—all of whom still own their own businesses. He’s found that success isn’t just about delivering a quality product or completing a seamless install; skills like collaboration, specialization, and storytelling can also increase your longevity in an industry with the third-highest level of burnout among employees.

Shows: “This Old House” and “Ask This Old House”

Most helpful lesson: “‘No’ is powerful. Everyone wants you for something, and it’s up to you to prioritize. And ‘no’ is the way of sending that message—that’s not important enough for you or me. ‘Yes’ means it’s very important.”

Favorite home pro on social media: Zach Dettmore of Dettmore Home Improvements

Best piece of advice: “It’s never about winning. It’s always about succeeding.”

Keep reading for more lessons from Kevin O’Connor, who helped popularize the home improvement show by putting tradespeople front and center.

1. Build up your ‘no’ muscle

Turning down work is a really hard thing to do. When you’re looking at a pipeline as a small business owner, and you realize that, one, two, three jobs out, you’ve got to fill the book—saying “no” is scary. But I have learned from the folks who I work with that… understanding the concept of opportunity cost is important because every job you take means that you’re filled for that period of time and you can’t take another one. So now you’re in a position [where] if you take a lesser quality job, you’ve blocked an entire chunk of your calendar from taking a higher quality job.

The folks who I work with, they have successfully [built] the muscles to be able to say, “No thank you,” [by growing] a robust enough operation that can withstand a couple of punches, a couple of low periods. [Small businesses should] be lean enough that they don’t have to lay people off when it gets slow but be big enough that they’re able to adjust and bring in revenue in various ways. And that is important because if you’re just going from one job to the next, you’re going to be more inclined to say yes. And that can cost you quite a bit.

2. Aim to succeed, not to win

Winning, by definition, means somebody loses. If [you’re renovating a house and] the architect’s going to try to “win” the project, it’s not going to work very well. They need the contractor, they need the engineer. There’s a constant give and take.

What I’ve seen successful [general countractors] do is [embody the motto]: “The rising tide that lifts all boats.” What’s good for the subcontractors is good for the general contractor. He wins loyalty from them. He wins promptness in terms of their response. He wins their leaning into the project and caring about it considerably. He is giving them business, but they are also making his product better and his business stronger.

Collaboration is essential. To avoid it—to try to win or try to beat out those other people you rely on—[is a mistake]. There’s a lot of people who wash out of our industry, and that’s a big part of the reason why: because they do not know how to integrate those services. They’re trying to win as opposed to trying to succeed.

3. Prioritize specialization and productivity for growth

[A small operation is] always a great place to start for many people. But if you do want to get out of that, then growing is essential. And I believe that productivity and specialization is the secret sauce. It’s basically the definition of [doing more with less].

I have always seen that the successful companies that have grown from small to bigger, from two people to 70 people, are the ones who embrace that specialization and productivity wholeheartedly. They’re constantly chasing it. Everything they do, [they’re thinking:] Is this making me more productive? Is this making my employees more productive? Is it making work easier for them, more efficient?

We’ve got some amazing builders who have stopped building on the job site so they can build everything [faster and more easily] inside a controlled environment. It’s a factory floor, basically. They’re no longer framing walls down on their hands and knees on a muddy job site—they’re doing it at a table.

4. Get a finance expert on the books

If you’re running a carpentry business that does, let’s say, high-end kitchen installs, you would never send in a plumber to trim out the kitchen. And yet so many times, the folks who run small specialized trade companies think they’re going to be the finance person as well—that they’re going to do the invoicing, the materials, the pricing, the collection, the advertising. And it doesn’t make much sense.

They would never send the plumber in to trim out the kitchen. Why would you think that you’re going to be the person who does the finance? I do think people need to really appreciate that running the books and looking at the numbers is a skill in and of itself. And that they shouldn’t feel that just because it has to be done, it has to be done by them.

5. Don’t chase your customers, attract them

There’s roughly 100,000 construction companies in the United States… and 90% of them have 20 or fewer employees. They also typically serve one geographic location. So we’re not branding ourselves like Coca-Cola with a national advertising campaign. [We succeed with a] very small, focused way of telling your story—which is easier now than it has ever been because of the digital world.

We work with a general contractor, Zach Detmore, [owner of Dettmore Home Improvements in New Jersey]. He’s very prolific on social media, but he doesn’t sit there and make posts saying, “Hey, I’m Dettmore Construction, hire us.” He tells a story about what he’s doing on the job site, and in the process of telling that story, he lets everybody who’s watching know his values because he talks about the people who work with him and he shows off what they do. He talks about what he delivers for the homeowner in terms of quality and craftsmanship.

He doesn’t chase his customers. He attracts them. He makes his story so authentic that people start flocking to him. Zach gets over 90% of his new employees who find him via social media, and the same thing goes for client acquisition. That storytelling is essential. It’s also a superpower because you can do it virtually for free, on your own terms. You’re probably not gonna be good at it at first, but you can teach yourself.

Pro tip: Explore these Yelp tools to help you tell an authentic story online, from advice to get you started on social media and ideas for evergreen content to a guide for filling out the “From this business” section of your Yelp Page.

6. Take feedback from your target audience

Even though I don’t run a construction business, I do have to deal with feedback because the show is very public, and there’s more than a quarter million followers on social media. But [I like to say that] I have an audience of four: the four people I work with on every job site. That’s my audience.

For the small business owner, focus on your customers because that’s who you have to pay attention to. You can’t ignore the bad, but you also can’t take it personally. [Critical feedback] is going to hurt your ego. But it is what it is. Deal with it professionally, and move forward.

My experience is that 99% of the people I deal with love the show, and then 1% of them throw these bombs in there: “He doesn’t know anything. I didn’t learn anything.” You just have to… focus on who you want to talk to, and push the rest aside.

These lessons come from two episodes of Behind the Review, Yelp & Entrepreneur Media’s weekly podcast. Listen below to hear from Kevin, or visit the show homepage to learn about the show and find more episodes.