Podcast: How to Built Honey Go Fix It From a Dining Room Table to Dayton’s Most Certified Plumbers
On the day Kassandra Hornik and her husband Shane officially turned on the phones for Honey Go Fix It, they sat around the dining room table in Dayton, Ohio with Shane’s brother-in-law Tyler. They had done their research. They had run the numbers. They were nervous in the way you are nervous when you think something big is about to happen.
Eight hours passed. The phone did not ring once.
That silence became Honey Go Fix It’s first real lesson. You cannot build a Google Business Profile and exist into leads. You have to go get them. On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin sat down with Kassandra for a conversation about what the four years since that quiet October day have looked like: the engineering mindset she brings to problem-solving, the morning routine that sets the team’s tone every day, what happened when she tried to expand into HVAC and commercial too soon, and why marketing is the last thing you should hand completely off to someone else.
A Chemical Engineer’s Approach to Building a Plumbing Company
Kassandra’s background is in chemical engineering. Before Honey Go Fix It, she was sizing pipes in a very different context: processing facility design rather than residential plumbing. When her son was born and she stopped working outside the home, the question of what came next landed differently than expected. Going back to an engineering job meant uncertainty about location, relocation risk, and giving up a home and community she and Shane had built in Dayton.
Shane, who had spent time at Roto-Rooter and Benjamin Franklin Plumbing, knew the trade. A friend suggested they could build this together. The research supported it. The leap felt like now or never.
The engineering training has not left the building. Kassandra describes her approach to every problem in the business, whether it is an employee challenge, a marketing decision, or a customer situation, using the same framework she learned in school: identify the parameters, understand the limitations, inventory the resources, and design something based on what is actually there. That systematic thinking is, she says, what makes Honey Go Fix It a little different.
Four years in, the company has six technicians, a reputation in the Dayton plumbing community strong enough that local plumbers are recommending peers apply there, and a marketing tagline that doubles as a promise: the most masters in the Miami Valley. Kassandra and Shane invest deliberately in their technicians earning their master plumber credentials, both because it is proof of expertise that customers can see and because it signals to the team that the company is committed to their professional growth.
What They Tried: HVAC, Commercial, and the Agencies That Moved Too Slowly
About two and a half years into the business, Kassandra and Shane had an opportunity. Shane carries an HVAC license alongside his plumbing license. One of their technicians had done commercial HVAC work previously. A few jobs came their way. They took them.
The lesson came quickly: “Just having the ability to do something doesn’t mean that you can do it in a timely and profitable manner.” The HVAC work was high-ticket. The execution was not smooth. They were not set up to do it efficiently, and efficiency is what determines profitability on any service call.
A commercial repiping project at a bakery added another dimension. The drain line work itself was straightforward. But the pace of a commercial food business renovation, dealing with multiple city departments, pulling permits, and managing coordination across stakeholders, was nothing like the residential service rhythm the company had built. The project was profitable on paper. Operationally, it did not fit.
The lesson Kassandra carries from both: “Solve the challenges that you have in front of you before you go looking for new ones.” Adding a new flavor of the same business is not inherently additive if it creates new problems the organization is not yet equipped to handle.
The agency experience told a similar story. The first two agencies Kassandra tried were too slow. Website changes took two weeks to push through. For a company that was young, agile, and constantly adjusting, waiting two weeks for a content update was not a workable pace. A third agency, Plumbing and HVAC SEO, worked better for 18 months before traffic slowly declined and prompted a re-evaluation.
What’s Working Now: LSA, Vans, the 3-20s Routine, and Hands-On Marketing
Local Service Ads is the bread-and-butter lead source at Honey Go Fix It. The quality is consistent, the conversion rates are strong, and the channel is well-suited to how residential service plumbing customers search. Thumbtack runs alongside it as a smaller but higher-average-ticket channel. PPC was added only six months ago and is still being calibrated.
The van signage has produced its own consistent return. Kassandra regularly hears from new customers who say they called because they spotted a Honey Go Fix It van in the area. For a young company building brand recognition in a defined geographic market, a well-wrapped vehicle is one of the most cost-effective awareness tools available.
Inside the business, the culture runs through a morning routine Kassandra calls the 3-20s. Every weekday morning the whole team gathers before heading out: three gratitudes, three contributions (something you did recently to make the world a better place), and twenty repetitions of something, twenty minutes of reading, a podcast, or physical exercise. The contributions piece is the one Kassandra emphasizes most. Gratitudes are common. Asking people what they actively did to improve the world around them is a different and more demanding question.
The 3-20s started with eye rolls from some team members. The pattern Kassandra observed was the same one Brent Garrett described in a separate episode of this series: demonstrate it and believe it yourself, and the team will eventually follow. Four years in, the morning routine is part of what makes Honey Go Fix It feel like a place where people want to show up.
On marketing, Kassandra is deliberate about staying close to it herself. She answers phones on evenings and weekends. She talks to the agencies. She monitors the channels. Her framing: “Marketing is not something you get to just hand off. You need to be hands on with it because that is the lifeblood of your business.”
The Lesson: Focus, Grace, and You’re Never Ready Until You Just Do It
The focus principle is the throughline of Honey Go Fix It’s first four years. Not every opportunity that walks in the door is the right opportunity for where the company is right now. The HVAC detour and the bakery project both taught the same thing: a business at six technicians doing residential plumbing should get excellent at residential plumbing before it chases adjacent revenue. The distractions cost more than the revenue they generate when the operational foundation is not ready to hold them.
The one-liner Kassandra returns to with her team is both personal and relational: “If you want grace, you have to give grace.” Employees come to work with full lives behind them. Customers call with plumbing problems and varying levels of knowledge or frustration. When someone makes a mistake or acts in a way that is hard to understand, the starting assumption should be that they were not trying to cause harm. That willingness to extend understanding makes it far more likely that understanding will come back in return.
When Todd Baldwin asked Kassandra what she would tell a young entrepreneur thinking about starting a service business, her answer was short and direct. You are never going to be ready until you just do it. Trust yourself that you are going to figure it out. Because you will not know what you do not know until you are in it.
Honey Go Fix It was built by someone who did not know what she was walking into and figured it out anyway. The phone did not ring on day one. It rings a lot now.
At Everyday Media Group, Todd Baldwin and the team work with residential plumbing and home service companies at exactly the stage Honey Go Fix It is in: established enough to have a proven service model, ready to build a stronger digital foundation, and capable of growing significantly with the right lead attribution, SEO strategy, and channel optimization in place.
Key Takeaways
- Busy is a good problem. The dining room table silence on launch day was not a sign the company was going to fail. It was the first lesson in what running a business actually requires: active, consistent effort to make the phone ring. Four years later, Kassandra is more afraid of underestimating demand than of being overwhelmed by it. Being overwhelmed with business is a good problem to have.
- Solve the challenges in front of you before adding new ones. HVAC licenses, commercial jobs, and new service lines all look like growth opportunities. They are also new problem sets that take bandwidth, expertise, and operational infrastructure. A residential plumbing company at six technicians should become excellent at residential plumbing. Every distraction competes with that.
- Marketing is the lifeblood. You cannot fully hand it off. Kassandra answers phones on evenings and weekends. She monitors channel performance. She talks to the agencies. The business owners who get the most from their marketing are the ones who stay engaged with it, know where the leads are coming from, and can spot when something changes before the agency does.
About Kassandra Hornik
Kassandra Hornik is the co-owner of Honey Go Fix It, a residential service plumbing company in Dayton, Ohio. She holds a chemical engineering degree and co-founded the business with her husband Shane, who has a plumbing background from Roto-Rooter and Benjamin Franklin Plumbing. The company launched approximately four years ago with three people at a dining room table and has grown to six technicians. Honey Go Fix It holds the most master plumber credentials in the Miami Valley and operates on a mission of building sweet lives for both customers and employees.
Search “Honey Go Fix It” on Google or follow Honey Go Fix It on Facebook for plumbing tips, updates, and the occasional amusement.
Is Your Dayton Plumbing Company Getting the Digital Foundation It Deserves?
Honey Go Fix It built its early lead flow through LSA and van visibility. The next layer, stronger organic search, better attribution, and an SEO strategy that compounds over time, is where the real growth happens. Everyday Media Group helps residential plumbing companies build the digital foundation that turns consistent work into consistent lead flow. Schedule a conversation with Todd Baldwin and the team.
