Podcast: How Mitch Smedley Grew and Sold Smedley Plumbing in Five Years and Built a Coaching Business for Trades Owners
Mitch Smedley has been a plumber for 25 years. In January 2020, he decided to start his own company. He opened Smedley Plumbing on August 1 of that year, directly into COVID-level uncertainty. Five years later, he sold 90 percent of the business and retained 10 percent as an advisor, partly because he genuinely liked the people who bought it. Somewhere in between, he built a YouTube channel with 28,000 subscribers, found a marketing agency that raised his average ticket by $400 in 30 days, and launched Trade Wins Consulting to help other trades business owners get from startup to their first few million.
On a recent episode of Everyday Excellence, Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group talked with Mitch about the van mistake that cost him a quarter million dollars, why marketing agencies are accidentally lying to their clients about lead attribution, and what it actually takes to build a trades business that’s worth selling.
From Plumber to Business Owner: Overcoming the Voices That Said Don’t
Mitch had been a plumber for over two decades before he started Smedley Plumbing. Throughout those years, he kept bumping into the same pattern: he’d grow into leadership roles, develop his skills, and then run out of room to go anywhere that wasn’t ownership.
The problem was the owners he worked for had a consistent way of discouraging that. ‘You don’t ever want to own a company. It’s so stressful. I’ve almost lost everything.’ The messaging was deliberate. These were business owners who wanted to keep their best people from leaving. But Mitch noticed that those same owners were driving to their lake houses on weekends in their Corvettes. The life didn’t match the warning.
It took time to separate the psychological pressure from the reality. In January 2020, he made the decision. Smedley Plumbing would open August 1st. He spent those months building the plan.
Opening During COVID: Why He Didn’t Hit the Brakes
Between January and August 2020, COVID happened. By the time the launch date arrived, the world looked nothing like it had when the commitment was made. Mitch’s wife raised the question most reasonable people would ask: maybe now isn’t the right time.
His answer was that they’d already committed. They opened August 1st and never looked back. Todd Baldwin, who started his own first business the morning after September 11, 2001 after having the training day scheduled for September 12, recognized the same logic. ‘Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur until it’s time to jump,’ Todd said. The commitment existed. Letting external circumstances override it would have meant something different than good judgment.
Smedley Plumbing grew to what Mitch describes as ‘an undeniable size’ in the Kansas City market. Five years later, that business was sold. COVID didn’t stop it. It just made the start harder.
The $250K Van Mistake No Business Owner Wants to Make
About 15 to 18 months into business, Mitch needed vans. Banks weren’t lending to self-employed business owners, so he was paying cash. COVID had begun distorting vehicle pricing, and he was searching the country for deals: medium-roof Ford Transits for around $35,000 each. He flew to Cleveland to buy one. He bought three total.
They sat in his driveway while he found plumbers to run them. When the plumbers came on board, the problem became obvious fast: the vans were too small. A medium-roof Transit can’t carry a water heater and a full set of tools simultaneously. The plumbers were pulling water heaters off the trucks and installing tool shelving in that space instead. It wasn’t a workable setup.
By the time Mitch went back to replace them, COVID pricing had fully hit. The microchip shortage was driving up vehicle costs industry-wide. Extended high-roof vans were now $72,000 each. Three replacements at $72,000 is $216,000, plus taxes, titling, and licensing. The original three vans sold for more than he paid (COVID pricing helped him there), which created a capital gains tax event on the profit. The total cost of the mistake came to roughly a quarter million dollars.
The lesson wasn’t that the original decision was wrong given what he knew in month three. It’s that equipment decisions made early in a fast-growing business can look very different by month 15.
Why Mitch Decided to Sell in Year Five
The sale wasn’t driven by the business struggling. Smedley Plumbing was growing and profitable throughout the listing period. The motivation was time and impact.
Mitch’s stated goal is to make the biggest impact on as many people as possible. As a plumber employed at other companies, his impact was limited to his immediate team and customers. Starting Smedley Plumbing let him impact more people. Building The Void podcast let him share how he did it. The coaching business let him go deeper.
The plumbing company had become a constraint. ‘Twenty-four seven, three sixty-five,’ he said. ‘From the moment I woke up to the moment I slept, everything was about the business.’ He and his wife had established a Wednesday night date night tradition, the only time in the week specifically protected from the business. Everything else was the company.
To build Trade Wins Consulting into what it needed to be, he needed time. Selling 90 percent of the plumbing company was the path. When the buyers turned out to be local entrepreneurs who wanted to run the business as it was and not strip it down, Mitch liked them enough to stay on as 10 percent owner.
What Every Business Owner Should Know Before They Sell
Mitch’s primary advice for anyone thinking about selling a business: never sell under an earnout.
An earnout is a structure where part of the purchase price depends on the business hitting performance targets after the sale closes. In theory, it’s a way to get more money if things keep growing. In practice, Mitch watched another business owner lose the entire earnout to a private equity buyer.
The mechanism is calculated. During negotiations, the buyer assures the seller that nothing will change: keep operating as you are, you’ll earn well on the backend. Then one to two years after closing, the cutting starts. Marketing budgets get reduced. Staff gets trimmed. Spending slows. The effect is to make the performance thresholds impossible to reach. The buyer avoids paying the bonus amounts they’d otherwise owe.
‘Be willing to sell the business and just walk away from it,’ Mitch said. He had the advantage of watching his own father sell a business nine months before he sold his, and he got to see firsthand what the emotional attachment problem looks like. Worrying about what a new owner does with a sold business, he said, is like watching someone do a burnout down the street in a car you sold. It’s not yours anymore.
On structure: Smedley Plumbing was listed with a broker for about six to nine months at a 10 percent commission. Mitch is ambivalent about whether he’d use a broker again. The deal was ultimately restructured as a stock sale rather than an asset sale, which changed the tax treatment in his favor and let him walk away with more.
Video Content, a $400 Ticket Jump, and Why Meta Ads Don’t Work in Home Service
Mitch hired a full-time videographer 18 months into running Smedley Plumbing. He acknowledges it didn’t make financial sense then and still hasn’t made enough YouTube revenue to cover one year of that salary. He’d do it again.
The channel grew to 28,000 subscribers. He hasn’t posted a full-length video in two years. That existing content became the raw material when he brought on Moss Marketing, a Kansas City agency focused on video-based social media content. They took Smedley Plumbing’s catalog and got it in front of the right audiences on Facebook and Instagram.
What happened next: average ticket prices went up $400 in the first 30 days. Nothing else changed. No new sales staff, no new products, no new service offerings. The existing content reached people willing to pay more for quality plumbing service.
But Mitch is precise about what meta ads can and can’t do for a home service company. ‘I have never once in almost six years had a meta ad campaign pay off in a local home service company,’ he said. The ads weren’t generating direct calls. What they were doing was keeping Smedley Plumbing in front of people until those people had a plumbing emergency and went to Google. ‘I can’t control when your toilet’s gonna break,’ Mitch said. ‘But what I can control is how much I’m in your view leading up to your toilet breaking.’
When the toilet does break and the customer searches ‘plumber near me,’ Smedley Plumbing appears everywhere: Google LSA, PPC, YouTube, meta platforms. Todd Baldwin called this the blinking light effect. In a market where most plumbers aren’t running YouTube ads, being the one that is makes you impossible to miss.
Why Marketing Agencies Are Accidentally Lying to You About Your Leads
The attribution problem in home service marketing is real, and Mitch describes it with a clarity most agency conversations skip.
Mary’s toilet breaks. Her neighbor Margaret recommends Smedley Plumbing. Mary can’t find the number, so she Googles ‘Smedley Plumbing’ and calls from the LSA listing. The marketing agency logs this as an LSA lead. When Smedley Plumbing asks Mary how she heard about them, she says her neighbor. Internal tracking logs it as word of mouth. Both are accurate. Both are incomplete.
‘Marketing agencies are accidentally lying to you,’ Mitch said. ‘They’re not doing it on purpose.’ They only have the platform data. The business has the call data. When neither side compares notes with humility, both end up with a distorted picture of what’s actually driving revenue. The referral needed the LSA listing to convert. The LSA listing alone wouldn’t have been enough without the referral. It took both.
The fix is structural. Turn on the lead source field in your CRM and make it mandatory when booking any new customer. Build a detailed, accurate source list that distinguishes between Facebook ad lead and Facebook community referral, between LSA and Google organic. Then compare your internal list against your agency’s reporting without anyone protecting their numbers.
His LSA-specific tip: every week, have whoever answers your phones go back through all LSA leads from the prior week and fill in everything Google asks for on every booked job. Name, address, phone, email, problem type, job price. Google is an information company. Feeding them complete data on your booked jobs is one of the most direct levers for improving LSA performance. ‘A lot of people miss that step and they only get like two LSA leads a month,’ Mitch said.
Trade Wins Consulting: The Coach Before the Coach
Most business coaching programs are priced and built for companies already doing $1 million or more. Their content covers commercial real estate, cost segregation studies, employee retirement programs, and lease vs. purchase decisions. All of it is valuable at scale. None of it makes sense to a one-truck plumber trying to get to truck number two.
Trade Wins Consulting targets sub-$1 million trades businesses with a goal of getting them to $3 to $5 million. The entry level, called Crew, starts at $249 per month. It includes an online video course covering business basics, a private Facebook group of other trades business owners, weekly Friday group coaching calls on Zoom, and two monthly lesson-style coaching calls that often bring in outside experts on topics like marketing, accounting, and leadership. Month-to-month. No contracts.
Higher tiers add private coaching with Mitch and his business partner David. The Captain level gets a 45-minute one-on-one call monthly. The Admiral level gets two per month for owners going through rapid growth or a specific challenge that needs more attention. Members can move up or down between levels without any financial penalty as their business demands shift.
The first thing Mitch typically has to fix with new clients isn’t technical. ‘Business owners say they want to grow, but they’re lying to themselves,’ he said. ‘They don’t want to relinquish control.’ The gap is between being a great tradesman and being a great trades business owner. Closing it means letting team members make mistakes, the same way everyone learns not to touch the hot stove. Nobody learns without touching it once.
Trade Wins grew out of a deliberate choice Mitch made early in the plumbing company: he refused to hire apprentices. Apprentices cost the business for their first three to five years, and at years two to four they tend to develop a false sense of worth right when their loyalty is lowest. Competitors steal them with a couple more dollars an hour, taking the company’s investment with them. Mitch decided to skip that cycle. The teaching instinct that decision left unmet became The Void podcast, then Trade Wins Consulting.
What Trades Owners Can Take From Mitch’s Five-Year Playbook
The clearest thing about Mitch Smedley’s five years is that none of it was accidental. The YouTube channel was a deliberate bet on brand equity before the business needed it. The marketing agency relationship was chosen for video capability and held accountable for results that went beyond lead count. The sale was structured to avoid the earnout trap. The consulting business was built because impact was the real point from the beginning.
For trades businesses working with Everyday Media Group, the conversation with Mitch validates exactly what Todd Baldwin recommends to home service clients: LSA and PPC running together, video content as long-term brand exposure rather than direct response, internal lead attribution built on CRM data and compared honestly against agency reporting, and a clear-eyed view of what each channel actually contributes. ‘Everything works in unison,’ Todd said during the conversation. That’s the model Smedley Plumbing operated on through its growth and into its sale.
‘Better to remain silent and be thought of as an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt,’ Mitch offered as one of his working principles. The other he uses in coaching: the first time you do anything, it’s going to be hard and ugly and inefficient. That’s not a reason to raise the price or walk away. It’s a reason to do it again, better, and set the price once you know what it actually costs you. Business is not linear. Lean in when it’s surging. Implement when it retracts. Keep going. To learn more about Trade Wins Consulting, visit callsmedley.com. Find Mitch on Facebook and Instagram at Mitch Smedley. His podcast, The Void, is available on iTunes and Spotify: search ‘Mitch Smedley The Void.’
