Optimized Entrepreneur / Jeremy Hanson

This episode is sponsored by MOD. Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with promo code HANSON. See their website for important safety information.
Most service business owners think of sales as the thing you do to land a customer. On this episode of Optimized Entrepreneur, Jeremy Hanson argues that sales is the single most important skill a service business owner can develop, and that you cannot get great at it without also mastering consistency, reputation, work ethic, cost control, and accountability. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of building service businesses, Jeremy explains why a service customer is really buying confidence rather than labor, why your reputation closes deals in rooms you never enter, and why your crew, your receptionist, and your branded trucks are all part of your sales operation whether they know it or not.
Using a commercial fleet washing account as a working example, Jeremy walks through the difference between selling on price and selling on value. A ten dollar per truck price gap on a twenty-five truck fleet adds up to thirteen thousand dollars a year. The same account at eighty-five dollars per truck, washed weekly, produces one hundred ten thousand five hundred dollars in annual revenue and five hundred fifty-two thousand five hundred dollars over five years, which is why the first sale is often the smallest one. Jeremy also covers knowing when to walk away from an unprofitable contract, how to say no in a way that earns future work, what a useful follow-up looks like, and why every owner should keep selling personally even after building a sales team.
The episode closes with an announcement: Optimized Entrepreneur is building a new training course, Master Sales for Service Businesses. Details will be posted at Optimized1.com, and Built Different newsletter subscribers will hear first when it opens.
Optimized1.com is home base for the show. Every episode, the Built Different newsletter, and the Optimized1 membership community live there. Members get tips, extra content, courses, and a community of people who have built businesses and talk honestly about what works. Visit https://optimized1.com to sign up for Built Different, join the Optimized1 community, and be first in line for Master Sales for Service Businesses.
Today's episode is brought to you by MOD, and we're glad to have them back on Optimized Entrepreneur. MOD is a telehealth service that connects qualifying patients with licensed medical providers who can prescribe a once- or twice-daily modafinil drink that can keep you energized, focused, and alert throughout the day. Modafinil was invented in the 1970s and has been used by soldiers, pilots, and astronauts in high-stakes situations where full concentration and alertness are paramount. Every patient completes their own online evaluation with MOD's medical team, which is the kind of standard this show respects. Visit https://mod.com for a free consultation and get 10% off your first order plus free shipping with promo code HANSON. See their website for important safety information. Thank you to MOD for sponsoring the pod.

Jeremy Hanson spent the day sitting across the desk from trucking terminal managers, and every one of them described the same frustration: they have work to be done and money set aside to pay for it, but they can't find people who show up and do the job right. In this episode of Optimized Entrepreneur, Jeremy explains why that complaint is one of the clearest market signals an entrepreneur will ever hear. Drawing on his own years running a winter truck-washing route in Wisconsin, he makes the case that unglamorous, dependable service work is where real opportunity is hiding. He explains why a handful of recurring commercial accounts can outperform a pile of one-off jobs, why a face-to-face conversation is beating the crowded inbox, how "the follow-through economy" rewards the contractor who handles bad days honestly, and why small local operators have an edge over national vendors. The episode closes with a practical one-week challenge for trades and service business owners and for anyone thinking about starting a business.
QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS. Where are the best business opportunities right now? Often in service industries where customers have budget and need but can't find dependable providers, such as fleet washing, commercial cleaning, HVAC, plumbing, landscaping and property maintenance. Why do recurring commercial accounts matter so much? A few steady clients create predictable income, make hiring and route planning possible, and often lead to referrals within the same industry. Is email marketing dead? No. Jeremy uses it and calls a good list an asset, but he argues it works best after a real conversation, when the follow-up email has a name and a face attached to it. What is the follow-through economy? Jeremy's term for a market where basic discipline, like calling back, showing up on time, sending accurate estimates and owning mistakes, has become a competitive advantage because so many providers fail at it. How can a small service business compete with larger companies? Through responsiveness, flexibility, local relationships and reliability, while meeting the larger customer's vendor requirements in advance. How do you validate a service business idea before investing? Talk to ten managers in the industry, look for patterns in the problems they describe, find out what they pay now, and run the numbers before buying equipment.

Before the podcast network, before the businesses, Jeremy Hanson drove a truck-washing route through the Wisconsin winter. Twenty hour days in snow and single digit temperatures, pressure washer lines freezing solid, soaked gloves, and semi after semi coated in road salt. On this episode of Optimized Entrepreneur with Jeremy Hanson, he takes listeners back to one three a.m. moment in a frozen truck lot and uses it to unpack the question every entrepreneur eventually faces: what are you actually willing to do to be successful, and is your reason strong enough to carry you through it? Jeremy breaks down the hidden price of success that never shows up in highlight reels, including comfort, ego, being misunderstood, and being a beginner in public. He explains why willingness is the scarcest competitive advantage an early stage founder has, why a real why has to outweigh the pain rather than erase it, and how to tell healthy sacrifice from self-destruction. The episode closes with a practical six-part framework for getting through your own frozen fingers season without losing your health, your integrity, or the people you are building for.
This episode is supported by Perplexity Computer, and it is a sponsor that fits the conversation. Every hard season goes easier when you stop wasting hours pulling information together. Perplexity Computer connects to the tools you already use, builds a morning command center for your business, and goes beyond answering questions to take on full projects, from rebuilding an email flow to drafting your next ad campaign. Instead of locking you into one AI model, it sends each step of the work to the right model for the job. Start your free trial of Perplexity Computer today at https://pplx.ai/hanson and experience the next phase of AI.

"It'll only take an extra ten minutes." Jeremy Hanson shows how that one sentence can cost a 22-technician company $154,440 to $228,800 a year and up to $1.14 million over five.
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After two complaints about sagging fiber, a fiber-to-the-home manager ordered fasteners every ten inches instead of every twenty-four on every install. Jeremy, consulting in the room, ran the numbers. At six to eight installs per tech per day, ten minutes becomes 22 to 29 extra labor hours daily and 5,720 to 7,627 hours a year, three to four full-time employees of payroll with no added customers. He walks it year by year to as many as 38,000 hours, then measures the loss against what a technician produces, $187.50 to $250 an hour against a $27 to $30 wage: roughly $1.07 million to $1.9 million a year in production capacity. He explains why good managers make this mistake, why a training problem should never be solved with labor, and gives a five-question test for pricing any rule before you make it.

When business slows down, most owners assume their customers are out of money. Jeremy Hanson argues that in most downturns the money is still there, but customers have grown far more selective about where it goes, and that is a problem an entrepreneur can solve. In this episode of Optimized Entrepreneur with Jeremy Hanson, Jeremy walks through how to keep a business busy when inflation, layoffs, high interest rates, and rising household costs squeeze your customers. He explains how to reposition a service from a want to a need by selling the result it protects, using an exterior cleaning business as the working example. He lays out the good, better, best pricing structure, explains why panic price cuts destroy margins, and makes the case for getting smaller before getting cheaper. From there the episode moves into finding the categories where money is still moving, turning a customer list into targeted campaigns, building recurring revenue, responding to leads quickly, running a structured follow-up system, taking market share while competitors retreat, building referral partnerships, removing friction from the buying process, staying visible, and using a slow season to fix the business from the inside. The takeaway: hard times do not erase opportunity, they move it, and the owner who adapts fastest finds it first.
QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS
How do you keep a small business busy during an economic slowdown? Jeremy Hanson recommends repositioning offers around the results customers need, creating tiered pricing, working your existing customer list, building recurring revenue, following up consistently, and staying visible while competitors pull back. Do customers really stop spending during a recession? In most slowdowns they keep spending but become more selective, moving money toward needs, maintenance, urgent problems, and convenience. Should a business lower its prices when sales drop? Jeremy argues against automatic price cuts because costs such as insurance, fuel, rent, and payroll do not fall with revenue; he recommends smaller, lower-priced offers that still protect margin. What is good, better, best pricing? It replaces a single yes-or-no price with three tiers, shifting the customer's decision from whether to buy to which option fits. What does get smaller before you get cheaper mean? It means shrinking the scope of an offer, such as a shorter engagement or a single-service maintenance visit, rather than discounting the full product. Why is a customer database valuable in a slowdown? Past buyers, unclosed estimates, and lapsed customers can be reached with targeted campaigns at a fraction of the cost of acquiring new customers. How should a business follow up on estimates? Use a helpful sequence at roughly day one, three, seven, fourteen, and thirty, varying the format and giving the customer useful information each time.
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