Schwab: Home service businesses hit a $200K-$500K revenue 'valley of despair'
Chris Schwab · From Side Hustle to Clean Exit in 30 Days · May 27, 2025 · at 6:53
Chris Schwab, founder of remote staffing agency Innova Local, explains the operational bottlenecks that prevent growing home service businesses from scaling.
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“So in the home services industry, there's something that we kind of joke about called the valley of despair. And what the valley of despair is, is when you're running a home service business, sort of between 205 100,000 dollars per year in revenue, there's a valley where you're profitable and you're very busy, but you as the owner are not profitable enough to actually hire a full-time office manager. So you're kind of stuck, and a lot of people get stuck in this 20 to forty-k a month rut for years on end, because they're busy, they're growing, and then they keep dropping the ball, and then they crash back down, and they lose accounts, and they repeat the cycle forever sometimes, so.”
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