Outta the Weeds: How to Build a Business That Doesn’t Run You
You Built a Successful Business. Now You’re Trapped Inside It.
You started this business to do great work and make good money. Now you’re answering every call, writing every estimate, managing every crew, and wondering when it was supposed to get easier. This book is the answer to that question.
The Ground We Cover
Pricing
Why most contractors undercharge and what changes when you stop. How to figure out what your work is actually worth and raise your rates without losing the customers you want to keep.
Delegation
How to stop being the person every decision runs through. What to hand off first and how to do it without everything falling apart behind you.
Hiring
How to find good people and keep them longer than one season. What to look for, what to pay, and what the contractors who hold onto good crews do differently.
Money
The gap between what the business brings in and what you take home. How to read the numbers that tell you whether the business is actually working for you.
Systems
What replaces you when the business outgrows one person’s memory. The specific structures that carry the weight so your willpower doesn’t have to.
Freedom
What it looks like on the other side. The contractors who built their way out describe what changed and what they wish they’d done sooner.
About the Author
Ryan Deemer has spent over a decade working directly with trades contractors on the business side of their operations. Hundreds of conversations with owners across excavation, HVAC, electrical, landscaping, plumbing, and construction. The same problems kept showing up in different businesses, different trades, different states: good operators, growing revenue, no structure underneath it, and an owner who hadn’t taken a real day off since filing the LLC.
The book came from those conversations. Real contractors, real numbers, real outcomes. The ones who built systems around the business instead of running it on willpower got their evenings back, started taking home what the work was actually worth, and stopped being the single point of failure in their own company.
Ryan is also the host of the Outta the Weeds podcast and co-founder of Throttled Up Marketing.
The Book Fixes the Business.
We Fix the Marketing.
If the problem is that qualified customers aren’t finding you, that’s where Throttled Up comes in.