Build the team that runs the company when you're not there.
Two days on-site with Rich Ashton. Plus six months of monthly coaching. Built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and mechanical owners running $1M to $10M companies who are ready to develop their next layer of leaders.
running Tom's Mechanical
teaching other trade owners
not a consulting firm
Growing Your Own Leadership
Two days that change the room. Six months that change the company.
Most leadership training fails for the same reason: the trainer leaves. The team goes back to the same patterns by Monday. This program was built to fix that. Rich is on-site long enough to teach the system, and on the line long enough to make sure it sticks.
Two Days, On Your Floor
Rich flies in. He's in your shop, in your office, in front of your team for two full days. Plain-language training on the core skills new managers actually need: how to take ownership, how to ask better questions, how to think ahead instead of reacting.
Six Monthly Zoom Calls
One hour every month for six months. Your people. Real situations from the last 30 days. Rich coaches them through the wins and the misses so the training translates into how they show up Monday morning.
Designed Around Trades
HVAC, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, roofing. The examples, the language, and the playbook come from forty years inside a real service company. Not from a leadership textbook. Not from a coaching certification program.
The hardest part of growing a trades company isn't finding leads. It's finding the next layer of leaders.
Most of what's written about leadership in small business comes from people who never ran one. The advice is generic. The examples come from tech startups and Fortune 500s. None of it survives a Tuesday morning at a $4M HVAC shop.
Most trades coaches focus on marketing, pricing, and operations. All of it real. All of it necessary. But the bottleneck that actually stops most companies from growing past $3M, $5M, $10M is quieter and harder to name. It's that the owner is the only leader in the building.
That's not because the team isn't capable. It's because no one taught them how to lead, and the owner doesn't have time. So the owner stays in the truck, on dispatch, on after-hours calls, on every decision over $500.
Growing Your Own is the answer Rich built over four decades doing exactly this work at Tom's Mechanical. Promoting installers into service managers. Service managers into operations leads. Operations leads into the people who run the company when he's not there.
See the BottleneckThe proof is the company that's still running.
Rich didn't build this in a classroom. He bought one HVAC and plumbing company in Arlington, Texas in 1988. He grew it by promoting the people he hired. Most of them are still there.
Bought Tom's Mechanical in Arlington, TX. Still owns and operates it today.
Managers Rich personally developed from the truck up over four decades.
Veteran. Washington State University graduate. Started with Trammell Crow.
Published Growing Your Own. Drawn from 38 years of memos to his own team.
Breaking Through Your Leadership Ceiling.
Rich joins host Market It With ATMA to talk through the moment most trades owners hit a wall, and what he learned about building leaders from inside the company over four decades.
Don't ask the consultants. Ask the people Rich promoted.
The most honest test of any leadership system is whether the people inside it stayed and grew. These voices come from two places: the people who came up through Tom's Mechanical, and the owners who've already brought Rich into their own shops.
"Rich hired me as an installer. I didn't know what a P&L was. Today I run the service department. He spent 14 years teaching me how to think like an owner instead of a tech."
[Alumni Name]
Service Manager, Tom's Mechanical
"We had three guys ready to be promoted and zero idea how to do it without breaking the company. Rich came in for two days and gave us a path. Six months later, two of them are running crews on their own."
[Owner Name]
Owner, [Company Name], [Trade] · [City]
"I've read every leadership book on Amazon. Rich's is the first one written by a guy who actually ran a service company for forty years. The advice lands different when it comes from someone who's done payroll on Fridays for that long."
[Owner Name]
Owner, [Company Name], [Trade] · [City]
Hear it in their voices.
A trade owner teaching trade owners. Not a consultant who read a book.
Most leadership training is sold by people who built a coaching practice, not a company. Most leadership books are written by consultants who never made payroll on a Friday.
Rich is neither. He bought Tom's Mechanical in 1988 and ran it through three recessions, the housing collapse, COVID, and everything in between. He still owns it. He still works with people who started with him in their twenties and are now in their fifties, running departments.
That stack became Growing Your Own. The same memos became the curriculum he now teaches in person at other owners' shops. He doesn't speak in frameworks. He tells the story of the guy he hired, the mistake he made, what it cost him, and what he'd do differently. The audience nods because they've been in the same room.
Rich's groundbreaking book is available on Amazon.
Get it on Amazon
Not a leadership book. 40 years of memos to my team.
Bi-monthly notes Rich wrote to his own people, on his own letterhead, about the things going wrong and the things quietly working. Promoted. Fired. Rehired. Trained. Trusted. The stack got tall enough to bind.
If you run a trades business, the book reads like someone walked into your office and started telling stories about the same week you just had. It's not theory. It's the conversation the guy across the table from you would have, if he'd already done what you're trying to do.
Two short answers to the questions most owners ask.
Why Do I Need This Book?
The Importance of Mentors
Read the one article that explains why trades companies stop growing.
No email. No form. Just the honest breakdown of the bottleneck most owners never name.
See the BottleneckFree. Anonymous. Honest.