Ben Jordan
Trades Entrepreneur and Coach
He grew up elk hunting in Colorado with his dad and uncles, packing horses four or five miles deep to an old army tent with a wood stove, and he still prefers roughing it in a wall tent to the amenities of an RV. Deer he can mostly take or leave, though his brother John talked him into Kansas whitetail ground, food plots, cameras, and a skinning shack. He has taken his great aunt to New Zealand, Africa, and this year Alaska, on a promise he made her at eleven years old.
- Plumbing And HVAC
- Trades Coaching
- Technician Training
- Root Cause Diagnosis
- Service Business Standards
About Ben Jordan
Ben Jordan is a plumbing and HVAC operator turned coach who trains service companies on standards, consistency, and root cause diagnosis rather than lead chasing. He built a large plumbing business with his brothers, and the ownership group has now decided to sell it so he can scale the coaching side, with a stated goal of making a thousand millionaires over the next ten years.
What Ben built
When he first got into the trades he told his brothers they were going to build the biggest plumbing company the country had ever seen, because he wanted to change the industry. They built a very large one, and his own verdict is that nothing changed, which is what redirected him toward coaching. The company itself runs on a single standard he repeats in training: serve the customer rather than fix the appliance, find the root cause, and set things up so the customer sees you less. His teams train constantly rather than a couple of times a year, which is the part Sam singles out as impressive, and Jordan's claim for it is not that they are the biggest or the smartest but that nobody will outwork them or match their consistency. On the coaching side he answers his own direct messages, charges for the work because people who do not pay do not pay attention, and points to clients such as Trent's group doing a hundred and fifteen thousand in revenue in their first three weeks. He and his partners are now selling the plumbing business and staying on to run it while he builds the teaching side.
Ben in the field
Hunting has been in his life since he was about eight, on Colorado trips with his dad, his uncles, and his siblings, hunting parties of twenty five people, horses, and an old army teepee tent with a wood burning stove. At fifteen or sixteen he was in a day when a herd came through and the family took three bulls and eight cows, and he gutted more elk that day than most people see in a lifetime. He moved to Utah and kept driving back to Colorado for elk, and he says the trades have paid for everything since: New Zealand, Africa, Alaska this year, all with the great aunt who raised him after his mother passed. Last year he took a bull over four hundred inches on a governor tag in New Mexico, and his brother took another over four hundred on a five day tag. Elk is the animal that matters to him and whitetail was his brother's idea. Most of the time, he says, if he does not shoot anything he is still happy just being out there.
Why this conversation matters
The tension Jordan keeps returning to is perception. He ran an exercise with his own team asking what comes to mind when they hear blue collar, and the answers were laborer and dirty, when he personally knows blue collar guys out-earning doctors. His argument is that too many owners picture themselves as the suspender wearing stereotype who never gets out of the trailer park while sitting on a company capable of changing their family, their employees, and thousands of customers. Underneath that sits a personal version of the same problem, the man in the mirror at four hundred pounds who had lost sight of how much he mattered until he decided to believe in himself. That is why the conversation moves so naturally between a service call, an elk camp, and a coaching goal of a thousand millionaires. The mechanism is identical in all three: raise the standard, do the work that comes after the win, and refuse the story that you have plateaued. As he put it to Sam, nobody sets limits on you but you.
“Everybody likes winning. Nobody likes going through a process.”
Ben Jordan on The Hunt for Success
Sam McGough's full conversation with Ben, available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Key takeaways from Ben Jordan
The ideas Ben left on the table in episode 20.
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Enough is enough, said to a mirror.
October of 2017 is the date he gives, and it is also, he points out, right when the business started growing. From that month to July of 2018 he lost a hundred and twenty pounds. He was running a company through all of it and freely says he did not really know what he was doing yet. The two things happening at once is the whole point of the story for him.
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The video he almost talked himself out of.
He hates shooting content and compares it to running ten miles at four hundred pounds. His video team knows how to trigger him and asked whether he was going to make more excuses or change somebody's life today, so he went in and shot three or four videos. On the drive home a plumbing owner sent him a message about his business and added that he had lost sixty pounds since he started watching. Jordan had been arguing against filming forty five minutes earlier.
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More millionaires out of the trades than anywhere.
Jordan states it as fact for the next five to ten years, and Sam adds the market math behind it. Population growth keeps expanding demand for plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs, while people who value their time increasingly hire out work they once did themselves. The older generation is retiring out and private equity is buying up what they leave behind. Sam says it is why he moved into the trades himself, after years of dealing with insurance companies, wanting a business where he could do good work, get paid, and be done.
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Are we here to fix it or to serve them.
That is the question he asked his team in training the day of this recording, and he credits it with changing the business. His reasoning is that home service only shows up on somebody's worst day and usually with expensive news they did not budget for. True service means telling them the symptom and then the root cause, setting up maintenance, and giving them options before the equipment fails at the worst possible moment. Anybody can swap a water heater or fix a P trap. Not everybody puts a camera down the sewer and fixes what caused it.
Ben's ideas in The Pursuit
Where the weekly newsletter picked up this conversation.