Mastermind Question of the Day: Seasonal Lessons
How much is one season of experience really worth in the Christmas light installation industry?
When you first start, you learn an incredible amount about what works, what does not work, and what it is actually going to take to survive the season.
Then the second season comes.
Most companies grow quickly—sometimes doubling—and suddenly the lessons are completely different. More customers, more employees, more vehicles, more inventory, more callbacks, and more opportunities for small mistakes to become expensive problems.
Then the next season teaches you something new again.
A company completing 100 homes does not necessarily have five times more experience than a company completing 20 homes. Volume matters, but there is another kind of experience that can only come from surviving multiple seasons.
Every season has its own challenges:
Tariffs.
Coronavirus.
Immigration and labor issues.
Supply shortages.
Storm damage.
Weather delays.
Equipment failures.
Rapid growth.
Employee turnover.
Even when you believe you have your business running on replay, something can change the entire game.
I could talk about this all day, but I want to share a personal example.
During the 2014 season, I had an Army Ranger—former drill seargant and undercover police officer—working for me. This guy was tough, capable, and someone you definitely wanted beside you when things got difficult. He was my best installer that season.
Later I relocated to Houston in 2018 and started over from scratch with only four seasons of industry knowledge.
Within two years, we had rebuilt the company, surpassed our previous progress, and developed entirely new systems based on everything we had learned.
My Army buddy heard about it and then returned for the 2020 season.
He started telling me that we needed to do things the way we had done them in 2014.
My immediate thought was:
We do not operate that way anymore.
The old way may have worked at one point, but the problems, growth, failures, and expensive lessons between 2014 and 2020 had forced us to develop better processes.
The 2020 season became one of the best seasons we had ever experienced across both businesses.
This was despite the fact that there way a HUGE HURRICANE in Louisianna that attracted most of the local roofers we used for light installers.
This was despite the fact that there way a HUGE HURRICANE in Louisianna that attracted most of the local roofers we used for light installers.
He left and returned again in 2024.
The same thing happened.
This time, he wanted to run the company the way we had operated in 2020. But our business had grown astronomically since then. We had more crews, more customers, better systems, better tools, and three additional seasons of costly lessons.
He aggressively pushed the old habits because following the old process did not require him to learn anything new.
Had I allowed it, our company would have regressed several years.
That is one of the dangers of listening to someone whose knowledge stopped growing during the season they left.
I sometimes notice the same behavior with our son Tyrone, who is entering his second season of being an installer.
“We should install it this way.”
“I think this would be faster.”
“Why don’t we do it like this?”
My response is sometimes:
Just do it the way I am telling you and pretend that I know what I'm talking about. LOL
When you have ten crews working, you hear hundreds of ideas.
Everyone has an opinion about the fastest installation method, the best way to organize materials, or the easiest way to complete the job and the proven track record of happy clients and no call backs.
But experience teaches you that installing quickly is only one part of the equation.
You must install it like you are going to warranty it.
You must take it down like you are going to install it again.
You must store it like someone else will need to understand it next season.
You must build systems that still work when ten different crews are following them.
A shortcut that works for one installer on one house may completely fail when it is repeated across 100 customers.
That is the difference between knowing how to hang lights and knowing how to operate a Christmas light installation company.
If you allow someone with only a few seasons of experience to control your processes, your company may regress back to the knowledge level of their last season.
Then you will be forced to relearn the same expensive lessons all over again.
Question of the Day:
What lesson did you learn during your most recent season that completely changed the way your company operates?
And what is something you did successfully in an earlier season that would no longer work at the size your business is today?
Drop your answer below. Your lesson may save another contractor from making the same expensive mistake.
