You're Not Too Busy to Train — You're Too Scared to Let Go

When I came back to Whittaker in 2019, one of the first things I noticed was that my dad had never built a second plumber who could run a job without him in the van.

Not because he couldn't. Because he was always there. Mike Whittaker showed up on every job that mattered, knew every customer by name, knew which GC liked a call before 7am and which one wanted a text. He was the shop. And because he was always there, there was never a reason to make somebody else capable of being there instead.

Then his hip went.

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The Guy You're Waiting to Hire Is Already Working for You

He drove one of your trucks today. He just doesn't know how to run a job without you somewhere nearby, and that's your fault, not his.

Spring 2020. My dad was six weeks into a knee replacement complication and completely out of pocket. I was running dispatch from a card table in the garage with Hank — who was two at the time — climbing on me like I was a jungle gym. Nobody in the shop could take a customer call and close it without checking with me first. Not one person.

That's what no training looks like. It doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up all at once, in the worst eight weeks of your professional life, when the whole machine runs through one phone number and that phone number is ringing unanswered in a hospital room on the fourth floor.

We almost lost the shop. Not because of the pandemic. Because of what we hadn't built before the pandemic.

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You're Not Avoiding Training. You're Avoiding the Risk of Trusting Someone.

The reason most shop owners don't train isn't time. It's not money. It's not that the apprentices aren't ready.

It's this: handing somebody else the job means admitting you're not the most important person in the room anymore. That's true of me. I'm not generalizing. I still want to be the guy who shows up and knows what to do, and that want is costing me.

I'm in a truck two days a week. Right now. I should be in the office. I know it, Becca knows it, my guys probably know it. It's not a scheduling problem. It's a me problem. And I get something out of being in that van that I don't get from sitting at a desk reviewing invoices, and I haven't fully let go of it, and that's honest.

I came up through Local 55, 2003 to 2007. I was not some special breed of human. I learned because somebody stood next to me and explained what they were doing and why. That's still the method. The only thing that's changed is guys like me are too busy — or too reluctant — to be that person on purpose.

Apprentices these days aren't worse. They're being trained worse. By guys like me who don't make time, because making time means letting go of the van.

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What It Actually Cost Mike — and What It Almost Cost Joe

My dad ran this shop for 36 years on personality and a Rolodex. It worked beautifully. Customers loved him. GCs called him back. The business grew on the strength of Mike Whittaker's word and Mike Whittaker answering his own phone.

But that model has an expiration date, and you don't know when it is until it's already past.

His hip went in late 2019. Then the knee replacement turned into a six-week complication. And in those eight weeks I watched 36 years of built relationships go soft in real time. Not because the customers were disloyal. Because they'd been trained, over three and a half decades, to call one number. When that number stopped getting answered, they called someone else. Some of them came back. Some of them didn't.

A shop built entirely on one person's relationships doesn't have customer relationships. It has that one person's relationships. When he goes down, you find out the difference.

There was no process for a customer who called in and got someone other than Mike, because that had never really happened before. No system for it. No person trained to handle it. The phone tree was one branch.

That's what I inherited. I love my dad. This is not a complaint. This is a warning — because I'm capable of making the exact same mistake, and I have to fight it consciously.

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What Training Actually Looks Like When You Don't Have a Slow Week

You're not going to find the slow week. So stop waiting for it.

Training has to live inside the work you're already doing. Not as a separate event. As a deliberate choice about how you run a job.

My guy Dom — two years out of his apprenticeship, pretty good — called me from a driveway on West 117th a while back because he'd snaked the line forty feet, got nothing, and didn't know his next move. We scoped it. Collapsed clay sixty feet out, classic 1925 house. I quoted the spot repair at $6,800. That's a training event. Or it's just a repair call. The difference is whether I pick up the phone after.

What did he see when he snaked forty feet and got nothing? What should that have told him? When do you stop snaking and reach for the camera? How do you tell a 70-year-old woman on a Tuesday afternoon that her sewer line needs to come up and the oak she planted with her late husband might not survive it?

Those questions are the curriculum. Twenty minutes on the phone after the job closes.

Send him out to quote the job before you do, not after. Let him say a number. Then you say yours. Then you talk about the gap. Do that ten times and the patterns show themselves. Or put him on the customer call with you by your phone instead of sitting next to him in the van. The van is a crutch. Your presence in the van means he never has to decide anything on his own, which means he never gets good at deciding.

Put him in his truck. Stay near your phone. Let him call when he's stuck. He gets better. You stay in the office.

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The Math Nobody Wants to Do

Becca's two days a week in the office — I mean this literally — added more booked revenue than a whole additional truck did. I watched it happen. Because the truck needed someone to run it, and "someone" kept ending up being me.

Same math applies to a trained tech. A truck sitting in your lot because you've got nobody qualified to run it isn't a truck problem. You're paying for it in steel and insurance every month while the problem sits there. And your own labor rate, when you're doing a service call instead of running the business, is the most expensive ticket you're writing all day.

I spent six years at Crestwood Plumbing, 2012 to 2018, specifically to see how a 30-truck shop actually operates. Here's what I saw: they didn't have better trucks. They didn't have some secret technology. They had guys who could work without the owner watching. The systems told people what to do, and the people had been trained enough to make a call when the systems didn't cover the situation.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

A bigger shop is the same business with more people capable of running it without you in the van. You don't need a new truck. You need someone who can do the job without you beside them. And right now, that person is driving your truck, waiting.

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What to Do Monday Morning

Pick one tech. One job type he's close to ready on — not something he's mastered, something where he's mostly there. Send him alone. Tell him you're a phone call away and mean it. After the job closes, call him. Not to check the ticket. Ask what he saw, what he decided, where he wasn't sure. That conversation is the training. Do it once this week.

Second thing: write down the three calls that came in last month that you took yourself because you didn't trust anyone else to handle them. Not the genuinely complicated ones. The calls you grabbed out of habit, or a low-grade belief that nobody else would do it right.

That's your list. That's where you start. Whatever's on it is exactly what's keeping you in the van — the decisions you haven't taught anyone else to make. Start there, not with the easy stuff. One phone debrief at a time.

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FAQ

How do I train someone when I can barely keep up with the work right now?

If you're at capacity and still need to be in the van to keep things moving, you've built a ceiling into your own shop. Debrief calls take twenty minutes. Sending someone on a solo job instead of riding along doesn't cost you more hours — it costs you the comfort of being there. One job type, one tech, this week. The volume doesn't have to slow down for this to start.

What do I do when I train someone up and then they leave?

Here's what I've found: the guys most likely to leave are the ones who feel stuck. Train someone up, give them real responsibility, and you'll keep them longer than if you leave them undertrained. If they do leave after two years of actual development — you still ran two more years of jobs without being in the van for every one of them. The alternative is keeping them undertrained so they don't get "too good." That's how you lose them faster and get nothing for it.

My guy is good with his hands but rough with customers. How do I fix that without making it weird?

Don't make it a performance review. After a job where a customer interaction went sideways, ask him what he said and what the customer said back. Work through it together. How do you explain a scope finding to somebody who's never seen a camera in a pipe? How do you quote a number that's three times what they expected without them feeling cheated? Those are skills. You practice them by talking through real calls, not by handing someone a script.

When am I ready to send a tech on a job alone?

No checklist I've ever seen survives a real job. Here's what I actually use: Can he diagnose the most common version of this job without calling me? Can he quote it in the driveway without checking? Can he handle a customer who pushes back on the price without folding or blowing up? If the answer to all three is mostly yes — send him. The first solo job is itself the training. The point isn't that he's fully ready. It's that you've decided to let the job make him ready. Stay near your phone.

I only have two guys. Does this apply to me?

It applies more to you than to anyone. Two employees means if you go down, the shop goes down. I know exactly what that feels like — March 2020, card table in the garage, Hank climbing on me, and not one person who could close a call without me. Build one person who can answer the phone, close a basic job, and make a call without you. That's not a growth move. That's what keeps the lights on.

How do I train someone to quote jobs without them giving the work away?

Have them quote every job out loud before you do. Not after — before. They say a number, you say yours, then you talk about the gap. Ten times and you'll see the pattern. Usually it's one of two things: they're scared of losing the job so they go low, or they don't actually know what a job costs to do right so they guess. Fear you can work on. Knowledge gaps you can fill. But you can't fix what you can't see, and you can't see it if you're always the one quoting.