// OPS LEARN
Learn to build a business
that works without you.
Free and premium courses for service business owners, operators, and anyone ready to stop trading time for money.
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// PREMIUM COURSES
The Service Business Blueprint
The complete playbook for starting, running, and scaling a service business — from your first client to building a team that runs without you.
Price It Right: Job Costing & Pricing for Trade Businesses
Teaches trade business owners how to calculate true job costs, build markup formulas, communicate price increases to customers, and stop the epidemic of underpricing that plagues years 1-5.
Cash Flow Survival: For Project-Based Service Businesses
You make money. So why is your bank account empty? Service businesses live and die on cash flow timing. Profit on paper means nothing if you can't make payroll Friday. This course teaches you how to fix it — for the kind of work where every job has a start, a middle, and a final invoice. You'll learn how to structure deposits and milestone payments that actually get paid. Understand the lien rights you have — and the deadlines that kill them. Build a 13-week cash forecaster you'll actually update. Run collections without flinching. Decide when factoring saves you and when it sinks you. Location-aware: pick your province (Canada) or state (US) and the tools surface the rules that apply to you. Built Canadian-first, American-second, agnostic-fallback for the rest of the world. RECOMMENDED FOR: • Handymen, painters, pressure washers, deck and fence builders, flooring installers, landscapers doing install work, HVAC/plumbing/electrical doing install jobs. • Solo operators and crews of 1–10 running one-off jobs in the $500–$50,000 range. • Anyone who's eaten a chargeback, a no-deposit dispute, or an unpaid invoice in the last 12 months — and anyone who hasn't yet but knows the day is coming. NOT BUILT FOR (yet): • Pure recurring service businesses (cleaning, lawn maintenance, pool, pest control) — separate variant in production. • Trade subcontractors working under GCs with pay-if-paid clauses — separate variant in production. WHAT YOU WALK OUT WITH: • A standard payment schedule for your business — deposits, milestones, final. • Your jurisdiction's lien deadlines on a single sheet. • A working 13-week cash forecast tied to your real job pipeline. • A collections escalation playbook with email templates and a demand letter. • The factoring math for your specific situation. 5 modules · 18 lessons · 4 quizzes · 2 assignments · 1 final test · 5 interactive tools. Built for owners who need to run the business, not just the jobs.
Cash Flow Survival: For Recurring-Revenue Service Businesses
Your monthly recurring revenue is not recurring cash. The average residential cleaning company is owed $4,800 in late payments at any given moment. That is two months of the owner's take-home, sitting in someone else's bank account. This course is for owners running recurring-revenue service work — cleaning, lawn maintenance, pool service, pest control, window cleaning, commercial janitorial, snow contracts, HVAC service plans. The math here is different: variant 1 is one $40K dispute. This is 200 small payments a year, and the leverage is card-on-file, stop-service, and small claims. You will install card-on-file billing as a non-negotiable. Design subscription pricing that survives processor fees. Write a cancellation policy with teeth. Run the stop-service playbook when a customer goes 30 days late. Calculate what one customer leaving actually costs you over 24 months — and decide who to fire, who to retain, who to escalate. Location-aware: pick your province (Canada) or state (US) and the small-claims and lien rules surface for your jurisdiction. Built Canadian-first, American-second, agnostic-fallback for the rest of the world. RECOMMENDED FOR: - Residential cleaning, lawn maintenance, pool service, pest control, window cleaning, commercial janitorial, snow contracts. - HVAC and plumbing owners selling recurring service plans (not one-off service calls). - Solo owners and small teams (1–10 staff) running 20+ recurring customers. - Anyone whose biggest cash hole is 12 customers each $400 in arrears, not one $40K invoice. NOT BUILT FOR (yet): - Project-based contractors (decks, fences, kitchens, landscape installs) — see "Cash Flow Survival: For Project-Based Service Businesses" ($39). - Trade subcontractors under GCs with pay-if-paid clauses — separate variant in production. WHAT YOU WALK OUT WITH: - A card-on-file rollout plan plus the script that gets 78% adoption. - A subscription pricing structure that breaks even on processor fees and rewards annual prepay. - A stop-service playbook with sample notice + restart-only-on-prepay contract language. - Your jurisdiction's small claims limit and filing logistics on a single sheet. - A 13-week recurring-revenue forecast tied to your real customer list and churn assumption. - A customer concentration risk audit and a churn-cost number for each segment. 5 modules · 18 lessons · 4 quizzes · 2 assignments · 1 final test · 6 interactive tools. Built for owners who got into service work for the recurring revenue and now realize recurring revenue is not recurring cash.
Cash Flow Survival: For Trade Subcontractors
GCs hold your money. Owners hold the GC's money. You finance the whole job. Trade subs live downstream of contracts they never negotiated. Pay-if-paid clauses transfer the owner's risk straight to your payroll account. 10% retainage sits in the GC's bank for 12 months past substantial completion. A 90-day pay cycle on a $400K commercial scope ties up $108K of working capital before you see your first dollar of profit. This course is the survival kit. Built for concrete, framing, drywall, MEP, fire protection, steel, masonry, glazing, roofing, and paving subs running $400K-$2M/yr on commercial, multifamily, institutional, and public-works projects under a GC. Location-aware: pick your province (Canada) or state (US) and the tools surface the rules that apply — pay-if-paid enforceability, prompt-payment legislation, preliminary notice deadlines, and bond-claim windows. RECOMMENDED FOR: - Concrete, framing, drywall, MEP, fire-protection, low-voltage subs on multifamily and commercial jobs. - Specialty subs (steel, masonry, glazing, roofing, paving) under a GC. - Public-works subs working under bonded prime contractors (Miller Act / provincial public-procurement bonds). - Solo operators and small crews who sub to a GC, even on a single $80K scope. NOT BUILT FOR: - Residential GCs / remodelers contracting directly with homeowners — that is variant 1 ($39). - Recurring-service businesses (cleaning, lawn care, HVAC service-call) — that is variant 3. WHAT YOU WALK OUT WITH: - Mobilization-payment + SOV-front-loading playbook negotiated against AIA G702/G703. - Pay-if-paid vs pay-when-paid clause analyzer keyed to your jurisdiction. - Preliminary notice + lien deadline calendar — every state and province. - Bond-claim playbook for Miller Act and Canadian public-works bonds. - 13-week cash forecast with retainage rows. - Factoring math for 60-90 day GC cycles. - Tax-timing rules on retainage (HST/GST + IRS). 5 modules - 18 lessons - 4 quizzes - 2 assignments - 1 final test - 6 interactive tools. Built for subs who run payroll Friday and bid the next job in the same afternoon.
Hire, Train, Keep: Solving the Trades Labor Crisis
439K trade workers needed in 2026. 92% of construction firms cannot find them. The owners who win are not out-hiring the crisis — they are out-keeping. Recommended for: trade owners with 1+ employees, or actively hiring their first. NOT for: solo operators with no hire intent / large operations with dedicated HR. The math of fully-loaded employee cost, the 30-day paid interview, onboarding systems that do not eat your Friday, the non-cash retention stack, the jurisdiction-aware non-compete map (US + Canada), the best-employee-leaving conversation, and the bench you build before you need it.
Contracts That Protect You: Stop Eating Losses
Service-business merchants with signed eContracts win the majority of chargeback disputes — 85-95% per industry data. Without eContracts: 25-30%. The four documents that decide every dispute — the signed contract, the signed change order, the photo timeline, the written sign-off — plus the chargeback defense pack and small-claims escalation playbook that recover the money when prevention fails. Six interactive tools walk you through writing a one-page contract, building change orders, documenting jobs in photos, and assembling the chargeback defense pack on a phone in your truck. // RECOMMENDED FOR — residential GCs, handymen, painters, cleaners, fence and deck installers, roofers, HVAC service, plumbers, electricians, pool service, and one-off landscape installers signing contracts directly with end-customers. // NOT FOR — subs working under GCs (covered in cash-flow-survival-trade-subs Module 2) or pure subscription services (covered in cash-flow-survival-recurring Module 2).
Beat the Heat: OSHA Compliance & Crew Safety for Outdoor Trades
OSHA's heat-illness National Emphasis Program is in active enforcement now. Federal heat rulemaking is in the post-comment-period stage — a Final Rule has not yet published. Inspectors are showing up under the existing General Duty Clause. Willful violation: $165,514 per occurrence (2025 penalty schedule). Preventive program: ~$400/employee/year. The math is not subtle. Six modules. Six tools. The plain-English current state of the rule, the 14-day acclimatization ramp, the schedule-around-the-heat playbook, the gear that actually works, the first 10 minutes of an emergency response, and the documentation pack that turns an OSHA inspection into a 10-minute conversation. [recommended for] outdoor crews in heat-prone climates — HVAC service, concrete, landscape, tree, roofing, fence, exterior cleaning, pool service, exterior painting. [not for] indoor-only trades. Cold-weather-only operators.