Common Threads: "Building a Career on a Foundation of Customer Service"

February 21, 2021

Ben Fisher is the owner & visionary of the Big Fish Contracting Company. He and David go way back, growing up in the same area. Ben shares his stories about learning at a very early age the importance of customer service, a strong work ethic, and trusting his skill sets, and how all of those things created the foundation for his very successful contracting company.


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Photo collage of The Pond members at events with the words Our First Anniversary
By Benny Fisher • November 12, 2026
Every roofing and business owner already has a pond. Why I learn more from failures in the room than wins, and what makes a peer group worth it.
A finish line on an open road that keeps going, a picture of a founder without a definition of enoug
By Benny Fisher • November 5, 2026
If you don't define enough, your vision will spend everything you have. Four questions to ask before the next round of growth, from Benny Fisher.
Gold handcuff on a dark brick wall with the words There's no lock on a gold handcuff, from The Deck
October 22, 2026
It started at 250 dollars a month and grew to 30,000. Losing all of it in one month was the release that let me build what I was actually called to build.
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Photo collage of The Pond members at events with the words Our First Anniversary
By Benny Fisher • November 12, 2026
Every roofing and business owner already has a pond. Why I learn more from failures in the room than wins, and what makes a peer group worth it.
A finish line on an open road that keeps going, a picture of a founder without a definition of enoug
By Benny Fisher • November 5, 2026
If you don't define enough, your vision will spend everything you have. Four questions to ask before the next round of growth, from Benny Fisher.
Gold handcuff on a dark brick wall with the words There's no lock on a gold handcuff, from The Deck
October 22, 2026
It started at 250 dollars a month and grew to 30,000. Losing all of it in one month was the release that let me build what I was actually called to build.
Snow globe with a quiet winter scene and the words 30 minutes of silence, from The Deck
By Benny Fisher • October 13, 2026
The snow is not the problem. The shaking is. Why thirty minutes of silence a day is how founders find the vision that was already sitting there.
Why a weekly cash review gives home service founders fewer surprises and more peace.
By Benny Fisher • October 1, 2026
Most founders only check cash when panic hits. Here's the weekly cash review I give home service owners: same day, same time, 13 weeks ahead.
White tour bus on an open road with the words put six people in a bus, from The Deck
By Benny Fisher • September 22, 2026
March 2021, a Texas ranch, and six people from my leadership team. You cannot reheat a room. The conference is not the trip. The van is the trip.
One glowing figure standing in front of a team of dark figures, a founder who carries the care, from
By Benny Fisher • September 11, 2026
You can delegate the P&L, the hiring, the whole calendar. The care comes back every time, and it moves up to you. The founder's real job.
He Already Had Number Ten
By Benny Fisher • September 3, 2026
The ten disciplines from Gino Wickman and Rob Dube, handed to a friend on a back porch in July. Where I argue with the order, and the one discipline a man can hide inside.
By Benny Fisher • August 27, 2026
You never know what's going to happen at the intersection of one point in time and a few people willing to tell the truth.
By Benny Fisher • August 20, 2026
I walked into a leadership meeting with a client's team about a year into working with them. Twelve people around the table. Everyone had a status update. Everyone gave their status update. An hour later, we had a shared understanding of what had already happened and nothing had been decided. That is not a meeting. That is a group status email that required everyone to show up in person. WHAT A REAL LEADERSHIP MEETING DOES There is a version of the weekly leadership meeting that most teams never experience. One where the issues that have been bouncing around in people's heads all week get named out loud, get owned by the right person, and get resolved before they become next week's bigger problem. That version requires three things that most teams skip. First , the issues have to be named honestly, not diplomatically. Diplomatic issue identification produces incomplete lists. What you are actually worried about has to be said in the room, not saved for the parking lot conversation after. Second , they have to be solved at the right level. Most of the time the founder is not the right person. A mature team asks who is actually closest to this problem, and puts the solve there. Third , the priorities have to stay honest. Most leadership teams do not need more ambition. They need fewer things on the list, held with more discipline. When every item is labeled important, people quietly stop believing anything actually is. WHAT CHANGED WHEN THEY CHANGED THE MEETING We rebuilt the format with that client. Same people, same time slot, different structure. A short pulse on the numbers, a review of what moved and what stalled on the real priorities, then time to identify and solve the actual issues, not report on them. Three things happened in the first month. The founder stopped carrying half the company's unresolved issues home over the weekend. The team started solving things without waiting to be told. And the leadership conversations shifted from status reporting to real decision-making. The meeting did not fix the business. It created the conditions for the team to fix the business themselves. THE QUESTION TO BRING TO YOUR NEXT MEETING Before your next leadership meeting, write down the three things you are most worried about in the business right now. Not the agenda items. The real things. Then ask: do these get named and solved in our weekly meeting, or do they stay in my head until they become a crisis? If the answer is your head, the meeting needs to change. A business that still depends on the founder's nervous system to hold its unresolved issues has not yet built a real leadership team. It has built a group that reports to a person. What is sitting in your head right now that belongs in a room with your team? Prepared by Benny Fisher | Visionary Navigator | bennyfisher.com
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