What the home improvement industry gets wrong about leadership

I have spent over 20 years building and leading teams in construction and home improvement. I have run commercial roofing crews, grown a company to $35 million, and now manage four markets as a Regional General Manager. And I can tell you that this industry does not have a hiring problem. It has a leadership problem.

Every conference I attend, every leadership call I sit on, someone brings up the same complaint: “We can’t find good people.” It has become the default excuse for turnover, missed targets, and underperformance. And it is wrong.

TL;DR: The home improvement industry blames its 60 to 80 percent turnover on a hiring problem. It is a leadership problem. Commission-only pay attracts the wrong people, onboarding is an afterthought, and managers are promoted without training. Fix the leadership and the hiring fixes itself.

The turnover number everyone accepts

In the home improvement sales industry, 60 to 80 percent annual turnover is considered normal. Companies have built their entire operating model around the assumption that most of the people they hire will be gone within a year.

Instead of asking why so many people leave, leadership teams ask how to hire faster. More recruiting, more leads, more bodies through the door. It is a treadmill. You run harder and harder and end up in the same place.

I manage four markets right now. When I inherited them, I found the same pattern in every one: high turnover, low morale, inconsistent training, and a leadership team that had been told the turnover was just how the industry works. It does not have to work that way.

Commission-only filters for the wrong people

Most home improvement companies pay their design consultants commission only. The logic sounds reasonable: pay for performance. No base salary means the company has low fixed costs and only pays when someone produces.

In practice, commission-only attracts two types of people. Experienced closers who will work for any company that offers a higher split, and people who are desperate enough to take a job with no guaranteed pay. The closers are mercenaries. They produce, but they leave the second someone offers a better deal. The desperate candidates wash out fast.

The people you actually want, the steady, coachable, professional salespeople who will build a career with your company, have options. Their options include companies that offer a base salary during ramp-up. Why would a talented person choose uncertainty when a competitor offers stability?

I am not saying eliminate commissions. A short-term base during training, even a modest one, changes the applicant pool dramatically. You get better candidates who stay longer and produce more over time. The math works in your favor even though it costs more upfront.

Onboarding is where you win or lose

Most home improvement companies treat onboarding like a formality. Three weeks of product training, hand them a tablet, put them in front of a customer. Sink or swim. The ones who swim were probably going to succeed anywhere. The ones who sink get replaced by the next batch.

That approach is expensive. The cost of recruiting, training, and losing a design consultant, including the lost revenue from blown leads during ramp-up, is significant. When you are churning through 60 to 80 percent of your sales force annually, those costs add up to a number that would terrify most owners if they tracked it honestly.

Good onboarding goes beyond product knowledge. Ride-alongs with top performers. Role-playing difficult customer conversations. Understanding the sales process well enough to handle objections without sounding scripted. A mentor who checks in weekly for the first 90 days. Clear expectations about what success looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days.

Companies that invest in real onboarding have lower turnover. I have seen this pattern repeated in every market I have worked in.

Promoting your best salesperson into management is usually a mistake

This happens everywhere in home improvement. Someone is your top producer, so you promote them to sales manager. Makes sense on the surface. The person who sells the most must know the most about selling.

Except selling and managing are different skills. The instincts that make someone a great closer, competitiveness, independence, confidence in their own approach, often make them a terrible manager. They cannot understand why their team does not just do what they did. They lose patience with coaching because the answer seems obvious to them. They micromanage the sales process because they would have done it differently.

The best sales managers I have worked with were not always the top sellers. They were the ones who could teach, who could listen, who could adapt their coaching to different personalities. They measured their success by their team’s numbers, not their own.

If you are going to promote from within, invest in management training first. Teach people how to coach, how to run a productive one-on-one, how to give feedback that actually changes behavior. Do not hand someone a title and expect the skills to follow.

Accountability starts at the top

In too many home improvement companies, accountability flows in one direction: down. Sales consultants are held accountable for their close rate, their average ticket, their lead resulting. Managers are held accountable for their team’s numbers. But who holds leadership accountable for the systems that produce those numbers?

When a new hire fails, the default explanation is that they were not the right fit. Sometimes that is true. But if 60 to 80 percent of your hires are “not the right fit,” the problem is the process that selected them, the training that prepared them, and the management that was supposed to support them.

I track retention as a leadership metric. If my managers have high turnover, that is a management issue first. We look at onboarding quality, coaching frequency, lead distribution fairness, and team culture before we blame the individual who left.

Managers do not like being held accountable for turnover. But the alternative is accepting 70 percent annual churn as inevitable, and I refuse to do that.

Know the product better than your reps

One thing I will never compromise on: leadership must know the product. If you are managing a roofing sales team and you cannot explain the difference between TPO and EPDM, or you do not know what ANSI/SPRI standards apply to your installations, your team will not respect you and your customers will not trust you.

I came up through commercial roofing. I know GAF products, JM insulation, sheet metal fabrication, building envelope systems. When I walk a jobsite or sit in on a sales call, I can tell immediately whether someone knows what they are talking about. Your team knows when their manager is faking it.

The home improvement industry has too many managers who were promoted for their numbers but never deepened their product knowledge. They can sell, but they cannot teach. And if you cannot teach, you cannot build a team that performs consistently.

None of this is complicated. All of it is hard.

The home improvement industry does not need a revolution. It needs leaders willing to do the unglamorous work.

Offer a base during training. Build an onboarding program that actually prepares people. Train your managers before you promote them. Track retention as a leadership metric. Hold yourself to the same standard you set for your team. Know your product.

The hard part is admitting that the way things have always been done is not working. It means investing money and time upfront in people who might still leave. It means measuring your success as a leader by how many people you develop, not just how much revenue your region generates.

The companies that get this right will pull ahead. The ones that keep blaming the labor pool will keep running on the same treadmill, hiring faster and faster to replace the people they keep losing.