When contractor businesses think about growth, they think about headcount. More people equals more capacity equals more revenue. But somewhere between employee 15 and employee 40, the math stops working.
You hire to keep up with demand.
Some of those hires work out. Some don’t.
The ones who don’t create callbacks, customer complaints, and a slow drain on your best people’s morale.
Your A‑players start wondering why they’re working alongside people who don’t care.
High turnover destroys culture, wastes training investment, and creates inconsistent customer experiences.
The contractors who scale past this don’t do it by hiring faster. They do it by hiring better and designing roles around the people they find, not the other way around.
This is the Four Quarters Hiring Rule.
And it changes how growing contractors think about their team.
What’s happening: Growing contractors hire for speed and end up with high turnover, inconsistent quality, and burned-out top performers.
Why it happens: The default approach is to fill seats based on demand rather than investing in fewer, higher-quality hires who stick.
Signs it’s happening: Constant training of replacements, callbacks increasing, best employees disengaged, culture feels diluted.
What to do next: Hire for attitude (you can’t teach caring), design roles around people’s strengths, and accept that a smaller team of A‑players outperforms a larger team of warm bodies.
Why do bad hires cost more at 20 employees than at 5?
At 5 employees, a bad hire is painful but contained.
You see them every day. You catch problems fast. You can course-correct or part ways before real damage is done.
At 20 or 30 employees, a bad hire might be running a crew you don’t see for days at a time.
They’re representing your company to customers you’ll never meet. They’re training habits into newer employees who don’t know any better. The blast radius of a wrong person in the wrong seat grows exponentially as you scale.
David Peters, founder and CEO of Construction Clock, learned this in his construction business before applying it to his tech company. You expand your team and then you realize these people aren’t working well together. When he started his next company, he was more selective: it’s okay to have a smaller team. A‑players want to work with other A‑players.
Four quarters beat 100 pennies
Ashley Smith, founder and owner of Always Forward Roofing, has a line that became the rule: “I would much rather have a team with four quarters than 100 pennies.”
She wants people who stick and stay and are strong, rather than constant turnover.
This isn’t just a philosophy. It’s basic math. High turnover means:
- Constant training cycles that pull your best people off productive work
- Inconsistent customer experiences that damage your reputation
- Institutional knowledge walking out the door every time someone leaves
- Your A‑players getting demoralized watching the revolving door
The Four Quarters Hiring Rule means accepting that slower growth with the right people beats fast growth with warm bodies. Every time.
I would much rather have a team with four quarters than 100 pennies.
What to look for beyond skill
Marco Radocaj of Balance HVAC keeps it simple: you have to care. That’s the only prerequisite.
When Marco was interviewing for his company, one candidate said something that stuck: I just want to say this and it’s weird and I hope you don’t get freaked out but I love air conditioning. Marco’s response: me too dude, me too.
The founder of Select Plumbing in Lincoln, Nebraska, Chris Caudy, took a huge risk hiring Kirk straight out of jail. When asked about his goals, he said he wanted to be a Hell’s Angel. Chris was ready to end the interview. But Kirk stood up, shook his hand, looked him in the eye and said: “I won’t let you down, just give me a chance.”
Kirk turned out to be awesome.
Technical skills can be taught to someone with the right attitude. But you can’t teach someone to care. You can’t teach work ethic.
One employee who genuinely loves the work is worth 10 who are just collecting paychecks.
Design roles around people, not job descriptions
The traditional approach is to create job descriptions and find people to fit predefined boxes. The best contractors flip this.
As Kevin Choquette of Ravin Builders explained: “Everybody has a strength, everybody is a weapon in their own area.”
If he pre-decided everybody’s role before he even met them, his company wouldn’t be what it is.
Marco Radocaj uses a phrase his daughter’s t‑shirt company popularized: Let him cook.
If someone wants to try something a different way, the answer is probably yes. Someone failing at Task A doesn’t mean they lack talent. It probably means Task A isn’t their strength.
Your job as the owner is to find what each person is naturally good at and position them to do more of that.
A simple scorecard for contractor hiring
Before your next hire, score candidates on these five things. Skill is only one of them:
- Attitude and energy. Do they care about the work, or are they just looking for a paycheck?
- Reliability signal. Did they show up on time? Follow up when they said they would? Small signals predict big patterns.
- Coachability. Can they take feedback without getting defensive? Will they ask the dumb questions upfront?
- Cultural fit with your A‑players. Would your best people want to work alongside this person?
- Technical skill. Can they do the work, or can they learn it fast enough with the right attitude?
Notice where skill falls on that list. Dead last.
Because everything above it is harder to teach.
Growing contractors don’t need more people. They need the right people. High turnover isn’t a hiring problem — it’s a standards problem. Set the bar high, hire for attitude, design roles around strengths, and accept that four quarters will always outperform 100 pennies.
Keep reading
This is one of dozens of patterns from contractors who’ve scaled through the hardest growth phase. For the full collection, read 35 Lessons from the Good Contractor Podcast: What Separates Great Contractors from the Rest.
Bad hiring often traces back to the owner trying to do everything themselves. Read: Why Contractor Businesses Get Stuck at 25 Employees
And if you’re hiring well but margins are still slipping, the issue might be deeper. Read: Good Work Doesn’t Mean Good Business: Why Contractors Bleed Money
We’re building a report on what actually changes as companies grow from 10 to 50 employees — what breaks, what works, and where the money goes. Look for Scaling the Trades later this year.
Frequently asked questions
How do contractors hire better employees?
Start by hiring for attitude, not just skill. Technical ability can be taught — work ethic and caring can’t. Use a simple scorecard that weighs attitude, reliability, and coachability above technical skill. And accept that a smaller team of the right people outperforms a larger team of warm bodies.
Should contractors hire for attitude or skill?
Attitude first, always. Every successful contractor interviewed on the Good Contractor Podcast said the same thing: you can train skill, but you can’t teach someone to care. The most expensive hires are skilled people with bad attitudes — they know enough to cut corners cleverly.
What hiring mistakes hurt growing contractors most?
Hiring for speed instead of quality. When demand is high, the temptation is to fill seats fast. But a bad hire at 20+ employees does more damage than at 5 because they’re further from the owner’s oversight — running crews, training habits into new people, and representing the company to customers.
Why does high turnover hurt contractor businesses more as they grow?
Because each departure takes institutional knowledge, training investment, and customer relationships with it. At scale, turnover creates a constant cycle of re-training that pulls your best people off productive work and creates inconsistent customer experiences that damage your reputation.
What is the Four Quarters Hiring Rule?
A principle from Ashley Smith of Always Forward Roofing: she’d rather have a team of four quarters (strong, committed people who stay) than 100 pennies (a revolving door of warm bodies). The rule means prioritizing team quality over team size, especially during growth.
