The Secret to Building a Winning Team with Vince & Anthony Nardo

Be a family WITH a business, not a family business: the Nardos' mother taught them to keep the two separate, so they could argue a business point all day and still have Sunday Italian dinner with no business talk, and the business never defined the family or the other way around.

The business has to come first, handled tactically: when a family member runs an area over budget, take them aside, coach them, or redirect their talents, keep everyone aligned on profit, and hard succession conversations get easier with honesty, transparency, and shared values.

Most companies operate without a real plan: they make big moves like opening a new market in a vacuum, with no cash-flow model, and confuse cash with profit, so forecasting AND hitting those targets with certainty is a core discipline before you expand.

Keep it simple to stay profitable: as a full-service remodeler they were spending 80% of their effort on 20% of the profit, so they narrowed to a simpler, scalable single-product model, the way a fast-food chain wins with a narrow menu.

Watch dollars per crew day, not just margin: a 90% margin on one pen a day isn't a business, so measure revenue installed per crew per day and cut the products that underperform on that number.

A peer advisory group can be the pivot point: their 'Dirty Dozen' (later the Big 12) of like-minded owners sharing real, un-inflated numbers was, in their words, the single reason they scaled, and they extended it below ownership so finance, marketing, and ops teams all learned from peers.

Check your ego and keep educating yourself: the right group has the right peers who listen instead of self-promoting, and constant reading (E-Myth, Good to Great, Scaling Up) teaches you the questions to ask and the people you'll need for the next plateau.