After 34 years in this industry, I can tell you the most expensive mistake I ever made wasn’t a bad marketing campaign. It wasn’t a busted truck or a botched job. It was confusing an employee who executed with an employee who elevated.
They look identical on paper. Both show up. Both hit their numbers. Both clock in, clock out, and don’t cause drama. If you’re scanning your roster on a Friday afternoon, you’d swear they’re the same caliber of teammate.
They’re not even close.
One of them is keeping your business alive. The other one is making it worth more every single day. And if you can’t tell which is which, you’re going to lose the second one to a competitor who can.
Let me break this down the way I wish somebody had broken it down for me at 22.
The Executor
The Executor is the employee who does what you ask. Beautifully, sometimes. Reliably, always.
You hand them a route sheet and they finish the route. You give them a script and they read the script. You set a quota and they hit the quota. They show up on time, they follow the playbook, and they don’t make waves.
From a process standpoint, they are gold.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about Executors.
They are the foundation.
Every business needs them. You cannot build anything sustainable without people who show up and do the work the way you trained them. If your entire team was made up of free-thinking innovators, your operations would look like a Jackson Pollock painting and your customers would be very confused.
So I want to be clear. I’m not knocking Executors. I love Executors. I was an Executor for a long time before I learned how to be anything else.
But.
The Executor finishes their list and goes home. They don’t see the broken sprinkler in the customer’s yard. They don’t notice the new neighbor who just moved in next door. They don’t think about whether the truck was loaded efficiently this morning. Their job ends where the job description ends. That’s not a character flaw. That’s the deal you struck with them when you hired them.
If you’re an owner thinking that’s enough, I have some bad news. It used to be. It isn’t anymore.
The Elevator
The Elevator is something different.
The Elevator does everything the Executor does, then keeps going.
They finish the route, then ping the office and say, “Hey, the customer at 412 Maple mentioned the HOA is hiring out for spring cleanup. I got the property manager’s number. Want me to send it over?”
They follow the script, then come back at the end of the week and say, “I tried something different on the price objection and I closed three more this month.” They hit the quota, then ask what the quota would need to be next quarter for the whole team to win.
You don’t have to motivate Elevators. They motivate themselves. You don’t have to micromanage Elevators. They manage their own standard. You don’t have to inspire Elevators. They inspire the people next to them.
Elevators are the reason your business gets better while you sleep.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Elevators don’t always look like the obvious all-stars.
Sometimes they’re quiet. Sometimes they’re not the loudest voice in the room. The signal isn’t volume. The signal is curiosity. They ask better questions. They notice things. They bring you problems with three solutions already attached.
The Cost of Confusing the Two
This is the part that took me too long to learn.
You can pay an Executor and an Elevator the exact same wage and tell yourself you’re being fair. You’re not being fair. You’re being lazy.
Because the Elevator isn’t just doing their job. They’re raising the ceiling for everyone around them. They’re training the new hires informally over lunch. They’re catching mistakes before they become refunds. They’re noticing the patterns in customer complaints your dashboard hasn’t caught yet. The dollar value of one Elevator on a 10-person team is not 10 percent. It’s closer to 30, maybe 40, on a good week.
If you compensate them like an Executor, you’re signaling to them that you don’t see what they do. And here’s the brutal part. They will leave. Not loudly. Not with a dramatic exit. They will quietly take a phone call from somebody who does see them, and you’ll be sitting in your office a month later wondering why your numbers slipped.
How to Spot an Elevator
In my hiring process, I lean on the WHO methodology by Geoff Smart. Strong recommendation. Read it. But beyond the formal scorecard, here are the signals I’ve learned to watch for over three decades.
First, listen to how they talk about their last job. Executors describe what they did. Elevators describe what they changed. “I ran the route” is an Executor sentence. “I rebuilt the route to cut 40 minutes off the day” is an Elevator sentence. Same job. Different brain.
Second, pay attention to the questions they ask in the interview. Executors ask about hours, pay, and benefits. All fair. Elevators ask about that stuff too, then ask things like, “What does the top performer here do differently?” or “What’s the biggest bottleneck in this role right now?” That second category of question is rare, and when you hear it, lean in.
Third, watch them in their first 30 days. Executors learn the system. Elevators learn the system, then start asking why certain parts of the system exist. Not in a rebellious way. In a “help me understand so I can be better” way. That curiosity is the tell.
How to Develop More Elevators
You don’t have to hire all Elevators. You can grow them.
Some of the best Elevators on my team started as Executors. They became something more because of three things, and these three things are owner-controlled.
Number one, you have to give people permission to think. If your culture punishes people for questioning the playbook, you will never have an Elevator on your roster, because Elevators question playbooks. That’s their entire personality. Tell your team that better ideas are welcome and then prove it by actually using their ideas.
Number two, you have to make ownership visible. People rise to the level of the ownership they can feel. If a tech can see how their efficiency affects the team bonus pool, they start running their own numbers. If a CSR can see how their close rate affects the marketing budget for next month, they start tightening their script. Show them the scoreboard.
Number three, you have to praise the elevation, not just the execution. When somebody on your team brings you a better way, celebrate it loudly. In a team meeting. In a group text. Wherever your people are watching. What gets praised gets repeated. That’s not a marketing slogan, that’s a leadership law.
The Personal Part
I’ll close with this.
I started cleaning windows at 17. Went full time at 18 with no car and no money, which forced me to be both an Executor and an Elevator simultaneously, because nobody was coming to save me. I had to do the job and figure out how to do it better every single day, or I didn’t eat.
That’s a hard way to learn the lesson. I don’t recommend it.
But it gave me an unfair advantage as an owner. Because when I look at my team now, across corporate locations and franchise partners, I can spot the Elevators within about two weeks. Not because I’m clever. Because I used to be one, and we recognize each other.
If you’re an owner reading this and you’re not sure whether the people on your team are Executors or Elevators, that is actually really useful information. It means you have not yet built the systems, the conversations, or the scoreboards that would force the difference into the open.
Build those. Promote your Elevators. Pay them like the asset they actually are. And give your Executors a clear path to elevate if they want one.
That’s how you build a company that gets better while you sleep.
And that, my friend, is the only kind worth building.
Keep Shining.
