I never stopped selling. I just kept getting handed bigger rooms.
26 years selling and leading in home improvement, an SVP seat at a $1.6 billion enterprise, and a company taken from $13 million to $37 million in a single year. Here's how that happened, and why I teach it.
Everything I know came out of my own P&L, not a course I bought.
I started where most reps start, in the field, sitting across from homeowners deciding whether to spend real money on their home. I sold windows, bath, siding, and roofs, and I lost plenty of deals before I figured out that the buyers who said no weren't saying no to my price. They were saying no to how I ran the first part of the conversation.
Once I understood that, everything changed. I stopped pitching every homeowner the same way and started reading which of the four types was in front of me, then running the steps in the order their brain actually needed. My close rate moved, then my income moved, and then I got handed a team.
From the frontline to the executive floor
I spent years building and leading sales teams, and eventually ran sales as SVP for a $1.6 billion home improvement enterprise. The frameworks I'd worked out in the field scaled to the whole floor: the four customer types, the five points of pain, the warm-up, the close. I took one company from $13 million to $37 million in a single year with the margin holding the whole way, and helped move another from 3% to 16% EBITDA in a single month.
I'm not a coach who left the floor in 2010. I'm still in the P&L every week, doing the thing I teach.
That's the part that matters to me. Most sales trainers are teaching a version of the game they last played a decade ago. I'm building these frameworks against live numbers right now, which is why they still land on a live sales call today.
Why I teach it now
I wrote a book called Dumb Tax about the avoidable price operators pay for the things nobody taught them. I run Atlas Financial across four lending verticals, I've shared the Top 500 stage with Jocko, and I've published more than 600 sales and leadership tips. The through-line is the same: take what actually works in the field and hand it to the people doing the work, in a form they'll use before the next appointment instead of forgetting by month two.
— Dustin RhoadesThe proof behind the story.
The brain is the engine. You just drive.
I don't hand reps theory they have to decode. I read the buyer for them, name the type in front of them, and give them the steps in the right order. This isn't a recycled playbook that got watered down passing through five hands, and it isn't coming from a guy who stopped selling a decade ago. It's what I'm running in my own P&L this week.
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