I am going to say this plainly: I believe Nexstar’s sales culture is hurting the residential plumbing industry.
That opinion did not come from watching a few angry videos online. It came from ten years in the trade, holding two master plumbing licenses, owning and operating my own plumbing and septic company, and then spending the last two years working inside three different plumbing companies. Two of those companies had used Nexstar’s methods.
Every time I have tried to work a service call through that style of process, I have felt the same thing happen. The customer becomes guarded. The conversation stops feeling like a plumber helping a homeowner and starts feeling like a salesperson moving someone through a funnel. Even when the customer buys, the relationship often feels weaker afterward.
I am not claiming every Nexstar member is dishonest, every Nexstar-trained technician is pushy, or every part of Nexstar is bad. Nexstar teaches real business disciplines that many contractors desperately need: answering phones, pricing for overhead, training employees, reading financial statements, building repeatable systems, and running a profitable company. I learned the hard way in my own business that technical skill alone does not create a sustainable operation.
My criticism is narrower and more serious:
When a plumbing company makes closing percentage and average ticket the center of the service call, the technician eventually starts optimizing the customer instead of serving the customer.
That can create impressive revenue today while quietly destroying the customer base the company will need tomorrow.
The problem is not charging enough
Plumbing companies have to charge real money.
A legitimate service company has trucks, fuel, insurance, payroll taxes, dispatchers, office staff, warranties, training, tools, licensing, marketing, callbacks, unbillable drive time, and technicians who deserve a good living. A company that underprices its work is not being kind. It is creating a future failure that employees and customers will eventually pay for.
I have charged more than competing plumbers. I still do not believe the answer is to pressure people.
Honest does not mean cheap. Honest means understandable.
A customer can accept a high price when the technician explains the problem clearly, shows the evidence, defines the scope, discusses the risks, and gives the homeowner control over the decision. The price may still hurt. That is different from the customer feeling handled.
You can charge $50 an hour or $700 an hour. If the person across the table feels pushed, cornered, or psychologically worked, resentment can survive long after the invoice is paid.
What Nexstar publicly emphasizes
Nexstar describes its flagship Service System as a six-step program for in-home plumbing, HVAC, and electrical technicians. Its public training catalog also includes Advanced Sales and Service, Inside Sales, Sewer Sales, HVAC Sales, and Sales and Install Management. Nexstar says these programs are intended to create positive buying experiences, five-star reviews, repeat business, and satisfied customers.
Those are good goals.
But Nexstar’s own public success stories repeatedly emphasize a different scoreboard: closing rate, average sale, revenue growth, objections cleared, and solutions presented per opportunity.
A 2026 Nexstar article about its Sales Objection Bootcamp says proper adoption should make closing rates and average sales rise consistently. It highlights one company whose revenue increased 53% while its average sale increased 72% on fewer leads. The same article compares a good sales process to a waterslide that moves the customer to the same ending with very little effort.
A separate Nexstar article about objection training discusses responses to price, shopping around, needing to speak with a spouse, repair versus replacement, and what it calls fake objections. It presents the idea that a customer’s “no” may simply mean the customer does not yet have enough information.
Another Nexstar member story celebrates increasing the average number of solutions presented on each opportunity from 1.59 to 3.07. The company reported an average-sale increase of about $300 and a conversion increase of nearly 15%.
None of those numbers prove wrongdoing. Presenting options is not unethical. Training a technician to communicate is not unethical. Following up on an unsold estimate is not unethical.
The danger is what happens when the numbers become the purpose of the visit.
A customer is not an objection to clear. A spouse is not a barrier to route around. A request to think about a $6,000 decision is not evidence that the technician failed to build enough value. Sometimes “no” means no. Sometimes “not today” is the most responsible answer a homeowner can give.
A plumbing call is not a normal retail transaction
The power imbalance inside a home is enormous.
The plumber understands the system. The homeowner usually does not. The plumber can see whether a leak is urgent, whether a sewer problem is likely to return, whether the water heater is unsafe, and whether a repair is reasonable. The customer may be dealing with sewage, water damage, no hot water, a frightened spouse, children in the house, or the fear that a small issue is about to become a catastrophe.
That is not the moment to treat human psychology as a revenue tool.
The pressure does not have to sound aggressive. It can be wrapped in friendliness:
- Build rapport before discussing the problem.
- Expand the inspection beyond the reason for the call.
- Create several options with a strategically attractive middle choice.
- Anchor the price with the largest package.
- Convert the total into a monthly payment.
- Answer every hesitation as an objection.
- Keep the conversation moving until the customer chooses something.
Each step can be defended individually. Together, under the wrong incentives, they can turn trust into leverage.
That is why homeowners often cannot explain exactly what bothered them. The technician may have been polite. The options may have been real. The work may have been performed correctly. Yet the customer still feels like the visit was designed to extract the largest possible decision before they had time to breathe.
Pressure can win the sale and lose the story
Recent research supports what many technicians can feel in the room.
A 2025 study published in Psychology & Marketing compared pressure-to-purchase tactics with an approach that encouraged customers to deliberate. Across five experiments, giving customers more autonomy produced more positive word-of-mouth. In the study that measured actual comments, 88% of participants in the deliberate-first condition shared positive comments, compared with 25% in the pressure condition.
That matters because the invoice is only one outcome of a service call. The customer also leaves with a story.
That story gets told to a spouse, a neighbor, a local Facebook group, a real estate agent, a property manager, and sometimes thousands of people in a Google review. A pressured customer may still authorize the work because the toilet is overflowing or the water heater is dead. Authorization is not the same thing as loyalty.
Housecall Pro’s 2025 homeowner survey found that 68% of homeowners would hire the same professional again after excellent service, and 73% would refer that business to someone else. Its research also identifies unclear pricing, weak communication, and unprofessional interactions as major sources of frustration.
The long-term opportunity is obvious: make the customer feel informed, respected, and safe, and one service call can become years of work and a stream of referrals.
Make the customer feel processed, and the same person may pay today and return to Google tomorrow.
What has worked better for me
My best sales technique has been acting like a knowledgeable human being.
I walk into the home, listen to what the customer is actually asking for, inspect the problem, and explain what I see. I show them the failed part. I explain what caused it when I can. I distinguish between what is required, what I recommend, and what is optional.
If the customer asks about a cheaper shortcut, I explain the code-compliant path, the less-than-ideal alternatives people sometimes consider, and the risks and limits involved. I do not pretend every option is equivalent, and I do not use code as a scare tactic. The customer deserves enough real information to understand the tradeoff.
Sometimes the right answer is a complete replacement. Sometimes it is a repair. Sometimes it is monitoring the issue. Sometimes the customer needs to collect another bid. If there is no immediate safety or property-damage concern, giving someone time to think is not losing control of the call. It is respecting the person who has to live with the decision and pay the bill.
This approach does not always create the highest invoice that day. It does something more valuable: it makes us the company the customer calls next time.
In the operation I am part of today, 46% of revenue comes from returning customers. That is a revenue-share figure, not a claim that exactly 46% of individual customers return. The distinction matters, but the business meaning is still substantial. Almost half of the money coming through the company is attached to relationships that already existed.
That is not the result of being the cheapest plumber. We are often not. It comes from answering quickly, showing up, being technically capable, communicating clearly, and treating the customer like a person rather than an opportunity.
The math Nexstar-style scoreboards can miss
Average ticket is easy to measure:
Average ticket = service revenue / completed jobs
Customer lifetime value is harder:
Contribution LTV = lifetime gross profit - acquisition cost - retention cost - callbacks and warranty cost
The first number tells you what happened on one invoice. The second tells you whether the relationship was actually valuable.
An illustrative one-and-done comparison
These are example assumptions, not Nexstar pricing data and not a claim about every plumbing company.
Transaction-first outcome
- Initial invoice: $2,000
- Gross margin: 50%
- Cost to acquire the first-time customer: $250
- Future jobs retained: none
The contribution is:
$2,000 × 50% - $250 = $750
Trust-first outcome
- Initial invoice: $1,200
- Second job: $700
- Third job: $1,400
- Total lifetime revenue: $3,300
- Gross margin: 50%
- Initial acquisition cost: $250
- Follow-up and retention cost: $50
The contribution is:
$3,300 × 50% - $250 - $50 = $1,350
The trust-first customer produces 80% more contribution even though the first invoice is 40% smaller.
The lesson is not that every initial ticket should be reduced. The lesson is that maximizing the first ticket can be mathematically irrational when it lowers the probability of future work.
The break-even point is lower than many owners think
Assume one strategy produces a $2,000 initial sale and another produces a $1,200 initial sale. The apparent advantage is $800.
Now assume the homeowner represents another $3,000 of reasonable plumbing work over the life of the relationship.
The trust-first strategy only needs a 26.7-percentage-point advantage in the probability of capturing that future work to recover the entire initial-ticket difference:
$800 / $3,000 = 26.7%
More generally:
Required retention advantage = initial ticket gap / future revenue opportunity
If a pressure-heavy process raises today’s ticket but drops the chance of winning the next water heater, sewer repair, fixture replacement, referral, or new-home relationship by more than that threshold, the “better” sale was actually the worse business decision.
What 46% repeat revenue does during a slow season
Use a company with a normal $100,000 revenue month.
With our current mix:
- Returning-customer revenue: $46,000
- New-customer revenue: $54,000
Now assume a slow season reduces new-customer revenue by 40%, while returning-customer revenue falls by only 10%.
The month becomes:
- New-customer revenue:
$54,000 × 60% = $32,400 - Returning-customer revenue:
$46,000 × 90% = $41,400 - Total slow-season revenue: $73,800
Now compare that with a company producing only 10% of revenue from returning customers:
- New-customer revenue:
$90,000 × 60% = $54,000 - Returning-customer revenue:
$10,000 × 90% = $9,000 - Total slow-season revenue: $63,000
The stronger repeat-customer base creates $10,800 more revenue in that single slow month on the same original $100,000 baseline. Across four slow months, that is $43,200.
The assumptions can change. The principle does not. New demand is more exposed to weather, advertising costs, search volume, economic fear, and competitors buying the same leads. Existing customers already know who to call.
Repeat revenue is not merely extra revenue. It is a stabilizer.
Retention changes the cost structure
Harvard Business Review has summarized research showing that acquiring a new customer can cost five to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. It also cites Bain research finding that a 5% improvement in retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%, depending on the business.
Those ranges should not be pasted blindly onto a plumbing company’s financial statement. Plumbing is episodic, job mixes vary, and a homeowner may go years without needing service. But the underlying mechanism absolutely applies:
- A returning customer does not need to discover the company again.
- The company does not have to outbid every competitor for the click.
- The customer requires less proof before booking.
- The technician starts with existing trust and job history.
- Price comparison often becomes less important.
- A satisfied customer can generate referrals with little acquisition expense.
Consider the scale of the 46% figure. On every $1 million of annual revenue, that mix would represent $460,000 from returning customers.
At an illustrative $1,500 average invoice, replacing $460,000 would require about 307 additional first-time jobs. At an illustrative $250 acquisition cost per booked new customer, that is roughly $76,750 in additional acquisition expense before considering the office workload, unused leads, reschedules, drive time, and operational capacity required to deliver those jobs.
A company with weak retention is forced to keep feeding the marketing machine just to stand still.
Average ticket is not a harmless north-star metric
Average ticket belongs on a dashboard. It should not sit on the throne.
When management constantly celebrates the biggest tickets, ranks technicians primarily by revenue, trains every hesitation as an objection, and pays heavily on sold work, technicians learn what the company truly values. The mission statement may say service. The scoreboard says extraction.
The better question is not, “How much did this technician sell today?”
It is:
“How much gross profit, loyalty, and referral value did this technician create over the next three years?”
A plumbing company serious about durable growth should track a balanced set of outcomes:
- Repeat-customer revenue by technician over 12, 24, and 36 months
- Gross profit per acquired customer over time
- Referral-generated jobs and revenue
- Review sentiment, not only star rating
- Cancellations, financing regret, refunds, callbacks, and warranty cost
- The percentage of customers who report that pricing and options were clear
- The percentage who felt comfortable declining work
- Revenue stability during historically slow months
A technician with a $1,250 average ticket and a loyal customer base may be far more valuable than a technician averaging $2,000 whose customers never call again.
Most dashboards cannot see that. Owners need to make them see it.
What ethical plumbing sales should look like
I am not against sales. A plumber who cannot explain value will under-serve customers and undercharge for skilled work. The answer is not to become passive. The answer is to make the process genuinely customer-controlled.
A healthy service call should do the following:
- Solve the reason for the call first. Do not use the original problem merely as an entry point for a whole-home sales hunt.
- Show the evidence. Photos, measurements, failed components, pressure readings, camera footage, and clear explanations beat emotional language.
- Separate required, recommended, and optional work. Do not blur a safety issue, a preventive improvement, and a comfort upgrade into one level of urgency.
- Offer real choices. A repair option should not be intentionally crippled to make the premium package look reasonable.
- Explain consequences without manufacturing fear. State what is known, what is likely, and what is uncertain.
- Respect deliberation. Unless the condition is actively dangerous or damaging property, a customer should be able to pause, call a spouse, or collect another bid without being worked through a script.
- Charge enough to stand behind the work. Trust-first service is not discount service.
- Follow up after the job. The relationship should continue after payment, not end when the technician’s commission is secured.
- Measure lifetime contribution. Reward technicians for customers who return, refer, and remain satisfied.
That process can still produce large jobs. The difference is that the sale becomes the result of understanding, not the objective of the conversation.
The part Nexstar gets right
The plumbing industry does need systems.
Too many excellent plumbers fail because they do not know their costs, do not answer the phone consistently, do not train employees, and do not charge enough to cover overhead. I have lived that failure. I will never argue that craftsmanship alone is enough to run a company.
Nexstar is right that contractors need business education. It is right that technicians need communication training. It is right that customers benefit from documented options instead of vague verbal guesses. It is right that a company must be profitable to provide warranties, create careers, and remain available when customers need it.
But a useful system becomes dangerous when it is treated as universal, scripted too tightly, or managed through a narrow financial scoreboard.
A process can increase revenue and still damage trust.
A technician can close the call and still lose the customer.
A company can grow its average ticket while weakening the asset that matters most: the number of homeowners who would call it again without searching for anyone else.
My conclusion after ten years in plumbing
I would rather earn $1,200 today, solve the right problem, and be the first call for the next decade than force a $2,000 invoice today and send the customer back to Google the next time something breaks.
That is not softness. It is long-term business discipline.
The strongest plumbing companies will still price correctly. They will still present options. They will still train their people. They will still make excellent profit. But they will understand that the homeowner is not a number to move through a six-step sequence.
The homeowner is the business.
Forty-six percent of our current revenue comes from people who have already experienced our work and decided to call again. During a slow season, that trust is worth more than a clever objection response. Over a five-year customer relationship, it can be worth more than the oversized first ticket a technician was congratulated for selling.
I believe Nexstar’s influence is pushing too much of the plumbing industry toward winning the transaction at the expense of the relationship. If companies keep optimizing for the invoice instead of the customer’s lifetime value, the short-term numbers may look great right up until the phones stop ringing.
The future of plumbing does not need better pressure tactics.
It needs better judgment.
Sources and further reading
- Nexstar Network: Business Training Resources — Official descriptions of Service System, Advanced Sales and Service, Inside Sales, Sewer Sales, and other programs.
- Nexstar Network: Sales Objection Bootcamp — Adoption — Official discussion of adoption, closing percentage, average sale, and revenue results.
- Nexstar Network: An Objection Bootcamp Ten Years in the Making — Official explanation of the objections addressed and the philosophy behind the training.
- Nexstar Network: Power to the Buyer — Member case study connecting more solutions per opportunity with higher average sale and conversion.
- Nexstar Network: Service System and Customer Objections — Nexstar’s description of rapport, options, and objection clearing in the home.
- Harvard Business Review: The Value of Keeping the Right Customers — Summary of customer-acquisition and retention economics.
- Housecall Pro: Home Service Customer Service Report — 2025 survey of 1,040 U.S. homeowners on rehire, referrals, pricing, communication, and service expectations.
- Psychology & Marketing: When Less Pressure Leads to More Talk — 2025 research comparing pressure-to-purchase tactics with encouraging customer deliberation.