Most home service owners who say they want a mentor are looking in places mentors don’t hang out. LinkedIn cold messages. Paid mastermind programs. Conferences that come around twice a year. None of those venues introduce the operator to the local business owner who’s already running the kind of company they want to build. The mentors are closer than that, and they’re available every weekday morning. That’s the recommendation Austin Yarborough, CEO of Central Coast Moving & Storage and the founder of Moving Army, made on a recent episode of the Snoball Effect Podcast. The strategy is unglamorous and almost too obvious in retrospect.
The Strategy: Find Disciplined Operators Where They Already Are
Austin’s actual recommendation, in his own words: “Wake up at 4:20 AM and get your ass in the gym at 5:00 AM. Do 20 minutes of cardio, and then go work out. Look for the guys that are disciplined, fit, and athletic. Walk up to them, ‘Dude, you’re freaking jacked. Do you own a business?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘What kind of business?’ Talk to those guys.”
The logic underneath is selection bias used in the operator’s favor. The person willing to be in the gym at 5 AM is filtering themselves for the company. They have the discipline to wake up early. They have a body that signals consistent attention to their health. They’re structuring their day around the kind of work that requires early starts, which usually means they own or run something. And they have time at 5 AM that they don’t have at 11 AM when most networking happens.
This is the population most home service owners never reach. The local roofing company owner with $8 million in revenue isn’t taking LinkedIn cold messages. The remodeling firm owner who’s figured out marketing isn’t at the Chamber breakfast every Wednesday. They’re training before work. A casual conversation between sets is the only window most working operators have in their day.
How the Approach Actually Plays Out
The opening Austin recommends is direct. Compliment something specific. Ask a yes-or-no question. Follow up with an open question. Five sentences of conversation gets the operator to whether the other person owns a business and what kind. From there, the conversation either continues organically or it doesn’t. Either outcome is fine, because the operator is going to be back tomorrow.
The compounding part of the strategy is that the same people are there every morning. The first conversation might be ninety seconds about lifting. The second conversation, a week later, is two minutes about what each person does. The third is five minutes about a problem one of them is working through. By the time a real mentor relationship forms, the operator has been seen and known and trusted for weeks. There’s no awkward “will you be my mentor” moment because the relationship grew the way real relationships grow.
“Those people are the ultra-dedicated, highly motivated people in your community right now hiding away because they’re so busy and they do so much action,” Austin said. “Those are the people that can point you in the right direction.”
What to Do When You Find the Right One
Austin’s framework for converting a gym acquaintance into a mentor is a phrase he uses repeatedly: rip off and duplicate. Once the operator identifies someone running the kind of business they want to build, the work is to study what that person does and mirror it. How they dress. How they communicate. What associations they belong to. What events they attend. What books or coaches they reference. The mentor doesn’t even need to know they’ve been adopted as a model.
This is the part most operators skip. They want a mentor to give them a step-by-step plan. The actual mentor relationship that works is more like a model the operator can study and copy. The mentor’s value isn’t their formal advice. It’s their visible example of what a successful operator at the next level actually looks like in real life. Watching that example day after day in the gym is more useful than a once-a-month coaching call.
The other piece of advice Austin shared is to dress for the level the operator wants to reach. He pointed out that most moving company owners show up to events in t-shirts and shorts and then wonder why realtors and other adjacent professionals look down on them. His own move was to start dressing like an six-figure entrepreneur before he was one. Collared shirt. Dress slacks. Quality watch. Not because the clothes made the difference, but because the clothes were a signal to mentors and peers that he was operating at the level where their advice was worth giving.
The Takeaway
If you’ve been waiting for a mentor to appear, change the venue. Sign up at the gym closest to your house. Start showing up at 5 AM tomorrow. Bring a small notebook and a willingness to start awkward conversations between sets. The mentors are already there. They’ve been there. They’re waiting for someone to ask them a real question. For the full conversation with Austin, including the hourly-rate math that helps owners decide what to stop doing and the framework behind his $264,000 mobile storage bet, check out the complete episode write-up.
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