Tim Sjobeck

I didn't just study business in a classroom. I was raised in it, literally. My dad owned a plumbing construction business, and my brothers and I spent our summers learning the trade. I can still remember being on the job site as a young kid, not particularly productive but absorbing everything. I'd pound nails into blocks from the scrap wood pile, building things with whatever I could find.

As a young teenager I ran the pipe threader for my dad, cutting and threading pipe while standing on a scrap header piece because I was too short to reach the machine properly. That's where my love affair with punch lists began. I'd grab small wood blocks and a pencil, get measurements from the other plumbers, write them down, and go cut accordingly.

Structure. Order. Actionable steps out of chaos.

That punch list mindset became the thread that ran through my entire career.

I took that blue-collar education to Alaska in the '90s, working 15 to 18-hour days on the North Slope oil fields. My dad taught me to work hard, but Alaska taught me what "hard" actually meant. The oil fields didn't tolerate mistakes. Every procedure mattered. Every system had to hold.

Back in California, I returned to plumbing, helping my dad's company and my brother's before finding a home with a plumbing company in Santa Cruz. That's where I met my mentor. He saw something in me beyond technical skill. He taught me the business side of the business, and more importantly, how to identify what I didn't know.

In late 2006, as the economy started to crack, my boss launched a Service & Repair division. I came in as a tech, grew into a service manager, and got trained through Nexstar, the trade association that changed my trajectory. They showed me how to turn my punch lists into documented systems, SOPs, and operational guidelines that actually moved the bottom line.

I fell in love with the process. Not just fixing pipes, fixing the systems that made the business work.

In 2010, we started a new plumbing business in Sacramento that would eventually add HVAC to our fold. I started back in the truck, building it slowly and methodically. We became a local fan favorite, winning "Best of the Best" nine consecutive years for Best Plumber and Best HVAC company, and grew into a good-sized company during one of the toughest economies in modern history.

My wife ran the office for about five years and became a ServiceTitan expert. I loved every part of it: being part of our community, training our team, watching them grow into their potential, especially the time in our tech training room, teaching the fundamentals and showing them the procedures that turned good techs into great ones.

Then my health forced a choice. In 2019, my cardiologist sat me down and delivered a clean ultimatum: Do you like breathing? Well, then sell the business, or she'd be explaining to my wife why I wasn't coming home. We sold the company in late 2021.

I was going to miss the training room. I was going to miss watching people develop skills they didn't know they had.

In 2022, ServiceTitan offered me a role as a Program Facilitator. I'll be honest, I was outgunned from a software perspective. But I had something most people in that role didn't: 30+ years in the trenches. I knew what it felt like to be the contractor trying to scale, the owner drowning in the chaos of running a business, the team leader wondering why the same problems kept repeating.

The first year was hard. But I realized I had an opportunity to help contractors at a scale I'd never imagined. As a plumber, I protected individual homes and businesses. As an owner, I built a team. Now I was helping contractors just like I used to be. It came full circle.

Most businesses are incredible at their craft and struggle with their company. Not because they lack intelligence or work ethic, but because no one ever taught them the systematic process for diagnosing and fixing the problems that slowly erode everything they've built.

Look close at the cover of this book. Dark granite, split straight through. And the crack isn’t empty. It’s filled with gold.

The gold is in the cracks. The lessons are in the failures.

I learned that after years on the Alaska North Slope, after building a plumbing business in Sacramento, and after two heart surgeries that forced me to ask what the hard work was actually for.

In 2023, at 52, I climbed Half Dome. Lots of people climb Half Dome every year. For me, those 4,800 vertical feet to an 8,846-foot summit were about more than dropping 76 pounds or checking off a physical challenge.

It was about conquering something bigger. Letting go of the bricks I’d been carrying. Looking down at that fallen tree and deciding, once and for all, that Fail doesn’t get the final word.

From the valley floor, Half Dome looks impossible. Up close, it’s just the next step. Then the one after that.

On the cables, there’s no room for extra weight. Every bad call, every mistake I never dealt with, I’d been hauling up that mountain with me. Somewhere on that rock, I finally started setting it down.

That’s the process this book teaches. Face it. Take the next step. Keep what works. Leave the rest on the mountain.

You can't delete your failures. They're permanent. But you can decide whether they're dead weight or building material.

Most business owners carry a backpack full of lessons they've never processed. The BUILD Protocol is your way of saying: I'm done hiding from this. I'm building with it.

Every failure you process becomes a lesson you own. Every lesson makes you smarter, faster, and harder to beat than any competitor who's still winging it.

Bios and photos, ready to use. Copy what you need.

Tim Sjobeck is the author of Failing to Fail: How Great Businesses Turn Setbacks into Systems. With 30+ years in the trades, he built a Sacramento plumbing and HVAC company named "Best of the Best" nine years running, then sold it. He is the founder of Advancing the Trades.

Tim Sjobeck was raised on the job site. The son of a plumbing contractor, he spent his summers threading pipe, worked 15 to 18-hour days on Alaska's North Slope, and went on to build a Sacramento plumbing and HVAC company named "Best of the Best" nine consecutive years before selling it in 2021. He has since trained contractors as a ServiceTitan Program Facilitator and founded Advancing the Trades. His book, Failing to Fail, introduces the BUILD Protocol, a five-step forensic method for turning any setback into a system that keeps it from coming back. Written from the trades, it is built for any business. In 2023, at 52, Tim climbed Half Dome.