Growing Leaders from Within | Rich Ashton

How one business owner rebuilt a struggling company by developing leaders from within instead of selling out.

How can a business owner step away without selling the company, sacrificing its culture, or leaving loyal employees behind?

In this episode, Levi sits down with Rich Ashton, a longtime business owner who purchased a nearly bankrupt HVAC company in 1988 and rebuilt it into a successful residential and commercial operation. Rather than selling the business to private equity when it came time to step back, Rich focused on developing the employees already inside the company into leaders capable of running it without him.

What You'll Hear:

Rich shares how he entered the HVAC industry without a technical background and quickly found himself battling debt, an economic downturn, skeptical vendors, and employees who were hesitant to follow someone from outside the trade. What he expected to turn around in two years ultimately took five years of persistence, leadership, and learning how to communicate with an entirely different workforce.

The conversation explores how Tom's Mechanical developed a culture centered on employee empowerment and exceptional customer service. Rich explains why loyalty to his longtime employees made him unwilling to simply sell the company and walk away, leading him to create a leadership development program for blue-collar employees.

Rich also explains how to identify natural leaders inside an organization. They are not always the highest performers or the people with formal titles. Instead, they are often the individuals others naturally gather around, trust, and seek out for advice. By involving those informal leaders in decisions, business owners can gain valuable insight and stronger support when introducing change.

For entrepreneurs, Rich emphasizes the importance of focus, persistence, and being selective about the advice they follow. He shares why outside opinions can pull business owners away from the opportunity that best matches their passion and strengths, and why failure should be viewed as a temporary stop rather than the end of the journey.

Now retired from daily operations, Rich reflects on watching five employees from the original leadership program successfully run the company. He also shares how the lessons from that experience became the foundation for his book, Growing Your Own, and his current work speaking and training others on employee development and leadership.

This episode offers a practical look at rebuilding a struggling company, developing leaders from within, and creating a business that can continue succeeding long after the owner steps away.

Connect with Rich Ashton:

🌐 Website: https://growingyourown.net/

🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-ashton-397a2b10/

📖 Learn more about Rich's book, Growing Your Own, on his website or through Amazon.