Twenty-Five Years of Hardware, One New Direction
Mr Windows had already been trading for around 25 years, mostly on service work, when Heather Clark bought it in 2017. She flipped the model almost immediately: less service, all parts, a solutions-focused business built around sourcing the hardware people couldn't find anywhere else. The business didn't even have a website when she took over.
"You had to fumble in and find it."
Building that first website was Heather's first move. Turnover doubled the following year, and kept growing organically from there as word of mouth and search traffic did their work.
Stumbling Along, Organically
By year four, growth had started to plateau. Heather had picked up just enough basic advertising to keep the business ticking over, but she knew doing more of the same wouldn't take it anywhere new, and she had zero interest in becoming a marketing expert herself.
"I don't Facebook, I don't TikTok, I don't do any of those sorts of things."
The insight that mattered wasn't about which platform to learn next. It was that growing the business meant surrounding herself with people who already knew what she didn't, rather than trying to become one of them.
A Health Scare Changes the Plan
Heather found The Entourage through an ad Jack Delosa ran that caught her attention, and did her homework before committing, talking to current and past participants about the results they'd actually seen. She'd worked with business coaches before, across other businesses over 15 to 20 years, so she knew what to look for.
The moment that really changed things wasn't a coaching session. It was a hospital bed.
"I was able to sit in my bed and watch recording after recording of Entourage training material, and wake up and go, 'Okay, I need a new plan.'"
Hospitalised with pneumonia, Heather spent the downtime working through Entourage training material, and came out the other side ready to rebuild the business with her coach, Amanda.
Replacing Herself, Not Just Growing
Working with her coach surfaced the real constraint on the business: Heather herself.
"One of the key things in working with my coach was identifying myself as the stumbling block. So then it was, how do I replicate myself?"
That meant building out training material so a team of four could handle the volume of work she used to carry alone, work she'd never really stopped doing even after hours. It also meant working out which parts of the business were genuinely hers to do and which belonged to someone else, from external call centre staff picking up the phones to leaning on her coach's own financial background for the numbers side of things.
Accountability, Homework, and Getting Out of the Rut
Running a small business had made Heather insular in a way she hadn't fully clocked until she was out of it.
"You get very isolated when you're in a small business. You become so insular, like horses with blinkers on."
A coach meant regular homework and nowhere to hide from it, one assignment landing before the last one was even finished. The Entourage community pushed Heather, a self-described introvert, well outside her comfort zone too, flying to Sydney alone and staying in a hotel by herself for the first time. Working with a coach who came from an accounting background also gave her more than a business plan: she learned to properly read a profit and loss sheet, and to understand concepts like sales and marketing funnels that had meant nothing to her before.
Results That Speak for Themselves
Since joining The Entourage, the results speak for themselves:
- Turnover: $80,000 a year when Heather bought the business in 2017, around $500,000 a year when she joined The Entourage, $4.5 million last year, and on track for $5.5 to $6 million this year
- Staff: grown from 5 when she joined The Entourage to 16 today
- Repeat, tradie customers: up from around 2% to around 60% of the customer base
- Average order value: $95, across more than 200 parcels shipped a day
- Current return on Meta ad spend: around 5x
- Google rating: up from one star when she bought the business to 4.9 stars today
"It blows my mind, 'cause all we do is widgets. A lot of widgets."
The growth has also brought bigger, unusual jobs: replacement locks for all 15 floors of a Sydney high-rise, 100 custom-made handles for a student accommodation tower, and tracking down UK-sourced hardware for a hospital's uPVC doors
From Working In It to Working On It
Heather doesn't do the day-to-day anymore, and has made peace with not wanting to. These days she can take a week off for herself. Jack Delosa often says most business owners buy themselves a job when they start a business, Heather no longer thinks that describes her.
"I haven't bought myself a job. I have a business, and I can step away because I've got an amazing team."
Bigger and Better, Then Handing It Over
Heather's plan for Mr Windows isn't to keep running it forever. She's thinking a sale within the next year or two, to someone with the energy to take the business into other states, a move she can see the potential for but no longer wants to make herself. With the team and systems now in place, whoever buys it can, as she puts it, "just step in and let them do their thing."
Open to Learning, Open to Growing
"If you are in a place where you are ready to learn and to be open to ideas, then I think that The Entourage is an amazing place for you to learn and grow. If you are closed-minded, you would be disappointed in your results, because you're not gonna be open to the learnings and the opportunities that are gonna be in front of you."
