377: Sell Your Story on Social with Sean McGraw
Sean McGraw, Founder and CEO of FOR Energy, shows leaders how to sell your story on social while building a scalable, systems-driven company. Guided by servant leadership, Sean runs a mission-centered residential energy business that helps Phoenix-area homeowners lower energy costs, improve comfort, and address indoor air quality.
In this conversation, Sean introduces The McGraw Business Build Framework—Org. Chart, Depth Chart, Playbooks, and Processes. He explains why systems create predictable outcomes, how playbooks combine mission and training with SOPs, and why processes should cover the repeatable 80% without overcomplicating the business. Sean also shares how speed, planning, and execution drive growth, why leaders must empower teams to decide within guardrails, and how FOR Energy uses social storytelling to market a holistic service that customers may not know to search for.
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Sell Your Story on Social with Sean McGraw
Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Sean McGraw, the Founder and CEO of FOR Energy, a full-service residential energy company helping homeowners reduce their energy costs, increase comfort, and improve indoor air quality through energy efficiency. FOR is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, where there is rain right now. There is. Sean, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Steve. Excited to be here.
Yeah, it’s great. And I was wondering about your business because I have a client who is in the energy efficiency business in Maryland, but they have a completely different climate. So I was thinking that what you have to do is really reduce heat, and what they have to do much of the year is to increase heat. So it’s kind of the opposite thing.
It is. Yeah. Arizona is a unique place. We get 115-degree heat for three, four months at a time. So our job is to keep heat out. Their job is to keep heat in. It’s actually the same concepts. You’re just dealing with different seasons, and it can still get hot in Maryland. So when they make a home energy efficient, they also want to keep the cold air in in the summertime.
Yeah, that’s right. And insulation is a big part of it. So we are going to dive into this. But before we go there, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?
Yeah. My personal “Why” is very generic and very simple. I want to leave this earth better than I found it. I want to leave a legacy behind me. I’ve got two young kids. And I would tell you this, my perspective’s changed since having those kids. My most important job in life is raising them right, raising them to be high-functioning members of society that give back. They’re philanthropic. They’re good people. I would say that ties into my company too.
So we’re a very mission-, vision-, core-value-centric company. One of our main core values is servant leadership. So part of our philosophy is, for our entire team, for the people that we hire, hire people that want to serve other people, whether that’s philanthropically outside of the office, whether it’s a coworker needing a hand or wanting to learn a new skill. We’re very big on just pushing and doing good things outward because it always comes back.
Yeah, I love it. Hire servant leaders. So what does servant leadership mean to you?
Yeah, I think maybe I have a unique definition, but servant leadership kind of evolved from a book that we had read called The Go-Giver. It’s a phenomenal book. It’s about the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success. And so servant leadership to me is elevating those around you.
So it could be something as simple as I’m going to go clean up a park with my kids this weekend on Saturday when they could be playing or hanging out with friends doing something more fun.
But I really want to ingrain in people around me, the more you serve and the more you better your community and those around you, the better your quality of life gets.
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So it’s really, really important.
Love it. Elevate people around you. That’s definitely a good rule to live by. So Sean, this podcast is called Management Blueprint, and we focus on unearthing great frameworks that people are using.
Yep.
So I wonder if you could share a framework with us, with our listeners, that you have discovered which helps you be more effective or a better servant leader or gain clients or serve clients or do something in your business that is easy to understand. It can be explained in three to five steps that people, when they hear it, could apply to their own business.
Oh gosh, this is a multilayered, complicated question, but I’ll tell you. I’ve read Scaling Up, I’ve read The E-Myth, I’ve read the EOS framework, and I’ve kind of pieced together pieces from a lot of these systems. And really, for us specifically, and even businesses I look at and admire, systems run the business. It’s rarely a person doing a bad— It can happen, of course. But if you’re hiring to your mission, vision, values, you’re hiring, firing, and promoting to those, everything after that should fall into systems.
And systems from top to bottom of the company run the company and allow a company to grow and keep the train on the tracks and create this predictable outcome.
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So I would tell you the first framework that really changed things for me and my company is simply putting together the structure of the company and kind of the platform that we’re going to use to grow. So the first step for us in that was putting together a living, breathing org chart. And that’s just the first step. But most companies don’t have an up-to-date org chart, which to me is crazy in a lot of ways because it’s the hierarchy, it’s the communication channels. And the reason I say it’s living, moving, breathing is because positions change.
New positions are added. Team members may join the team, team members may exit the team. And so keeping that up to date is a foundational piece for us. So that’s number one. Number two is a depth chart. If this person isn’t here, who can do that job? To me it’s ultra important, especially for companies from, let’s say, $1 million to $6 million, $7 million, because you have a lot of single points of failure. You might have one person that knows how to do a very, very important job, and hypothetically speaking, if that person got hit by a bus tomorrow, what do you do? So creating that depth chart.
The third piece for us was creating playbooks and training and operating manuals for every single position in the company. And we’re not perfect at this. Updating them is kind of the challenge that I think we need to get better at. But people can’t be successful at a job if they don’t have proper training and a proper blueprint to be successful at that job. And then I would say the fourth thing is creating processes around anything that you’re doing 80% of the time. So there’s always going to be one-offs in business. There’s always going to be a phone call I’m not expecting and some kind of challenge that my team or myself have to solve for.
But for 80% of the business, it’s happening every single day, and those items should be documented and infused in the training for that position and well-known throughout the company. So that framework has served us well. We’ve been gut-punched a lot of times over the last couple of years, Steve. Like, business is harder than it’s been in a long time. We had a pretty good-sized solar company, and there’s been a lot of legislation changes, a lot of bad actors in the space that have completely changed the landscape of solar.
So we’ve kind of pivoted, and we’re kind of reinventing ourselves and really focused on energy efficiency, which allows us to go back and relay the foundation in a lot of ways. But those are the items that have really served us well, and as we continue to hit these levels in business, we do have to go revisit how we’re doing things. And that system worked at $2 million. Is it going to work at $10 million? Probably not. So we’re always looking at ways to make things better, faster, less expensive with the same or better outcome, and it is most of the time possible to do.
Yeah. That’s fascinating. So you mentioned playbooks and then process. What’s the difference between playbooks and process in your vocabulary?
Yeah, to me, they do go hand in hand. So a process is something like, how do we take a phone call from a customer? I’ll use that as a very basic example. So some companies, you can walk into their call center and they just have people saying, “Hello?” It’s not a right way to answer the phone. But if you don’t train somebody on how you expect them to answer the phone, well, shame on you. They did their job. They’re supposed to answer the phone. So, “Hey, this is Sean with FOR Energy. How may I help you today?” There’s a big difference between the two.
But simply by documenting and identifying something, and then walking them through how to accept an appointment, how to put it on the calendar, how to make sure that by the time they’re done with that phone call, it’s ready for that next step, that’s a process. And that process should be a part of the playbook. The playbook is kind of, I don’t mean this in any negative way, it’s the Holy Bible for that position. Like, you need to follow it like gospel. And if you do, you’re creating a path of consistent results. Without the playbook, you’re creating chaos every single time.
So the playbook is like a high-level process for the function, and then the process is more of an SOP?
Yeah, I think that’s a good description. So the playbook might be a collection of SOPs, but it’s going to go deeper than that. It’s going to explain our mission, our vision, our values, the why behind the process. Whereas the process is a step-by-step instruction manual. The process is as simple as, you know, when I was a kid, I played with Legos. I love Legos, and now I have two little boys that love Legos, and I get to play with them again.
If you follow the instructions on a Lego set, it’s always going to look exactly how it’s supposed to look. But if you get a box of Legos and there’s no instructions in the box, and you are unpacking these Legos, you’re going to have a really tough time doing the job. You’re going to have a really tough time making the Legos look like they look on the box. You might get close, but I bet you’re not accurate.
Yeah. I like that analogy. It’s a good one, especially with today’s big Legos, like the Millennium Falcon and stuff like that. It’s hard to just intuitively put it together.
I don’t think a person on Earth could put together that Lego set without instructions. It’s too complicated. And business is really similar. If you look at it like a Lego set, people really do need to know what A, B, C, D, E, F, G, to get from start to finish are. But the whole purpose is you build a masterpiece, and it is exactly the same as it looks on the box.
Yeah.
And a good process will do that in business and just create that predictable outcome which everybody’s after, and so many people neglect.
So how does AI influence this approach? Can you become too mechanical and actually regress?
Yeah, I think you can. I think you can over-process a business. Owning a business in any vertical is complicated. You’re juggling a couple of different things. You want process, but you want simplification at the same time. I’ve personally done it. I’ve seen buddies do it, where they overcomplicate their business with process. So when we are designing a process, we’re always looking at, is this going to scale? Is this simple to understand?
You want to ask those questions and really make a process as simple as possible to get from A to Z. Like, if you have a process and can eliminate a step and have a really top-notch, world-class outcome, you should eliminate that step, in my opinion.
Yeah. Yeah. Simplify, simplify. So what drives growth in your business?
That’s another really deep, good question. I would say this: speed. If I could boil it down to one word, it’s speed. And then a second would be planning. We’re getting to a stage where we’re creating a predictable model where we feed it $1 and we might get eight back, eight to 10 back if we’re running efficiently. Speed in making decisions and making pivots when you need to is ultra important in every business. We’re living in the age of AI. We’re living in the age of information.
Starting a business is really hard. It always has been. I think it might be harder now because of costs and things like that than ever before, and maybe, like, a tighter talent pool. But I will tell you, starting a business today, these people starting businesses have all the information in the world sitting in their pocket on their phone. So the knowledge is there. The execution is what’s tough. And the reason I say speed is because if we take a month to make a decision and there’s some young buck that started a similar company to mine that’s just really, really giddy and ready to go, and they make that decision in a day or two days, they might be light-years ahead of us very, very quickly. Speed, planning, and execution drive growth 10 out of 10 times.
So how do you make sure that you are accelerating your decision-action velocity?
Well, it’s really on my brain at all times. I’ve just come to know that if I drag my feet on a decision or an opportunity, that opportunity may not be there anymore, or it may change, or I may let somebody else get to it first. So this is just a state of mind for me, and it is hard to drill into my team, and you can do it through process. Like, for instance, today, we haven’t done a great job of planning our marketing for future months.
So we’re creating a system where, mid-month, let’s call it the 15th, my team is going to present the following month’s marketing plan so we can agree, we can discuss, we can identify issues, poke holes, and get to a place where we all agree and we’re rowing in the same direction. So when that next month comes, we are quick. We have a plan. Now we’re in execution mode.
It can be done. It should be a mindset. I mean, some leaders have a tendency to drag their feet and ask a lot of questions and create analysis paralysis. But when I look at the leaders I admire the most, they’re making quick, quick, quick decisions.
So if you doubled your company in the next 12 months, would the number of decisions double that you would have to make as well?
They could. They could, right? Yes and no. The decisions my team would need to make would definitely increase.
A big piece of growth is empowering a team to be able to make important decisions for their department or their job without me.
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Now, there are certain things I always want to be involved in, but true leadership is empowering other people. If we’re growing and I’m having to make all these decisions on a daily basis, I’m a bottleneck, and to me, that’s not healthy, and I’ve done it.
It’s slowed us down. I want others to be able to make decisions with some guardrails, right? They might have a budget, but I’m going to say, “Okay, your budget is X amount of dollars for this month. What are you going to do with your budget? How are you going to create this many demo opportunities, leads with that budget?” And let them fly.
Yeah. So it’s very much outcome-driven. You give people the outcome and go figure it out kind of thing.
And I might have a little influence, especially if they’re newer, but I want them to make decisions. I want them to fail. I don’t want them to make a heavy $50,000 mistake, but I do want them to fail because you learn through failure.
Yeah. No, no question. No question. Success is always the teacher. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now?
We’re trying to scale energy efficiency. Now, the reason I say that is energy efficiency is not a product, it’s a collection of products, and so marketing has become challenging. If we were a bathroom remodeling company or a roofing company, I could just go buy leads and promote one product, but it’s not that simple for us. We have to tell our story. We have to say, “Hey, look, you could call an insulation company and get insulation. You can do that, but they’re not going to look at the home holistically.”
When that insulation person comes to your house, they have one job: to sell you insulation. What if insulation’s not the problem? What if you have attic ceiling issues or disconnected ducts or your windows are outdated? Don’t self-diagnose. Have us come to the home and look at it holistically and make recommendations for you that are going to solve your problem. Same with any product category. If you call an HVAC company or a roofing company or a window company, they’re going to send somebody out with the mission to sell that product to the homeowner whether or not it’s going to solve their issue.
So we are challenged right now with marketing our energy efficiency program, energy audits, and home energy checkup when it’s not a product category. So we’re getting good, we’re getting close, but we’re not fully there.
So in your introduction, we talked about reducing energy costs, increasing comfort, improving air quality and energy efficiency as a byproduct. So what is the product, or what is it that you’re selling?
Time. We’re selling information. So when we set an appointment, we’re setting an appointment to go… It’s almost a home inspection just focused on energy, or a doctor’s visit for your house. When we go out there, we run through a series of tests, visual inspections, measurements. We generate a report that’s about 20 pages long with photos from the depths of your attic, where, Steve, you probably never want to go in your attic.
It’s nasty, it’s dirty, it’s not a fun place to be, but we specialize in that. But before we do that inspection, we sit with the homeowner and really try to understand, what are you dealing with? Do you have indoor air quality concerns? Is your home uncomfortable? Is your utility bill astronomical? Because rates continue to climb. They’re putting these data centers everywhere and passing the bill to the homeowners. So we really have an amazing value-add, but we have to be able to tell that story to get somebody to set an appointment with us.
So when we collect all this information, we sit down with the homeowner and say, “Hey, look, it’s all based on pass/fail according to ENERGY STAR standards. These are the five areas you’re doing well. You don’t need to worry about these. But these are the five areas that you should probably make an improvement to fix your issue.” And then we give them a quote on the items that they don’t pass, and hopefully they choose us to make the improvements on their home.
So how do they reach out to you in the first place? What is the need that emerges for them, or what’s the need that you are creating in their mind so that they respond to you?
Yeah. We run a lot of ads where we get to tell our story, so social media ads where we get to talk about, “Do you have a hot room? Is your home uncomfortable? Do you have bad indoor air quality or a high bill? Here’s what we do.” And when we run those, people actually get to see our process, and we get a lot of people signing up to have us go out to their home in that fashion. We’ve been in business 16 years, so we have quite a database of people to reach out to and people that have met us in the past.
We do, I don’t know, 200 to 300 shows and events every year where we set up a table and actually talk face-to-face to somebody and set appointments that way. We have canvassing crews that go door-to-door introducing ourselves and our services. We’ve got a pretty robust marketing system, but scalability becomes the issue because if we have to verbally tell our entire process and we just don’t have somebody searching “home energy checkup in my area.” That’s what we’re struggling with.
So tell me about these shows and these events. What is the theme of these events, and how do you get people to come?
Here’s my philosophy, Steve. Our demographic is homeowners, so people that own homes within our geographical area that have a high bill, indoor air quality issues, or comfort issues. And I will tell you, at most shows and events throughout Arizona, we’re going to run into those people. So if we can simply set up a booth and have the chance to talk to people that fit our demographic, we have a good chance of setting an appointment. So the theme of the events, it could be a home show. It could be that people are literally there to improve their home, and it might be us, it might be a kitchen vendor, a bathroom vendor, a lighting vendor, landscaping. Great. Have all the companies that fit their needs.
We know they own homes, and we know they’re looking to improve their home. That’s a great opportunity for us. But we also do fairs and festivals and farmers markets. I mean, we’ve done a show out here called the Ostrich Festival where they’ve got ostriches that people go see. We also have bigger opportunities where we’ve got a space within Walmart locations where we’re able to talk to people walking by. So anytime I can get a table in front of a large quantity of people, we’re going to run into our demographic and we’re going to book some appointments.
Do people realize that they have bad air quality? Is this something easy to notice?
Yes and no. So we’re in Arizona, and lots of places and parts of the country have this problem, but dust. Where does dust come from? A lot of it comes from what’s in your attic, old, nasty insulation and, sometimes disgusting, but some people have rodents, bugs. Some people think it’s a problem that they can’t fix. But I will tell you, in 2026, most people are very conscious of the air they’re breathing, the water they’re drinking, so it’s on their mind. But that would be an example of an ad that we would need to run to drive results for us.
Yeah, that’s fascinating. You know, I noticed that when there is persistent rain here, then it creates allergic reactions in me. And I was Googling the other day, what is causing it, what to do. We did some stuff. We have crawl spaces here in Virginia, and we insulated the crawl space, and we put in the air exchange and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, it does… I did notice that it’s an air quality issue, but I wouldn’t have thought that an energy efficiency company would solve it. I would not have connected that.
Yeah. So most people don’t. It’s a byproduct of the work that we do. But there’s a lot of things you can do, Steve. There’s the type of filters you use in your HVAC unit matter. There’s air scrubbers and indoor air filters that you can install to help you. Most people don’t know this. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, says that indoor air quality is three times worse than outdoor air quality. Most people would never guess that. But if you’ve got things in bloom and you’ve got allergens in the air, they come from the outside. If you’ve got leaky windows or you’ve got a leaky attic and duct system, it’s just another outlet for that to get in the house.
That’s fascinating. And what can people do in their attic? Do they hoover their attics? So how do you make it non-dusty?
How do we solve the issue? Is that what you’re asking?
Yeah. Yeah. You said that people have a lot of dust in their attics.
Yep.
And then you can fix it. How do you fix it? You go up and vacuum there, or what’s the process?
Yeah, it’s a good question. You’re on the right track. So, a couple of things. Every home is different. A lot of homes have different types of insulation, different types of construction. That’s the value in what we do. We’ve worked with almost all of it. In Virginia and Maryland and that part of the country, you’ve got really old homes. Your insulation could be 50, 60, 70, maybe even older than that. Insulation over time breaks down into fine particles.
And when you have leaky ducts and a leaky home, there’s an opportunity for those broken-down particles to get in the house, and that’s now the air you’re breathing. So in a dream scenario where we’re making a home go from horrible to as efficient as we can, we do get up in the attic. We vacuum out all of the insulation that’s there because it’s older, it’s broken down, it’s not effective anymore, and we create a clean, bare floor space in the attic. And then we do what’s called an attic seal. We use expandable foam and plug all the wire and pipe penetrations, all the chases, voids, top plates. What we’re doing is we’re sealing off…
Let’s say this is the inside of your home, this is the attic. We seal a barrier. We create an attic barrier so the air in the house is in the house, the air up in the attic is in the attic. And then we re-insulate with a modern fiberglass insulation to keep that heat out, and insulation that’s not going to break down at the same rate as this other stuff, and now you’re in great shape. And the last thing we do often is we seal up duct systems. So when ducts leak, you’re paying to cool the attic space or the crawl space. When you seal them up, that cold air that you worked hard to pay for makes it into the home and stays in the home longer.
And then the icing on the cake is when somebody has older, inefficient windows that are leaky, maybe they don’t function anymore. We put new high-end, energy-efficient windows in there. And once all those items are done, most people notice a massive increase in comfort, less dust, better indoor air quality, and certainly a lower bill.
Yeah. Love it. That’s great. Well, thanks for explaining this.
Yeah.
This is fascinating. So who are your ideal customers? Are they all in the Phoenix, Arizona area?
Yeah, they currently are. So Phoenix, we call it the Valley, Phoenix Metro. I think there’s four or five million people within an hour of where I’m sitting right now, which is a pretty special place to be because most places you’ve got rural areas. We are just very dense. So yeah, anybody that owns a home that has a pain point, so a high bill, an uncomfortable house, or poor indoor air quality, we can help them.
Yeah. Well, if you’re listening and you live in the Valley, then think about your home. Reflect on it like I did on the call. Is your air quality good? Are your windows still fresh? Do you have a dusty attic, or do you have an old house? And if you answered affirmatively to any of these, then probably you need to call Sean and Sean’s team and get an audit to see what’s happening, and then you can make up your mind what to do.
Sean, that’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing that. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you stay tuned and log on because every week I bring a couple of exciting entrepreneurs who bring their frameworks and their insights. So thanks, Sean, for coming, and thanks for listening.
Thanks for having me, Steve. It was a pleasure.