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Every home service business has a story — and we’re here to tell it.
The Home Services Success Stories Podcast features conversations with real Peakzi partners and clients across the trades: HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, and beyond. Each episode spotlights an entrepreneur or service leader who’s built something remarkable — sharing how they started, what drives their business, and the lessons learned along the way.
From building teams to scaling operations and embracing AI-driven marketing, our guests talk candidly about what’s working, what’s changing, and how Peakzi helps them grow, hire smarter, and show up stronger in AI search.
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From Apprentice To Owner: How Gold Star Wins On Process, People, And 24/7 Service
•Peakzi •Season 1•Episode 17
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Peakzi Podcast: What if your real product isn’t a part, a price, or a quick fix—but a repeatable process that customers can feel at every touchpoint? We sit down with Matt Thompson, owner of Gold Star Plumbing, Heating, and Cooling, to unpack how a master plumber turned a craft into a scalable, customer-first company that wins on consistency, empathy, and 24/7 responsiveness.
Matt Thompson with Gold Star Plumbing, Heating & Cooling in Hicksville, NY takes us back to his start in the trades, the loss that changed his direction, and the decade of hands-on experience that shaped his leadership. He explains why Gold Star’s core values—honesty, empathy, and stick to it—aren’t slogans, but behaviors trained weekly through huddles, ride-alongs, and candid feedback. The turning point came when he asked his team a simple question: what is our product? The answer wasn’t equipment or installations—it was the service process. By defining and refining that process, Gold Star built a consistent experience that earns name-dropped five-star reviews and trust that lasts beyond a single job.
We also dig into the operational engine behind the promise. ServiceTitan powers dispatch and after-hours calls, while AI agents are being piloted to ensure someone answers at 2 a.m. Matt shares how Peakzi reveals brand visibility inside AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Grok, surfacing a surprising value perception gap that led to targeted training. Instead of racing to the bottom on price, the team learned to communicate outcomes, warranties, safety, and long-term savings more clearly—shifting the conversation from cost to worth.
If you lead a home services business, you’ll walk away with a playbook: hire to discover strengths rather than force them, train until process becomes culture, use technology to extend your humanity, and measure what the market actually perceives. Matt’s vision is bigger than a quarterly target—he’s building a generational brand designed to thrive long after the founder steps away. Subscribe, share with a fellow operator, and leave a review telling us one change you’ll make to elevate your service process this week.
Welcome to the Home Services Success Stories podcast powered by Peakzi, the number one AI platform for growing your home services business. And on the show today, we have Matt Thompson, who is the owner and founder of Gold Star Plumbing, Heating, and Cooling. Matt, welcome to the show. How are you?
Speaker 1
Excellent. Thanks for having me. I'm much appreciated.
Julian Placino
Yeah, it's great to have you on and excited to learn more about your journey and your story as a home services success uh story and leader within this space. So uh so Matt, you found a gold star right here in Hicksville. So what inspired the founding of the business and what do you want it to stand for?
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's that's a great question. So I found a gold star, I guess, back in 2010, and at the time, and coming from where I came from, I I always had a sense that I wanted to build something bigger and build something generational and that things could just be done different and better. Um, so that was always like in the back of my head, or the main reason why. You know, I saw all these different struggles that we all went through as contractors, and I was like, there's gotta be a better way, there's gotta be a different way to do it. So I jumped in and that's how it all happened,
That's why we got started. And was your background home services? Did you come from a different arena? What was all that like?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so my background is plumbing originally. Um so I'm a licensed master plumber by trade, and I kind of got into the trades kind of by accident. So my father was a master craftsman, so I always thought I'd go in his direction or follow in his footsteps, like my brother and you know, he was following it in the footsteps. And then uh when I was about 17, my father passed away. So then that got you know totally different direction. And I was kind of lost at that time in my life, still in high school, and my cousin had just bought um a plumbing company here on Long Island, and this was in you know, 40-year-old plumbing company that he took over. So I was friendly with my cousin and I kind of moved in that direction with him, and sure enough, I in high school I started working with him um and my uncle, because my uncle was with him as as well, so still kind of family oriented, but it was my cousin, so that's kind of how I got into the trades and um just progressed from there. So I always did a lot of plumbing, commercial, residential, industrial, and um, you know, as time went on, working with my cousin for about 10 years, I felt it was time for us to go in different directions. Him and I didn't always see eye to eye on things and where I wanted to, where I could, where I saw it could go to. Um, so that led me to get my own license and go in my own direction.
Julian Placino
And go in your own direction. Was that always part of the vision of going into business for yourself, or was it just something that kind of organically happened just on the journey that you were on?
Speaker 1
Yeah, it definitely organically happened because I I love
the company I worked at. I love the work that we did. It's just that we, you know, we butt heads too much, you know. I guess that's that happens, that's normal, you know.
Julian Placino
Sure. Well, well, Gold Star is built around core values like honesty, empathy, and stick to it. So, how did you come up with those values and and how does that show up in your team's day-to-day work?
Speaker 1
So we just reflected on how we kind of always operated, and that's really where the core core values came from. Um, you know, where all of us are kind of uh, you know, put your head against the wall and go until you can get it done, you know. So that's where the stick to it came from, you know.
Julian Placino
How do you train that or hire for that? Like how do you scale that across the organization?
Speaker 1
Yeah, that's a great question. Um how do you train for that? And how do you scale this? Um man, I wish I had a good answer for that. But you you know pretty quick if once you when you bring somebody on, you have to spend some time with them and just see how they react to things. You know, if they're
easy to quit at things and like, oh, that's too tough or complaining. That does, you know, you you get a good sense right then and there that it's it's probably not gonna last for too long, you know?
Julian Placino
Yeah. You know, hiring always comes up as a topic of conversation during these interviews because I'm speaking to the choir here, it's very tough to find that great combination of technical experience as well as like presenting them in front of the uh the client, you know. So um, any kind of hiring or recruiting tips that you could share that seems to have worked well for Gold Star?
Speaker 1
What I've started doing recently, like in the past, I I would always have all these high expectations for people. And now I I approach it a little bit differently, is I um I have no expectation. So then I can sit back and kind of see how they flourish and see what direction they go in. And if they do something that's in the right direction, you can encourage them, like, wow, that's amazing. Like if they actually did something, it's like, wow, that's great. So it just changed the culture a little bit. Um, from my experience, that it's you know, if if you come in and you have all these expectations on top of you, it's kind of overbearing. Does that make sense?
Julian Placino
Interesting. Okay, so not going in there with expectations, but kind of a blank slate and seeing the person as as honestly as you can without trying to force the conversation one way or another. So because honestly, you're looking, you're trying to figure out how they can be a superstar.
Speaker 1
You know, you may want them to be able to do all these things and be this specific individual, but we're all different and we all have our own superpowers. So it's it's kind of your job as a leader to figure out what your superpower is and will it work within the company, right?
Julian Placino
Yeah. So basically looking for kind of the thing that that person does uniquely well, what they bring to the table, how is that added into the culture overall?
Well, well, Gold Star has got really awesome reviews, and many of them are actually naming your technicians by name. So um, they talk about how professional and respectful your technicians are. So, how do you train that? And how what do you think has been the key to your high level of customer experience and success?
Speaker 1
So, we do do a lot of training week in and week out, and just having real honest conversations with the technicians. And you know, like this morning in training, but tomorrow this morning was just a regular daily huddle, and I was I had a thought that I wanted to talk to everybody about. And my thought was just to get everybody to reflect on. I said to everybody, what is our product? Right? Like, what is our product? You know, and they were all you could tell they were all a little stumped and a little they were like, Oh, well, it's the good installs we do, or it's the you know how we do the job, and we do a great job. And I'm like, so I asked more questions to uncover, and then it finally came down to the service, and I was like, all right, let me let me give you guys a hint, right? So our product is our process, our service process, our system of how we deliver the service, our system of how we deliver that install, our system of how we interact with the customer on the phone. That process, that's our product, really nothing else. And if that isn't great, we really don't have anything else. Or it doesn't matter to go further or market more or get more customers or go deeper. We have to back up and make sure that process we have is dialed in consistently between all of us. You know, whether I go there or somebody else goes there or anybody in the company goes, that process has to be real consistent, at least 80% of the time, and that's our product.
Julian Placino
Interesting. So you've got them thinking about the whole thing differently. And if you've got everyone aligned in the same direction, that's how you kind of scale that whole experience. And it wasn't just the outcome of fixing it, it's like that kind of proprietary methodology that's homegrown to Gold Star, um, that you're you're delivering kind of that brand experience because that that is the brand, right? The unique thing, because there's so many other kind of like home services organizations out there. What do you do differently to stand out? Interesting. So so um so one thing that stands out is your commitment to growth, being better tomorrow than you were today. So, besides kind of the things that we've talked about, what else do you think Goldstar has done to stand out and become a leader in home services? What have you done uniquely different?
Speaker 1
That's a good question. What have we done uniquely different? Um, from my perspective, just taking the time to reflect on on that process and what
that should look like for us. You know, there's plenty of other processes, whether it's Nextar Praxis or um flat rate, there's there's a ton of different processes you can use or systems that you can use, but you know, organically, what is ours and what does it look like? You know, how do we communicate with the customer? Um what is their you know, how do we make them feel even after the service call or the install? Like what does that look like? And I think that's what we spend a lot of time talking about and working on. Um for me, that's what I would say.
Julian Placino
Gotcha. So really just really thinking through the process um and and paying attention to every step of the way and kind of the thing that makes the the Gold Star brand unique. So okay.
So so for those who may not know, Gold Star offers both plumbing and HVAC services 24-7. Is that correct? Gotcha. So so how do you main that maintain that level of responsiveness while keeping quality high and consistent?
Speaker 1
So we do, you know, we learn leverage service titan a lot, right? And we do have some processes in place that that help that. Um, you get a call at two in the morning, we leverage Service Titan to allow us to answer the phones. They can talk to somebody live. We're coming on board with AI agents also. So that's how we're we're able to be responsive 24-7.
Julian Placino
So some technology implemented into the business helps helps you uh to maintain that quality. So um, so on the topic of technology, you know, this podcast is powered by Peakzi. You are a Peakzi customer. So tell us
Yeah, so Peakzi is really cool. Like weekly basis, I'm in there looking and just to see. Obviously, I'm looking to see how our metrics have grown and how um chatbots are picking us up. And because we all know that that's that whole search realm is completely transformed pretty rapidly. Um, even myself, like you never go to a browser anymore to ask questions, you just go directly to whether it's grok or chat GPT, another one just to ask the question. AI agents coming on board, you know. I don't know if everybody has that right now, but that's coming. You're everybody's gonna have their own agent that you're gonna go, you know, hey, find me three plumbers, find me a plumber and have it scheduled and get that fixed for me, or my air conditioning, something along those lines. So I think the awareness of um and that's the right word, uh, visibility to those chatbots, to me that's a huge piece of what a PC does. There's some other things that it you know uncovers for us. Um our overall score and ranking as far as that goes in the marketplace, it's super, super interesting and um fun to watch and see how we you know rank up against other competitors, even to the tech, you know, on the technician level. I think that's it's huge, huge awareness.
Julian Placino
Yeah, so I heard really it's the visibility. Also, the way consumers now are searching for information, it's certainly not just Google anymore, it's uh all the LLMs that you mentioned, right? Chat GPT and Grok and all those. Um, also I heard uh you said how do you stack up in the market? So the the customer insights, like how are you doing in the market based on different variables? So, what would you say has been the most measurable outcome or benefit you've gained so far by being a Pixie customer?
I think that's you know, just seeing the opportunity in our market with it to see where we stand, you know, with our um custom, you know, our our competitors rather rather like I was looking the past couple of weeks and I was noticing that our opportunity is in value, right? So the perspective in the marketplace is that we weren't showing a high value, like oh, the price is high or whatever. So that's something that's triggered us to like, you know what, we have to make sure the customer is seeing the value in what we do. So we have to train towards that and have those conversations. Um and that goes back to the process being dialed in and worked on, you know.
Julian Placino
Interesting. Yeah, so it kind of helps you sort of look at um strengths and weaknesses of the business things that you can kind of change up so you can be that much more competitive in the marketplace.
yeah. And yeah, you wouldn't have that, you would you'd never know otherwise. You know.
Julian Placino
Great, great. Well, well, Matt, kind of close us out here. So um, so looking ahead, what is your vision for for Gold Star and where do you see the company going in the next few years and beyond?
Speaker 1
Yeah, so I'd like to see us build a generational brand that's that's gonna be around long after I'm gone. Um, that's really what I've transitioned to over the past year or so. Um I probably had a different feeling, but you know, that's a bigger, bigger than me. And it it uh helps inspire me to get up every day and work harder every day. Um if you're if you have this end goal where it's gonna be this. This kind of
just lives on without me. So to me, that's more exciting, more inspiring.
Julian Placino
So to to build a generational brand, something that'll impact generations for for many years to come, something much bigger than uh than yourself. I think that's a very inspiring vision for sure. So uh well, Matt, close us out. Tell us uh your website, how do folks connect with you on social media? Tell us all that.
Speaker 1
Yeah, agree. So we're um gold star plumbing, hyphen. Sorry, goldstar hyphen plumbing.com is our website. Um, you can get us at goldstarservice today.com also. Um social media, you'd have to look us up. I don't I don't know those off the top of my head. So Okay.
Julian Placino
Thank you, Julian. Much appreciated. And everyone else, thanks for tuning in. And we'll see you next time on the Home Services Success Stories podcast powered by Peakzi, the number one AI platform for growing your home services business.
