There’s a version of running a business that looks really good from the outside.

Clients coming in. Content going out. Everything seems to be working.

But behind the scenes?

It’s a lot.

A lot of decisions. A lot of moving pieces. A lot of things still running through you.

And at some point, you start to wonder: Is this just what it takes?

Listen to the Episode

In this episode of our How I Run This series, we’re joined by Vikki Diaz, who runs both a painting company and a marketing agency for contractors.

This is a real, behind-the-scenes look at how she’s built structure into her business so it can grow… without her having to be in everything.

What We Talk About In This Episode

• How Vikki runs two businesses while moving toward a more hands-off role

• The systems and automations that remove her from day-to-day tasks

• Why staying involved in key moments still matters for trust and client experience

• The difference between content that goes viral and content that actually converts

• What led to her burnout point and how she rebuilt her business differently

Key Takeaways

• You don’t need to be involved in everything for your business to run well

• Systems create freedom, but intentional visibility builds trust

• Burnout often comes from trying to do too much for too long

• Growth requires structure, not just more effort

• Knowing where to stay involved is just as important as knowing what to delegate

Continue the Conversation

If this episode made you think about how your business is currently running... you’re not the only one. This is exactly the kind of conversation we’re having inside the community every day.

👉 Join us here: https://thesolopreneurceo.com

A space for solopreneurs who are building real businesses and want camaraderie, perspective, and real conversations along the way.

Episode Transcript

Solopreneur CEO Show Episode 17: Below is the full transcript of this episode for those who prefer to read or want to revisit specific parts of the conversation.

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Marcia:
Welcome back. I am so excited to have our second interview in the How I Run This series.

Today we are going to be introducing you to Vikki Diaz. She is a branding and marketing specialist for construction companies. Realizing that she really had a gift in storytelling for her own family business she thought, Hmm, maybe I could replicate this process for other companies.

I had mentioned Vikki a few episodes ago because I actually met her in real life. She had done another podcast interview and I learned a lot about her family, and she's amazing, I can't wait for you to meet her.

Vikki, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about why you and your husband got into the painting business, and then we'll get into the whole episode.

Vikki:
Thank you for having me.

My name is Vikki Diaz and I own basically two businesses, Leo's DMV painting, and then also Hous of Trades.

I started with Leo's DMV painting because we have a son that's special needs. Because of how demanding the schedule was for him, we needed to find an alternative way that wasn't a traditional nine to five route.

Opening up our business and through social media, we were able to grow our business and be able to get more of our leads and basically time.

A lot of other contractors were requesting or trying to see, trying to figure out what we were doing to expand our business.

That's when I decided, well, let me see if there's a demand. Let me create Hous of Trades. Now I help different contractors around the DMV area, grow their business through social media.

Marcia:
I've found that's happened in business before where you're just naturally good at something or you know, it's an acquired skillset. People see it and they're like, wow, how do you do that? And then it can go from picking your brain to I should actually start charging for this.

I've seen your equipment stack and it's really impressive. The first time I met Vikki, I was like, do you have this? Do you have this? Do you have … and she has everything.

It's really cool the amount of equipment that she has.

Was it all just boots on the ground, like learning as you went? Or did you take training and courses and mentorships and all that kind of thing?

Vikki:
All the videos that I've done for my own company, it was literally just my phone. So I grew the company with the phone. Actually at church I ended up learning about the camera and how to use the camera and all that other stuff. I got irritated at someone that wasn't taking the pictures and videos properly.

So I told my husband, look for my birthday gift, I don't wanna party. I don't want anything. Buy me a camera. Let me figure this thing out.

Once I discovered it and I was like, ah, you know, I actually like this, I can see myself doing something with it. That's when I started investing in different things, like classes, YouTube videos, trying to figure out exactly how to get the best angles, how to do everything that I was doing with the phone, but with a camera.

Marcia:
Very cool. I love that you asked for that as a gift and I hope your husband put that on your taxes as an expense because you're using it.

Vikki:
He did, yes.

Marcia:
Okay, good, good, good. But I love that you asked for it as a gift 'cause you're like, let me just test this out and try it out and see if it's something that I like.

And then it just opened up all these doors. That's awesome. We're big on people investing in themselves and their businesses.

Could you walk us through what it looks like right now, managing and being in the day to day with both of those businesses, the branding and the painting.

Vikki:
So right now, we hired an office manager and a virtual assistant. So all the admin work, someone else takes care of it. The perks of it now is I want to be more hands off.

Systems are like your best friend. Everything's automated, so once we get a lead, nobody really touches it, it's just automated. Once they book the call, then that's when either I'll hop on if I have time or someone else will hop on. The only thing that we do keep the way that we've run from the beginning is that Leo and I will go out to the estimates.

So we'll still make our way out there. We'll still show up to the job sites. Usually it's just for a couple hours, but we'll show up there. For the homeowner to feel like, okay, I still have the owner's attention. One of the biggest things is I don't want to losethe customer service that we've had from the beginning, because we're growing on the other end with Hous of Trades.

Marcia:
What I've seen in your marketing of Hous of Trades is you're encouraging these companies to build their brand on trust and to do the visual storytelling where they are potential clients, they're looking 'em up online, and they're seeing the attention to detail and the care that is being given.

So that's important for your painting business, for you to still be the spokesperson, the front person. It sounds like it was an intentional decision from the beginning.

Carin and I, we're so pro systematizing your business.

There can be this misconception that creating systems means you're removing yourself entirely from the business, and that's not what we're saying at all.

To be a good business owner, you have to be a good leader. And being a good leader is being that front person that lets the client know like, Hey dude, I'm there for you all the time. If you need anything, just reach out to me.

But having you be involved in all of those other aspects, it's not necessary. That would drain you so much, especially with the family stuff going on. I love the intentionality that you have there and what you teach the clients that work with you. You're putting the human into the brand and that's what sells, that's what's going to sell now.

Vikki:
There's been so many homeowners that have gotten burnt from someone that they'll go ahead and hire, like a big company. Sometimes it's not even like the actual company that shows up. They'll sub the work out. And then they don't have connections to the actual owner.

When there's a problem, they don't know exactly who talk to. We do sub out our work. But we're very involved. It's to the point that you can't even tell that we sub out our work. That's how it's supposed to be.

Marcia:
Yeah, exactly.

Having people who are representing your business there's quality assurance that you have, right. They're probably wearing branded t-shirts, that kind of thing. But yeah, like you're the project manager.

A little bit of backstory. Vikki showed up on my agency's Instagram. You reached out and you're like, hi, I am Vikki. This is what I'm doing and let me know if I can ever help you in any way. And I was like, What?!

I just loved it because people are usually like, Hey Marcia, I'm trying to revolutionize ... And I'm like, blaaaah. But you seemed like a real freaking human. You took that initiative, you reached out, you sent a message.

And then I saw what you were doing, and I'm like, oh my God, this is exactly what I wanted to do. Because I started my business after working for a luxury builder in the area. A lot of builders, they're mom and pop shops and they have a lot of different subcontractors and there's a lot of moving pieces, but the marketing and branding angle isn't done as well as it could be.

So I was like, damn, look at Vikki. But, you know, you were like focused. You're set. Like you had that experience. The meetings that I was having with people that I had met when I was at the builder, they were like, oh, this is definitely a service that is needed.

Once I kind of got out of that lifestyle, I took a different path. But you went down this path and I just see so much potential in your future with the branding and the marketing, because a lot of these builders, a lot of these construction companies, they just don't have the bandwidth to hire a full-time marketer.

The agency work that you're doing, it's really cool and it's needed because it will help construction companies stand out from the rest. There are a couple companies in the McLean area where they have an on staff person, full-time person.

And you can just tell.

Branding does build trust. When you are constantly seeing them in your feed, and it's like, okay, if I'm going to go with a builder, I want to go with someone who's showing me the entire process from foundation to keys being handed over.

It makes you think these guys aren't going to just run away. If I have issues and there will be issues, houses settle. Like I learned so much. I was like, oh my God. I love my 50-year-old home now.

Vikki:
Yeah, it's already settled into the property. There you go.

Marcia:
Yeah, exactly.

All right, Vikki. So what is a boundary or constraint that you've put in place that's made the business better that most people in your industry wouldn't consider?

Vikki:
In the painting business, we have a separate number. Contractors give their “personal number”, that's the office number. So we have two different numbers. We have the office number, which is the main number. And then once we close the deal, I tell the homeowners, Hey, look, this is my personal number. If you need anything, let me know. Shoot me a text, give me a call.

But it's not my personal number. It's another number that's an app on my phone. They have that reassurance that if anything happens, they can get a hold of me real quick. That's definitely one of the perks that we've had with the painting.

Giving that line, like, okay, this is my actual number. I know that whoever's calling me is actually someone that's not business related.

Marcia:
I think it's really good to have separation. It does give the client the reassurance that they're getting directly to you, but it's not where you're constantly being pinged and everything.

I'm sure you see like the notifications in the app and you're like, oh, okay, I need to check this.

It can get very overwhelming having like all these different contacts, because you're talking to contractors, you're talking to homeowners, you're talking to business owners, you're talking to business owner staff, right?

How many different types of people are you talking to?

Vikki:
A lot.

My phone at the end of the day has like a whole bunch of notifications. Sometimes I just DND everything, the whole day.

Marcia:
Yeah. Well you have to, right?

Vikki:
Yeah.

Marcia:
I've started doing that too, putting the focus on my phone. Because there's certain things where I just cannot be distracted.

It's important to do focused work where there aren't distractions, especially if you're on site. And there's active construction that's happening. Exactly.

You did touch on this about having the office manager for the painting business, but what's something in your business that looks simple from the outside but it actually has a lot of structure behind it?

Vikki:
With Hous of Trades it’s the editing. The way I edit is not the traditional go viral method where it's flashy here, transitions there. There's intention behind it. I know the process of how the order is supposed to be.

The sequence of the way it's being edited is the same way, and it's a little bit more of a documentary style than like the flashy, because what we're doing is not just creating a video just to go viral, we're trying to document the process. Which is completely different than the traditional videographers that are out here.

Sometimes that's the hardest thing for contractors to understand is I'm not just making a video. Basically that video, you can grab it and you can put it into your SOPs. Or you can put it into your backend. So it's not just for social media, but it has multipurpose.

Marcia:
The marketing agencies that work with companies that are brick and mortars or that are doing work in a localized area: virality should never be your focus, it shouldn't be your goal.

You want the eyes that you're having on your content, be local people who can actually hire you. The rest of it's just smoke in mirrors. It's a waste of money. You want someone to work for you who has that focus and that intention to tell your story.

Vikki:
Yeah, exactly. Most of the contractors they look at the number and they are like, you know, I just want to go ahead and hit 1 million. I want to hit this and that on the videos.

The deck company that had talked to you about that was one of their things. They wanted to see the big number on their videos. I told them, it doesn't make sense to have someone from Indiana, from different states or even different countries look at your stuff if you're not going to be able to send a crew out there to actually do the job.

It's better to have a smaller view, have 200 people, but it's 200 people in your area that you can eventually close than 20 million and none of them are anywhere near you.

Numbers talk at the end of the day, but some people just don't get it.

Marcia:
Yeah. It's that mentality that the wider the reach, the more customers you're going to get. That might work if you're an online business. Stuff that's made to go viral, that's a system and the people who go viral, like they're getting paid by the social media company. So like by YouTube and by TikTok. And that's how they're actually making their money. It's not by providing a service for people off of the platform.

That's always a big disconnect between business owners who are like, I don't want to part with my money unless I'm seeing a return.

If you are able to tell a good story with your marketing and sell a custom home, like, wow, that's a big return, right?

Vikki:
Yeah. The marketing itself isn't something that you just turn on one day to the next and you have a bunch of clients.

You have to build the momentum. If you go from showing no content to like starting to slowly show content, you're starting to get the movement and then you start generating your leads. It takes about six to eight months of consistency and actually having a strategy put in place to get results.

Marcia:
Yes. Yeah, it does take time for sure. And that's why I think you want to hire people. Hiring the office manager and the VA for the painting business. You didn't do that before you needed to. You needed to. You felt friction in your business and you're like, how can I remove myself from every aspect of this business?

Right?

Vikki:
That is what I did. The work with the painting and also Hous of Trades, it was too much mentally.

Physically and emotionally too. Basically there was a day that I crashed. And I was like, okay, I can't do this because I can't be the best in the painting and I can't do everything all at once. Let me free my hand out of this one and focus more on Hous of Trades.

That's when I started putting the pieces together. If I would've done it beforehand, before getting to that point, that would've helped. But, sometimes we learn the hard way.

Marcia:
Yeah. It's so common. And thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of us have crashed out and sometimes people will reach that level and they'll get very catastrophic with their thinking like, okay, I just have to close this. I have to let this go completely.

And you didn't do that. So I'm glad that the crash out was enough where you were like, look, we have a viable business here and we have something that's growing.

Having an agency is remarkable because you can bring in so many subcontractors, like a Google ads specialist. You can really grow where it moves from just focusing on what you're focusing on right now. Whereas painting, it's it's cyclical, right?

It depends on how much money people have, what's happening in the economy and like how many people are moving. With branding and marketing, companies are always going to need to brand and market to get customers and clients.

Marcia:
So I'm glad that that helped you and it is so, oh my God it's so painful when that happens too. Because you just, you question everything, right? It’s brutal, man. Because you're like, should I have even been doing this? You start to look at all of your friendships and your relationships and you're like, oh, if I had just… Well, that's how I am.

I'll just sit there in a puddle and be like, man, I really just screwed this whole life up. And then you freaking build back up.

And it's like, Okay, Marsh … Okay, Vik, I'm sure there's a way this has been done in the past.

That's what this podcast is about. That's what our community and our society is about. It's letting people know that we're freaking humans running these businesses and there's going to be times that we crash out. We have to know that what we've built is real and that we can come up with a structure and a format that is not based on emotion.

Nothing has to just completely break in half.

Did you have help with that?

Vikki:
I was trying to figure it out with my husband. Trying to make a game plan with him. I actually go to therapy too, so I was talking it out.

Like you said, we get in this little bubble that business is always going to go up, but eventually it goes down and it's part of the rollercoaster.

Social media in a way doesn't also help that. It makes the business owner world look like it's glamorous and it's not.

Marcia:
It's not!

Vikki:
There are days, like you said, that we're going to doubt the heck out of our mind.

And it's like we have a strong mentality, we should be able to get back on course. When those days hit, just hit reset.

Marcia:
Those are the days where I'm done fighting it. A few months ago I got the glamorous autoimmune diagnosis.

It gets triggered by stress and I'm like, cool, because I've never been stressed before. And the autoimmune thing is most likely from just having repeated stresses.

In entrepreneurship it gets to the point where you look at your health and you realize, I can't keep doing what I've been doing.

Whenever I feel really bad, I'm just like, I'm just going to read a book. I'm just going to go for a walk. I'm just going to unplug.

This was the part you liked in the summit where I said, I have to treat myself like a toddler sometimes.

Like, did you eat today, Marcia? Have you watered yourself? Like given myself water, not like peed.

What you said, business ownership is not glamorous. There is so much that goes into it that is not beautiful and that's why sometimes you do need to hire that outside help so that you can make it look like it's glamorous, you know?

That's not being fake or anything that's just portraying your business in the way that you want it to be portrayed.

With my personal brand, I'm all about getting people to be more audacious and to be better leaders so I can share the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But if I was a construction company, I wouldn't want to share the person who just put a nail through their hand. No, that's not good for business.

Vikki:
Not good for business.

Marcia:
Let's finish up with this question. Based off of everything we just said, if someone listening is successful, but they feel maxed out or stuck doing too much themselves. What do you think they're underestimating right now?

And what would be your advice? Like you said, if you had just seen the breakdown coming, you would've initiated those things in advance. What if our listener feels like that now, like they're in a pressure cooker and they're just like, I am freaking out.

What would you say?

Vikki:
I would just tell 'em breathe.

It's not the end of the world. Yeah, it might seem like it, but it's not. It's better to think with a cool head than a hot head. With a hot head or if you're very impulsive, I'm impulsive. I've learned that I have to step back whenever I feel overwhelmed and think of everything that I've accomplished so far up to what I have right now.

The companies that I'm constructing, the family that I have and things like that. Once I start looking into everything that I'm doing, then it's like, okay, if I'm in this problem, let me go and figure this out step by step.

We can't get from A to Z without going through B, c, D and through the alphabet. Sometimes that's what we forget.

We have that ultimate goal. There are all these little steps in between that we have to take and they're little tiny steps or things that we have to accomplish to get to it.

And sometimes we just don't do it.

Marcia:
We can want to skip some steps, but the path reveals itself every step you go. And I find that too when I'm super overwhelmed that I literally have to take a piece of paper and write down every single thing that's on my mind.

And it just brings me so much peace because it's validating. I'm like, oh my God, this is an insane amount of stuff to do. Then I can start labeling it, is this an A priority or is it a D priority? Can this be delegated?

Also celebrating what you have done, the successes that you've had, which makes you remember you are able to do this. It's just a moment in time.

A short plug because we are having this meeting tonight. The Success Secret Society is on the third Wednesday of every month at 7:00 PM EST, we have an intention setting and it's all about that nervous system reboot.

We do breathing exercises and we celebrate the successes that we've had and we make plans for the future too.

Ideally we could every day be like, okay, I am starting to really stress out, I should breathe. But sometimes having that on your calendar where it's like, I can go be with these people and we can all exhale together, it's a beautiful thing.

So Vikki, it has been such a pleasure getting to know you. Thank you for being our second interviewee!

Vikki:
Thank you for inviting me and for having me here. It's a pleasure.