Tony Hoty was only in his twenties when he learned one of the most expensive lessons of his career.
He had already done something most young entrepreneurs would consider a major success. After getting into the home improvement industry while attending Ohio State, Tony returned to Cleveland and started his own remodeling company at just 23 years old. Using the lead generation and sales techniques he had learned while knocking doors, working events, sitting in call centers, and selling through retail stores, he says the company grew into a multimillion dollar business relatively quickly.
From the outside, it probably looked like he had figured it out early.
Then the business collapsed.
By the time Tony was around 28 or 29, he says both he and the company had filed bankruptcy. Lending was beginning to tighten, the remodeling market was becoming more difficult, and the weaknesses inside the business were suddenly exposed.
Tony would later describe the problem very simply.
Having the skill to grow a company was not the same thing as having the character, discipline, and financial foundation required to survive when something went wrong.
He had learned how to create demand.
He had not yet learned how to build a company that could survive a storm.
It Started as a Part Time Job for Beer Money
Tony did not begin his career with some carefully designed plan to become a remodeling entrepreneur.
While studying at Ohio State, he took a part time job to make extra money. He has joked that it was basically beer money.
The job happened to be in home improvement marketing.
Tony started learning how to knock doors around active job sites and talk with neighboring homeowners. He worked home shows and fairs. During cold Ohio winters, he spent time in call centers contacting old leads that had never turned into appointments. He also worked inside retailers like HQ and Builders Square, two chains that competed in the home improvement market before Home Depot and Lowe's became as dominant as they are today.
Without realizing it at the time, he was getting an education in something that would eventually become the center of his career.
He was learning how a remodeling company creates demand instead of simply waiting for demand to appear.
After college, Tony initially did what he thought college graduates were supposed to do. He put on the suit, entered the Fortune 500 world, and began a more traditional corporate career.
He did well.
He just did not enjoy it.
Before long, he went back to the industry he already understood.
At 23, He Started His Own Remodeling Company
Tony returned to Cleveland and started a remodeling business at around 23 years old.
The skills from his earlier job immediately gave him an advantage.
He already understood canvassing. He knew how to work live events. He understood call center follow up. He had seen how retail lead generation worked. Instead of sitting around hoping homeowners would find him, he already knew several ways to put his company in front of people who might eventually need remodeling work.
The business grew quickly.
Tony says it reached multimillion dollar scale while he was still in his twenties.
For a young entrepreneur, that kind of growth can create the impression that the hardest part has already been solved.
Revenue is increasing.
Customers are coming in.
The company is getting bigger.
But growth can hide weaknesses for a long time.
Tony was about to find that out.
Then the Market Changed
The first major storm arrived as lending began pulling back from the remodeling industry.
At the time, Tony's company sold a significant amount of work through monthly payment options. That meant consumer financing was an important part of the sales process.
As the economy began weakening ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, lending started tightening.
According to Tony, Cleveland began feeling some of that pressure early.
Suddenly, a model that had worked during better conditions became much harder to sustain.
Tony later admitted that the business problem was only part of the issue.
He had developed the skills to produce sales, but he had not developed enough of the other qualities required to protect the company when conditions changed.
The business could grow when things were going well.
It could not withstand the first major storm.
By roughly 29 years old, Tony says he filed bankruptcy personally and for the business.
The company he had built was gone.
And he could not simply open another one the next morning.
Bankruptcy Took Away the Easy Option
This is where Tony's story becomes more interesting.
He still knew the remodeling industry.
He still understood marketing.
He still knew how to generate leads and train sales teams.
What he did not have was the financial foundation to immediately start another remodeling company.
Tony has said directly that after the bankruptcy, he did not have the credit necessary to go right back into business for himself.
So he did what he could still do.
He took the one thing he knew exceptionally well and started teaching it to other contractors.
For roughly the next decade, Tony traveled around the country helping remodeling companies build canvassing programs, improve sales teams, work events, develop call centers, and generate more appointments.
At the time, it may have felt like a detour from owning his own business.
In reality, those ten years became a second education.
For 10 Years, Other Contractors Became His Classroom
Tony was no longer looking only at one company.
He was walking into businesses all over the country.
Some were growing.
Some were struggling.
Some had strong marketing and weak sales.
Others generated plenty of leads but failed to handle them correctly.
Some could create demand but could not recruit enough people to support it.
Others had good salespeople but weak leadership.
Tony was able to see patterns that would have been much harder to recognize if he had stayed inside a single company.
He learned what successful operators were doing differently.
He also saw the same mistakes repeated over and over.
And perhaps most importantly, he had time to look back at his own failure with more perspective.
Tony has said that helping other companies ultimately helped him understand what he needed to do differently himself.
The bankruptcy had taken away his ability to immediately rebuild.
The decade that followed gave him a chance to become much better prepared when he finally did.
Ten Years Later, He Decided to Try Again
After spending roughly a decade on the road, Tony wanted another shot at owning a remodeling business.
But this time he was not the 23 year old entrepreneur who had learned how to make the phone ring and assumed that was enough.
He had spent years watching companies from the inside.
He had seen how hiring affected growth.
He had seen how leadership affected field marketing.
He had watched call centers lose valuable leads that companies had already paid to generate.
He had seen how businesses became dependent on a single source of new customers.
And he had learned what happened when a company grew without enough structure underneath it.
Tony returned to the Cleveland remodeling market with a very different perspective.
The businesses eventually became known as Window Depot Cleveland and Bath Depot before being rebranded in 2025 as Window Expo and Bath Expo. The company chose to leave the Window Depot USA network and operate under its own independent brands while keeping the same ownership and team.
Today, Tony is president of the operation, supported by teams across management, customer service, the call center, scheduling, marketing, project management, warehouse, and field operations.
That structure looks very different from simply being good at generating leads.
The Second Company Passed $10 Million
By 2026, Tony said he was approaching roughly 10 years in the new business and that Window Expo and Bath Expo were producing well over $10 million in retail sales.
That figure is based on Tony's own statement rather than audited financial disclosures, since the companies are privately held.
But it marks a major contrast with the first part of his career.
Tony had already proven in his twenties that he could create a multimillion dollar business.
The second time around, the challenge was different.
Could he build one that lasted?
The business has grown into one of the larger locally owned window companies in the Cleveland market, with a physical showroom in Westlake. Window Expo focuses on replacement windows while Bath Expo handles bathroom remodeling, including showers, tubs, and tub to shower conversions.
Tony had made it back into the same industry that once ended in bankruptcy.
Only now he was bringing ten additional years of experience with him.
He Still Believes Contractors Wait Too Much
One of the biggest ideas Tony carried into his second company is the difference between waiting for demand and creating demand.
Many contractors rely almost entirely on homeowners who are already searching.
Someone searches Google.
The phone rings.
The company buys a lead.
A referral comes in.
Those channels can work extremely well, but Tony argues that they make the business dependent on demand that already exists.
His approach is more proactive.
If Window Expo is replacing windows at one house, the neighboring homes may be the same age and dealing with the same problems. Instead of waiting several years for those homeowners to search online, a canvasser can start a conversation today.
The same principle applies to home shows, local events, retail locations, fairs, festivals, and other places where the company's target customer already spends time.
Tony calls this creating or uncovering demand instead of simply competing for the limited number of people actively looking for a contractor that day.
That idea became one of the foundations of the company he rebuilt.
Door Knocking Was Never Just About Knocking on Doors
It would be easy to reduce Tony's strategy to one sentence.
Knock more doors.
But that misses most of what he teaches.
The actual system starts much earlier.
The person at the door needs to look professional enough that the homeowner feels comfortable answering. Tony's teams use things like visible identification and professional field clothing. The conversation is designed to begin naturally around work already happening nearby rather than immediately launching into an aggressive sales pitch.
Then another part of the company has to take over.
The lead needs to reach the call center.
Someone needs to confirm the appointment.
The salesperson needs to understand that a homeowner generated through canvassing may behave differently from someone who searched Google because their bathroom is already falling apart.
Tony learned during his consulting years that companies could become good at producing leads and still waste them because the rest of the organization was not prepared to handle them.
That lesson became central to the way he thinks about marketing.
The lead is only the beginning.
Most Contractors Don't Actually Need More Leads
Tony's experience eventually led him to another conclusion that sounds almost contradictory for someone known for lead generation.
A lot of contractors asking for more leads do not actually need more leads.
They need to stop wasting the ones they already have.
Tony describes lead handling as an art and says remodeling companies often have significant leakage throughout the process. A company may spend money generating inquiries, only to lose them because the initial phone call is handled poorly, appointments are not properly followed up, old leads are ignored, or salespeople give up too quickly.
Adding another advertising campaign to that system may simply pour more water into a leaking bucket.
That is one of the major differences between the Tony who built his first company and the Tony who rebuilt years later.
Generating demand was still important.
But now the entire system behind that demand mattered too.
GMSL Insight
Contractors often treat marketing as a separate department from the rest of the business.
It is not.
A Google Ads campaign can produce a lead, but someone still has to answer the phone. The lead needs to be qualified. The estimate needs to be scheduled. The homeowner needs to show up for the appointment. The salesperson needs to close the job. Production has to deliver what was sold, and the customer experience needs to be strong enough to create reviews and referrals.
When any part of that chain breaks, the company may blame marketing even though the real problem is happening somewhere else.
Tony's comeback is a good example of what happens when an owner starts thinking about the entire customer acquisition system instead of only the lead source.
Events Became Another Way to Control Demand
Tony also built heavily around event marketing.
Home shows are an obvious example, but his teams look beyond traditional remodeling events.
Tony has described his Cleveland team finding an event built around games and activities for senior citizens. At first glance, it might not sound like a remodeling event at all.
But the audience made sense.
Many of the attendees were older homeowners who wanted to remain safely in their homes. Bathroom accessibility, safer showers, and aging in place were directly relevant problems for them.
The event worked because the company was not simply looking for the biggest crowd.
It was looking for the right crowd.
That distinction is small but important.
Marketing is not about being everywhere.
It is about being where the right customers are.
Hiring Became Part of the Marketing System
The more demand a company creates, the more people it needs to handle that demand.
Tony has spent years studying the hiring side of canvassing and event teams because those jobs experience high turnover.
Instead of hiring someone based entirely on an interview, he prefers giving candidates a realistic look at the work.
For retail marketing roles, that can mean interviewing near the actual environment where the person will work and seeing whether they are comfortable approaching and interacting with strangers. Tony has discussed using shadow opportunities so candidates can experience the job before the company spends significant time onboarding them.
That may seem like an HR issue rather than a marketing issue.
But at scale, they become the same problem.
A company cannot run a large canvassing program without canvassers.
It cannot dominate local events without people who know how to engage attendees.
It cannot follow up hundreds of inquiries without a functioning call center.
Creating demand requires creating the capacity to handle it.
The Business Became Bigger Than Tony
The company's current team structure shows how much the business has evolved.
The business includes a general manager, production management, administrative and HR leadership, service coordinators, office staff, call center management, scheduling, marketing personnel, project managers, warehouse staff, installers, and other supporting roles.
That is the same pattern that appears repeatedly in contractor success stories.
The founder may provide the early energy.
But the company cannot remain dependent on the founder forever.
Tony's strongest skill was lead generation.
If he had built the second company entirely around his ability to personally create demand, he would have created another job for himself.
Instead, he built teams around the functions he had spent years teaching other companies to systemize.
That is what allowed the business to grow beyond one person.
Bankruptcy Became a Very Expensive Education
Nobody would recommend bankruptcy as a business strategy.
Tony certainly did not need to lose his first company in order to learn.
But once it happened, he had a decision to make about what the failure meant.
He could treat the first company as proof that he was not capable of running a remodeling business.
Instead, he spent the next decade studying the industry from a different position.
He trained other contractors.
He watched what worked.
He watched what failed.
He learned how leadership affected results.
He learned how businesses wasted leads.
He learned how culture affected canvassing and event teams.
And after roughly 10 years, he returned to ownership with a much broader understanding of what a remodeling company actually required.
The first business taught Tony how quickly a company could grow.
Losing it taught him how quickly growth could disappear.
The years in between taught him how to build differently.
He Came Back to the Same Industry
One of the most interesting parts of Tony Hoty's story is that he did not abandon remodeling after bankruptcy.
He came back to it.
The second time, he did not try to pretend his first failure never happened.
He used it.
Today his companies operate independently as Window Expo and Bath Expo, serving the Cleveland area with window and bathroom remodeling services. Tony has now spent more than 30 years in the home improvement and remodeling industry.
That means most of his career did not happen during the success story.
It happened in the middle.
The knocking doors.
The failed company.
The bankruptcy.
The years on airplanes and in hotels training other businesses.
The hundreds of conversations with contractors.
Then the decision to start over.
What Contractors Can Learn From Tony Hoty
The obvious lesson is persistence, but that is almost too simple.
The more useful lesson is that the skill that creates growth is not always the skill that protects growth.
Tony was already good at marketing when he built his first company.
That did not save it.
A contractor can be exceptional at sales and still fail because the finances are weak.
A company can generate huge amounts of demand and still fail because production cannot keep up.
A business can spend heavily on advertising while losing half of its opportunities inside the call center.
Tony's second company benefited from something the first one could not have had.
Perspective.
He had seen enough companies to understand that marketing, sales, people, leadership, operations, capacity, and finances all have to work together.
GMSL Insight
One of the most dangerous moments for a contractor can actually be when the business starts growing quickly.
Revenue can make weaknesses harder to see.
More jobs can temporarily cover poor pricing.
More leads can hide a bad booking rate.
A busy schedule can hide weak systems.
Then the market changes, advertising gets more expensive, financing tightens, or demand slows down, and problems that were already there suddenly become visible.
The goal is not simply to build a company that grows when everything is working.
The goal is to build one that can keep operating when something stops working.
The Bigger Transformation
At 23, Tony Hoty knew how to generate business.
By 29, he had learned that was not enough.
His company went bankrupt, his personal finances were damaged, and he spent the next decade traveling because he says he lacked the financial foundation to immediately build another remodeling company.
Those years could easily have looked like lost time.
Instead, they became the period when Tony learned the parts of the business he had missed the first time.
Eventually, he returned to Cleveland and tried again.
The second operation became Window Expo and Bath Expo.
And according to Tony, the retail remodeling business now produces well over $10 million in annual sales.
The comeback was not built around discovering some completely new opportunity.
He went back to windows.
He went back to bathrooms.
He went back to canvassing, events, call centers, sales, and the same remodeling industry he had already spent most of his life studying.
What changed was the operator.
Tony already knew how to create demand when he was 23.
After bankruptcy and ten years of watching other businesses succeed and fail, he understood something more important.
He knew what had to happen after the lead came in.
And that is the difference between creating sales and building a company.
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