About halfway through, Justin White does the arithmetic out loud. Say 40 crew leaders, he tells Peter, each carrying a company iPhone, out on job sites eight hours a day. That is a great deal of potential footage, and he still cannot get the authentic version of it out of the field. The admission is where the episode stops being an interview and turns into a working session.
Justin hosts the Trades Talk Podcast, where he sits down with operators and leaders inside and outside the trades to compress decades of experience into an hour. His guest here is Peter Murphy Lewis, founder of Strategic Pete. Peter went from a boarding school in Missouri to college in Boston, then to South America on a scholarship to study for a master’s degree, meaning to become a diplomat. He stayed, built a travel company whose clients included Beyonce, Paul McCartney and Aerosmith, and was then handed his own Chilean television show in the mold of Dirty Jobs.
Three seasons and more than 100 jobs on camera followed. Grave digger on day one. Window cleaner in a one-man harness on the outside of a 13-story hospital. Stand-up comic. Three rounds against a 120-pound national champion boxer who beat him. Peter brought that storytelling work back to the United States six years ago, and by the show’s own count has since coached more than 200 CEOs. He makes documentaries for private equity turnarounds, misunderstood industries and companies preparing for a sale. What Justin gets out of him is not theory. It is the order of operations, applied live to a landscaping business. There is a written companion to this episode in our article on marketing a trades business like plumbing.
Key Takeaways
1. The Trades Have a Proof Problem, Not a Content Problem
Peter teaches this framework when he speaks, and he always opens the same way. Companies, industries and individuals are not short of content; everybody is publishing. What they lack is evidence. “People want to be able to see not hear what you do,” he says. That is why he keeps coming back to documentary: a Jason Bourne film is not the real world and negative news is not the whole city, but documentary sits in the grey area, contradictions included. He argues people change their opinion through stories far more readily than through data or marketing.
2. Pick the Smallest Business Goal Before Anyone Picks Up a Camera
His first question to an owner is not about channels or budget. It is what the smallest business goal is that, if a story achieved it, would leave them happy. He narrows it with Justin on air: I want to talk about my company becomes I want recruits, which becomes 100 applicants next month instead of five. “I see people pull up a camera and start recording, but they haven’t worked on the narrative or the story arc,” he says. Fix the goal and the audience, the question and the messenger follow from it.
3. Start With the Elephant in the Room, and Look for the Widest Gap
Peter works mostly with misunderstood, underrepresented or mission-driven organizations that struggle to shift what the public believes about them. So he asks the uncomfortable question first: “What’s the most negative thing people would say when you’re not around?” Then he measures the distance between that belief and the truth. His rule runs against instinct. “The larger the gap, the easier it is for us to change our opinion.” Justin supplies the trades version straight away: the assumption that contractors are always trying to rip off the homeowner.
4. The Executive Is Usually the Wrong Person on Camera
This is his openly contrarian position. “It’s not that CEOs can’t tell the story,” he says. “It’s that when you make somebody tell the story and they don’t feel comfortable or it’s not their passion, they shouldn’t.” The better question is the one he opens the episode with: who is closest to your business and loves it more than you do? Often that is a frontline crew member or a raving-fan customer whose enthusiasm is contagious. Let the executive fill in the gaps that person cannot.
5. Let Customers Prove the Claim You Cannot Prove Yourself
Justin says on the episode that his company moved its entire maintenance operation to electric equipment on January 1, 2025. Mowers, blowers, edgers, everything but the truck. He still cannot tell the story, he says, because there is no contrast in a photograph of a crew working. Peter’s answer is to cast the people who need quiet: writers, meditators, new mothers, his own brother whose pain disorder makes sound hurt. Record their reaction to the old equipment with the decibels on screen, then the new. “I would let them tell your story.”
6. One Well-Made Story Can Be Reused Fifty Times
The production cost frightens small trades businesses, so Peter reframes what gets bought. “Once you have a well crafted story, that story can be used 50 times across other departments,” he says. He describes a clip recorded about a year ago that a client now drops into the email sent to applicants: watch this, because it reflects who we are. Recruitment, retention, nurture and sales all run off the same footage with different copy, so the applicant arrives already sold.
Rapid Fire Q&A
Q: Which of the 100 jobs frightened you most?
A: Stand-up comedy, on fear alone. He had roughly eight hours to build a set for an audience that had paid to laugh. He was also thrown off the top rope by Mexican wrestlers, and boxed a 120-pound national champion who beat him in three rounds.
Q: So who should actually be the messenger?
A: Rarely the executive. Start with whoever is closest to the business and loves it most, a frontline crew member or the customer who talks about you unprompted. Their passion carries. The executive can fill in the jargon and business context afterwards.
Q: What if the budget will not stretch to a documentary?
A: Build it in stages. Design the experiment, execute it, then bring in a thought leader to pull the findings together. He says the framework itself comes out of an hour or two on a call, and you do not commit further money until it resonates with people you test it on.
Q: Who runs this inside a trades company?
A: Not the owner. On a team of 10 or 20 there are one or two people who would happily give three to five hours a week to marketing or video. Enable them, give clear direction, and tell them up front that the first month is allowed to fail.
Q: What is your trade secret?
A: “Everybody is good at telling stories, but they struggle to tell their own story.” So start with someone who shaped who you are, and tell their story. You think you are talking about them, but you are learning how to talk about yourself.
What This Means for Trades and Home Service Owners
The playbook in this episode is sequential, and most trades owners enter it at the wrong end. Before any phone comes out of a pocket, write down two things: the smallest goal a story could hit, and the elephant in the room. If the goal is 100 applicants and the elephant is that the work looks easy from an office window, you already know the film. Somebody comfortable comes out and tries to cut a straight line, and the footage argues for you.
Cast the messenger before you buy any equipment. The crew leader who loves the work, the homeowner who coined a nickname for your crews, the client who recommends you at the grocery store. Those people carry a claim your own voice cannot. This is the discipline behind Strategic Pete’s documentary storytelling practice: find the person the audience will believe, then build the question set around what you actually want the viewer to do.
The electric equipment example is the template for any claim a competitor could also make on a website. Do not assert it. Stage the contrast, put the customer in the frame, and let the reaction be the proof. When it works, the same material becomes the foundational asset behind your brand story video production, and everything short-form is cut from it rather than invented separately.
Then budget in stages and plan the reuse before you spend. Test the framework in conversation, run one small experiment, and expect the first attempt to underperform. Peter’s own closing point is that the story you tell about yourself is the one that moves first, which is why he signed up for a marathon 12 days before turning 40 after watching a documentary about someone he had never met. Justin’s challenge to listeners is narrower: take one step.
Listen to the Full Episode
This conversation is from the Trades Talk Podcast, hosted by Justin White, published on August 12, 2026. Justin brings Peter Murphy Lewis inside his own landscaping business and builds the content plan on air, which makes it one of the more practical hours in the feed. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts.
