Guest: Chuck Worley, Owner of Worley Home Services

Episode Introduction

Some leaders talk about integrity; others fund it. In this episode of The Hook, I sit down with Chuck Worley, founder of Worley’s Home Services, whose orange-and-green vans are everywhere across the “757”. We talk about going from rock bottom to 75 employees and $10.3M in annual revenue. This is a masterclass in character-driven growth.

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It Started With Just One Truck 

Sarah: Welcome to The Hook with Sarah Larsen. I am excited to introduce my guest today, Chuck Worley with Worley’s Home Service. Chuck, I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do?

Chuck: Sure. Well, I’m flattered that we’re doing this. I own Worley’s Home Services. We do heating and air conditioning, electrical, plumbing, crawl space encapsulations, insulating attics, spray foam—pretty much everything. Home service, which is why we named it Worley’s Home Service because we do everything.

I was raised by a Navy Chief in Norfolk. He could do anything. I mean, all the neighbors… he gets home from being an E-8, a Senior Chief in the Navy, and he is out building an addition on the back of the house. My dad’s one of my heroes; he could just do anything, from roofing to siding. He just kind of does everything.

When I got into the home service business, people would say, “Can you do this?” I’d do a great job, and they had a great experience. They’d ask, “Can you do gas piping? Can you do electrical? Can you do this switch for me?” Once they have a great experience, they want to keep calling you back for stuff. We just went out and got our other master’s cards and things to be able to do those other trades, and that’s how we morphed from heating and air to kind of everything now.

Sarah: Well, if you’re here on the Virginia Peninsula for sure, you have seen the green and orange Worley’s trucks driving around. There are a lot of them, and you are keeping very busy.

Chuck: We are busy, man. We’ve been extremely blessed. It’s been a great, sometimes hard, ride over the last couple of years. I grew up in Norfolk and went to St. Pius on Little Creek Road. Then I went on to Norfolk Catholic. I had a short stint at Norfolk State. College was not for me, though Norfolk State University is a great school. I just wasn’t ready for college.

I ended up wrestling there for a couple of years. I was a state champion in high school in wrestling and track. I got recruited to the Apprentice School, which has a Division Three college inside it, but they teach you trades. I was blessed to get the heating and air conditioning trade. I believe I was the ninth or tenth graduate from that program. It’s probably the youngest apprenticeship. Welding is the oldest, then ship fitting, but heating and air was a new trade they started, probably in the eighties. That was a tough trade. Again, I was not a school guy, but I did make it through the Apprentice School—barely. I probably got the lowest GPA to ever graduate, but I did graduate. It’s a great program.

What I’m trying to teach kids now—and of course, anybody under 30 is a kid to me; the older we get, the older that number goes—is this: Look man, you could have a great trade. My top professional plumbers, HVAC guys, and electricians are making $80,000 to $100,000 a year. You can make good money in this trade if you’re not afraid to grind. You have to work.

When I went through the Apprentice School, I didn’t realize the value of it until I was through it and then opened up my own company. I realized, “Oh man, I can do okay. I can support a family with this trade.” I don’t have to be a doctor or a lawyer. I can make decent money and take care of my family. Going to the Apprentice School changed my life forever. It taught me a trade.

I was very blessed to have good people that helped me when I went into business for myself. That’s why I’m so helpful to newer, younger companies. Look, don’t be a plumber and also try to be a CPA. You need to hire a CPA. You need to hire a bookkeeper. You’re a plumber, not a bookkeeper. I try to help these younger guys. I feel like if we help our competitors or smaller guys trying to get bigger…because everybody calls me. They see us growing like crazy. They’re always asking questions, and I love helping people. I feel like if we raise the standard of our industry, it’s going to only make our industry better.

Sarah: Did you start your first business right out of college or right out of the trade school?

Chuck: After I came out of the Apprentice School, I went to work for a couple of people. I mentioned my dad earlier. Character, integrity, and doing the right thing were something that was taught really early. A couple of the companies I worked with did not necessarily have the ethics that I was raised with, and they were cutting corners. I’m just not about that. I want to do the right job, and the only way I’m going to be able to control that is if I own it. That’s why I opened my own company.

In 2001, I opened up my own company. It was just me and a truck, and I had no customers. I was like, “Now what?” I started banging on doors. I’d do a job, a service call, and bang on the door next door: “Here’s my card, call me if you need me.” I’d do a good job. I would tell the customer, “Hey, I have nothing to do tomorrow. I would love to help your neighbors.”

The business really grew pretty steadily over the 13 years I was in business. We went from me and a truck to about $2.1 million. I had 15 to 20 guys working for me. I was really blessed to have the business that I did. I had done a few small acquisitions. A couple of guys wanted to retire, and I kind of took over their customer base and gave them an exit strategy. I’m really good at working out exit strategies for employers that are really ready to kind of move on with the rest of their life. Now that I’m 54, all the people that I learned from are in their sixties and seventies, so now they’re kind of looking back saying, “I trust this guy. I can do it.”

A Promise In Bankruptcy Court

Sarah: I know you had a little disruption in there somewhere, so tell me about that.

Chuck: I was married for 20-some years. I have two fantastic kids. My ex and I are friends. We co-parent. We have a good relationship. We were great parents, not great husband and wife. She led me to Christ. She gave me two great kids and led me to Christ, so I can’t really hate her. Went through a divorce in 2013. It was a long, drawn-out, negative four years. We finally divorced, with a lot of debt and a lot of stuff.

I ended up selling off my company for a dollar with the agreement that he would pay off my debt. So I got a dollar. He would pay off the debt and didn’t.

Sarah: Everything’s tied to you?

Chuck: Yeah. That was in 2013. I worked there for a year; I was a million-dollar salesman. Again, I was trying to get back on track and then started getting phone calls and judgments and all this stuff. I had an 803 Beacon score when this started. When it got to 400, I figured out something was going very badly. All this debt, some I knew, some I didn’t know, was just attacking me, and I was forced into a Chapter 7, which basically is not a reorganization. It was bad enough that they’re like, “Okay, you’re an idiot. We’ll wipe it all out.” Chapter 7 in 2015.

When I was going through that divorce, I was sitting in bankruptcy court. I told you, character, integrity, always doing the right thing. I’m sobbing in this courtroom, going through this bankruptcy and divorce. It was just a negative 2015. I’m sitting in court, and they’re doing the bankruptcy thing, and I’m sobbing. It’s such a low point. That’s not who I am; I pay my bills. I had an 803 Beacon score. I got this waterfall feeling, like water just kind of washed over me, and I got this total peace that, “Chuck, we are going to pay these people back.”

I’m like, “What are you talking about? I can’t even pee in a cup. I don’t even have a cup.” God gave me this peace. It just kind of washed over me. I said, “It’s going to be fine. We’re going to pay everybody back.” He gave me that peace because that is who I am.

It took almost seven years, but last December, I wrote a check, a pretty sizable check, for the 70th person. I bankrupted on 70 people, and I paid back that 70th person, and it was a significant number. Dave Ramsey is awesome. He taught me how to pay the small guys off first, so I definitely recommend anybody that hasn’t heard of daveramsey.com to go there because it changed my life. Personally, I’m debt-free. The only debt I have at 54 years old is my house.

I’m talking over half a million dollars of debt. It was significant, life-changing stuff. I just felt like God was telling me that we needed to pay. Where some of that money came from was we tithe 10% of our business net profits. I believe that we have been so blessed because of what we did in business.

I do like to show people that they can tithe personally, but tithe on your business. God only asked you to test him in one thing, and tithing was the one test that he said, “Test me on this. It will work.” And I’m telling you, it will change your life. It will change your business. It is just amazing what we have done in business.

Going from… in 2016, it was me, Chase, and a guy in a truck. We had one van that wasn’t even mine. It was a lease to somebody else, and I was paying the lease payment. We didn’t have anything. Six years later, we have 75 employees. We did $10.3 million last year. It is impossible to do what we did. There is only one reason that we did it, and that is because God blessed us. He is just amazing. The people that we have, the amount of people that trust us, it is so important to us. Are we perfect? Absolutely not. Is our company perfect? Absolutely not. We have 75 people. When you have that many people, a friend of mine told me, “Do you know how to screw up a perfectly good church? Add people to it.” How do you screw up a perfectly good business? Add people to it.

It is important to us, our people. I’m going to ask you a trivia question. You’re in business, right? Is it harder now to find a good employee or a good customer?

Sarah: Today? I’m fortunate that I don’t have employees. That is true. But I did five years ago. I had a business. Honestly, it is hard to find good employees, but if they can trust you as a business owner, I think it’s easier to find someone, especially if you’re treating your employees well. This is what my husband and I found: because we treated our employees well, they recommended their friends. You don’t bring your friends into a business you wouldn’t want to work for.

Chuck: Most of our employees are referrals from an employee who works for us. That is a true statement. I feel like the hardest thing to do now is to find a good employee versus finding a customer. Ten years ago, the answer is different. I could find employees left and right; I couldn’t find a customer. Now I think it’s harder, so focusing on the employees is key.

One of the reasons that I wanted to grow the business is because it takes more pressure off of each person. If you have three guys on call and one guy calls out, you’re 33% down. If I have five guys and one guy calls out, it’s only 20% down. Each of the four guys takes an extra call, and we’re covered.

The bigger we get, we can give breaks. We’re not working on Sundays anymore. We don’t go on call. When somebody’s interviewing with us, they go home and tell their wife, “Man, this guy offered me this. This guy offered me this, but this guy said I don’t ever have to work Sunday.” Where is he going to work? It’s a big deal taking care of the employees and giving them time with their family.

Working With Family

Chuck: One of the magics of our business is my best friend, my son Chase. He’s always been the yin to my yang. He’s the exact opposite of me, which is sometimes fun.

Sarah: He’s a quieter guy.

Chuck: He is quiet. I’m definitely on the outskirts of an extrovert, and he is an introvert—100% opposite. But our relationship, our magic, is building a business together. Me going to get the business… all the way back to when I started the company, he encouraged me with a push. “Dad, why don’t you just open your own company again?” I was just a miserable person. I was upset.

In 2015, he’s like, “Why don’t you just buy a company, open another company?” We looked at a couple of companies. I bought this little small crawl space company in 2016, and he kind of pushed me into it. I’m like, “Payroll, payroll taxes, employees. I’m no good at any of that.” He’s like, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of that.”

Sarah: How old was he at that point?

Chuck: He was 22 at that time. He sees his dad’s miserable. We’re best friends. He’s like, “Man, you just need to go back into business for yourself. That was when you were happiest.” So I buy this company, and he says, “Look, I’ll do all the payroll and employees and all that stuff. I’ll take care of that. You just go get me business.”

I went out, and I banged on doors and networking events, and I ran every single sales call. I was working 150 hours a week. He was working 100 hours a week. Of course, he’s going to school full-time, carrying 18 to 21 credits per semester. Full-time is 12.

He graduated. He went to Division One in lacrosse, hated Newark, New Jersey. He grew up on a farm in Tabb, so it was a big culture shock, and he just didn’t like it up there. He came home to CNU and loved CNU. He graduated from CNU, played lacrosse there. He was the vice president of Pike Fraternity.

We’re really active in the CNU community now. He loved working together with me but wanted to finish school quick as he could, so that’s why he doubled up on all the things.In 2018, he graduated. One of the biggest things that makes me so proud of him is his grind.

I always give my ex-wife credit: her brain is my grind. He doesn’t have to work here. He can make a lot more money somewhere else, go to work for somebody else. But he sees a vision, and it’s really been a magical five, six years. My yin to my yang. Everything I hate, he loves. He hates talking to people and going to networking events and branding.

Creating a Brand

Sarah: You’re always wearing your colors.

Chuck: I’ve always got the orange and green on. It’s funny, I was at a networking event last night, and the lady’s like, “If they don’t know who you are, I’m not giving you a name tag.” I’m like, “Alright, well that’s, maybe I’m doing a good job with this branding.”

Sarah: You’ve got the orange shirt, orange handkerchief, orange wristwatch band with your green blazer. It looks really sharp today. I’ve also seen you in the green shirt with the orange jacket.

Chuck: Very loud orange.

Sarah: The orange and green Chucks.

Chuck: You gotta have the Chucks. Love the Chuck Taylors, right?

Sarah: Your name’s Chuck, of course. You gotta have the Chuck Taylors.

Chuck: Gotta have the Chuck Taylors. I’ll do orange and green, and then the laces are opposite.

Sarah: You have fun with it.

Chuck: Everything is about top of mind awareness. I’ve got this crazy guy with a bright orange jacket, and you get home, and your heat’s out. I always joke that you may not like me, but you will not forget me. It’s important that we stay in front of people. I feel like I do a really good job staying in front of people.

Sarah: I want to talk to you about that because you told me a couple of years ago that you were working with a marketing coach or something like that. I know you do a lot of education for yourself; you’re always learning, and you get a lot of support from other business owners. Tell me about your experience and what you’ve done.

Chuck: I haven’t had a marketing coach. I’ve just been dumb luck more than anything else. I’m not afraid to grind. A couple of years ago, I’m crawling underneath a house, and I get really frustrated because I see this PVC pipe, a plumbing pipe, notched out. I don’t mean notched out; I mean a 14-inch beam, 12 inches of it is cut out. You can’t walk across that. A plumber just cut it out. I’m crawling out of a crawlspace, and of course, I’m a chubby guy trying to get out of the crawlspace. I’m frustrated at that, too.

I’m just like, that really gets stuck in my craw when some contractor charges a customer to do a crappy job. It just makes me angry. I remember grandma used to say that. I’m coming out, and I sent this silly post, “What’s stuck in Chuck’s craw,” and it just went nuts.

Sarah: And you still do that?

Chuck: I have people walking up to me weekly saying, “What’s stuck in Chuck’s craw?” I just talked to a big competitor this weekend, a huge crawl space competitor. He walks up to me, and I introduce myself to his wife. I’m like, “Hey, I’m Chuck Worley,” and she says, “Oh, I know what’s stuck in your craw!” I’m like, “Man, the biggest competitor’s wife knows who I am, so I must be doing something right on social media.”

It’s been fun, and it’s educational, too. I’m trying to teach people that you can make money doing the right job, having the right people in place. It’s important to me to do a good job. Again, that’s just the way I was raised: character, integrity, do the right thing. Again, we’re not perfect by any means, but we want to be.

One of my favorite coaches is Saban from Alabama. You love him or you hate him, but I absolutely love winners. Saban is doing this interview, and he says, “We are peerless. We don’t have competition. We are competing against perfection.” Every single play is designed to score a touchdown. If everybody does their job, I score a touchdown every time I touch the ball. Wow, like he’s right.

I’m sitting here watching football. I should be more mad now because not every play is a touchdown. Everybody didn’t do their job. If everybody did their job, every play would be a touchdown. That just makes sense. He’s competing against perfection. So, how do we get our company there? If everything goes perfectly—which with 75 people is impossible sometimes—but I’d rather have…

Sarah: You’re not competing against the other companies that are out there. That’s right. You’re just competing…

Chuck: I’m competing against perfection. What is the right job? If everything was right, every job would go perfectly, and I would pray for that day.

Sarah: We need those challenges, right?

Chuck: Absolutely. If it was easy, everybody could do it. The biggest impact stuff that I really want to do is impact our industry. Let’s have a great kind of rise to the tide. Every boat rises when the tide rises.

I want to encourage people: if you’re in business for yourself, start tithing on your business. I’m telling you, it will change your life. It will change your business. I really believe that is a big part of why we’ve grown the way we have.

Sarah: When you say tithe your business, are you giving your tithe for the business to the church, or are you talking about just wherever? I know you’re a big proponent of charity, donating to all those things.

Chuck: We’ve done everything from Young Life. There’s a Five Loaves Food Pantry in Newport News. We have given to it weekly for seven, six years. It’s important to just giving back, giving back period, and focusing on the 757.

I cannot tell you how many people, because of our [wrapped] trucks and vans they’re like, “Man, is that a franchise or what?” No, it’s just, my last name’s Worley. We’ve done a really good job impacting our area in the 757. Getting people to know who we are, giving back to our community, giving back to our employees, giving back to our people. It is really important, and I just feel like people need to hear that, especially when times get tight and times get tough.

There is nothing tighter than going bankrupt. I had a post a couple of years ago. I was walking through my shop and saw this big pile of copper, and I burst into tears in the middle of my warehouse with 20 guys running around. They ran into my office. I don’t know what happened. In 2015, I was scrapping metal to eat. I was going to the shop. I was cutting up copper and getting $10, $20, $50, $100, going and buying some food so I could make it another five days until some more money came in.

Sarah: Talk about starting a business from scratch.

Chuck: Yeah. No cash. I think all the companies that I’ve purchased, a lot of them were handshake agreements. We had stuff in writing, but they trusted me that I was going to… I mean, I had a 17-page contract that was not honored. It doesn’t matter. If you don’t trust the man behind the pen, the ink is worthless. My dad told me that years ago.

Sarah: I don’t know if you know the entire story about my husband and I with our previous business.

Chuck: I knew you had a previous business.

Sarah: He had a business partner that did some not-so-good things. It affected our business.

Chuck: Dave Ramsey said, “The only ship you want to jump off of is a partnership.”

Sarah: I believe a partnership can be good. Adam and I worked together very well, but I was the support for the business. They owned it together, and we ended up having to get out and signed an agreement that said, “Okay, we’re going to pay X, Y, and Z.” The last year, just trying to keep the business afloat, we had gone into our own hole of debt. We owe money to the IRS, and in the agreement, all those company cards that were in my husband’s name were supposed to be transferred to the business. They were supposed to take care of all of that, plus the IRS debt, and we never saw a dime of that. I completely understand what it’s like to have that stress of the finance hanging over you. We’ve had all that stuff come back to us, and we’re still in the thick of it. It’s five years.

Chuck: February in a couple of days will be the eighth year for me. I was very happy to pay all those people back. I joke that it’s incredible. You’re paying people who’ve already written it off. Some people are like, “Yeah, okay.” But they took it…

Sarah: You’re covering somebody else’s debt to them now.

Chuck: Right. I joked that I was paying it off. It helped my Beacon score zero, but it made me feel better. I think it’s part of our story. I didn’t know that at the time when I’m in tears in bankruptcy court, but I do know it was part of our story and part of what we were supposed to do. It was a pretty crazy ride, but there have been ups and downs.

Sarah: I love seeing the growth and knowing that you’re thriving and buying other businesses to help out.

Chuck: We’re doing exit strategies for guys that are ready to just move on. A friend of mine died a couple of years ago. They had a eulogy, and no one was going up to talk, and they’re like, “Does anybody have anything to say?” I started talking about him and the impact that he had on me, from teaching me Excel spreadsheets to business. I opened up my own company, and he still came over and helped me because I left his company. I was like, “Man, I couldn’t have done it without Jeff.” He really loved me and really wanted to help me. I’m like, “I want to do that. I need to have the impact that he had on me.” I was in full sob when I realized the impact that he had on my life, and I’m like, “Man, we all need to do that. We need to help other people.”

Sarah: When you think about the ripple effect there, him helping you has made this big ripple effect of what you’re doing, and then you can do the same for somebody else.

Chuck: Absolutely.

Why Quality Wins

Sarah: What’s in the future for Chuck Worley and Worley’s Home Services?

Chuck: Trying to keep growing.

Sarah: Are you going to be nationwide?

Chuck: Not nationwide, Hampton Roads, Virginia. We are going to own our market, and I feel like we’re doing a great job owning the 757. If you’re driving on the interstate or driving anywhere and you don’t see one of my vans, I’m going to need you to pull over. You obviously can’t see because they’re everywhere. I’m getting text messages and PMs daily: “I saw your truck. I saw your truck,” or a picture of my truck. It’s very flattering, and I appreciate people encouraging us. It’s been a fun ride for sure.

We definitely want to own the 757 area code, pretty much Virginia Beach. We don’t go into Carolina, so pretty much the Virginia line all the way to New Kent. We’ve just expanded up into Williamsburg more and are doing a lot up there, actually.

The problem with expanding that much, or I have a friend who franchises, is I feel like we can’t control the quality of the personnel. We can’t control the quality of the people and the products. On that note, we have two guys who could both build $1 million off their trucks. They’re amazing, great technicians, great installers, great HVAC guys. But they bleed green and orange, and they want the quality. We pulled them out of trucks, which cost me **$2 million in revenue**, to make sure that our guys are… we call them for “happy checks” to “quality assurance checks,” making sure that we’re going to do the right job. Up until a couple of years ago, I did all the sales, and I did all the happy checks on every single job. I was on every single job.

I was still doing every quality check a lot, and then it came to a point where I’m like, “Okay, I need a life too.” Then we started expanding. Now that we’re at $10 million, we have full-time guys just making sure that our quality is where it’s supposed to be because that is why we get referrals. We take care of it. Again, not perfect, but we do want to do the right job. It’s a fight to get to perfection. That’s us.

Sarah: Awesome. Well, thanks, Chuck. I appreciate your time today. That was fun. Thanks for sharing your story. I think it’s really inspiring.

Chuck: Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Key Takeaways

• Integrity scales. Chuck’s choice to repay all 70 creditors after Chapter 7 rebuilt not just finances but reputation.
  
• Tithe your profits, not just your paycheck. Treat generosity as an operating principle and watch doors open.
  
• Branding is memory. Orange-and-green everything, weekly social segments (“What’s stuck in Chuck’s craw”), and omnipresent vans = top-of-mind. 

About Chuck

Chuck Worley is the founder of Worley’s Home Services, a full-service HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and crawl-space company serving Virginia’s 757 area code.

A product of the Newport News Apprentice School, Chuck built his business on craftsmanship, generosity, and unapologetic branding (including the orange and green Chucks). After losing everything and declaring Chapter 7, he spent seven years paying back every creditor while growing Worley’s to 75 employees and $10.3M in annual revenue while giving 10% of net profits to local causes. 

Connect with Worley’s: callworleys.com 

Energetic Reflection

This episode hums with the frequency of restoration. Chuck’s story is proof that money follows meaning — and meaning follows integrity. When your standards are internal and your generosity is structural, the brand becomes a lighthouse. 

If this conversation reminded you that business can be both bold and good, I’d love to stay connected.

Each week in my Reiki-infused newsletter, I share stories and energetic insights for creative entrepreneurs who are building from alignment, not exhaustion. It’s part inspiration, part strategy, and all heart, because your purpose deserves to prosper.