A few weeks ago, I interviewed Daniel "Danny" Fuentes about Cardinal Plumbing
Heating & Air, the company he started with Nikolai Matveev in 2013. Cardinal
has since grown into a much larger operation and made its first appearance on
the 2026 Inc. 5000 at No. 3,574.
That is the visible milestone, but as I listened to Fuentes talk about what he and Matveev had learned along the way, I kept thinking about a much earlier stage of business ownership. I was thinking about the solopreneur or skilled professional who has left employment, started a service business, and is still doing most or all of the work themselves.
That is the part of Cardinal's story I want to focus on here. This is not an attempt to turn a company of Cardinal's current size into a blueprint for a solo business. Instead, I think parts of its experience are useful for examining a transition that begins much earlier: the shift from knowing how to do the work to learning how to own the business that delivers it.
When Fuentes and Matveev started Cardinal, they already knew how to be plumbers. Both were master plumbers who understood the technical work, had experience with customers, and knew the practical realities of the trade. What they had to learn was how to become business owners.
The same distinction can appear in many professional-service businesses. A consultant may already know consulting, a marketer may know marketing, an attorney may know legal work, and a cybersecurity specialist may be exceptionally strong technically. Ownership adds another set of responsibilities around customers, sales, cash, delivery, systems, and eventually other people.
Several things Fuentes described reminded me of practices that are commonly recommended to small-business owners. They may be worth considering even when there is no team, management structure, or ambition to build a company as large as Cardinal.
Being equal partners did not mean doing identical work
Fuentes and Matveev knew each other from the company where they worked before launching Cardinal. As that employer went through instability, they found themselves taking on more responsibility and learning how the business operated beyond the plumbing itself.
When they eventually started Cardinal together, Fuentes said trust became essential. So did understanding where each person was strongest. They did not treat a 50-50 partnership as a requirement that both founders participate equally in every kind of work, and over time their responsibilities developed around their respective strengths.
A solopreneur obviously cannot divide the business between two founders, but there may still be something useful in separating the roles one person is already performing. A solo owner can be the practitioner, salesperson, marketer, administrator, finance manager, customer-service lead, and owner within the same week.
One practice I have seen recommended is to make those roles more visible, even if the distinction exists only in a calendar or weekly routine. Client work will naturally demand attention because somebody is already paying for it, while prospecting, financial review, follow-up, or improving a process can be easier to postpone. Separating those responsibilities can at least make it easier to see what the business needs beyond today's customer work.
Information became useful when they applied it
Fuentes repeatedly emphasized how much Cardinal's founders learned from outside training, business groups, and people who had already encountered some of the problems they were facing. What stood out to me was his distinction between receiving information and actually applying it.
That feels particularly relevant now because access to business advice is rarely the problem. Owners can find books, podcasts, YouTube videos, courses, networking groups, county programs, consultants, newsletters, AI tools, and more information than any one person could realistically use.
A practice I have seen suggested repeatedly is to narrow the amount of change attempted at one time. Rather than coming away from a workshop with ten ideas to implement, an owner might choose one promising idea, identify the behavior that would need to change, try it for a period of time, and then look at whether anything actually improved.
Cardinal's experience reinforced that distinction for me. Learning can expose an owner to better possibilities, but its practical value appears when some of those ideas become part of how the business actually operates.
Memory eventually needs support from a system
As Cardinal grew, Fuentes and Matveev had to rely increasingly on structure, processes, numbers, and forecasting. A solo business can encounter a much smaller version of that challenge surprisingly early.
When activity is limited, keeping the business in your head may work reasonably well. You know which prospect requested a proposal, which invoice has not been paid, who asked you to follow up next month, and what projects are coming next. As activity increases, remembering all of those commitments becomes harder.
One common small-business practice is to move important recurring information out of memory and into some kind of simple system. That could be a basic sales pipeline, a recurring cash review, an onboarding checklist, a project template, or even a calendar reminder that makes a particular activity harder to overlook.
None of these needs to be sophisticated. What seems useful about them is that they make an important part of the business less dependent on the owner remembering it at exactly the right moment.
Good work also needs visible proof
Fuentes also connected Cardinal's growth to its reputation. He said prospective customers frequently find the company through online search and then use ratings and reviews to help decide whether Cardinal feels trustworthy.
He cited a 4.9 Google rating and more than 7,000 reviews across Cardinal's locations. That is a scale of public proof that most solo professional-service businesses will never need, and in some fields public reviews may not even be the most appropriate form of credibility.
The underlying problem, however, exists at almost every size. A prospective customer is often being asked to trust the quality of someone's work before experiencing it firsthand.
I have seen businesses address that uncertainty in different ways. A consultant might use a case study or testimonial, a designer might rely on a portfolio, an accountant might build credibility around a clearly defined specialty and referral relationships, while an IT professional might show a concise example of a problem solved and the resulting improvement.
The specific form of proof will depend on the business. The broader practice is simply to make it easier for someone who does not know you yet to see evidence that you can do what you say you can do.
The founder's job keeps changing
As Cardinal became larger, Fuentes and Matveev began hiring people with deeper knowledge and capability in particular areas of the business. That meant the founders could no longer be the people through whom every decision and standard flowed, and Fuentes described his own role as increasingly becoming that of a leader of leaders.
A solo professional may never want a large staff, and many businesses do not need one. But I think there is a smaller version of this transition worth noticing.
For one owner, it may start with a bookkeeper taking responsibility for part of the financial process. For another, it might be a contractor producing a recurring deliverable, a virtual assistant handling scheduling, or a specialist taking ownership of work outside the founder's strongest area.
A question I have seen used when thinking about delegation is whether a recurring task genuinely requires the owner's expertise or simply happens to be something the owner has always done. That distinction can become useful long before a company begins building a formal team.
Technology can remove friction without replacing the relationship
Fuentes said Cardinal is using artificial intelligence to improve efficiency while continuing to treat the human customer experience as central to the business. I think that offers a useful way to think about AI in a much smaller professional-service business as well.
Some tasks benefit from speed more than from personal attention. AI can help summarize notes, organize information, prepare first-pass research, draft routine follow-up, or reduce repetitive administrative work.
Other parts of professional services depend much more heavily on judgment, reassurance, interpretation, negotiation, or trust. In those situations, the question may be less about how much can be automated and more about whether technology creates more room for the human part of the service.
Five questions I took away from the conversation
Cardinal's current size can make its story feel distant from a person who is still running a business alone. But Fuentes' description of the company's earlier years left me thinking about several questions that seem relevant much sooner.
For someone in that stage, these may be useful questions to consider:
- Craft: What work genuinely requires my particular expertise?
- Sales: What activity needs to happen regularly for new customers to continue entering the pipeline?
- Proof: What can a prospective customer see before hiring me that demonstrates the quality of my work?
- System: What important follow-up, financial check, or delivery step still depends mostly on my memory?
- Delegation: What recurring responsibility could eventually be documented, automated, or handled by someone else without reducing quality?
These are not a formula for building a business, and Cardinal's path will not be the right path for every owner. What I find useful about them is that they surface some of the responsibilities that arrive when someone moves from practicing a craft to owning the business around that craft.
Cardinal's Inc. 5000 recognition is a growth story, but the part I keep coming back to happened much earlier. Fuentes and Matveev did not need to learn how to be plumbers when they started the company. They needed to learn what else the business required of them once being good plumbers was no longer the whole job.
For a solopreneur, the scale may be completely different. The transition is much the same: the original craft still matters, while ownership becomes a second craft that has to be learned alongside it.
Connect with Cardinal
Cardinal Plumbing Heating & Air is based in Sterling and serves Northern Virginia. Learn more at cardinalplumbingva.com.