In 2008, I was invited to keynote Mitsubishi's Diamond Dealer conference. If you know the trades, you know what that room was: the Diamond Dealer designation is one of the most prestigious programs in HVAC, and the audience was a couple hundred of the best-performing contractor operators in the Mitsubishi universe. The best of the best, in one room.
About thirty minutes into the keynote, I asked a question. How many of you, right now, are investing in SEO, in organic content, in being found online for the right searches?
Three hands went up.
Three. Out of a couple hundred of the industry's top operators, three companies were investing, in 2008, in the thing the entire next decade of customer behavior would run through.
What happened to the three hands
I've had fifteen-plus years to watch that room's story resolve, and here is the result, exactly as I wrote it in the book: they are juggernauts today. All three of them. Every single one. The contractors who raised their hands in that Mitsubishi conference room became, over the years that followed, dominant companies in their markets.
And the hands that stayed down — the great majority of that elite room — spent the next several years catching up. Some caught up at great expense. Some never fully did. These were not lesser operators; they were Diamond Dealers, the winners of the previous era. Being excellent at the current game gave them no immunity to the game changing.
Three hands. Fifteen years. Two outcomes. That is the math of an industry inflection point.
Why the hands stay down
I have told the Mitsubishi story from stages for almost two decades, and the question I've turned over the longest is not why three hands went up — it's why roughly two hundred stayed down, in a room full of smart, successful people. Two reasons, and neither is stupidity:
- The truth about an inflection is always unwelcome. The reason I won rooms in 2008 — and the operating argument I've used ever since — is that I was telling people what they did not want to hear about a thing that was about to be true. An inflection point, by definition, tells the winners of the old game that the scoreboard is being replaced. Nobody claps for that. The comfortable response is to stay the course.
- Early is indistinguishable from wrong — for a while. In 2008, investing in search looked speculative and the evangelists looked like nuts (I was called both words; only one was a compliment). The window where raising your hand creates a fifteen-year advantage is exactly the window where it feels uncomfortable to raise it — and every year of waiting quietly bills you the waiting tax.
You are in that room right now
Here is why this story belongs on this blog and not just in the book: the 2026 version of that keynote question is being asked, in every conference room in the trades, right now. It just sounds different:
- How many of you have agents answering your after-hours calls and booking real jobs?
- How many of you have connected your data into an intelligence layer — instead of a chat tab?
- How many of you publish an entity file the answer engines can read — so machines recommend you instead of guessing about you?
- How many of you have audited your vendor network for AI enablement?
When I ask versions of these from stages today, the count is about what it was in 2008. A few hands. A quiet room. The same math starting its clock: the operators raising their hands now are compounding while everyone else deliberates, and in ten years the industry will describe their dominance as if it were luck.
The only question that matters
You cannot go back to 2008 and raise your hand — but you're being handed the same moment again, and this time you've read the ending. The three hands didn't have perfect knowledge; they had the willingness to move while afraid, early, when it counted. The full story — Tony, the room, and the bet that started there — is in chapter four of Hands Up, free like the rest of the book. And if your audience needs to hear the question asked from a stage, that's the keynote.
Which hand are you?