This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
Once a month, Utah Business hosts Founder Friday, a free event that showcases the wisdom of Utah-based founders. In April, Kiln hosted a conversation between Utah Business Editor-in-Chief Melanie Jones and JobNimbus founder Ben Hodson. This event was sponsored by Kiln and Northwestern Mutual. Here are a few takeaways from the conversation.
1. Broad interests mean better problem-solving.
Less than a minute after Hodson sat down for his Founder Friday discussion, he recommended “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein to audience members. Hodson, who also quickly admitted to laying down a guitar track idea before arriving at the event, relates to the book’s explanation of why we should value an interdisciplinary approach to life.
“Our brains use patterns to solve problems,” he explains. “My brain thought about the math of the song and what I was trying to do, … and that’s where I came up with the idea. Now, I’m sitting in a business meeting with a different problem set. My brain takes the same patterns I’m using for all these other creative pursuits and applies them [to my current problem]. Suddenly, I’m an idea machine because I’ve gotten so many inputs. It’s a superpower to have broad interests.”
2. Success comes when you stop fearing risk.
During one of his earlier ventures, Hodson had some investors fall through, and he wasn’t able to get the company off the ground. In massive debt, he considered going bankrupt but ultimately decided to dig himself out of the hole instead, an effort that took two and a half years.
Once out of the hole, he had a new outlook on life that would forever change how he approached business. “After I went through that, I could go through anything. How bad can it get?” he says. “I unlocked in a way that I could take on even more risk because it couldn’t be worse than what I’d already gone through. Actually, I think, it gave me some of the successes later because I was willing to take on more risk than I would have.”
3. Don’t chase money, chase impact.
JobNimbus’ mission is to make their contractors into heroes for their customers, families and communities.
“Every single thing we do as a company is around making them look good to their homeowner,” he says. “That homeowner will say, ‘That’s the best contractor I’ve ever worked with, five stars.’”
When contractors have happy customers, they grow profitably and can spend more time with family, friends or their community. When contractors have a successful business, they can do more good.
“We make this cool flywheel, this virtuous cycle, through everything we do now,” Hodson explains. “And there just happens to be a lot of money behind that, but we don’t chase the money, we chase the impact.”
4. Employees should come before the customer.
“Which is more important: your customer or your people?” Hodson asks. “Most CEOs say customer. I say people. … I believe if you take care of your people, then they actually take care of the customer.”
