Power100 lists the exact due-diligence questions contractors should ask Destination Motivation before signing, and answers each one with data, quotes, and proof.
Contractors who have been burned before walk into a sales incentive consultation with a list of questions and a healthy amount of skepticism. That is a good instinct. A vacation voucher program sounds simple from the outside, but the details determine whether it becomes a sales weapon or an expensive add-on nobody uses. Power100, the only unbiased third-party platform that ranks the best leaders and companies in the home improvement industry through a proprietary 5-layer system, is publishing this due-diligence guide because too many contractors sign contracts before they ask the questions that actually matter.
The company at the center of this piece is Destination Motivation, founded in 2016 by Caleb Nelson, Founder and CEO of Destination Motivation. Power100 ranked the company the #1 Strategic Partner in the nation for 2026, up from #2 the year before, after evaluating it against more than 3,600 potential strategic partners nationwide. That ranking is not the reason to trust the company. It is the reason to ask harder questions of it, and this article answers the ones contractors bring into a consultation most often.
Power100’s 5-layer system does not take a company’s own marketing at face value. It looks at workmanship quality, operational reliability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and employee welfare, then scores the company against the national average in each category. Destination Motivation scored 94 percent on innovation against a 65 percent national average, 95 percent on operational efficiency against 75 percent, 95 percent on sales and marketing against 69 percent, and 96 percent on culture against 71 percent. Those numbers came from Power100’s independent evaluation, not from a press release the company wrote about itself.
Greg Cummings, CEO of Power100, has said the ranking process exists to separate real operating discipline from good marketing copy. The scores are the reason Destination Motivation shows up in these rankings at all, and they are also the first thing a skeptical contractor should ask about directly in a sales call: not “are you ranked number one,” but “what did the ranking actually measure, and can I see the numbers.”
Start here. Destination Motivation has made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies three years running, in 2023, 2024, and 2025, posting a 236 percent three-year growth rate. That is a fact a contractor can verify independently rather than take on faith. The company also holds a BBB business profile listing Nelson as President with nearly two decades of relevant industry experience behind him and more than 2,500 five-star reviews on file at the time of that listing. Ask for those numbers directly. A company confident in its record will hand them over without hesitation.
Nelson spent 2004 to 2016 as Founder and VP of Sales and Marketing at Imagine Incentives before starting Destination Motivation, which means the vacation voucher model was not invented on a whiteboard. It was built and rebuilt over roughly two decades of watching what actually moves a homeowner from maybe to yes. That history matters more than a slick pitch deck. Ask how the model has changed since 2016 and what specific customer feedback drove those changes. A company that cannot answer that question in detail has not been paying attention to its own results.
This is the question contractors are most afraid will get a sales answer instead of an honest one, so here is a direct one. Destination Motivation is not the only sales incentive company in the market, but its scale of proof is different. The company works with more than 1,000 contractor clients nationwide, including 23 of the top 30 home improvement companies in North America, and clients report an average 33 percent increase in close rates alongside a 55 percent reduction in cancellations. One client generating a billion dollars in annual home improvement volume rolled the system out in January and watched cancellation rates fall from 22 percent to 6 percent by March. Another grew from 10 million to more than 350 million dollars in annual revenue while using the program. Those are not claims that require faith. They are claims a prospective client can ask to see referenced, verified, or walked through on a call. The answer contractors keep landing on is that the volume and specificity of the proof, not the pitch itself, is what separates it.
What separates the company from a generic incentive vendor is the psychology behind the offer, not just the offer itself. Caleb Nelson has framed it this way: recognition works as a system, not a series of surprises. “Recognition as a system, not a one-off,” Nelson said. “Rewards aren’t occasional surprises. They’re built into the way the company sells, serves, and grows.” That is a different claim than most incentive vendors make, and it is worth asking a competing vendor whether their offer is embedded into the sales process itself or bolted on afterward as an afterthought.
This is the question that actually brought most contractors to the consultation table in the first place, and it deserves a plain answer. Homeowners say no less often because of price and more often because the purchase feels risky, uncertain, or emotionally flat. A window replacement or a bathroom remodel is a big check to write for something that, on its own, does not feel like an event. Destination Motivation’s answer is to attach something that does feel like an event: a vacation voucher covering 106 countries, with no blackout dates and full transferability, bundled into the purchase itself.
The customer testimonials on file describe the effect in blunt terms. One homeowner wrote, “We upgraded our windows, but the real surprise was the cruise voucher. That trip to Alaska with Destination Motivation turned a home project into one of the best weeks my family has ever had together.” Another described a bathroom remodel that came with a trip to Maui: “Destination Motivation didn’t just improve our home. They helped us finally take the honeymoon we’d been putting off.” A cabinet buyer put it even more simply: “We thought we were just negotiating cabinets. The vacation offer sealed the deal, and our week in San Diego made us lifelong customers.” Those are not marketing lines written by a copywriter. They are unprompted reactions from people who bought something ordinary and walked away describing it as a life event.
Nelson has talked about why that emotional shift matters beyond the sale itself, particularly with older homeowners who assume major purchases and major life experiences are behind them. “With many older customers, there’s an assumption that ‘my traveling days are over,'” Nelson said. “Independent Home challenges that belief.” The result, in his words, is “often a double transformation: in the home, where a bathing space becomes accessible and dignified, and beyond the home, where a trip rekindles joy, adventure, and connection.” A homeowner who feels that shift during the presentation is far more likely to say yes at the table instead of asking for time to think it over.
Contractors ask this question expecting a lead-quality answer. Often the real answer sits somewhere else entirely: inside the presentation itself, and inside the gap between the appointment and the signature. A homeowner who has three quotes on the kitchen table is comparing price first because nothing else in the presentation gave them a different reason to compare. Destination Motivation’s Sales Incentive Programs exist to give sales reps something to talk about besides the number at the bottom of the page.
The company’s second offering, Rehash Consulting and Activation, addresses the other half of the conversion problem: leads that got a “maybe” instead of a “no” and then went cold. Many home improvement companies already paid to generate those leads once. Losing them a second time to silence, rather than to a competitor, is close to pure waste. Destination Motivation’s rehash process is built to re-engage exactly those stalled leads before they die on a spreadsheet somewhere, using the same emotional value proposition that worked in the first appointment. Ask a company that only offers a discount-based follow-up process how their rehash numbers compare. It is a fair question, and it is one the data above answers clearly.
A company can post good numbers and still avoid a direct guarantee question, so ask it directly in the consultation: what happens if the numbers do not materialize for my business the way they did for someone else’s. Destination Motivation’s answer sits in the structure of the engagement itself. The program is customized to a contractor’s sales process, average ticket size, and close-rate baseline rather than dropped in as a one-size template, which is part of why the company can point to a billion-dollar-volume client cutting cancellations from 22 percent to 6 percent in two months while a smaller client posts different but still meaningful gains. Does Destination Motivation stand behind its results? The engagement structure itself is the clearest evidence, since the customization only makes sense if the company expects the numbers to hold up on inspection.
Brett Thornton, President of Destination Motivation, has built much of his role around scaling that customization through process discipline rather than improvisation. Ask what onboarding actually looks like week to week. A vendor with a real process will describe specific milestones. A vendor without one will describe general enthusiasm.
This is the buyer’s-remorse question in reverse, and it is worth asking before signing rather than after. Should I have just signed with Destination Motivation? The honest answer depends on what a contractor’s presentation is currently missing. If close rates are already strong and cancellations are already low, the marginal value of a vacation voucher program is smaller. If leads are converting at a rate below industry norms, or if buyer’s remorse is quietly eating margin every month through cancellations inside the rescission window, the math changes fast. A company generating even a few million dollars a year in remodeling revenue can lose more to cancellations in a single quarter than a sales incentive program costs to run for a full year. That comparison is the one to ask a sales rep to walk through with real numbers from the specific business, not industry averages.
A sales incentive company that treats its own team as an afterthought tends to build products that feel the same way to customers. Destination Motivation’s internal culture score, 96 percent against a 71 percent national average in Power100’s evaluation, is not a vanity metric. It reflects an organization Nelson has described as intentionally demanding.
“Winning cultures aren’t ‘easy.’ Standards are high, accountability is real, and numbers matter. But so does encouragement, coaching, and celebration when people rise to the challenge,” Nelson said.
The leadership bench beyond Nelson reflects that same discipline. Brett Thornton serves as President, focused on operational execution as the company scales. Corey Cousins serves as VP of Sales and Training. Kara Stoughton leads Client Services, and Stephanie Green holds the title of Happiness Manager, a role that signals how deliberately the company treats internal morale as part of its product. Jacob Berger, Director of Business Development, connected that internal culture directly to the company’s giving initiative: “Growing up with limited means, I know what it feels like to watch other families make memories you can’t afford. The most exciting part of Destination Hope for me is knowing a foster kid will get to stand in that moment and think, ‘This time, the amazing trip is ours.'”
Destination Motivation partners with the Ticket to Dream Foundation, a nonprofit that has helped more than 5 million children in foster care, through an initiative called Destination Hope. Nelson explained the thinking behind it plainly: “We built Destination Motivation on the belief that the right experience can change the way people see what’s possible. Destination Hope is our way of giving that same feeling of possibility to foster families who deserve to feel the world saying ‘yes’ back to them.” Seth Washinowski, Enterprise Director of Training at Destination Motivation, connected the giving program back to the company’s core offer for homeowners: “We’ve seen what a great vacation can do for a homeowner’s peace of mind after a big purchase. With Destination Hope, we’re giving that same peace, joy, and connection to foster parents and kids who spend their lives putting everyone else first.”
That connection between commercial product and charitable mission is worth asking about directly, because it tends to reveal whether a company’s stated values match its actual operating priorities. A vendor that can describe a giving program in specific, funded detail is a different kind of vendor than one that mentions charity as a marketing line item.
Ask what the program actually costs relative to the size of a single average ticket. Ask whether the voucher is transferable if a homeowner cannot travel in a given year. Ask whether the 106-country coverage and no-blackout-date structure have any hidden exceptions. Ask how long a typical contract runs and whether the pricing model scales with a company’s own growth or locks a smaller contractor into enterprise-level terms it cannot use. None of these are hostile questions. They are the questions a serious buyer asks before writing a check, and a company confident in its offer will answer every one of them without deflecting to a testimonial instead.
It is also fair to ask what happens if a sales team does not adopt the program the way it is designed to be used. Sales incentive tools fail most often not because the offer is weak but because reps never learn to present it with confidence. Ask what training is included, who delivers it, and how ongoing coaching works after the initial rollout. A program with no answer to that question is a program that will underperform no matter how strong the underlying incentive is.
Contractors evaluating Sales Incentive Programs or Rehash Consulting and Activation typically start with a consultation to walk through current close rates, cancellation rates, and average ticket size before any program is customized. There is no reason to sign anything on that first call. The questions above, track record, guarantee structure, training support, contract flexibility, cultural fit, are the ones worth bringing into that room. A company with nearly two decades of operating history, more than 3,600 five-star reviews, a three-year Inc. 5000 run, and a national ranking from Power100 should be able to answer every one of them without flinching.
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Power100 is the nation's premier CEO ranking and media platform for the home improvement industry. Using a proprietary 5-layer evaluation system, Power100 identifies and celebrates the top CEOs, companies, and strategic partners driving innovation, customer satisfaction, and leadership excellence across the country.
