Casey Dillon w/ Atlas Excavating – DT 430

Summary

Dirt Talk by BuildWitt – Episode 430: Casey Dillon w/ Atlas Excavating Release Date: April 2, 2026

Episode Overview

In this episode, host Aaron Witt sits down with Casey Dillon, President and CEO of Atlas Excavating—an Indiana-based civil construction company renowned for tackling complex underground utility installations. The conversation traces Atlas’ humble beginnings, deep family roots, evolution through multiple generations, and how Casey and his brother bought the business from their parents. They also explore the challenges of family succession, industry shifts towards specialization, risk management, the adoption of new technology and A.I., and the central role people play in a successful construction business.

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Table of Contents

• Atlas Excavating: Family Origins and Evolution
• Strategic Focus: From Diversification to Specialization
• Project Challenges and Increasing Complexity
• Rising Costs and Managing Contractor Risk
• Casey’s Path: From Reluctant Heir to CEO
• Sales, Qualification-Based Bidding & Industry Change
• Transitioning Generations: Family, Succession, and Coaching
• Culture, People, and Company Values
• Transparent Financials & Decentralized Decision-Making
• Technology, Social Media, and the Future with AI
• Quotes & Memorable Moments
• Timestamps for Key Segments

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Atlas Excavating: Family Origins and Evolution

• Atlas Excavating began in 1981, started by Casey’s parents after his father suffered a career-ending back injury. With roots extending to his grandfather’s construction business, the story is a quintessential “from nothing” narrative.
• The Dillon family was “all in” from the start—personal guarantees, riding the financial razor-edge. “They take your car, they take your house. Yes. Not just the business stuff. Yeah, all in.” (Casey, 02:50).
• Casey grew up working alongside his parents—he recalls riding in the dump truck with his mom and witnessing the company’s early big break (the Lafayette railroad relocation project) (02:02–02:41).

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Strategic Focus: From Diversification to Specialization

• Atlas diversified into concrete, bridge crews, slit form paving, and more through acquisitions, but eventually returned to their core strength: being a pipe company.
• Why the shift? Concrete, especially flatwork, meant less control and thin margins; specialized, complex pipe work offered better profit and fit their expertise, despite there being fewer “star” jobs.
• “We just really settled into being a pipe company... What we try to do is 20-foot plus deep, wet rock, nasty stuff, live sewer tie-ins. Our guys are just amazing.” (Casey, 04:28–04:38)

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Project Challenges and Increasing Complexity

• The site work environment is getting nastier as "easy" development opportunities disappear—leading to more expensive, deeper, and more complex projects (06:27–07:33).
• Rising material costs and inflation are relentless. Rock escalated from $12 to $39 per ton in recent years, and contractors have little recourse besides accepting rising input costs and managing their risk carefully (07:59–09:34).

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Rising Costs and Managing Contractor Risk

• Discussion on how risk is increasingly pushed down to subcontractors and suppliers, making proper compensation for risk vital.
• “We’re not opposed to risk... I’m just not going to take risks for free” (Casey, 10:01).
• Casey describes learning to push back—refusing to be the “bank” for jobs where payment is 90 days behind, and focusing on value for risk taken (10:09–10:30).

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Casey’s Path: From Reluctant Heir to CEO

• Casey’s journey was not linear: He considered an engineering career elsewhere, initially preferring mechanical engineering (ships and engines) (11:25–12:58).
• Ultimately, “My mom came in and like, nope, you’re not going to California… You’re going to come work here” (11:25).
• Gained experience at every level—laborer to project manager to CEO. “I’ve done everything from labor, run a skid steer loader, dozer, off road truck...” (10:30).

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Sales, Qualification-Based Bidding & Industry Change

• Atlas historically relied on public bid model (“lowest price wins”), but COVID-19 shifted 85% of their work to private, negotiated jobs. This required a shift to proactive sales and marketing, and even hiring their first ever salesperson (19:13–20:36).
• Qualification-based bidding is growing in place of hard bids, with municipalities seeking risk-sharing and collaborative scoping over adversarial change order battles (31:26–32:16).
• “If everybody’s arguing change orders all the time … it’s just a disaster. And that’s how the industry’s been for 15 years. A lot of places are going now to like a qualification-based bid…” (31:26–32:16).

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Transitioning Generations: Family, Succession, and Coaching

• Succession Challenges: The buyout from Casey’s parents was a difficult, even family-fracturing process. Coaching (sourced through YPO) helped Casey and his brother build healthy communication and prepare the next generation.
• “It fractured our family to the point, like, I don’t know [if] we talked to my mom and dad for a year or so. …Life’s too short to hold a grudge… I love you.” (51:09–52:09)
• Next-gen planning is underway, involving external advisors, clear rules (“four rooms” model—family/owner/leader/employee), and transparency to their children (58:32–59:54).

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Culture, People, and Company Values

• Atlas is notable for its collaborative and supportive approach to competitors—helping peers, loaning equipment, and prioritizing industry improvement over zero-sum competition.
• “We only compete on bid day. Because after the bids open and you’re low and I’m not, I want your people to be safe. I want you to do the job well. I want you to make money…” (37:54)
• Core value: “We’ve got to provide generational success for everybody, not just Nick and I.” (47:41)

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Transparent Financials & Decentralized Decision-Making

• Atlas shares full financials—income statements and performance targets—with the whole workforce each quarter.
• “We share on the screen and we PDF it to them, our income statement. And we say, this is where we’re at. Here’s our goals. ... That’s the scorecard.” (112:58)
• Foremen have P&L visibility and authority to make operational changes. Team learning is prioritized; mistakes are shared to improve processes, not for blame (67:47–68:58).

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Technology, Social Media, and the Future with AI

• Social Media: A major driver for talent recruitment and business credibility, especially as Indiana moves towards qualification-based bid evaluations (98:32–101:02).
  • “If you’re not selling yourself, nobody else is. …But we feel like the state of Indiana is probably going to go to 50% qualification-based bidding.” (100:01)
• AI: Atlas is investing serious effort into integrating AI for knowledge capture, decision support, and forecasting, piloting AI “bot” assistants to preserve senior manager expertise and make younger managers more effective (106:33–108:09).
  • Witt reveals BuildWitt is also launching an AI tool—“Frank”—to serve this purpose.
• Training: Atlas leverages BuildWitt training platform for onboarding and skills building. “If anybody’s listening... and their company doesn’t have the training, ask, figure out why.” (75:37)

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Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Risk: “We’re not opposed to risk. I’m just not going to take risks for free.” (10:01–10:03, Casey)
• On Family Pain: “It fractured our family … but I can decide to be intentional. For me, like, this is how I’m going to do this. And they can either do it or not, but I’m going to be happy with my choices.” (52:09)
• On People Development: “The more we can take care of our people, the more we can do it the right way, safe… we gotta provide generational success for everybody, not just Nick and I.” (47:41)
• On Industry Collaboration: “We only compete on bid day … I want you people to be safe. …You know, do we share trade secrets? No, but … we can communicate and make sure the industry’s in a good place.” (37:54, Casey)
• On AI’s Potential: “Mine all the knowledge out of the 50 to 60 year olds, build this into an AI prompt system… So then 25-year-olds can solve 80% of the problems.” (106:33)
• On Transparency: “Huge leap of faith. But we share … our income statement. And we say, this is where we’re at. ... That’s the scorecard, right?” (112:58)
• On Leadership Growth: “Learning how to pitch that sometimes is better. ...Your job as estimator is to protect us from ourselves.” (65:31–65:43)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:18] – [03:41]: Family business origins; growing up in construction
• [04:28] – [06:15]: Shift from diversification to specializing in deep pipe work
• [06:27] – [09:34]: Development challenges, rising project complexity and materials costs
• [10:01] – [10:30]: Risk management in contracting
• [11:08] – [14:36]: Casey’s decision process to enter the family business and become CEO
• [16:26] – [20:16]: Qualification-based bidding, shifting business models during COVID
• [23:52] – [26:09]: Sales philosophy, "pain funnel," and efficient no’s
• [27:56] – [32:16]: Change order dynamics and qualification-based bid models
• [33:13] – [34:54]: Succession, EOS implementation, long-term vision
• [44:00] – [47:41]: Making the industry (and community) better, workforce development
• [51:09] – [54:46]: Family buyout pain, sibling collaboration, using coaching as a tool
• [67:47] – [68:58]: Sharing mistakes as learning opportunities
• [70:07] – [73:46]: Proving labor is the highest job cost, onboarding, BuildWitt training
• [98:32] – [102:59]: Social media strategy, qualification-based marketing
• [106:33] – [108:09]: A.I. for bridging the experience gap, “Frank” and BuildWitt’s AI platform
• [112:58] – [114:29]: Open-book management, financial transparency with staff

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Final Takeaways

• People & Culture First: Despite all the tech and heavy iron, the episode’s recurring theme is people—hiring, training, empowering, and succession. “People are our biggest asset” is actionable, not just a saying, at Atlas.
• Continuous Adaptation: The need to shift focus (from diversification, to specialization, to technology, to new sales models) shows how dynamic and resilient the most successful contractors must be.
• Transparency & Trust: Sharing goals, financials, and hard-earned lessons builds trust up and down the organization.
• Looking Ahead: Atlas and companies like it are preparing for the AI age and the transition to the next generation, building not just their own business, but strengthening the entire construction industry community.

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For listeners—from green apprentices to company leaders—this episode offers a powerful, practical look at building, adapting, and sustaining a multigenerational construction business, with actionable wisdom for all.

Transcript

[A]

This episode of the Dirt Talk podcast is with Casey Dillon of Atlas Excavating. He is the president and CEO of Atlas, an Indiana based civil construction company specializing in tough projects, especially complex underground utility installation. Casey started at the company decades ago alongside his parents, and now leads the business with his brother as the second generation. With planning now focused on what the third generation will look like, Casey has been a longtime listener of the Dirt Talk podcast. We've gone back and forth on email, phone call, text message. Tried to get him on here for maybe a year or two. It's like he has a business to run or something. But we finally got him down here to talk about his upbringing, the future of the company, how he bought the company from his parents, the trials, the tribulations, all, all the good stuff that's usually within these episodes. I had a blast and I hope you enjoy this episode with Casey Dillon of Atlas Excavating. When did you get started in business officially?

[B]

Oh, well, let's talk how we got here. My mom and dad started the business in 1981.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So my grandpa owned a business and put in like footers and foundations and laterals to houses. My dad started laying block, the block for the foundation. They got in a head on collision and my dad broke his back. I must have been four years old at that point. So he could no longer lay block. So he's like, well, sell all that stuff. Bought a backhoe and started putting lateral, you know, water, water lines and sewer lines in and, you know, and no different than the we all, the way we all talk about today. He'd drive by and see somebody go, man, that excavator is pretty cool. We need one of those. I need to go find a job to need one of those.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And it just started from literally nothing and went from the guy running the hoe to putting the pipe in to, you know, grow, grow, grow. You know, I remember when I was probably four or five years old, my mom drove the dump truck and I would ride around with her in the dump truck and, you know, she would haul sand and stone to jobs. And then one day we got a, we got a big job in Lafayette, the railroad relocation project. And then, you know, you're kind of on the map. And then, then it's just a constant state of growth, you know, no different than any other small business. It's, you know, personal guarantee, all in all the time, you know, putting all the chips on the table and just this huge gamble. And that's just the life I grew up in.

[A]

Yeah. And Personal guarantee for people that don't know is like you, you get money loaned to you and if you don't pay it back, they take everything from you.

[B]

They take your car, they take your house. Yes. Not just the business stuff. Yeah, all in.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And those are scary times for sure. You know, they, they, they built a business up. You know, the models of how to do things back then were different. Like we, we eventually, we've always been a pipe company, but at some point we, we acquired some guys that were going out of business and so we had a north division. So we picked up six crews in the northern Indiana. Then someday something happened similar to a bridge cut, so we got bridge crews. Well, then we picked up slit form paving and concrete. And so we started doing all these tangential businesses which take capital, which take bonding capacity and you know, at some point we can make more money. If you have a limited amount of resources, you can make more money doing pipe than we could doing concrete.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And so we kind of divested from all that stuff and it was a painful process. But then we just really settled into being a pipe company.

[A]

Well, and pipes, not easy, obviously, but concrete's flat work especially is really tough. I mean it's, the margins are not all that.

[B]

Well, that and I mean from our standpoint, you're not in control of the biggest issue, which is the concrete. So you know, we'd say, hey, we need to pour a thousand yards. They'd like, well, we can give you 700. Oh great. We're just going to lose money. Like you just can't because it still takes the same amount of people to pour it. You just don't get as much done and it just costs more. And then, you know, you have cracks, you have repairs. The cost of fixing stuff is ridiculous. Yeah. And yeah, the margins are just lower. You know, huge companies that do a lot of that stuff, I'm guessing they make their, their small percentage over a huge number. And that's their business model. That's fine. But for us to have, you know, smaller company that has limited resources, we got to put our eggs where we can make the most. You know, we got.

[A]

Yeah, be specific. And like a lot of civil contractors I know that do it, they do it really just to control the schedule. Like if they do everything, that's most of the time when I've seen it,

[B]

or they're huge and generally they're not very good at it. But you know, let's say you're doing a road job and it's three to five Foot deep, you know, concrete, rcp, storm sewer. You know, anybody can kind of do that stuff. What we try to do is 20 foot plus deep wet rock, nasty stuff, live sewer by, you know, live sewer, tie ins. Our guys are just amazing at doing some of that stuff. So when those jobs come out, I mean we just put a star on the bid board. Like that's our job. We got to go get that one. And you know the problem is even for the whole state of Indiana there's just not that many jobs out there. So you get 2, 3, 4, 5 of those jobs. Well then you gotta have 15 other jobs are just kind of regular jobs just to kind of keep everything rolling.

[A]

Going back to what you said about your dad wanting an excavator. I think a lot of people overcomplicate some of this stuff because that's, that's what got me into this world. I saw in my neighborhood it was, I've told the story a million times, but it was a 385 excavator. It was the first time I'd ever seen a 385.

[B]

That's a big one.

[A]

It's a giant machine sitting in a neighborhood on a two lane road. It's unbelievable. And. And to 17 year old Aaron it was even more unbelievable. I'd never seen anything like it. And I, I wanted to be a contractor because I wanted my name on a 385excavator. That was it. Like that, that was the thought process that, that's like, like as a, especially as a male, like sometimes it's that simple. Whereas like I think a lot of people when it comes to attracting next generation, this and that, they start to do all these mental gymnastics. It's like no, just show them a machine.

[B]

I just want to have cool shit. Like I just. It's just big boys of big toys.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Now ideally you can figure out the business model to afford it. And it's not just for vanity's sake of you're buying a 385 excavator. Yeah, but yeah, that's that, that's kind of how it goes.

[A]

The nasty stuff. I actually funny enough I had a conversation this morning though with another guy up in Indiana I think it was. And the interesting thing is a lot of stuff back in the day you could just blow and go because there wasn't as much in the way, it wasn't as complex, so on and so forth. But now projects are starting in some ways getting to be nastier. Nastier because there's so much more built up. There's so much more that needs to be replaced. Is that what you guys see in your neck of the woods?

[B]

For sure. You know, I would say, like the easy develop developments are done. So now if you want to put a new factory in or a new subdivision, you've got to go farther away, which means a deeper pipe, which is, you know, longer, deep. Hey, good for us. It just makes everything cost more. And we're kind of at the point. It's really hard to build affordable houses when everything costs so much. What, through regulation, through just distance, through time, materials, everything just goes up and it's, it's. I mean, we feel for it. Like, we want to build houses that people can be proud to live and have a beautiful subdivision, but it's like you got to survive to build it, so you can't do it for free. Yeah, but it's a challenge for sure.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's really interesting, especially even the past six years or so, just the cost on even really basic stuff like rock pipe, manholes, whatever. I mean, you've seen it more than I have, but it's, it's, it's almost equipment. Like, go buy a 385 right now. Or now 395, but that versus just five, six years ago. Yeah, like what, Put another half million dollars on it?

[B]

Yeah, probably. I mean, it's, it's crazy. And it's, you know, so what, you know, as we're reviewing bids, you have in your mind what something should cost. You're like, oh, that's really high. And you dig into it like, oh, wow, rock. Rock cost twice as much as it did, what I remember. And it's like every time I turn around, like, man, that's. I can't believe it's. You know, it used to be $12 a ton, then it was $20 a ton. Now it's $35 a ton. You look at like, oh, it's $39 a ton this week.

[A]

Like, well, and true. As a contractor, I don't think people really understand this. Like, you just get an email or like a letter in the mail, so to speak, saying, yeah, it's now $39 a ton. And you can't be like, well, wait, no, you just said it was 35. Like, it doesn't work that way.

[B]

We have. Our industry's pretty decent where we're at, where we'll get quotes before the bid, and then we'll decide who it is and we'll write a purchase Order. So if we kind of say, hey, I want to buy 20,000 tons at 33 bucks, they'll honor that till the job's over. Now, they may have a stipulation like, hey, we think this job is going to be done at the end of the year. That's a good for 20, 26 number. But 20, 27, it's going to go up, you know, a dollar a ton or something. So at least you can kind of forecast and see. But I mean, the last time we had fuel go crazy and, you know, all the inflation, everything went up. You know, everybody kind of learned, you know, what. What's my risk? What's the owner's risk? What's the industry risk? You know, force majeure. We all can speak that much better than we used to be able to. You know, I'd never heard that term in business for 30 years, and all of a sudden now it's like, you can quote it. Oh, and most all of our PMs can quote it. I mean, it's like, nope, this, this was the deal. We got a quote, we got a bid. Act of God, act of war. Here's the deal, here's the new prices. And, you know, go get three prices to check it. And.

[A]

But that's the tough thing with contractors like you guys is everybody's trying to push the risk down.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And so the general contractor pushes the risk down, the owner pushes the risk down. Equipment manufacturers risk, material suppliers risk. Like, yeah. And it, in a lot of ways, it starts and stops with you, which is just the world of construction. But.

[B]

But we're not opposed to risk.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

I'm just not going to take risks for free.

[A]

Well, and that's my point is like, I don't think anybody in this world's opposed to risk. But it's like, you should paid for it.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

Like, why, why are you. And why are you playing banker on projects even? Why are you not getting paid for 90 days to finance a project when you're also the one taking all the risk on it? It's like, how does this make. And then now we're wondering like, man, how can't we pay our people and attract the right people? It's like, well, there's not enough money to oftentimes develop people in the right way.

[B]

So, you know, mom and dad started the business, and I've. I've started when I was, say, 13. And so I've been in this business 37 years, you know, 38 years now, probably. So I've Done everything from labor, run a skid, steer loader, dozer, you know, off road truck, like just build up through the field, get a degree in engineering, come work in the office, manage the shop, project manager, take over estimating now CEO, I mean, so I've got the basis of all the little pieces to figure stuff out. And it's a complex process.

[A]

Was getting involved in the company always the plan for you, Was there like ever any other consideration?

[B]

You know, my dad wasn't the easiest person to work for. I've never heard that one. Yeah, so coming out of college? No, I was going someplace else and matter of fact I went, I went to school to study engineering. Obviously it would be civil engineering, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, I went the school I chose, I went to Valparaiso because I wanted to play football.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

You know, I wasn't smart enough to get in Purdue's engineering school. I wasn't big enough to play football, Purdue. So I went to Valparaiso, small Christian school. And they didn't let you pick which discipline of engineering the first year. So that first semester you got a sample of all of them. Well, they did like two weeks of mechanical engineering. Like they got robots and lasers. I'm doing that. That's cool shit. And so I studied mechanical engineering, having an intention to go into engine design. I wanted to design boats. Like I wanted to do something completely different. You know, back in the day we didn't have the Internet then. So you know, I sent out I think 100 resumes to every boat manufacturer in the United States. I got one call back, wow, is in California. So I'm like setting up the interview and my mom came in and like, nope, you're not going to California. We're going to make him an offer, more than he can get anywhere else. And you're going to come work here, you know. So I get a degree in mechanical engineering. My grandpa, you know, blue collar, hard working guy and he comes and shakes my hand like, well, congratulations, I guess you can work on my truck now. I'm like, oh no, I can't actually do anything. Sure, I can read the manual, but yeah, I got to fix anything. So, you know, my wife and I, first people to go to college in our family. So there wasn't really an expectation, you know, to a certain extent. I think for a long time my dad had this, hey, we're just paying a bunch of money for you to go play football. Which, you know, hey, he loves football. I love football, you know, to a certain extent because I was playing football Kept me in school. That made me get good grades. That got me a degree in, you know, engineering. And then at some point when I started to work, I go to work for my dad. He puts me in charge of the shop. You know, I'm over at mechanical stuff. I'm like, hey, this is great.

[A]

Love.

[B]

I love how all this stuff works.

[A]

Are you a mechanical mind or not really? Yeah. Okay. You are.

[B]

Yeah, I'm definitely a 3.3D spatial. Like, my opinion is, like, if you can't draw it, you can't build it.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So we have a lot of whiteboards like you guys do here. You're drawing pictures on the wall. Hey, do that this way. You know, whether it's trench boxes, you know how to assemble stuff. But yeah, that whole mechanical nature is, you know, pretty natural for me at least.

[A]

You either have it or you don't. Like, I don't at all have it, but in. But that. And that. That's my fascination with people that do have it. It's. It's incredible. Like, mechanical.

[B]

Well, guess what? I'm not good at creative things. Spelling, you know, spreadsheet. I'll go to. I'll go to task with anybody on spreadsheets. Writing a letter. Like, it's a good thing. We have autocorrect and all these. I mean, sometimes I type a letter a word so bad, even autocorrect, you tell what it is. Like, that's. That's pretty bad.

[A]

So that's. Well, you've. You've done all right with. With the ability to spell.

[B]

I guess I'm getting better.

[A]

So, um. Yeah, mechanical. It. It's. It's. I mean, it's still like engineering school for me. It taught me the. It taught me problem solving. I think if anything else, like, honestly, it's made. It hasn't made business easy, but it's. I feel like it's made it easier than if I got a business degree, because at least for me, like, I just. You just get these problems that are so hard to solve. Like, the test will be a problem, and it's very simple. It's like two sentences. Here's what you need to do. But then you end up with seven pages of math to prove an hour later. And then every kid in the class can have a different answer and all of them can be right. Like, that's just a different game you're playing.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And the problems are so hard.

[B]

And I think engineering teaches you how to think.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, it's not. It's not A solution. Right. It's not a, hey, here, do this spreadsheet. Here's a forecast when you can't memorize

[A]

your way through it.

[B]

Yeah. And it's, take a super complicated process like an airplane, break it down into all the individual components. Like, okay, if I understand hydraulics work, I understand how the engine works, understand how the flaps work and then you can kind of reassemble it all together. Well then you can understand the complexities of how everything in the system works.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And then, you know, and ideally if you have an emergency, you can figure out how to troubleshoot and you know, get, get stuff fixed.

[A]

But that's the difference between mechanical and civil is mechanical stuff moves. Civil you, you don't want anything to move.

[B]

Funny story. So remember when the, that, that the boat hit the bridge and fell down?

[A]

Oh boy.

[B]

Do it right. So my son's a civil engineer, he went to Kentucky. So I'm like, you know, a lot of people are complaining about, you can't believe that the bridge wasn't strong enough to fall down. And my son's like, well, anybody can design a bridge that won't fall down. It takes a civil engineer to design a bridge that'll barely stand up.

[A]

Yes, yes. Well, and, and then now the bridge that'll get built there is going to be so over engineered.

[B]

Oh for sure.

[A]

Like, and it now the costs are already projected to be like completely through the roof. $5 billion I think it is now.

[B]

Goodness.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. It was like the estimate I think originally was like 1 or 2 billion and now they haven't even got to construction yet. They're like, we think it's actually going to be five. And if they're saying it's going to

[B]

be five, oh, it'll be more.

[A]

It's probably going to be 10 for two lanes either direction for the exact same thing. But that's what, that's what, that's what you're taught in civil though is like again, de risk. You don't want the risk on you, so find the right answer, prove it's the right answer, then multiply it by three and we're going to make a fancy term for it called the factor of safety factor. Because safety is everything.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

But it's really just me covering my ass, making sure for sure that I'm not wrong.

[B]

Yes, but now you talk about risk. You know, we, we're in the risk business, right. And let's say we give a proposal to somebody and they'll say, hey, your price is too High. Hey, great. This is a great opportunity for us to figure this out. Let's negotiate how we can take the risk out of us and give you a better price. And then, you know, and we'll risk share. We can say, hey, you know, these things we'll take, those things are yours. These things in the middle, we got to just kind of agree. We're going to see what happens here.

[A]

What's like, what's an example of that?

[B]

Like ground. Ground dewatering, you know, so let's. Let's say there's a geotech report and it's not 100% wet, like it doesn't look good, but it doesn't really. You're not really sure. So you might add a million dollars to your bid. If they say, I need a lump sum, all in number. Okay, well, we add a million dollars to dewatering. Oh, your price is too high. Well, you want to share some risk on this dewatering. And, you know, so I see. And so I don't know if you've heard this concept of don't spoil your candy. We as engineers or we as contractors, and we get a set of plans or a job or a problem, we'd love to solve the problem. And we're like, hey, what you need to do is we give the solutions to the owner and then they take our good ideas and they go get the cheaper guy to do our idea, and then we don't get the job. So it took us a long time to figure out, like, I've got an idea how to save you money, and I can get to that number. And they say, well, how. Can't tell you.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So then we kind of do this. Sign a letter of intent, get us on the team, and we'll get the number to where you want it to be, and we'll work through the plan redesign, working with the officials, and we'll get this thing where you want it to be. But experience has shown us if we tell you we probably don't get this job. So that's been a real game changer. And it's also part of partnering. How do we work together? The people we've been successful at doing that with just love working with us when they come in, like, okay, well, how can we get this job to this price? Well, here's how. Well, some of those things you can do, some of them you can't do. But it's the concept of, well, here's a set of plans. Well, without any knowledge. So let's say that dewatering example, they would say, well, how would you do that? Like, well, we can go dig test holes, we can drop an excavator off and we can dig some holes around. And we can probably get a better idea than just the geotech. Now the other contractors can drive by where we're digging holes and you play that whole game. But there's ways to figure it out and share risk. For instance, maybe the margin on the subs, well, maybe we can manage everybody, but maybe the owner needs to pay the subs directly. So there's different ways to kind of shift some of that. And you know, and it matters. Some, some. Some of our GCs and subdivision guys, they don't want anything to do with it. Like, no, I want you to do all of it. I'll write the checks. Just tell us when you're done. And some guys want to kind of micromanage. You know, the undergrain guy and the concrete guy and the asphalt guy. You know, those big national builders, they have a system for doing that. You know, they've got PMs and, and people that do that. The small guys, they just want us to do it.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Just do it, do it right. They know we'll take care of it. They know we'll make it right.

[A]

And there's pros and cons to both approaches. Yeah.

[B]

And I mean. And you know, let's say we were to decide our business model is only one or the other. Well, then you would lose the other half. So it's like you kind of gotta be a little bit.

[A]

Which is then riskier.

[B]

Yeah. So you gotta kind of. You gotta kind of. At least the way we look at it, we gotta be versatile. You know, the customer's right, the customer gets what they want. And then we just gotta figure out, do we want to work for them? You know, do we like the risk profile that they want? Can we get the price they want? You know, back in the day, my dad was hard bid, public bid. You know, he didn't want the credit risk. You know, he'd had. He'd been burned on all those site jobs, negotiated jobs. And, you know, we built some of them through the years and we got, we got our dick slapped. I mean, it was. They were not fun to build. And then, you know, Covid hits. And there is no public money. Absolutely no public money. So we went from 85% public work, 15% private, to the next year, 85% private work, 15% public.

[A]

Really, with 2020, it was brutal. Really.

[B]

So that, you know, 2020 there was still some public money and we got a lot of work done. Well, then there was nobody working. There's no tax income. There was no public funds. Now warehouses, box buildings, you know, house. Like everything else, it kind of inverted. And so we had to. We first time in the history of the company hired a salesman.

[A]

You're in Indiana, right?

[B]

Indiana. Okay.

[A]

But Indiana was ultimately much better off than Illinois.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Over the past five, six years.

[B]

The guy you had here the other day was New Jersey. No, Pennsylvania. You said that was like one of three states that shut down completely.

[A]

Completely. Oh, yeah.

[B]

You know, we were essential. We worked every day.

[A]

Well, and that was, it was really interesting, like with the migration patterns over the United States and how much it's changed. And it's like a lot of people have float into Florida, Texas, Arizona, Carolina. It's like, yeah, I can explain all those. But then Indiana has been one of the biggest winners. And it's like, what's going on with Indiana? It's Illinois. Illinois has made some horrible decisions and driven so many people and businesses out of the state. And a lot of them have just gone right across the state line. And Indiana's been like, come on down, let's go.

[B]

We've had a good string of some good mayors or governors that have just been pro business for probably 15, 20 years now.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But I mean, currently, right now, if somebody's going to put a data center in a factory, a chips plant, an automotive thing, it's not Michigan, it's not Illinois, it's not Wisconsin, it's not Ohio, it's not Kentucky. Most of them are coming to Indiana.

[A]

You've got, you got them all there.

[B]

Which, which is, you know, so I mean, I talked to my other peer group friends in other states and they're, you know, cutting back and things are like, there's, there's so much work right now that we can be a little bit selective. But, you know, you got big projects, national builders, you know, people from South Korea. It's, it's. It's a different game for sure. But we tried it. We're trying to do, you know, more like a 70, 30 split public, private at this point. But we always got to be. We always got to be nimble enough to be doing the private stuff because you never know when the market's going to change. But we pick up salesmen, you know, after Covid, and we start the process. We've never done sales. We're a public, big company. And. And so we're like, hey, how do we. How do we get better at this? And the sales guys, works for a couple months. He's like, I got a crazy idea. I don't know if you've ever thought of this, but maybe we should put our name on our equipment.

[A]

That's a good. Oh, yeah, that's low hanging.

[B]

And then, like. Then, like the next week, he's like, hey, you know what else we could do? We could. We could probably put some signs with their name on jobs. Oh, yeah, really? Because we'd never done sales. We'd always been public work. You got a bond, you turn a bid in, you get the job.

[A]

You just. You just didn't care to put your name on stuff because you didn't have to. Didn't.

[B]

Yeah. You know, because usually if something happens and they know who to call and yell at and like, hey, if you stop putting your phone number on the doors of trucks, people stop calling. And then you're like, well, stop putting your names on stuff. People don't call and complain as much. So, hey, life's good. But then you start going to sales. Oh, oh, this is important. So, like, I don't know, over two months, we started putting, you know, big decals on equipment and putting signs on jobs. And then family and friends and people in the area like, man, you guys are really growing. Like, no, it's same company. We just didn't put signs up before. So, you know, so then that thought process goes down. Okay, well, let's. Let's go towards private work. Let's go sale. Let's. You know, so we got to. We made some mistakes. We stubbed our toe several times. We picked some bad owners to work for. We end up doing some training called Sandler training, if you've ever heard of that.

[A]

I have not.

[B]

It's like a sales process. That's where that spill the candy story comes from. But there's a whole lot of. Whole lot of terms and stories that we can teach our estimating team and our sales team and specifically my brother and I, to. To not do some of these things that are not good sound sales philosophies.

[A]

Like. Like what?

[B]

Don't give away the answer. You know, don't. Don't ask. Don't answer the unasked question. You know, sometimes that uncomfortable silence, you just spit stuff out. That doesn't usually help.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

If they ask a question, answer it directly. You know, be as honest as you can. But sometimes you just. You just diarrhea the mouth. You just talk too much.

[A]

Well, and people. People just love to fill voids it makes people really uncomfortable if there is a silence. But I think that's one of the big things I've learned in leadership is you sometimes have to ask a question and then just back off and let it be awkward even for a little bit. But oftentimes you'll get what you need if you don't just jump in right away.

[B]

Yeah, well. And so have you heard of the pain funnel concept? No. So let's say you're a developer and I'm a contractor and I walk in and say, hey, we lay pipe and we moved her. Like great, I need a road. I guess we're out, right? From our marketing, from our website. If we sell features and benefits and you don't align, we're out. So the sales philosophy is more like, hey, I see you got a project coming out. What's it about? What's most important to you? Oh, schedule's most important, Cost is most important. You know, and to just keep asking questions that they tell us all the solutions and then you get through a 30 minute conversation, you're like, hey, you know, we're actually, we actually align pretty well on a bunch of these points. We should probably work together. And then, you know, the other secret is if you've heard this, like, hey, you turn a bid in and you're too high so you want to renegotiate. Hey, you get a new number. What you really want to do is get to know as quick as possible, like this job's not going to happen. Move on, like stop chasing things that are dead end because people don't want to tell you bad news. They're already working with somebody else. But they like, well, you know, if you try again, maybe we'll talk. Oh, it's, you're dead. Just, just move on in.

[A]

In business that is so rampant, like people, I respect people that tell you no because so few people will actually tell you no. It drives me nuts. And, and it's been a great like even in selling dirt world this year. I'm a terrible salesperson. I, I sales it, it kills me from the inside out. It's just like I'm dying on a vine. But I focused on only people that have attended the this year. Everybody that's told me no for three years didn't even call them.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I don't care if, if you come or not. I would love you to come, but I've tried to convince you for three years now. Not happening.

[B]

Probably not coming.

[A]

Yeah, they're not coming. Yeah, well, most of them. I haven't signed up for this year, but we're almost completely sold out.

[B]

Yeah. My friend Jim Wilcox from Sandler Sales in northern Indiana is an amazing guy. If you want to get on the phone, I'll share contact with you. Get on the phone with him for half hour and figure out, like, if you have that pit in your stomach when it comes to sales, he's. He's a genius of solving some of those problems. It's a skill, right? I mean, you're an engineer. You're obviously smart. You can do things, right? I mean, you got through one way or another. Yeah, but I'm telling you, like, sales is a skill. I don't want to do sales, but evidently I'm pretty good at it, at learning the process and the tricks and, you know, goofing it up a whole bunch of times. But. But there's. It's a skill to be learned.

[A]

And this whole conversation about sales is, again, for people not tracking here. If you're public work, if the city of whatever Lafayette or choose your city, says, we need a pipeline, you turn in. A lot of people don't even know how this works. You. I mean, people listening to this, but when we bring in people from the outside, they're like, wait a minute. It's just the lowest number. It's like, yep. You get a. We need this pipeline. Build it to this specifications. How much can you build it for? And you turn in one number, and they read the numbers.

[B]

Open at a public meeting.

[A]

Open it at a public meeting. And, you know, on Friday afternoon or whenever it is, who was first and then who. The second, you know, first loser is. Second loser is. Third loser is.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And whoever has the lowest number gets the price. So it doesn't matter who you really are. I mean, there are some parameters, but,

[B]

I mean, if you have a horrible. They can kick you out.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

But, I mean, it's got to be egregious.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

But, yeah, that's the world we lived in. I mean, for 30 years. That's just. That's just how you did it.

[A]

But now with these private projects, if I'm say, car manufacturer, xyz, and I want to build a factory and I need all these, you know, this new water and whatever it is for my new factory. I can. I can pay whoever I want. It's a service like. Like my house. I can hire whatever plumber I want. More, less, someone in the middle. It's to my discretion, so.

[B]

Exactly. Right. So that's the traditional world, right? Private public work where the Industry is going. Now think about. You always have to pick the cheapest guy. Well, then guess what? You'd like to think that everybody's honest and bids what the work takes. And then you go, well, they've got to know they've got a thing that they omitted over here and that's gonna be a change order. So we're bank on getting a million dollars a change order this job. And so constantly there's an argument of, is it in the specs, is it in the scope? Should you have known about it? What's a type 1 change of condition? What's a type 2 change of condition?

[A]

Give an example of a change order. Again, I'm just trying to. Not for this conversation, but for somebody not familiar with how the change order game works.

[B]

Yeah. So let's say that you got a set of plans and there's a road and we're going to put a water line down the right side of the road, right? There's no utility shown. It's a big grass field, it's 20 foot wide. There's nothing. The way life's easy. We bid, we bid 700 foot a day to put this water main in. Well, you get out there and there's three fiber optics lines, a gas line, something else in the way cross it. Like, oh, that wasn't shown. Now we're getting 200 foot a day. Well, that difference between 700 and 200, that's not really our risk. Like, you knew this stuff was there and you didn't tell us. And then they would argue, well, you should have known. So you've got to got to say, oh, well, there's a house there and there's a gas meter on the side. You got to kind of assume a gas line runs there. So you can't get a change for that. But if there was something that's completely misrepresented and maybe they didn't know, maybe the town had old records and they weren't aware of it. So, I mean, a lot of times it's not the engineer's fault, it's not the town's fault, it's not our fault. But you have this big delta. And the way we used to do it is we would go do the work and we would lose money and then we would sue them or file a claim at the end. And guess what? That makes everybody mad. Everybody hates that process. Well, now we're stuck out. Not just the retainage, also the other extra million dollars we spent and now we're paying attorney fees to go Argue with them. And so at some point we finally decided, like, stop doing the change order first. Just stop work, pick your toys up and leave and say, look, we can't make money at this. We got to renegotiate this. And they're like, oh, no, you got to keep going. No, we're leaving. You pull off a couple jobs, oh, now you have some leverage. But at least we didn't spend the million dollars and lose it to go argue about it later. So think about across the industry. If everybody's arguing change orders all the time, they miss. Municipalities hate it. The town boards hate it. Lawyers, the financers. Exactly. The financing people hate it. Like, it's just a disaster. And that's how the industry's been for the last 15 years. A lot of places are going now to like a qualification based bid, get the contractor involved when 30% of the plans are done. And then let us say, hey, we shouldn't put the pipe on the right side of the road. We should put it on the left side of the road. And they're like, well, why? Well, it's a million dollars cheaper. Oh, okay, we should probably move on left side of the road. But then you kind of go through this scoping process of sharing risk. What's in, what's out. You kind of agree on a maximum price and you know, this is our risk. This is your risk. You'll build the job. No change orders. You know, everybody's on the same team building the job versus this adversarial us versus them mentality.

[A]

Yeah, but the qualifications type model, it sounds really good. And oftentimes it is. But I'm also my fear of it is that it, it's good for you guys that have been around for 35 years, but then now we're kind of gatekeeping a little bit like, it doesn't necessarily. I don't think it drives as much competition because if I have the bigger resume.

[B]

Well, again, what's most important? Is it the cheapest well, or is it getting the sewer and water to this factory so they can open this, they can put people employed.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You know, so it's like, and I think every situation is different sometimes. And not even municipalities who do this say, no, this job needs to be open bid. This one needs to be like, speed is an issue. Okay, now we have to change delivery method. But I think it's just another, it's just another method, another lever to pull if you're a city to say, this is how I want to deliver this solution.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you Got to be able play in both worlds, right?

[A]

Yeah. No, especially nowadays.

[B]

I mean think about, so think about all this inflation. We're talking about how much more jobs cost. Well, public works got to be bonded. If you're a small guy trying to get in the industry and now jobs cost twice as much. You got to have twice the capital, you have to have twice the bonding. And it, you know, so it's. The barrier of entry has definitely gotten up. Everything costs more to get in. And bonding is not as easy to get. I mean it's just, it's just a, it's just a hard business to get into.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Which there's again, there's, there's pros and cons. I think like the non stop competition within this world has eroded. A lot of good things like it's. Contractors have just been in this non stop survival state. And when you're in survival state, I've been there in business for years, you can't think about the future.

[B]

It's hard.

[A]

And when you don't think about the

[B]

future, you have problems and you make really bad decisions.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So. So mom and dad retire about six years ago now my brother and I buy them out.

[A]

So that recently.

[B]

Yeah. So as they're, you know, that was a whole painful process. Ptsd, we probably don't need to dig into that. But second generation kids buying from parents, that was tough. But, but that part happened right. About COVID and, and it just so happened. So now I'm taking over. I'm president. I joined an organization called YPO. It's young president's organization. You got to be under 45 years old. You have to have so many employees, so much revenue. And I just get to hang out with these amazing leaders. And I go to this first meeting and they're sitting in a conference room and there's this. They're giving this presentation on this business operating system. And I'm like, this is like a cult. Like these work. Like what are they talking about? I'm just kind of looking around like, I'm like, does anybody else think this is weird? I mean, it was an EOS presentation.

[A]

I was going to say it was an eos.

[B]

And so like they get done with the presentation and they have any questions, 80% of the people in the room raised their hand like, holy shit. And they're like, hey, we've been doing this for three years. What about this problem? And I'm like, oh, everybody in the room is already us. What is this thing? So then I'm like, oh, we got to do that. So we start reading the books and then we launch EOS a year later. But that gets us in that 10 year. Here's the BHAG, here's the three year plan, here's the one year plan, here's the 90 day plan. A lot of people in the company have to live in that 90 day plan. But at least if they know where we're going, we're more likely to make a better decision. So you always get in that point of do we need a person or not? Well, we need a person because of this specific job. But is this part of the long term strategy or do we subcontract it? You know, so with having a roadmap out there, we can at least make decisions going the same direction as where we're going on our three year plan.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's, you know, but to your point, cash, you know, hey, we need to acquire. Well if you got to have money, you know, so it's, it's a, it's a comprehensive plan. And that EOS model has served us really well to get rid of shiny objects, you know, know what we are, what's our niche. And we, and we decided light pipe move dirt like that's our logo, like that's who we are. If there's something that's not one of those two things, we probably don't want to do it.

[A]

And that's the most profitable contractors I've seen there. They have a very well defined market that is, here's what we're good at, here's our circle of competency. We might go outside of it to, in special circumstances, but 90% of what we do is right in here. And we do it better than anybody else in our market. There we go. Or it's or vertically integrated and we do everything.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which, which is a whole different quarry's mines, asphalt, concrete. I mean that, that's a great game to get into.

[A]

It's a much more profitable game, I would think. Yeah, much more profitable. But I think so. If you're in the middle, it's really hard to make money.

[B]

Well, you know, back, I mean I want to say 2000. The key was, you know, you gotta be able to do everything. You gotta diversify that way if concrete's good and pipe's bad, you can do. No, that's horrible. You're just bad at everything.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, and you make less margin and you know, you can't really move skilled concrete finishers to go lay pipe. Like they don't transfer. So, yeah, we just kind of went deeper with getting better at putting pipe in the ground.

[A]

So when you said peer group earlier, you were referring to ypo?

[B]

Yes, sir.

[A]

Okay. And ypo, it's business owners in all different kinds of businesses. That's right in your area, but you're

[B]

probably one of the few contractors. It's a worldwide organization.

[A]

It's worldwide. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. So there's like, Indiana has 100 people chapter, and so, yeah, there's probably five or six contractors in there.

[A]

Okay. That's some of them, Will.

[B]

Yes. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, I heard Will's podcast.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I was just mesmerized. I'm like, hey, somebody get me his number. So I give him a call, and then we had lunch. And then about a year later, he joined ypo.

[A]

He just said he's too busy to come on the podcast again.

[B]

He's. He's a busy dude.

[A]

I know he's a busy guy, but I'm good. I'm glad to know there's at least some benefit.

[B]

Yeah, for sure. But, I mean, we've had lunch several times. You know, share books, you know, but we literally do the exact same thing. Say we bid 250 jobs a year. We probably don't bid against them 10 times.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

You know, great.

[A]

X.

[B]

You've heard from Lafayette. Yes, From Indiana. Huge, huge company.

[A]

We went out on a project with them.

[B]

Yeah. Jason Dap. Great guy, great leader. You know, amazing company again. They have their niche. We don't really compete against them. There's a few jobs a year we overlap. It's like, hey, you can be awesome. We can be awesome. And, you know. You know, do we share trade secrets? No, but we, you know, we can communicate and we can. We can make sure that the industry's in a good place.

[A]

But that. And that's where I think ego hurts the industry a lot of times, because it's like there's so many people fixated on just killing each other. It's like, yeah, we don't have to go. We're all in this together. Like, we're all actually on the same team here.

[B]

What I like to say is exactly that we only compete on bid day because after the bids open and you're low and I'm not. I want you people to be safe. I want you to do the job well. I want you to make money. I want you good. Competition is a good thing. You know, somebody who's not safe or getting people hurt, that makes the industry worse. That means OSHA's out there killing everybody, you know, so, you know, we want to try to be a mentor and a sponsor and be help. And it's amazing how many people that I know that own other companies that we bid against. I got their cell number. Now, you can't talk about bids, but you can talk about people problems, equipment. Hey, man, I'm in a bind. Can I borrow something from you and my people? You know, sometimes like, well, why would you loan our competition something? Like, because they've helped us out. Right. And it's not every day, but every once in a while somebody needs some help and you're like, hey, happy to help.

[A]

Have you always had that mindset or has that been a change?

[B]

I would say my dad taught that. I mean, he's always been like an industry first. Like, he created the Nuke of Indiana. If you're familiar with Nuka national utility contractors, him and about six guys built the first chapter in Indiana.

[A]

An Indiana guy just took over. David Howell.

[B]

Yes. Yeah, he was a Midwest mole guy. Yeah, he and I used to go to Washington together and go see Congressman. And so I've known him a long time, but, you know, so those types of peer groups were exactly that. Where, hey, how can we work together? We compete on bid day, but the competition really at that point has always been contractors versus the engineers, contractors versus the owners. How do we get a level playing field? We spent, I don't know, five or six years trying to write a new set of. And we actually finished it. A set of sewer and water specs for Indiana. So Indot has all the road stuff, which is storm bridges, you know, everything. They don't have sewer and water. So every city and town, every engineer has a different set of specs. Well, you know, spec books, 1200 pages. And you get two weeks to bid it. Like, you can't even read it that fast. So you start figuring out, okay, let's get a standard that everybody can operate in. So we worked through that for a long time. Didn't have a lot of success, but it's just that constant. Like, work together with your peers. And my dad taught that from a very young age of be a good neighbor, do what's right, help people out, run your business.

[A]

Yeah. And I think that's the future for the industry. The industry has to operate like we all have to be on the same team here. Because my point is, listen, everybody else is benefiting from us, so to speak. Civil contractors beating the shit out of one another.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because then they're. Everybody else is Far more consolidated than we are. The materials companies are more consolidated. Equipment like the, the big environmental firms, law firms, engineering firms like everybody else then can take their piece while we're all down here just bickering and kicking the shit out of one another.

[B]

That's fair.

[A]

Like, we can't, we can't. It's not sustainable. We all know that. And, and it sucks.

[B]

It's like, what's fun?

[A]

Yeah, it's no fun. No, no. No one really likes to just fight all the time. Who wants to do that? I mean, some people do.

[B]

We've got, you know, we got some old school guys that still kind of have that mentality like, my job is to kick people's ass. Well, actually, it's not. Your job is to make money. Your job is to keep people safe. Your job is to keep people working. You know, there's other things. Now we also have to have a line of we're making money, we're not. We got to figure how to fix it. You know, the technology change in the industry. So I mean, I don't know if people are familiar with Heavy job, like HCSS product, amazing company out of Houston, Texas. But I was like a laptop, you know, laptops when it first started. But the concept of, you know, back in the old day, I'd say, hey, Aaron, you're a foreman, I'm the office guy. Hey, bud, we need to talk. Let's go have lunch. We'd have an hour long lunch to talk about how we're losing money. And I'd spend 45 minutes just convincing you that we're actually losing money. We spent 15 minutes fixing it. Well, now with heavy job, they can basically run a profit loss statement every day. And then they call me, hey man, I'm not making any money. Can you come meet with me? I got to get some ideas. And now it's not me anymore, but it's one of our people. But all of a sudden it's the voice of truth. Like, everybody agrees that's the number. And then, okay, well, how can we fix it? All right, do we need a bigger excavator? Do we need a bigger bucket? Do we need a smaller bucket? Do we need less people on the crew? But I mean, all of a sudden we spend the whole hour fixing the problem versus just trying to convince ourselves that there isn't a problem. Sure. It's a challenge. You want to talk about the next level? Obviously, people is a big issue. And that's why I love supporting you guys is we're all on the same boat of getting people into this industry and some of the stuff you guys talk about since then, we're now going to the high school trade shows and we're participating in all that stuff. Obviously we want some of those kids to come work for us, but we got to make the industry better. I don't care if you're going to be an electrician, be a plumber, be a pipe layer, be an operator, just get in the trades industry. We had to start doing our part. So I think the more you talk about it, the more your message is out there. If everybody does their little part and you know, which means you got to have good benefits, you have to have good wages. Like, you know, when people figure out that they can make a really good wage and be safe, well then all of a sudden this isn't a look down your nose at a ditch digger. You know, this isn't a second option. Like, no, this is a really good

[A]

option and it should be, and it is at a lot of companies. But then the, still, the macro perspective is it's, it's not like I, I just, statistically, the military is a better bet if you want your son or daughter safer. The military is safer than the US Construction industry.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

Yep. Like through the global war on terror.

[B]

Wow. That's crazy.

[A]

It's a crazy thought. It's a crazy thought. And, and financially, it really, really depends on where you're at. Like, if I want to make a good wage in the south in construction.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And I don't want my, my wife to work. No way. And I want to have three kids in a house. Not a, not a chance.

[B]

For sure.

[A]

No way. Even if we're a dual income household. Like, and, and, and those are the conversations I'm trying to get going as well, is like, listen, we can, we can sit here and talk shop all day about fuel and materials and college and whatever we want to AI, we can talk about it all. But I have no say what the United States military does in Iran.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I don't have, I don't have Trump's cell phone number. I don't, I, I'm not involved in those conversations. I don't have any control over fuel price. I don't have any control over the US market. I don't have any control over fathers and mothers sending their kids to college. Like, all of that is irrelevant. All I have control over is my business, my community, my team, me as an individual. And so it's like, instead of being all up here, why don't we just focus on us. Like, right. Why don't we just make ourselves better? Like, and to me is a pretty good, we win, we win first, and then those around us win. Like, how is that, how's that a bad deal?

[B]

No, that's exactly. I mean, if you get too focused on just our house, you know, and you don't look outside at all, well, then that's how you can get very, you know, blocked into a small thing.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

That what you guys have brought out is like, hey, the whole industry needs people, right? We got, we all got to kind of do our part. So, you know, so when I talk to those other leaders, like, hey, you need to help support this, you know, college initiative thing. Hey, you really need to help this trade show. And they're like, yeah, you're right. And then, you know, they might drop off a machine or something, you know, send somebody over. But I mean, with enough people talking about it, we might have a chance to make a difference. It's slow.

[A]

It's the only way. Yeah, but, but that's the only way. Everybody's always like, you know, thanks for what you're doing. And it's like, I'm doing my part. And the scale is unbelievable with what we do nowadays. But it's still, if it's like, if it's up to me, there's not a chance this wins. And when I, when I speak, it's like, everybody has a responsibility to tell the industry story. First and foremost, you have to preach it to your people, your existing workforce. You have to remind them repeatedly, like, especially if you're the one at the top, non stop. We're not just digging a hole today. We're not just putting seven sticks of pipe in today. This water line feeds this neighborhood. People don't live without this. And you've got to do it every day because like right now, when it's muddy and shitty and you're, you're pushing shit uphill and nothing's going your way, it's pretty easy to lose track of that. That's 1, 2. We've got to talk about it within the community. Like you said, going into high schools, being part of whatever neighborhood organization there is, talking about it in church, I don't know, but just talking about it one in the community and then last, like, make sure you're talking about at the dinner table. There's. There's a lot of people in this industry. It's like, do your kids know what you do and why? No. Well, maybe that's a good place to start, I don't know, like, just talk about what you do and why. And if we have there's, I think, 8 million people in the United States construction industry. We need 350,000 right now. If you've got 8 million people talking, how many are they reaching? You know, you're reaching almost the entirety of the United States of America at that point. Yeah, we can draw in the 300, 400,000 people we need.

[B]

It's a great vision. How we doing?

[A]

I. We're. We're making progress. I think we're making progress, but like you said, it just, it takes time. Yeah, it takes time. We're trying to steer a whole, a whole part of the economy.

[B]

Yeah, great story for us. So we've got a guy workforce. Dale Whitaker, awesome foreman, been with us a long time. He was one of those guys early on, like, man, I don't think I'm smart enough to do this. I don't think I want to do this. All the stress and we're like, no, you can do this. And we train him and now he's like one of our best guys. He's got his daughter, works for us, two sons. You know, it's like, hey, when, when do you feel strong enough to bring your kid into work for us?

[A]

It's a good sign.

[B]

That's a great sign.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And, and no one of his kids is, is a leader, force, solely foreman for us, that, that, that means you're doing something right. So the more we can take care of our people, the more we can do it the right way, safe. You know, you gotta have, you know, and that's our core value. Like, we gotta provide generational success for everybody, not just Nick and I. Like, we got to make sure everybody is, is doing well.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And that, that's rewarding, that, that's fulfilling.

[A]

Well, and, and that's my qualm. Sometimes with people within your generation, it's like, you're good to go. But, like, listen, you're leaving me a pile of shit, man. Like, and, and now I have to deal with it and that. And, and, and I don't even blame a lot of people. Like, especially like 60s kind of right now they're, they're on their way out and they've made all their money. Like, I'd be doing the same thing they are. Like, listen, I've been busting my ass for 40 something years. I'm gonna just ride the wave and ride off into the sunset. And I'm fine with that. I get upset, though, when they're in the way of progress.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Like, don't get in the way of progress because we've got to get the show on the road here. And that, that's when I start to get really frustrated.

[B]

Well, and I mean, and even my dad, which is amazing leader run a business built from nothing, right? You go through 2008 downturn, you know, it sucks, life's horrible. And then all of a sudden it's like, hey, he can see the end of the tunnel and we need to start doing some, you know, some investment. It's like, hey, I don't want to, I don't want to risk everything anymore. And all of a sudden, you know, when he's the leader and we're pulling back, it's like, if we keep going down this path, we're going to die. And so he and I had this power struggle for a couple years of like, look, I'm pushing. He's like, hey, I'm the boss, you shut up. You know, and we had some knock down drag outs. But, you know, I, I got the benefit of seeing that, of saying, oh, now I understand his all in nature of everything. And personal guarantees like that, that gives you a certain risk profile. And when you get to be 55, 60 years old, hey, I don't really want to risk everything anymore. So I got, I got to see some of that. Now I'm currently 52. Does that change if that starts happening to me and I'm the one driving the bus. But we can have problems. So like, I got to be aware of it, you know, and say, okay, who's the right risk people? Who can I. How can I train people to think the way that I do? And you know, that's part of our leadership team of, you know, people who can make those decisions because that's their job and it does all things don't have to flow up to my brother and I.

[A]

How, yeah, how was like when your dad was still in the business, was, did you always have a relationship or was it sometimes where you were like you're working in the same place?

[B]

But no, we had a very family dynamic. My wife worked for us, my mom worked in the business. We were technically 51% female. Owned WBE company. My mom paid all the bills, did all the checks. She was kind of the office person. My dad was the field guy. Then I come in and we kind of, if I was in operations, my dad would be in estimating. If he wanted to be an estimating, then I'd be in operation. So we kind of had some separation. But yeah, I got to the point of I would call him Terry at work and dad at home.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Just because it's like, no, this is the boss. This. Like, you know, you have to put that in the right mindset, which put some people off, obviously, but for the most part, you know, he might chew my ass and you're the biggest dumbass in the world and like, oh, shit, this isn't going good. And then, like, he's done. He's like, you want to go to lunch? Like, no, I don't go to lunch, you asshole. Like, and then we go to lunch and he'll be fine. He's just super intense and, you know, he has a line and it was a good place to learn. He taught a lot of amazing people how to be great leaders and how to do hard stuff. And so we respect and appreciate all that. But there, towards the end, it was tough because it's like he wanted to pull back and the rest of us are still full go. And there was just a lot of friction there. And that was a painful couple years, that handoff, the succession plan just wasn't as fine tuned as it probably should have been. And that frustration really was painful for the family. I mean, it. It fractured our family to the point, like, I don't. I don't know. We talked to my mom and dad for a year or so. And then at some point I had some friends, some of my best friends. You know, they're all about the same age. Their dad's passed away. Like three of my best friends. Dad's passed away. And I finally said, you know what? Life's too short to hold a grudge. Yeah. And I just called up, say, hey, I'm over it. I love you. Every time I talk to him on the phone, I say, I love you. And you know, that's not the relationship we've had. But. But it's like I can decide to be intentional. For me, like, this is how I'm going to do this. And they can either do it or not, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna be happy with my choices.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And that. That took. Take a long way to get there. And my wife will even say, like, I'm surprised you can forgive them for some of the things that were said. Like, it is what it is. Like, I can choose how I deal with it in the future. So.

[A]

Well. And I've learned the same. The same lesson a lot of ways with my dad. It's like there's. There's two Sides, you have no vote over their side, but you have. You have your vote.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And if. If you do your best, if you approach the situation in a way that you can be proud of and that you could be at peace with, it makes everything so much better than just sitting there and poisoning everything without with resentment and.

[B]

Was easier said than done, was it? So at the time, you know, I'm kind of running the business. My brother's superintendent. He wasn't as versed in office stuff. Great at being a field guy. Not really office stuff. Well, at the time, you know, my parents, like, hey, we want the sons to be 50. 50. I'm like, no, no. I've been doing this work longer. I got a bigger piece.

[A]

That's an interesting dynamic, too.

[B]

Yeah. So guess what? I didn't get to say so. So, like, why did he get over that? So guess what? I have to hire a coach, and I go through some, like, some stuff. Well, at some point, with this adversarial relationship with my dad, maybe it was intended. Maybe it was genius on his side. Probably more unintentional. Well, at some point, my brother and I, like, we got to stop arguing with each other, and we got to both focus on that. And then. So through the coaching, my brother and I learned how to have tough conversations with each other and not be emotionally mad about it. Like, look, if we can't talk about this, this will never work. Like, you can't go home and complain to your wife. I can't go home and complain to my wife. And then the two wives are talking about, like, if you're going to do that, we owe it to each other to have that conversation first. And. And so we had to. I mean, we went through some individual coaching for probably a year or two years, and it works. Like, we have some tough conversations. We walk in, we sit down, we close the door, we have the conversation, we figure out a path forward, and we move on. But we don't let things linger. We don't let things hang out there because we saw what pain it caused with mom and dad.

[A]

How did you go about even finding that coaching?

[B]

YPO connections? You know, just being in a peer group of talking to people like, hey, you know, and even if they're not in construction, you know, everybody has the same problem. So even with this. This great, amazing group that I'm in, you know, there's manufacturing, there's a car dealer, there's a bank guy, but we all got people. Like, we all have, like, we all have family like, there's all these issues and like, hey, I don't know if this is going to work, but this is a, this is somebody. So I probably interviewed three, three coaches, you know, found one that we can be honest with and, you know, figure out how to learn and get better, how to process things.

[A]

Was it, was it hard for you at first or were you at the point where you're like, I'm gonna dive into this.

[B]

You know, I look at it from like, like the engineering perspective. Like, I, I can try forever. I'm not going to solve this solution. Like, somebody's going to teach me how to solve this. And so I, I, you know, I thought I could figure it out myself. I'm like, I can either beat my head against the wall or I can find somebody to help. And, you know, so I started going to a coach for probably a year and then I would, you know, somewhat intentionally say, hey, I was talking to my coach yesterday and he had this idea, oh, I was talking to my coach and he said, read this book. And then eventually my brother's like, maybe I should talk to that coach. Probably be a good idea. So then his idea, he goes, meets with the coach. Well, then he starts getting better. And sometimes it's just, am I right? Do I have a real issue here or is this just my perspective? And sometimes it is my perspective. Sometimes, like, no, there's a real issue. You need to deal with it. And then, okay, well, let's say you're gonna have a tough conversation. Let's practice, let's dry run this. And then they like, hey, you fucking asshole, why'd you want to do that? Maybe we shouldn't start that way. Maybe we say, hey, we got an issue we should talk about. Oh, that's probably a better way to approach this. And so the two of us started doing that. And then after about a year, he starts doing the same thing I was doing. Hey, I was talking to my coach. And then like our VP of estimating, maybe you should talk to Carl. And so next thing you know, now all of our leadership team's talking to him. Anybody who's identified up and coming leader is working with him. So, you know, he gets our state of the company, he gets our vision statement, you know, so he knows where we're going and he knows how we think long enough. So if somebody, we got a young guy that's coming up and like, I don't really know, they don't tell me what's going on. I'm like, he's like, no, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure they're clear. If you need clarification, just ask. They will provide clarification. But he kind of knows the answers we're going to say anyway. So he's a great, kind of behind the scenes, you know, mentor coach of those guys, of, hey, I know where, you know, I've talked to Casey. I know what his vision for you is like. He's honest like this. This is exactly how he wants you to do this. And it's just another outside voice that you know, and we don't care. They get like an hour a month to talk to the coach. I don't care if it's personal. I don't care if it's professional. I don't care. It's about coaching. I don't care. It's about your kids. Because if your mind isn't right at work, you're not doing the best job. And so if you need to sort your stuff out with your family, your kids, you know, your parents are sick, whatever it is, find somebody to talk to. Because I'm not great at that. I mean, people used to come to my office, talk. I'm like, I don't have any idea how to deal with that. But this person does. And then it just works. And it's really helped us take the next step.

[A]

Has it made you more effective with your kids and your wife, too?

[B]

That's probably debatable.

[A]

Yeah. Your wife's here, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Careful.

[B]

She might say, like, stop. Stop running that sandler shit on me.

[A]

Yeah, enough with those mind tricks.

[B]

Yes, but I mean, through that pain of the buyout with mom and dad, one lesson my brother and I learned is like, okay, we're not going to do this again. And so, you know, let's say I'm 52, I'm going to work, say, 10 more years. 10 to 15 more years. Now's the time to be laying the plans for that succession plan. So I'm going to a whole bunch of seminars and classes and conferences to try to learn this. Do I have a plan? I don't have any plan. Now I'm. We're trying to build a plan. So we feel like it's important to explain to our kids, like, this is how the business works. So if you've read the Harvard Business Book, Josh Barron wrote the book, and it's like the four rooms model, you know, so the four rooms are like, you can work for the company, you can be an owner, you can be a leader. But just because you're one doesn't. And you can be in the family. There's the fourth one. But you can be in the family, not work in the company. You can be the family and work in the company. So each room has a different hat and a different responsibility. And so we're actually going to end up hiring Josh to come and talk to our family this summer and kind of explain from a neutral third party. So it's not me telling my kids or me telling my brother's kids, hey, this is how this works. But it's like, you know, you could possibly workforce and not own anything. You could be. You could workforce and own something. You could own part of the company and not be part of the family. Right. So, you know, it's like, it's what's the rules? Like, how do we get a foundation? But we've got to do a better job of educating the how to own a business part to our, to our next generation.

[A]

Because you have a son in the company.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And how old's your son?

[B]

So he's 26 now.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Civil engineer, project manager. You know, just, you know, starting his career. Same thing like me. He worked in the summers through high school, he worked in the summers through college. The day he shows up as a full time person, he's got seven years experience.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

He's worked for most of the crews. He knows everybody. He knows the work. I mean, we get the biggest job we've ever had.

[A]

Talk about it his entire life.

[B]

Yeah. And you know, he was one, when we're driving down the highway, he was like, oh, what's that? You know, like, slow down, Dad. I want to see what they're doing over there. Just super inquisitive. You know, he's probably 24 at the time. We get the biggest job we've ever got. Big, big sewer job in Huntington, Indiana. It's like 40 million. Huge job for us. Way bigger than we've ever got before. And like, all right, who's going to manage this? And everybody's like, oh, Keane's running this job. And so he youngest guy in the room, he's like, I got it, no problem. And then, you know, obviously you get the best superintendent to go up there. Sean McTagg and him go up there and they build this really tough live sewer, rock deep, nasty job, and does a great job. Well, guess what? The next big tough one comes along. He gets the next tough one. But it, but you know, he just a lot of confidence there. He works hard, but we owe it to him to like, lay out the plan. Right. So we're, so we're working through this plan and it's not easy, you know, and you can have a really good plan for the next 90 days. You can have a rough plan for one year, but a 10 year plan, I don't know what that looks like.

[A]

So much changes, but, but not having any kind of plan. I've seen it. I've now seen it hundreds of times. I don't know. Like, I'm in such a. I have such a weird job. I'm in such a weird position. I get to be around all these businesses and see all these family dynamics. And now that I've been doing it for long enough, I've seen it just so many times over.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

The amount of frustration it creates with the next generation, especially that lack of clarity.

[B]

I don't. I got a book idea for you. Just start putting a chapter in there for every contractors buyout story.

[A]

Yeah. Well, there's been some adventures, you know,

[B]

and what I'm, what I'm saying, like, everybody has a story. So when I joined ypo, I thought, hey, this is going to help me solve this buyout problem. So I would talk to somebody, they'd say, hey, I'm second generation. Oh. And so I'd schedule lunch. We go sit down. And I literally had like a notebook, 25 chapters of how to not do a family buyout.

[A]

Wow. Really?

[B]

Not a single positive, just don't do this. And so I'm like, well, I've learned all this stuff. Now we're gonna go do this. Well, I just wrote the 26th chapter.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

So, you know, I don't want to write the next chapter for our kids.

[A]

But that, that's. And that's what I talked about. Like, that's a big thing I've learned in leadership is you, you can't avoid the pain a lot of times. Like some.

[B]

I hope so.

[A]

I mean, some of it is you kind of have to touch the stove to learn it yourself. Like, you can hear about it 25 times from other people. But there is part of it where maybe you can avoid some pitfalls, but there's going to be some.

[B]

Just like you said earlier, there's things I can control.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And there was the other half that I couldn't control. Sure. So going to the next one, I can at least control my half right now. Does the other side receive it? Well, is this financially possible? You know, I mean, the concept of buying this, you know, for our kids to buy, like they're not independently wealthy. How are they going to come up with the money to buy the company? So, you know, we owe it to have the strategy. And it gets more complicated the bigger you get, the more owners you have

[A]

as the generations start.

[B]

So my brother's got two kids, we've got three kids. So, you know, two of my kids are still in college. Nick's youngest son's in high school. He's starting to work in the business. He's starting to do some ag tech training and learning the three dimensional stuff. And then his, his oldest son's in chiropractic school. So, you know, he probably doesn't come to work for us. I mean, maybe crack, crack heads or something. Maybe he'd get rid of all of our headaches we all have from construction.

[A]

I don't know about that.

[B]

Yeah, but at some point, you know, we have to figure out, you know, we've heard horror stories of mom and dad, what the sons, the 50, 50. One kid wants to run it, one kid doesn't. It's like, well, then you run it and then at the end of the year, you take half of the money you make and give it to your brother. And they're like, oh, this is just going to be an amazing kumbiha moment. Well, guess what? The one brother flies to the other brother, hands him a check. You, I'll see you next year. Like, that's not fair. So it's like if one thing at least my brother can kind of agree on, like, okay, we're not going to do that. Now if I have personal wealth or he has personal wealth and we want to give it to our kids, your personal money is fine, but we gotta, we gotta kind of keep the rules straight on the business money. And where do we want to go with this? How do we want to hand it down? How are we going to do a sales process? How do we do it as tax efficient as possible? And it's complicated and it's, it's a long process.

[A]

Well, and it doesn't just impact your family, it impacts everybody at the company and all these families. And if you do it wrong, you can screw up not just your family, but hundreds of families potentially, which is, which is, it's a lot of weight to carry as well.

[B]

Yeah, we won't do that.

[A]

No, no, no, I'm not saying you will, but like, that's what's on the line. Like, that's, that's, that's what's up for grabs if you don't do that.

[B]

We have to Any. Any conflicts have to be ownership conflicts, not. You can't have conflict in business. You know, we can't. We can't be misaligned sitting in front of the team.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Right. So. So if we have a conflict, we need to go close the door. We need to sort our shit out. And then we got to be on the same page. And we'll say it often. Whether it's the leadership team, whether it's my brother and I, hey, whatever we decide when we're done here, we both say the same thing. We don't say, you wore me down. And I. Well, that's what. That's what he wanted to do.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

No, we say the same thing moving forward. Forward. If we're not comfortable saying that, the conversation is not over. And the more we can have a unified front man, that, that message goes a lot stronger. When everybody agrees, that's really good. And then everybody gets to have their vote. Hey, I think we should do this. Okay, let's play that out. All right. We're not doing that. But we'll take the one piece of that, we'll add it to your two pieces, and we'll get a plan that everybody can get behind and it'll accomplish what we wanted to, and it'll be a good message. And then we share it.

[A]

And very like in leadership too, I've realized very rarely do I have the right answer, like, or the best answer even. It happened today. And I. I thought I had the best answer. I chime in. I'm like, I think we do xyz. And then Randy chimes in. He's like, I actually think maybe if that doesn't work, we do this. And I was as he was saying,

[B]

that's a way better idea.

[A]

That's way better. It happened in real time today. I was like, I did not have the best answer. That is so much better. And I'm glad he had that answer because now we're in a better position.

[B]

You know, similar scenario for me of like bid reviews, right? So we kind of have a tiered chart, you know, a job under this size. Estimators on his own from this size to this size. Two estimators have to look at it above that size. One of my brother and I have to look at it above this certain size. We both have to look at it, you know, So I gotta constantly tell my team, like, if you get me in a competitive mode, I wanna win and so is my brother. So, like, your guys job as estimator is to protect us from ourselves. Cause If I say, oh, no, we can do a thousand foot a day, they're like, no, you can't. That's what it's going to take to get a job. Well, then don't get the job. But, you know, you got to understand the math and the science behind it and not just be aggressive to be competitive for the sake of winning. And our team's good at that stuff. And you're exactly right. Usually my idea is the worst idea and somebody else has way better ideas. So learning how to pitch that sometimes is better. So.

[A]

Yeah. And like, as a leader, as a visionary, like, your job is to guide it in the right direction. But. But yeah, very rarely do I have the best idea.

[B]

Well, and then the next thing you know, as a, as a young leader, you love nothing more than somebody comes in with this huge problem and you solve it. You're like, man, I'm a rock star. And then guess what? The next time they have a little problem, like, well, I should go ask Aaron, see what he thinks. That's tough. And so now we're kind of have like the next level down. And Andrew was just telling me the other day, like, when somebody comes in and asks a question, he asked three questions back and Nick's son was like, man, you're a dick. Why, why don't you just give him the answer? He's like, I got to teach him to fish. Like, I got to teach them to think through this. Even if it's a super simple answer, even if you know the answer, you gotta, like, you got, you gotta make it a little bit painful for him to come into your office.

[A]

But you have to rude.

[B]

But you gotta get them to think through so they can eventually run on their own.

[A]

Well, and, but, but to do that, you have to override the basic human desire to feel, feel important and needed. Like you, you want to be the one with the answer. It makes you feel valued, it makes you feel safe because, well, they need me within this organization. But that's, it's, it works completely against you. I was thinking about it last night.

[B]

It's tough.

[A]

Yeah, it's it. And, and it. You have the. At least I have the urge all the time and I have to catch myself. Or afterwards I'm like, damn it. I just gave them the answer. Like, yep, like, it got me again.

[B]

So I like to say we need to retrain our auto responses.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So if your auto response is yes or no, like, auto response will be asked three questions like, you know, sounds like, hey, what do you think we should do. What's the pros, what's the cons? What do you think we should do? Yeah, and some of them might be like, you're not going to give me an answer. I'm like, nope, this dollar amount question is within your purview and I'll even let you screw it up because you got to learn, like, think through it, you know, and if they put their own skin in the game and they screw it up, they will switch or pivot quickly if I make the decision. Like, well, Casey said that's what we're doing. Not my responsibility. I'm gonna go do what he said, even if it's bad, and then they won't pivot as fast.

[A]

Well, and it's a, it's a short term hit to the business, but it's a long term investment because they're not gonna probably make the mistake again for sure.

[B]

Well, and usually they don't make mistake the first time either.

[A]

No, no one wants to screw up, get through it. Yeah, but that, that there's, there's same thing.

[B]

Like, let's say we just had a job the other day. One of our young managers made a mistake a year ago that cost us $60,000. Like, okay, well, we learned a lesson. What did we learn? Write it down, share it with everybody. Like, as opposed to just yell and cussing, you know, it wasn't intentional. They were trying to make a good decision at the time. Ended up being worse. Like, okay, well, let's share this knowledge with everybody. Let's, let's learn. Take this opportunity to learn.

[A]

What was the lesson?

[B]

We used some old gaskets on a concrete pipe job that the city had a conflict and they put all shit on the ground for four years. We came back and we're like, hey, for $30,000 we can replace all these gaskets and we shouldn't have any problem. And they're like, oh, no, those gaskets are fine. We put them in. We spent $60,000 fixing leaks.

[A]

I see.

[B]

It's like, probably shouldn't have done that, you know. And further, I think we talked to the city and said, hey, this, this could be a problem. Like, well, we've kept them indoors for four years. They should be fine via phone call, not via email. So, you know, we don't have the correspondence, you know, so is that fair for us to go ask for them for some of that money? I think it is. But, you know, this whole sales model of negotiation and working people. Is it worth $30,000 to have somebody think after the fact. It's a business decision at that point.

[A]

That's business in a nutshell. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly.

[B]

You know, young kid, learned, won't make the mistake again.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

But it's, you know, we haven't had that problem in probably 20 years. So at least if he has it, he could share it with the other eight managers. Then they can all learn the same lesson, like, oh, next time, don't do it that way. So. And it's hard. It's hard to have that many people in a room. You know, we used to have, like, everybody together so everybody can learn together. Well, then we kind of went to this team concept of, you know, three different teams so they can manage closer to their individual teams. But it's that constant state of adjustment of, you know, do you have young guys? Do you have mature guys? Do you have old guys? And it's, it's, it's a challenge.

[A]

Oh. And it's, it's, it's, it's fluid. It's always changing. There's always something in motion with people and with a team, there's you. You will never have it 100% locked in. It just doesn't. It doesn't happen that way. Yeah.

[B]

I don't know if you remember, you had a podcast a while back and you were talking about, you know, people always say people are our biggest asset. And you're like, oh, that's bullshit. It's equipment. Everybody spends millions of dollars on equipment. Do you remember me sending you an email on. On that?

[A]

I remember you sent me an email.

[B]

So. So I brought receipts.

[A]

Oh, you brought receipts.

[B]

I brought receipts for you. So. So this is a history here of

[A]

you're a better man than me. I have no receipts. Accounting is always complaining about my lack of receipts.

[B]

Actually, I got a copy for you. So. So this is our history of jobs. And this is total cost by labor, equipment, material, trucking, sub. And you can see by percentage of labor of job cost.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Is greater than equipment every year for the last 10 years.

[A]

Substantially. Yeah.

[B]

And that doesn't even include overhead labor. So, I mean, that's just job cost labor. So, you know, I think the difference is you buy an excavator, you pay $500,000 up front, and it lasts 10 years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, if I go hire a manager, $100,000, and he's gonna be here 10 years, he cost me a million dollars.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

It's just you pay one incremental and you pay one up front. The mindset, like you could say, Is like, oh, that stuff's expensive. All your money's in there. Iron. Well, your capital's in the iron. We spend more money with labor.

[A]

Yeah, I just, I think, I think where I was getting with that is they say people are number one, but that is not how they act. They spend way more time and energy managing their equipment and their fleet and their materials and the things that they can measure. Because that's the world we live in. We love.

[B]

Well, it's easy.

[A]

It's easy. And that everybody in construction, we got into it probably because we like to see results and measure things in the real world, build stuff. Exactly. And with like, with people being number one. But, but like how much energy and how much investment and how much time is actually spent on people within this world? It's very, very, very, very small. It. Not at the best companies.

[B]

Right.

[A]

But industry average. If I, if I get like, there's no training as standard. If I get a job in construction at 18, what's going to happen is I go to the office and I fill out a W2. I don't even know what a W2 is.

[B]

Right.

[A]

I have no idea if I filled it out or not. I might even have to call my mom to figure out, like, what do I put on this line? I don't even know.

[B]

Everybody screws up. The withholdings.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And then I screw it up and then I do some other paperwork. I don't even know. And then I pee in a cup and then I get a phone number and then I get an address and then I go to a job and. Well, and then what?

[B]

And then, you know, what we do is we have them watch 30 minutes of build with videos before they start work.

[A]

Now we're cooking.

[B]

And so. And so part of our, part of our captive insurance plan is you need to have an onboarding system. So I made a little video, launch it through the platform. Hey, welcome to Atlas. This is who we are. You know, two minutes and then.

[A]

I wasn't even teaming you up.

[B]

Yeah, but here's. But, but I mean, you have to do these things. And then it's like, well, we could have a website link, you know, to YouTube. I mean, it's like. So it's like the technology's got to. You got to be able to do these things, you know, the new, younger generations all on their phone. Well, guess what? Here's a whole bunch of videos you can watch to learn how to be a better pipe layer or be a better loader. I mean, it's the Content's amazing. It's still hard to get people to use it. You know, some people jump on there and they'll go through 100 videos in a week, and then they just kind of taper off. Yeah, right. So it's like, how do we re. Engage? You know, it's, it's, you know, we haven't got to that. You know, it just takes off on its own yet. I mean, that's why I keep supporting. It's like we got, this is the right thing to do. We just haven't quite figured out how to make it go viral yet. You know, we just. It just hasn't been the de facto answer for everybody to use this as a training system. No, we got to get there.

[A]

Yeah. And I.

[B]

We've, we've.

[A]

We've learned a lot on how to get there, but part of the, part of the solution is it just takes effort, and it just takes sustained effort. And if there's not sustained effort, there won't be sustained.

[B]

Well, on the same token, I could give you 20 ideas how to fix it and go, hey, great. I can't buy that many engineers to go do that with the cash flow I have. Yeah. So it's like, it's a constant state of, okay, what's the most important thing and what can we actually get done?

[A]

You know, over the next 12 months, though, you're going to like what we've got.

[B]

I'd love it. Man, oh, man.

[A]

Because now that again, like, for our business, we've been in survival mode for years, and it's just a lot of times it's like, let's survive past next week.

[B]

Yep, let's.

[A]

As long as we make it past next week. Like even I was thinking about the other day. I don't even know I've talked about this. Like, shoot. It was last year, Dirt World Summit. We're like a week from Summit. In the hotel, we tried. We assumed that we were going to get the credit department with I don't even know what hotel company was, one of the giant hotel companies. The hotel company was going to allow us to pay the week after the event, which was no problem because pre sales cash, we'd have the money. Not a problem. It was like 750,000, maybe $1 million bill. Big bills.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But the credit department and the hotel, they don't talk to each other. Same company. But it's like, well, we don't work for them. That's not our problem. You owe us money. You got to pay us before the event. And so we had like $750,000 bill due and we didn't have a million dollars. We didn't even, we didn't even close to that. And so there I am, like a few days before Dirt World, everybody at Dirt World's like, wow, this is great. You're doing such a great job. Just a few days before that, I'm calling everybody and their mother that I know, trying to figure out how to get 3/4 of a million dollars.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I can pay this bill and

[B]

then I have the show.

[A]

So we have the show.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I need a short term loan.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Hopefully you didn't call the mafia.

[A]

No, no, no. Got close. My. A friend's dad is a hard money lender and I've thought about calling him a few times in business. I never have though, because I, I

[B]

know you've learned something.

[A]

I've seen that world. Yeah. But that's to illustrate that's just the world we've, we've been living in. And so there's no planning, there's no vision, there's no here's where we're going. It's like, let's just survive. But now we're finally to.

[B]

Well, let me do the shameless plug for you. If anybody's listening to this podcast and their company doesn't have the training, ask, figure out why. Like, there's. How many listeners do you have to this thing? I don't see you plug this. I don't see you push it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

This is the engine that drives the bus. Right. And we gotta get more people. And the more the laborers, the operators, the workers, the managers, the people who are asking for this, the more we can grassroots this, the more we can get more people doing it.

[A]

I appreciate that. Well, and the more money we make, the more we can plow into.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Making it better.

[B]

And the faster it'll get better. Right. And the sooner we'll help fix the industry. Yes. And fix maybe isn't the right word. Improve. We can get, we can get better.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not like. And I've really had to adjust my approach and I've talked about this a lot recently, but I was, I spent the first five years telling everybody, people like you, like, you're wrong, which we

[B]

listen really well when.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. How does that work? Yeah. Are you, are you, you're gonna like

[B]

this pain funnel concept.

[A]

Do your ears perk up? Like, wow, we gotta listen to this kid that can't even grow facial hair, looks like he's 12. Like, didn't work all that well. So then it's like I've realized, well, what you've done has got you here. And so it's not been wrong. Like, it's got you here. So I can't. It's dumb for me to criticize that. But you and everybody else knows it's not necessarily going to get us further.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And so let's go create this better model. Let's go build this better future. Let's go build this next generation. And I think we're just part of the way to get there. We're just helping people along. But. And in a lot of ways, like, you're here because you're doing a lot of this stuff already. I want you to tell people about it so they don't hear it from me. They hear it from a guy that does what they do. Like, I'm just here to build this, you know, where the stage hands, not the stars, is one of our values.

[B]

I saw that.

[A]

Build the stage, put you on it. Dirt World, same thing. Like, it's not build with show, you know, it's Dirt World. It's not our event. We just facilitate the event. But it's about the industry getting to a better place, and that's. That's our whole business.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, some type of defeatist attitude can come in there. Like, you know, I can't decide the rules. I can't change Washington. I can't change the laws. Right. I just have to figure out a win within the rules I have. And I don't have to. I don't have to be the best in the world. I just got to be better than you. I just gotta be better than the competition. I'll be better than the next guy. And as long as you keep. If we all keep that attitude, this industry will not get better.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The more conversations we can have openly, the more we can talk to our competition, the more we can say, okay, as an industry, this is an issue we should all work on. Together. We have a chance. I think we're breaking it down. It's a slow process.

[A]

Yeah. But even, like the competition, I. I think about it, like, I just have to be the best I can be. That's all I can do.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, I can't. I can't even really worry about the competition. Like, I. Because what they're doing is. Is kind of irrelevant to what I'm doing. And in a way, like, I know you have to. There's some nuance there, but all I can do is my best and if I pour all of my energy into doing my best and all of our energy into doing our best as a company, we're probably gonna win. And if we don't win, like we did our best.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That's also just life and business. Like a lot of companies go under and a lot of. There's a lot of failure. And maybe you learn from things you know from like Netflix like that was born out of. You could go down the list of all these companies that they had a lot of failure before they even started the thing.

[B]

You listen to the acquired podcast.

[A]

No.

[B]

You should put that on your to do list. Some amazing guys go do research on some of the biggest companies in the world and they. It's like a three or four hour podcast and they talk about all of the trials and tribulations. You know, it's kind of like good to great. Like just a business study which is. Yeah, it's just more recent and there's some amazing ones on there. Like you. You would very much enjoy the logic because it kind of like here's, here's where they pivoted and made a major change and this is, you know, this, this is what got them there. And here's the decision they made and it was it a person, a reason, a beliefs, an industry like what happened to make. It's just an amazing. Just like you. I can either have these experiences myself or I can go talk to people and learn from their stories and figure how that applies to my piece. Sure. Does it all 100% apply? No. But if I can get 5% of Casey's stories and 2% of David Howell stories and Jason Miller stories and Jason Dap's story, all of that starts like, ooh, I see a trend here. You guys are all doing the same thing. How can we work on this together? How can we go the right place and how can we walk into a room, set our egos at the door and work something out? Let's figure out how to make the industry a better place.

[A]

But that's why I'm so optimistic. Because I think we have this convergence that is the United States of America starting to understand like globalization has kind of run its course at this point and mathematically it doesn't work long term. Like the population we thought the population. I was just learning to listening to Larry Fink talk about it Blackrock yesterday with Mike Rowe of all people.

[B]

People just weird. Weird.

[A]

Anyway, anyway, we thought population was just going to go forever. Turns out that's not the case at all. Like not Even close. And so this indefinite era of growth in which that we can just farm out all of the making stuff of our society elsewhere and we can just make up a bunch of numbers on spreadsheets and prevent pretend like everything's great, like it doesn't work long term. So we have to produce more resources here, we have to make more here, we have to do more within our area of influence. I believe, at least that's where I think the world is going. If there is to be a sustainable model for the United States. It could all crash and burn, who knows? But I'm going to do my part to create that next version of America. I think this version was born post World War II. That world's. The world's different. We have to do more here, so we need to build more here. And then not only do we have to build more, but all the stuff we have is old and crumbling because it was really born in the 50s and 60s and 70s and everything has a 50 year design life, 75 year design life at best.

[B]

I mean it's only like bridges, you know.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, bridges and like water infrastructure and wastewater and power, et cetera. Yeah, you know, basic, you know.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, Great book called the End of the World is just Beginning.

[A]

It's. This is. Was one of them that set me on this path of like, holy shit, the globalization.

[B]

You know, why are you the world's police and shipping stuff across?

[A]

I mean it's unbelievable because you. I've, since I read it, it's like you see it kind of happening already. But I believe we have to do more here. We have to replace what we have. So we're going to have to build a lot of shit. And so there's this, there's going to be this need for our world that's greater than ever. Our economies and this next generation's kind of retooling itself to be like, well, wait a minute, we were lied to by corporate America. Like, maybe this isn't the best way to live life. Maybe it is better to do something that I know creates value in the world and work alongside other people and that is aligned with human nature that we've done for tens of thousands of years. So you have that and then you have this, I think this next generation of company that's focused on like, wait a minute, it's not about really methodology, it's not about equipment. The differentiator here is people. So let's go pour into this bucket here like never before. And you have all of these things coming Together it's like, holy shit. This could be an unbelievable future and opportunity if we get this right.

[B]

Well then let's just lay AI over the top of all that mess.

[A]

Yes, yes, yes. Robot overlords. Yeah, that I'm painting all this picture before the robots take over. Once that happens, we're fucked. But until that point.

[B]

Terminator. I know.

[A]

Yeah. Until that point, I think it's gonna be great.

[B]

Yeah. But that, all those sci fi movies in the same.

[A]

Like I, I go back and forth on the AI thing, though. Like, on some days I'm like, they're way underestimating this. This could be the demise of everything. And then other days I'm like, they're way overestimating this. You already have so many states saying we can't accommodate more data centers. We don't have the power, we don't have the water. We don't have the infrastructure. Like, we don't have the ability to even accommodate this. And then you've seen enough like water main repairs, you're gonna have robots doing that next year. Like, I don't know.

[B]

I don't know we get that far that quickly. So I, so I go to the YPO Construction Network forum. It's a big event every year. You go and it's all construction guys and you talk about what the trends are. Three years ago they're like, hey, AI's coming. Two years ago, hey, AI's coming. Last year, AI's coming. This year, they're like, Bring your laptop. AI is here. We're gonna teach you how to use it. And so like we're sitting there with our laptops and like in a work session for two hours, like building, Building master prompts to do things like, oh, shit, this is. We need to be doing this now. So we came back from that and my son's actually spearheading like getting a team to get us going. I mean, we have, you know, that's one of the other pain points we have in construction. Our tech stacks, like 17 different programs.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

None of which work together. No. So you got to export out of one thing, import it in another thing, manipulate it, put it in this other thing. Well, guess what? There's a lot of human error in that. It doesn't work very well. You know, if the industry could get better, getting the softwares to work together would be amazing.

[A]

We're working on that. Give us a few years. I think one of the other challenges in construction is there's a lot of data that's not necessarily broken down in Any meaningful way.

[B]

That's exactly right.

[A]

And I think this is. It's a great. It's probably what you're applying AI to. Yes, in a lot of ways is

[B]

just better understanding cost forecasting. Yeah, I mean, versus a manual process. I mean, you know, the jobs get bigger. Now we have jobs with a thousand cost codes. Hey, hey, young manager. I need you to go forecast 1,000 cost codes. A third of which are done, a third of which haven't started, and a third are in process every month. I mean, and expect you to be perfect. The chances that are really bad. Sure. There's just a lot of opportunities to make mistakes. Yeah, but it's a big data model. So I mean, can we figure out a way to mine the data and help us, you know, instead of managing all thousand, Costco narrow this down to the 10 worst ones. Which one is the most risky, which ones have the most opportunity? Let's provide some clarity. But you know, we just, we've all built these softwares and hcss love them. Like, just the complexity, it just gets bigger. It gets bigger, it gets bigger. The jobs are bigger, everything costs more, and it's just impossible to manage. It's just huge data sets.

[A]

Well, in the data is only as good as what's going in as well.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Which is another.

[B]

Which, I mean, which is funny. Like in our business, we'll have a group of office people sit together. You know, if the field guys would just do perfect on their paperwork. Yeah, my job would be a lot easier. And I'm like, well, the field guys, keep in mind, are the ones working in mud up to their knees in the rain, in the snow, getting sworn

[A]

in out by Nancy down the street.

[B]

And by the way, we also want them to, like, code all their tickets. They're the one doing the work. Like, let's give them a little bit, like, why don't you go out there instead of calling him seven times, drive to the job site and get it from him. I'd get my shoes all muddy. Well, yeah, that's what the job is, man. But we have to provide perspective. And so, you know, everybody's over their own domain. And to your point, if I just control my shit, I'll be good. Well, sometimes you got to be aware of what the other guy is. What are they into? What's their mess? And you know, we had, we had one guy that he didn't turn his paperwork in. Like, this is the third week in a row. Like, you know, his pipe layer didn't show up or having a Baby isn't here and he's in the hole laying the pipe and ordering stone and ordering deliveries and ordering trucks from in the hole while he's up to his knees in mud. Yeah, like, yeah, we probably give that guy a little slack this week. Like let's, let's just call and see what's going on there.

[A]

And, and it's like. Have you called them? No, I haven't called him. Well, I don't know, maybe start there. Like that's, I, I, I've had to say that a million times. Have you called them?

[B]

Because I'll send them an email.

[A]

Well, yeah, and, and they haven't responded. And it's like, well it's personal there. It's basically no, they're telling me to off because they're not responding.

[B]

They don't like me.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they make it personal. You make it, you take it all personal. It's like, no, maybe they're just busy. I don't know, maybe they have a job.

[B]

Drive out there and see what they're doing. Oh, this sucks. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. And by the way, there's traffic and there's people and there's ground and there's utilities and Yeah. I mean it's just, you know, crazy, crazy world.

[A]

Yeah. One of my favorite things, it's company Blattner. You walk in and it says everybody here either works in the field or supports those that do.

[B]

Oh, I love it.

[A]

And it's like there's a lot of companies that need this sign.

[B]

We probably need that sign.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean everybody I think does, everybody think forgets what really drives the business at the end of the day? General contractors. But I give gcs a bunch of grief because they're, they're very important, they're very self important when they're not building a lot of stuff. But it was a, it was one of the more effective messages I saw. It's like, hey, this whole office, everybody here, this is all to support building stuff.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

We don't actually make the whole thing one like we're, we're, we're important. Everybody's needed here. We're all piece of puzzle. But it's all about at the end of the day, pipe in your case, pipe going in the ground. That's how you bank money.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

By linear foot of pipe.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Whatever helps that good. Whatever gets in the way of that.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, you know, the manager ordered all 3 inch pipe to go do this job. They get out there, it's not 3 inch, it's 4 inch. Well, he didn't intentionally screw you sure. Like, he didn't. Like, hey, you know, I'm really going to screw with that guy today.

[A]

Like, yeah, let's check. Show these guys.

[B]

So now I got to pay a restock. Got to get it. What the most important is get the new stuff there. So then we get the 4 inch delivered. The 3 inches still sitting there till the job's over. Oh, shit. Why'd we leave that set outside for a year? That. That's the game we play.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah, it's. And it's a. It's a complex game, and I don't think you have to experience it all that much to appreciate it. Like, I was a pipe player for a little bit of time. I'll never forget it. Like, I don't need experience.

[B]

Come on up. We'll show you.

[A]

I. So this is something I've. Turns out I'm a little busy these days, but I've actually played around with, like, should I go work in the field for, like, one or two weeks a year just to ground myself a little bit?

[B]

There you go.

[A]

And it's still a thought. I don't know. But I have actually thought about, like, maybe I should go spend a week or two here. There.

[B]

What's. What. So, like, we'll have friends that want their son to work for us through the summer. And, like, what are they going to do? Well, we want to go to college. Hey, great. We'll go work their dick off. Putting silt fence in or running a rake. They will study in college. They want. They will want to graduate or they'll

[A]

want to come back out in the field. Like, that's.

[B]

Yeah. But for the most part, like, you need some motivation. Either get that degree.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Or you're going to do this. I don't really care either way.

[A]

But it was.

[B]

But it.

[A]

But for me, it was motivating because I wanted to get back out to the field. I hated school. It was brutal. I was just staring out the window all day just like, this is miserable. Get me back out there. Then I'd get into the summer, it's like, let's go. And it'd be a different kind of misery. You know, you'd be, you know, working 80 hours a week and 120 or whatever it is. Just. Just like, get me back to school. Funny enough.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

But then, like, I've thought, like, I'll tell people in college or school, being an adult's way cooler than school. Like, or at least it should be if it's not. I get. I love school. I understand, like, it was a very good time of my life, but I like being an adult way more, you

[B]

know, And I got. I got two kids in college still. And, you know, they come home and it's like, oh, I'm so stressed out. Like, you have no idea.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you hate, like, you hate to be that old guy. Like, just wait till you have a mortgage and kids.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And a schedule and shit to do. And, you know, you're along the ride. You're not in charge of it anymore. And they don't see it yet.

[A]

Yeah. But. And there, there's a lot of that. But then there's also the opportunity to choose your own adventure in life, which is hopefully where you fall into. But what I hated when school is like, you're just told, here's exactly what you do. And it's. And I would argue college is easier than not going to college because it's a very well prescribed path for four years.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

It's a padded room you don't really have.

[B]

Can't really screw anything up.

[A]

You can't really screw anything up. You're told where to live. You're. If you need debt, you're told how to go get as much of it as you need. You're told where to eat, how to eat, what classes to sign up for, what, what classroom you go to. Everything is just follow directions and you'll be good to go.

[B]

I got a good one for you. So my son's going to college and he wants to join a fraternity. And I was in a fraternity.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I knew what to gain from it. And I said, I'll tell you what, bud, because it's expensive, I'm like, I'll pay your dues as long as by the time you're done, you end up with a voted position. President, vice president, secretary, treasurer.

[A]

Ooh.

[B]

And he's like, deal. And he'd tell his friends, like, I can't believe my dad. He's paying for me to go drink beer and hang out with the buddies. And then I think his third year, he got to be president. And about a month into it, he calls me, he goes, I get it. Now I understand why you paid for it. Because again, you're managing beer drinking with sororities. Right. It's not the end of the world. But I mean, today to do a party, they have to sign a contract. They have a docusign to execute contracts of who's doing what, who's paying for what. Liability separation. But you Gotta manage the college experience. Like, so you get to be in charge of the idiots. Right.

[A]

So it's like, oh, and it is.

[B]

And he's like, well, this sucks. Yeah. You're managing your peers, and even if you screw it up, it's not that big a deal. So it's a great trial run to learn to be a leader of your peers.

[A]

No, I learned actually, some. Some great leadership lessons from a fraternity. I dropped out. I made it three semesters, and it was just too dysfunctional for me. I was. I couldn't. I couldn't.

[B]

We should have been in charge.

[A]

But I tried to be. But then. But then what happened was somebody who was clearly not the right. Right person, but had more tenure. Everybody felt bad for him because he didn't get this position. Then he didn't get this position, then he didn't get this position. So we're like, well, we have to give him a position. Screw qualifications or vision or anything like that.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Now we have to give him a position. And when I saw that, it was just. It was a few other things, but it was like. I mean, just. Just managing that many shitheads.

[B]

It's.

[A]

I was on, like, the. The disciplinary committee.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because. Yeah. And it was. What. Yeah, there were some issues that came up. And I remember sitting in this meeting, these two older guys come in. I think they're seniors. And I'm like, the sophomore. I'm a squirt. And for whatever reason, I'm on the disciplinary board because no one else wants to do it. Right. And they come.

[B]

Supposed to discipline the seniors.

[A]

Well, they come in and. And these guys had gotten three thrown out just before I'd gotten in for something. And it was something you shouldn't be doing, probably. So they. They got. But suspended or whatever it was. And then they got back in, so they got a suspension. But it was a big deal. It was like, we've got to. We've got to lay down the law. And this might have been a year later, so not that much time. And I remember these stories coming up. I'm like, this is. This is serious stuff. And they come in and they say, guys, basically everybody is doing this. And I go, I couldn't believe myself. I'm like, no way. And I'm looking around at the other guys on the board. I'm like, are you guys hearing what I'm hearing? Like, we've got to do something. And they're just sitting there like, they were probably doing it too.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like, I wasn't around later at night you know, for some of these activities. And there was just no.

[B]

No reaction.

[A]

No reaction and nothing done. And I couldn't. I'm like, so there's no standard here? Like, wait a minute.

[B]

Yeah. Isn't that why we joined is to have a standard? Yeah.

[A]

That was all a charade. Yeah. Because we probably got caught by the school or something like that. And to me, it was like, that just poisoned the whole thing. Another thing, even worse happened, and I won't even get into specifics of that, but, yeah, the whole thing was like, so we're going to proclaim we have all of these standards and values, but all of that at the end of the day, like. And that, to me, just doesn't work well.

[B]

And if you're not careful, you can have a business says the same thing. You can have the values on the wall and not live them.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You can promote the wrong person. I mean, it's all those same stories. So, you know, kudos to you for getting out of it. And my guess is your. Your temperament is. You're not gonna put up with that at work. No, we're not gonna go promote somebody because he got passed over six times. Like, you got to make money. Like, the best guy wins.

[A]

No, but. And that's how I look at myself. Like, who gives a shit if my name's on the company? I could get kicked out of this company. Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

If Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple, there's a way that I could get kicked out of this company for sure. One way or another. Whether it's investors kicking me out or whether it's going out of business. You know, there's a bunch of different ways I better be pulling my weight. I better be worth the position that I occupy the day. I'm not. I deserve to go.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And that's how I hold myself further.

[B]

I mean, any good organization should be able to run without you or me.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And, you know, I'd be able to take time off and things still function now. Yeah. You know, still. You're still pulling part of the load, so, you know, you can only do that so long. But. But it's a different leadership structure to, you know, let the team make their own decisions.

[A]

Well, and we had a conversation today with our executive team. We had a problem with a customer. They. They got on to improve on the training platform, and then they did a bunch of it. And then the owner was like, well, we're not getting any value, so we just don't want to pay and this and that. And we're like, all right, let's set up a meeting. And they missed the meeting because they were busy unloading something. And that's what they said. And Randy was like, yeah, that's why you need training, because you're the guy unloading something.

[B]

You're the boss and you're unloading.

[A]

It's like, I mean, yeah, kind of like. I like the irony here.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So we had a good chuckle about it. Getting, getting screwed. The usual business stuff.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, we just, we did the same thing. So, you know, the annual comes up, we know, hey, how many, how many hours, you know, how many training things we do. And the girls told us a number and, you know, by percentage of total licenses, it looks like a low number.

[A]

It looks like.

[B]

But I want to say there was, I don't know, 850 hours of training. Like, that's 850 hours of training we didn't do if we didn't have this.

[A]

Correct.

[B]

Like, yeah, can we do more? Yeah, we should do more, but we shouldn't stop doing it because it's not 85% effective.

[A]

Well, and that. And yeah. Do we want better utilization? Yes. But it's like to justify the cost for a year, you have to not turn over one person.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You have to not back over something with.

[B]

You got to have the vision to say, hey, this is a long term investment. And yeah. Is. Is the software amazing? It's. It's really good. It's not amazing yet. It's not, you know, it's not Spot. Spotify. Well, guess what? Spotify has a lot more engineers working on it. Sure, we'll get there. It just didn't take time.

[A]

Oh, well, yeah, we'll definitely get there. We're, we're rebuilding the entire code base as we speak again that we just rebuilt about 12 months ago, because why not? Maybe even six months ago? So, so what are you. Now that you're through this period? It sounds like, like the business has transitioned. You've got the next generation in, in some ways coming in. You're working through what that looks like. You're putting your name on equipment. You guys just did a branding project. Values. You're doing EOs. You've been doing it for years.

[B]

New website, New website, sales process.

[A]

Sales process, training. Like, there's a lot going on. What are you thinking about now? What are you excited about? What's coming down the road?

[B]

So, like, social media and AI would be the first two things I would talk about.

[A]

Yeah, we, we glossed over AI, we'll

[B]

come back to that. Social media. So like we're not selling widgets, right? So it's like, how do we as a construction company get value out of social media? So we're like, well, it's, it's important, but we're not sure how important. So we kind of made a committee of people like, hey, who wants to volunteer? We picked three people and we would get together like once a week, once a month, talk about stuff, start doing stuff. And oh well, you put a little bit of effort in, you can get some results.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so we learned some stuff and then we said, okay, that, that's, that took us to a certain extent. Then we did a different plan and that got us a little bit better. And then we finally just got to the point like, we're gonna have to hire somebody to do this. So we put an ad out, did some interviews. Dustin, the guy that's doing it now, just doing an amazing job.

[A]

What. But you as a business owner, what prompted the, even the, you going down the path of social media? You know, you can say it was me. No, no, just.

[B]

Well, we do look at the content that you guys have as the standard, right? And then I can tell, you know, early on when you guys were doing the rebranding for companies, we would go follow those people, like the stuff they were doing. Like, ooh, that's impressive. That's a great story. And so like, so we start benchmarking. How do we get our website to look like theirs? How do we get our social media engagement to look like theirs? How do we get our follow followers to be at that point? So it's like, well, there's gotta be something there, right?

[A]

But what about, what about it drew you in in the first place?

[B]

Well, I would say the biggest like we have to do this moment was the concept of this qualification based bidding. Like you got to put your story out there, right? If you're not selling yourself, nobody else is. Now if you want to live in that world to turn a bid in and you're low bid and you get it, that's fine. But we feel like the state of Indiana is probably going to go to 50% qualification based bidding. Well, at that point they got to choose you. So if they're going to choose us, they should at least have easy access to hear some of our stories, see some of our people. You know, at the end of the day, we get the most value currently out of our social media for recruiting people. Okay, so when we put an ad out, people like, hey, I know somebody who works there. You know, we do stories about, you know, 10 year anniversary, 20 year anniversary, kids, you know, whatever's going on, we try to promote that, but you can't overtly make it about recruiting. But that's where we get the most value is when we put a job ad out, we get applications because somebody we know, somebody that knows somebody who works there is the people we end up hiring.

[A]

So the driver was the change to qualifications based.

[B]

That's when like we got to do something.

[A]

But the, one of the big benefits has been recruiting.

[B]

Yeah, I would, I would say that's the, that's the quiet benefit that, you know, is probably not popular to talk about. Yeah, but, but it sure works. Then we've got, you know, so, so now the social media guy is like, you know, all branding. So it's like, well, you got to use the same logo with the same color styles, with the same stuff. And so now we're doing these qualification based packages and they may be 30 to 50 pages or 100 pages and, and they gotta look good. So it's like Dustin's amazing at the software. He actually worked as a laborer back in the day. So he knows about our work. But it's like the estimating team knows the content, I know the strategy and he knows the technology. So between all of us, we can get something that works. But it's like, and we were just talking about it yesterday, Tom's like, hey, who's in charge of this process? I'm like, I don't know, man. Me. You? I'm not sure who's supposed to be in charge of this because right now it's still like, we gotta figure it out mode and we got to figure out what are we really trying to accomplish. Like, all right, Dustin, your jobs, make it look good. Tom, your job is to make sure we answer all the questions. My job is to make sure it fits in the strategy.

[A]

And this is like RFP or something like that.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, and you know, we get like 30 days to work on these things and they're 50 to 100 pages. I mean, they're just massive documents and you gotta, you gotta custom write each one. You know, we had a great one we're super proud of and we got, okay, let's use that as a model copy paste. And so that was a sewer job. So we had all our big sewer jobs with some awesome photos and job profiles. And we're turning one this week. And it's a road job. Like, you take all those pictures out and put road jobs like, yep. And like, oh, yeah, forgot about that. Like, you know, it's just the little things because there's so much going on to figure it out. But I mean, getting somebody who's totally dedicated to, you know, our LinkedIn image, our TikTok image, like, like, you know, and every platform has its own why you do it and level of professionalism. And we joke. So Dustin's always like, you know, what do you call it when somebody gives you negative comments on the website? There's a word for it. Young people talk about flaming. I don't know what it's called. But like, somebody's right. Negative stuff. He's like, you want me just delete those. I'm like, I go, I don't know, just with them. Like, just.

[A]

That's what I do.

[B]

Just go back at them.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I'm like, that seems to get a lot of comments. And I go, I'll tell you what, you can do whatever you want and if somebody gets mad, I'll tell them I said it was okay. And then we just won't do it again in the future. Like, you got some rope? Just go have fun with it. And so he, he cautiously went. And then he had a few. And then he put one out the other day and it had the F bomb on it. It was like the, the background music and they're like, did you approve that, Mike? No, he's got it. Like, have you been to our office? You hear how we talk? Like that's.

[A]

I've heard it before.

[B]

Yeah. I don't know that we should really shield who we are here. Like, this is, this is how we talk when we're in the office. So. But he's, he's doing an amazing job. But now we can do, you know, the logos on the trucks, logos on the excavators, logos on your shirts, the proposal. Like, everything's the same, you know, and it's just. That's exciting. Like, you can see some. He had a post the other day, we were doing this really tough job, sewer connection. And it's, it's like a 20 foot by 20 foot manhole. We had a core, a 66 inch hole inside of it to put a new sewer too. And so it's like, hey, we took an Insta360 camera on a pole, dropped it down in there and you could see all the way around, right? So he's like, hey, go up there. And I go, you're doing this to help the ops guys build the Job. Right. But I go figure out how to make a post out of this. So he drops it down in there, scans around, does the thing, and then he takes AI and has an alligator climbing out of the pipe.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

Obviously fake, right? And he just posts it. And then people like, oh, that's totally fake. He's like, well, of course it's fake, but he got me. He got 400,000 views on this thing. I mean, just a joke, but, you know, hey, what do you not expect to see in a sewer pipe? And it just kind of spins around and crocodile comes out. Just. Just crazy stuff. I mean, you got to give him some flexibility and have some fun with stuff.

[A]

Well, and I think that's. That's the formula. You have to have somebody that at least speaks the language of the industry. I just. I haven't. I've very, very rarely seen it done by somebody that has no background on the industry. It's.

[B]

Yeah, it's hard.

[A]

And I spent. Hasn't spent time. I feel like they just. They can't get it.

[B]

Well, they use the wrong word.

[A]

They use the wrong words. And, like, you can't. You can't. Sometimes you can't put your hands on it, but it's like, yeah, they just don't get it. Like, I want them to get it, but not quite. So I think that's one thing. And two, you as the guy, quote, unquote, have to allow them the creative freedom to do what they do. Oftentimes, that's just not the case. And it ends up being.

[B]

We start off with, I got to check everything for it post. Well, that just delays the process.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Like, I want three posts a week while we're waiting on Casey to approve them. Oh, shit. All right. You're gonna have to start posting them on your own, and you're gonna have to make some mistakes. Yeah, it's just Instagram. It's just like. It's just. It's not that important.

[A]

Well, like, worst case scenario, you delete the post.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

That's how it's been with me. It's like I've deleted quite a few posts at this point. Someone gets mad or mistake or whatever it is. The next day, though, no one is the wiser. You go to the next post. It's not that complicated.

[B]

Yeah, we try not to make people mad. I mean, we like to think we're above. Above that level. No, I try. And sometimes you go, oh, unintentional. Oops. So we do some flexibility there. The next thing I'm Excited about right now is AI. There's some opportunities there. The way it was presented at this conference I was at, obviously you've heard the story of AI won't replace your job, but somebody who knows how to use AI will. You've heard that story over and over. The approach this group was talking to us about was so what do we have the problem in the industry? We have a whole bunch of people that are 55 and a whole bunch of people are 30 and there's nobody in that middle area. Right. So their logic is mine. All the knowledge out of the 50 to 60 year olds build this into an AI prompt system.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then now you can take your 25 year old right out of college and he can solve 80% of the problems. If you can, if you can figure out how to build this bot to do it. So I mean think about like a help desk for a project manager with, trained by the 50 year olds.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Right. And so then at some point we can get the 25 year olds and 30 year olds to be almost as effective as the big guys or at least get 80% of the problems. So that concept, now is it going to be easy? Oh, there's no way. It's not easy by any means. But can we get something going that direction?

[A]

You'll, you'll have that available to you within the next month or two. And Bill would approve.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Well, I'm excited to see we're calling it Frank.

[A]

He's that, he's that 50 something year old, 60 something year old superintendent.

[B]

Is this an add on service or is this part of the regular, part

[A]

of, part of the platform?

[B]

Now that's cool.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And we'll, we'll, there'll be, there'll be additional stuff, but it's like the theory is everybody can go try to build it on their own and there's value to you having your own.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But when it comes to a majority of industry knowledge, it's all the same stuff.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And we have more information than everybody. Everybody. Yeah. On the, on the industry as a whole.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And then we have the ability to have more people using it, which makes it better, faster.

[B]

I mean, what's the delivery method look like? Is it like a bot?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Just go in there and ask a question.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Are you, you got people trialing it, beta testing.

[A]

Oh boy, do we? Yeah, it's incredible. Yeah. And I'm talking about it now because by the time this airs, it might already be in beta with our customers.

[B]

Very cool.

[A]

Yeah. So, and it's no secret. I mean it's not that clever. Everybody's had this idea. But we, we're.

[B]

But you have more data. When you have.

[A]

We have more data and we have more trust. I think that's a big piece of AI and construction as well is, you know, this like technology. This is not the most trusting world. Like everybody's already just now coming around to social media and it's 2026.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Like we were just talking about. So even just like something that people can trust one and then it's going to be driven by stories as well. So we're going to be able to inform it with real world stories.

[B]

What platform are you using now?

[A]

You're not the technology guy succeeding? I'm not the technology guy, man. I'm not the AI guy. I'm the talk shit on a microphone guy.

[B]

Yeah. At least you know your role. Right.

[A]

We've got people for that. Yeah.

[B]

That's awesome.

[A]

Yeah, I. But yeah, yeah, I.

[B]

Something and that's what everybody's talking about. That's the way we're going. And then you say, okay, well now take large data sets and numbers and figure how to do predictive forecasting.

[A]

Then you can do the stuff specific to you. Yeah, exactly. From an estimating perspective.

[B]

You know, like, you know, clearly you can tell if you're going to make money on a job when it's done. Well, guess what, that's checkbook construction. You know, you don't want to do that. Ideally you're amazing. If you could predict it at 50% complete. Well, how about a 30% complete? How can we tell how the job's going to be done at 30%? But if we could start figuring that out, then we would know where to put our best people. Then we know where to put our best leaders, where to focus our change. And we just, we're just not that good at the data yet. And you know, we 75%, we pretty much know where the job is going to be. Well, it's too late at that point. You can't fix anything.

[A]

Sure. So yeah, and that's a. I mean I think the fun thing about what we're doing is like I've been a laborer on pipe crew. Like I said, Randy's run a civil construction company. Jason started out on the back of a paver. Like we can put ourselves back in that position too. And that was one of the confusing things with me in construction was I never knew this score.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I never knew if things were doing well or not. You kind of know based on how pissed off the superintendent or project manager, whoever is.

[B]

But then there's the ultra guys. Pissed off everything, no matter what.

[A]

There's the guys that are pissed off all the time or like. Yeah. How often the boss is around. If the boss is around a lot, it's probably. Probably not going well. Yeah, but that's like, the only indicator. You didn't really. Again, me, as a. As a laborer, I didn't know how many joints we had to get in a given day.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

I didn't understand, like, what the schedule looked like, what. What a win was. I didn't. I didn't have any of that. It was just show up and do

[B]

your job, work hard.

[A]

Yeah. Which.

[B]

Which there's like, if you don't get yelled at, you win, and if you

[A]

don't get yelled at, you win. Yeah. And.

[B]

Well, that's. So that's kind of the EOS model, right? It's EOS is. The very basic level, is everybody wants to win, and if everybody in the company had three to five numbers and all three of five numbers were green, then the whole company's winning. Right. Easy concept. Now, how do you get that to each person? Building those numbers is hard. Right. And then you know where to focus. So maybe the pipe guys, the pipe players put seven pipe in a day. Well, the loader guy's not to put seven pipe a day. His is to count how many buckets of stone I put in the stone box. Like, so it's like, hey, we're supposed to put seven buckets in and we put eight. You know, we overran three ton in this one stick of pipe. Like, so everybody's got to have their goals and their rocks that they can figure out. Like, how is this. Are we winning or not? Well, so then, you know, at some point, we talked about heavy job. You've got the plus and minus on the sheet. And our best foreman, you know, what they do, they share with their whole team, hey, this is where we're winning. This is where we're losing. And then, you know, you got a young guy's like, well, I can't get the guys to go any faster. Like, did you show them the numbers? You want me to show them this? Yeah, show them. And the next thing you know, they're part of the solution. Oh, if we need to go faster, we could do this other thing and roll that out. So we're in eos. We have an implementer they're teaching us, and we're like, year three in and, you know, we're having goals and we're working stuff. We're doing great. And him, as well as five or six other YPO members are like, hey, you got to start sharing how you're doing with the team. And I'm like, nah, that's. It's too complicated. Yeah, we just can't share how the company's doing. And we had one year that was great, and everybody got, like, a 10% bonus. Well, the next year, we do the quarterlies and we say, hey, companies doing good, Companies doing good. Companies are good. Bonuses come out. Everybody gets 5% raise. They're like, hey, you said everything's great. Why does my bonus half as good? Like, well, we made half as much money. Like, oh, we didn't tell people we were doing half as good. We should probably start sharing. So, huge leap of faith. But we share on the screen and we PDF it to them, our income statement. And we say, this is where we're at.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Here's our goals. We want to buy new equipment, want to buy new trucks. We wanted to add on the office. Like, we have all these things we want to spend. That money comes from making money. And this is where that, you know. So we say, here's our goals, here's our targets, here's our things. We share it. We get real questions, we get real feedback. And it's a leap of faith. And, you know, we are who we are. Like that. That's the scorecard, right? That's the scorecard. Is the company winning or not? Then you go to the job level. Okay. Is the job winning or not? Then you go to the crew level. Is the crew winning or not? Then each individual person. And the more you can roll that down, the better chance you have a success.

[A]

And when did you start sharing that financial.

[B]

Probably, probably three years ago.

[A]

And has it been good?

[B]

For the most part? Yeah. Yeah, really good. And we call it the tough stuff. Like this is. We got to talk about the tough stuff.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You know, and then like in construction, I don't know if you've. If you've seen the financials of construction company, like in Indiana generally, January, March, you lose your ass, you got a huge hole, and then. Then you start. You start digging out of it, and at some point, you got your black day of where you're making profit. So one of our goals every year is to be at a zero, no loss by the end of March. In the last three years, we have, we've been able to get subdivision work and off road work, and the Weather wasn't bad, and we've been at zero in March. Well, then every dollar you make, you get, you know, a small percentage of profit for the rest. Well, this winter's been particularly bad and we're going to be in a huge hole coming out of March now. We still have the work, we still got the people, we just got a lot more to do. So, you know, we just kind of compressed the timeline. But, you know, we got to share that with people. We got to say, hey, we're behind. Probably going to meet more overtime this summer. Like, we're probably going to have to work hard, we're going to have to add some crews, we're going to have to do some stuff to get the same amount of work, you know, work done now in a 9 month period instead of a 12 month period. But.

[A]

But there's a why associated with it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Instead of you just being the asshole.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, all right, everybody's working more.

[B]

Everybody's working Saturdays.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

But at that point, people will start saying like, well, if you want me to get 500 foot a day in, I need 2500 or I need 3000 foot in a week. What if I get my 3000 foot done in five days, can I not work Saturday? Sure. Exactly. Everybody wins. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so they start thinking like, oh, so we just need to get the job done faster.

[A]

Yeah, well, and that.

[B]

And it's no longer motivated by the cost per unit. Cost per foot of putting a pipe in the ground. It's like, we'll just get one more pipe a day for seven days and that's. That's another day.

[A]

Well, that goes back to like the loader operator example. Wasting rock. They're not intentionally trying to waste rock. Yeah, that's not.

[B]

Well, it's not even a loader guy. It's. It's like if, if the grounds too soft, you got to put more stones. If it's too wide or you put too much on top of it. But it's just, you got to have a line of. For good or we change.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like it. And it's not a matter of yelling, screaming. It's just like, we're supposed to put five buckets of stone per pipe in. We did six. If we keep doing this, we're gonna lose three ton for every pipe. Three ton at $36 a ton. Like, it just adds up. Like, that's why we're losing money. So you got to track because sometimes some of our foremen will go slower. They'll get a smaller bucket, a smaller box and go slower. But they'll have less trucking in the less sand backfill. They'll make more money by going slower, which is counterintuitive, but without the trust and the math, you're like, just go faster. Everything's better if you go faster.

[A]

And that, that's their decision. Yeah, okay, interesting.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But then do you use that to help inform the rest of the company if there's a better.

[B]

Yeah, so let's, so let's say crew A is having a problem. Somebody will go talk to them. It might be my brother, it might be Scott, might be one of superintendents. They'll go meet with them. Like, all right, what can we do different? They're like, well, because of this gas line, fiber optic, line, tree trap, whatever the case is, we can't go any faster. Okay, well let's figure out how to be cheaper. Take a guy off the crew, narrow it up, get smaller boxes. So like, you know, you want a 3 foot wide spreaders because it's the fastest to work. Well, if we go to two and a half foot, you know that, that's, that saves a little bit of trucking, saves a little bit of backfill. Like every little thing makes a difference. And then they'll just start tweaking it and they'll get like, okay, for, instead of running a six man crew, we'll go down to a four man crew. We'll make the spreader smaller and then overall we'll still, we'll still make money. Now that works great from a profitability standpoint, but if we're supposed to get 400 foot day and we're only getting 200 foot a day, the job's gonna take longer then.

[A]

Now you've considered scheduling.

[B]

So he's like, okay, well how long is that? How's that gonna affect us? So then it's, you know, you just gotta kind of play all that together. Sure. Which is really hard when you know, let's say our estimating team's like, hey, we want to see our production averages to help us bid better. Like, well, but the problem is we change the crew size. So it's not always the same crew. So you know, they're managing a price per unit of put pipe in the ground and it may be more or less. So production isn't really the issue. It's the cost per unit. And so it's hard to. Hard to get that explained. You know, obviously we focus on labor and equipment because that's usually our Biggest risk item. Yeah, but so is aggregate, and so is trucking Materials is huge. And so you gotta. You gotta control all of those at the same time. And without having that source of truth at the job level that they can make their own decisions. It's tough. It's really tough.

[A]

I mean, it makes perfect sense to me. That's like, what. What every great company I know is doing right now. They're sharing information.

[B]

You know, let's say from an office standpoint, we can say, look, we're gonna buy delivered stone from this vendor, and they're gonna have trucking hauled at this dump site. Two separate operations, because that's the cleanest, best way to build a job. And then the farmer gets out there and goes, well, I know this guy is 50 cents a ton more for stone, but I can haul a truck full of dirt to his dump site and then lodestone and bring it back. Even with the 50 cents more, I'm saving trucking both ways. This round robin method works better. So it's like, oh, we got to give them the flexibility, and the software's got to be built where they can run the scenario without having to call, you know, accounting or a project manager to figure out. They can figure that stuff out on their own.

[A]

So. And they can make those decisions, and

[B]

they can make those decisions on the fly. Yeah. Now, the young guys, maybe they don't know those tricks yet, but most all of our good crews that they can. They can all make those decisions on their own. And so that's just another one of those tricks of, hey, plan A. This is easy. We're hammering it. Great. Oh, it's not going so good. We got to start pulling all the tricks we can to figure how to get the cost back in line.

[A]

But. And has it been decentralized like this? It's been decentralized like this just for a few years.

[B]

No, I'd say. I mean, my dad was always really good about sharing job costs with people.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

So we've always had a job book. Now, back in the day, it was a printed book. You had the actual budget. You had the purchase. Like, they. They knew everything. They should be informed, you know, how to do it. So the only thing that ever got them in trouble was, you know, they're seeing we're getting paid $200 foot to put this pipe in, and I'm only spending, you know, $500 a day in labor. Look how much money they're making. Yeah, well, there's a lot of other things that go into that so you know, heavy job is great about comparing cost to cost. You don't compare cost to profit, like cost to sell price.

[A]

Well and, but this is the importance too. It's not just about sharing information, it's about, about educating people as well. Because the way money flows through a business is way different than the way money flows through a household.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

They're two totally different games. You're playing two completely different games. And so we've, we've had to just non stop and we, we, we continue to have to do this. Educate people. Educate people. Educate people. Educate people. Educate people. Here's what these numbers mean. Here's why, here's good, here's bad. It's a little bit different what you've been taught. This is why like the more we can teach, the more they can understand, grasp onto it and then the better off they can, then the more effective they can be with, with that information we're giving to them.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I don't, yeah. The solution is not just give people a bunch of information because if they don't know what to do with it or if they don't know how to read it, it's, well, it can be,

[B]

it can be counterintuitive, it can, it can work. And what's really dangerous is when they think they know what they're doing and they don't.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because then they start making decisions. And now that's that, that and then. So you gotta like it's the pain funnel. Okay. How'd you get here? What did you do? What was your decisions like? Oh, your decision tree was really good. You just had the wrong information, you were looking at the wrong screen to make that decision. If you'd looked at this screen, you probably would've made a different decision. So it's not that their decision makers broke, it's, they just weren't looking at the right set of data to make the right decision.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then, you know, if somebody makes a mistake and you learn from it and you don't fire them over it, they won't make the mistake again. I mean now. Yeah, it's just really expensive to make a bunch of mistakes the first time.

[A]

It is expensive. Yeah. And yeah, but people, I'm an, I'm an optimist when it comes to people. They don't want to screw up.

[B]

Right.

[A]

They want to win. They want to win, they want to do their best. And, but, but you have to trust them. And I think this is where people really struggle and this is what I've noticed is if I say I trust you, but I act in a mistrusting way, whatever. The distrustful. Whatever.

[B]

Double check. Call somebody else.

[A]

Exactly. I'm double checking. I'm calling someone else. Exactly. Then it creates resentment. And now you are going to potentially act in a distrustful way, whatever the heck the word is, and then it's going to confirm me, like, well, I knew that.

[B]

I knew I couldn't trust you.

[A]

I knew I couldn't trust it. And this is why I can't trust people. But I was the one that created that whole dynamic in the beginning. Whereas when you just genuinely trust people, you'll get the shithead 1 out of 10 times, but 9 out of 10 times, people are like, holy smokes. I've never actually been trusted before. I don't want to screw this up. I'm gonna do my best. It changes the dynamic.

[B]

And I think there's an old school, you know, everybody's gotta be mad at everybody. Everybody's gonna be arguing, you know, kind of that old, like, you know, whether it's the contractors, engineers, or whether it's boss to worker, like, it's just. The more you can get on the same page, like, life's better. Like, it just is. I mean, and it's. It's hard to get some people to change.

[A]

It's. It's funny, this whole conversation, we're talking about construction, but we haven't talked about, like, equipment or anything like that. It's all about people. Process.

[B]

Yeah. Which is, I guess I read a book recently and then. And basically, you know, it's same thing. Everybody, every CEO talks about the business, about people, and the guy's like, in five minutes, I can tell you if it's true or not. Let me look at your calendar.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What are your meetings about?

[A]

That's good, right?

[B]

And if your meetings are about leadership and training and teaching, and then you are putting your, you know, money where your mouth is. And if you're. All your meetings are about financial reports and, and equipment purchases and, like, you know, I'm saying, so where are you spending your time? Other people. What's the saying? They, you know, they see a lot more than they hear.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And if I'm working on leadership and I'm working on training, they say, oh, shit, this really is important. Like, if I just say, hey, we're gonna outsource this, we'll have somebody else do it. That's not the same.

[A]

Yeah. One of the best indicators for me is, like, if I go out to a job site and one of the leaders of the company is with me. That's a pretty good sign, like, because that doesn't happen very often.

[B]

Really?

[A]

Oh, yeah. You. You'd be surprised, but they're like, I can think of some great leaders in the industry right now.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

They're along. They've been, you know, they'll always be out on the job. They'll be with the people, like a heath Hannah, like a. A herb sergeant.

[B]

I mean, well, there's. And then there's the, like. Think about the chain of command. It's hard to. When you're the boss, the owner, whatever, it's real easy just to jump down. I know the hoe guy. I want to go talk to him. Yeah, well, again, well, now the foreman's like, well, why is he talking to him and not talking to me? Why does he do it? Right? So it's like, if I show up to the job at this point, I'm jumping like three or four levels. And usually the chaos that creates isn't worth. So on one hand, my guy's like, hey, why don't you go there? I'm like, well, I drive by on the weekends. Like, I'll sit in the parking lot and fly the drone over. Like, I see what's going on. But if I put my nose in the middle of this, I'm inevitably gonna ask a question, you're gonna give me an answer, and then I'm gonna start calling me, hey, why the hell are you doing that? Why are you doing this for? Like, I trust you. I want you to do it. And sometimes just me being there disrupts the whole flow. And so it's just. It's a discipline that's hard.

[A]

Well, and I like Ryan Schmidt. He talked about this, how he has scheduled time to go out to different sites and spend time with the whole crew, and he brings breakfast or whatever it is. But if he's just driving by, like, he won't stop because It'll be for 15 minutes, and he doesn't have enough time to spend to people. And they'll be like, well, he doesn't, you know, care, whatever it is. And perception is reality. And especially as a leader, like, you are watched like a hawk, man. And. And I, I've caught myself even forgetting that, like, wait a minute. Everything I do is watched very carefully. And I better. I better understand the second, third order consequences of my actions. I can say something that means nothing to me, that keeps them up all night.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Like, and that's really easy to do. It happens all the time. But I can also look at a job site and tell you the quality of the company with a fair degree of accuracy. I'd say like within 80% accuracy. I can look at a job and be like, yeah, I probably know what kind of company this is. I mean it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not that.

[B]

You know what? So start taking those pictures of goods and bads.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And then train an AI model.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And then you snap a picture and am I good or bad?

[A]

Well, but it's like, it's simple shit. It's like what are your work pickup trucks look like? What's the passenger wheel well look like of your work vehicles? What are the tracks? Are the tracks shoveled on excavators? Are the floors and equipment swept out? It's like simple stuff is materials. Is, is there trash in the yard where people park is materials? Is it, is it orderly? Is pipe stacked up in the right way or is it just thrown all over the damn place? So the excavators beat up, Are the machines beat up? Yeah. How scratched are the counterweights?

[B]

Is the trench boxes garbage? Or do they look like they're well maintained?

[A]

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I. Is the brand on machines, how do their people look? Do they look like they just came out of a homeless camp? Or do they look like. I know they're dirty. They're like working in the mud all day. But do they look like professionals? That's part of it as well. You go to Europe and you go to a European job site, everybody's looking good. And I think that creates a sense of pride in the work. I think that's important.

[B]

One thing we've done great as an industry is the high vision.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You just can't be on a job. So without high vis. Without boots, without a hard hat, like, I mean we've at least as an industry professionalized to that level. Like you, you can tell when you drive by, like, hey, there's a non union company, they're wearing shorts, you know, no hi vis, no hard hats. You go to the next job. Oh that those guys know what they're doing. Like that, that at least makes you at a level playing field, you know. And when you go into bid do a gc, the. They just want the lowest number. Like do you want a safety program or do you want the cheapest price? Like you, you know, which one do you really care about?

[A]

Well, but going back to qualifications, like you can't even get the door with a Lot of. Especially the big GCs without a certain standards.

[B]

Well, I mean, the big ones, you know, Turner, they've got a plan, and if you don't, they won't. You're not qualified. You. You can't even turn a bid in. Yeah, yeah, you know, so guess what? They're willing to pay for that fee. Like, they're willing to pay for us to have a safety program. Right. So. So we're at least a level playing field with the people we compete against when we bid them. So now the problem is not all GCs are the same. They all say the same words, but then their actions don't represent what they actually say. So then you go, well, we don't really want to. If you're going to hire, if you're. Let those people bid, we probably don't want to be working for you. So that's the. Get to know quickly. Well, we got to figure out who else. Who else are you? You know, who else do you normally use? And if they list the A players in the industry, hey, we'll be. We'll be as competitive as those guys. They list these other guys. Like, yeah, we're probably not the right mix from you. You're probably not going to want to pay for our safety program and our training program and our new equipment that works every day and getting done on time. If you just want the cheapest number, we're probably not your guy.

[A]

But then that, but that sense of discipline is what creates a great company as well, is, you know, but you knowing what jobs to take on and which ones to walk away from. Yeah, a lot of companies don't have that sense of discipline, which I understand. Like, especially I didn't live through 2008, 2009, when it was feast or famine, and it was famine and it was. We. We don't say no to anything. But that creates a huge problem.

[B]

One takeaway, you know, after. After that, you bet every job you could get. Right. That's kind of my dad's philosophy. But everything you could get, you'll get what you get. And then you'll. You'll make. You'll try to make money and it'll be fine. And then at some point, we're like, it takes just as much effort to start a $500,000 job as a $5 million job. And then we came up with one of our EOs. Things like don't bid any job that's under a million dollars. And we're like, can we actually do this? I mean, could we have the Discipline to say no to jobs that are under a million dollars. And then we started doing it and all of a sudden we're not, you know, that's 50 jobs a year. We're not bidding that we weren't going to get anyway. It's 50 jobs that, that is more efficient from a career standpoint, less intensive on project managers. And all of a sudden like, oh, shit, this actually works. And now you got to go find the other jobs. But it worked. But it was that fear of, well, this is the way we've always done it and just change philosophies. Oh, that's a, that's a, that's a gamble. That's a risk.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And, you know, luckily it worked for us, but.

[A]

Well, it seems like it's working pretty well.

[B]

We're trying always opportunities to improve, though.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

That's, you know, that's, that's, that's one of those auto responses. I've tried to train myself when somebody's got a problem, you know, Jocko's thing, like, somebody screwed something up good.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

We're going to learn today.

[A]

I love that.

[B]

We're going to get better today.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you know, Andrew says that in my office all the time, like, hey, we've got an opportunity to get better. We are so blessed with opportunities to improve. And my people, like, you are sick in the brain.

[A]

Yeah. But some of these guys, they just get so worked up about shit and it's just like, what's the point of getting all stressed out all the time? Like, oh. I mean, the, the thing that's beaten, beating that out of me is air travel. Yeah, I, I mean, I, I gave up stressing about it so long ago. So many people get so worked up about it.

[B]

So, so what's your secret there?

[A]

Don't stress out about it.

[B]

Show up early. Take Xanax.

[A]

No, I just assume it's gonna go wrong. I just assume it's gonna go wrong. So when I get somewhere on time, I'm like, this is unbelievable. How good is this? And so when things go wrong, it's

[B]

like, you probably fly more than the average listener here.

[A]

More than the average listener.

[B]

How many flights a year do you think you're in?

[A]

It's like between 80 and 100. It's not that many. But now it's a lot of long haul. Like it's a lot of miles.

[B]

Yeah. You're going some cool places.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like of the 80 to 100 a year, how many have. The schedule gets totally screwed up?

[A]

Quite a few now post Covid, the airlines are a disaster.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And the, and the US Airlines have consolidated more and more and more. There's no competition. It's, it's. And it's so funny. It's like they enforce all this antitrust stuff with construction and this and that, but you have the airlines over here colluding up the wazoo. I mean, the whole thing is a collusion scheme. And they're in bed with the federal government. Like, give us $50 billion during COVID just because you can. Just because we can get it, and then we're going to be shittier. It's like, what other business works this way? There are these quasi government companies now, and then they're on the stock exchange. That's the craziest thing. You get $50 billion. I love it how like, can still pay.

[B]

And so I'm sure you do the same thing. You do flight away or whatever. It's like, okay, where's my plane? Yeah, like, well, it's not even here yet. But they won't tell you it's going to be late until it's late. I'm like, well, you could have saved me from driving here two hours early and now waiting two hours. But no, they can't, you know, like, but they have the on time and they don't. It's not late till it's late. Like, come on.

[A]

Oh, it's a bunch of games.

[B]

Let's. Let's be honest with ourselves.

[A]

Yeah, but, but it's, it's. It's like I have no say over it. You know, I don't have. And there's an illusion of choice in our travel. You don't really have a choice. Like, that's the funny thing too, is like, I only fly Delta. It's like, well, you must not fly very much because that's not how it works.

[B]

Yeah, we always, like, we want to go wherever we want to go. The best times we want to go.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And sometimes it's. You switch brands, like, well, international.

[A]

You have to, because it's international law. You can't have certain airlines flying in different countries. Like, a country. Like, a country's airline has to originate and end in the country. So, like, American Airlines can only fly two countries, and then to America, they can't go. Fly to a country and then fly to another country. So that's why you have all these different airlines around the world.

[B]

I did not know that. Not interesting. I didn't know that. Other. I'm guessing that's why you're a travel expert. And you. You. You figured out how to not be stressed out about.

[A]

Well, that's why I'm on 20 airlines a year now.

[B]

You're a frequent flyer on all of them?

[A]

Yeah. People are like, wow, you must have great airline. I was like, no, I don't, because I'm on so many airlines.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I can't do anything about it. But anyway, that's my. I'll get off my airline soapbox.

[B]

We'll solve that after we get.

[A]

Maybe I am stressed out about it.

[B]

Like, maybe you are.

[A]

No, no, no. I appreciate you coming down. I really enjoy.

[B]

Been a long time coming. You've asked me for a couple years, and I've been. I keep. Keep reading the. The emails you send out. I watch the podcast.

[A]

It's like you've had a company to run. You've got.

[B]

Yeah, we're busy. Yeah. What you're doing is amazing. I mean, it's. It's pulling everybody together. You know, anything we can do to help. I think most people in industry would say the same. I appreciate it, but. But I think somebody's got to be that unifying voice. I think you guys are doing a good job of right now, so I appreciate it.

[A]

No, we're. We're just playing our part. I didn't choose to be here. We didn't choose to be here, but it's like, we're here. This is our role to play. You're playing your role.

[B]

Yeah. For everybody.

[A]

Plays our part. We'll be in a. I think a really good.

[B]

Hopefully we can try to get profitable and do more cool, cool adventures with technology. So I'm excited about this AI thing. So that might be a huge sales get ready.

[A]

Yeah. I would love to show you some of the stuff we're working on because we've got. Got some tricks up our sleeves. Yeah. I. People, when they're like, what do you. What do you guys got going? I'm like, world domination. They're like, that's so funny. I'm like, it won't be in a few years when we're eating your lunch, but until then.

[B]

Yeah, it's coming, huh?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Gonna need a bigger office.

[A]

Yeah, we're gonna have a different office. I want equipment on the next one.

[B]

There you go.

[A]

I want dirt.

[B]

So I remember some of your stories. You. Did you buy a skid steer personally to goof around with? Yeah. And then I saw a sign out there. Have you flipped it over?

[A]

Rolled it with 12 hours on it squarely on its roof, like 180 degrees right on Its roof.

[B]

Did you learn something that day?

[A]

Boy, did I. Yep. I. Yeah, that was a really good lesson. So. But that the problem too is like I've spoken a little bit about this recently, is people like you, you came up in the industry around working people. So by the time you legally got into this world at 18 years of age, you already had 15 years experience. Me, I got in at 18 with zero background experience. My dad was a lawyer. Like I had nothing.

[B]

I didn't know how to use a

[A]

ratchet straw, how to use a grease gun.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I don't know the basic principles of a skid steer. And if you have material in your bucket and it's a little raised and you're going down a hill backwards like, and you hit a soft spot, of course you're gonna roll over, you dummy. That's how it works. It's physics. I just. You just don't know that or. The first time that I loaded it, I didn't. I didn't have it in the right spot on the trailer. And then you start going down the interstate and the trailer's going like this back and forth and you're nearly shitting yourself.

[B]

Everybody learns that lesson.

[A]

Exactly. But it's like there I am in my 20s learning that lesson, whereas a lot of people learn that when they were 14.

[B]

I was probably 16 when I learned that lesson.

[A]

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So I've just had to learn this stuff later.

[B]

Oh, it's amazing the amount of things we can flip over and break at work. Sometimes you're like, that's impressive. That's awesome.

[A]

And that's how the previous generation came up too, is they were able to make mistakes like on the job worked because mistakes were kind of part of the game. As long as you didn't kill someone.

[B]

Now there wasn't cell phones and social media posting stuff and.

[A]

Yeah. But you go work for a turner and you roll a machine on site, they shut the whole fucking site down. And it's a, it's a fiasco. It's a company wide email and.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

So on and so forth. And it's just. The rules are different now.

[B]

Yep. So it's a crazy world.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah.

[B]

Hopefully we're getting better.

[A]

I think so.

[B]

Yeah. What's the. I'll see if I can find a graph and send it to you. But basically it's in the industrial age. Every other industry has, you know, multiple X to improved efficiency. Except construction is just flat and.

[A]

Well, it's declined.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

It's. It's steadily. It's like slowly declined for five decades. Inefficiency.

[B]

Yeah. And then I look at from the same thing from, you know, from a costing standpoint. So if, if the town had a problem on one job and they're going to fix it by, you know, bedding all the pipe in pennies or whatever silly thing they come up with, well then now that's the new standard. Well, is it my job to say that's silly, you should have just done it right the first time or you want to do something silly? We just put it in the bid. We had one job. They wanted to put styrofoam on top of the bedding stone to make sure that the, the dirt didn't collapse the pipe. Like that's got to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's what you want, that's what we'll do. But you know, it just makes the job cost more.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And then you just, you know, and then everybody in the industry just slowly adds their safety factor, their safety program, whatever thing they want to call to make themselves feel better. It just drives the price up. Productivity goes down. Like you're not getting real value of the things we're spending.

[A]

And a lot of people don't talk like these government agencies, they can't really effectively employ, employ a lot of top notch people anymore because they can't pay these top notch rates. So all these top notch people are going to these consulting firms and these engineering firms that then the federal, their government agencies, state, federal, local agencies have to use because they don't have the internal people because they can't pay the people and then they have to take their piece around. Around goes.

[B]

Yep. For sure.

[A]

Yeah. It's a hamster wheel. Yeah.

[B]

Well, cool.

[A]

Well, yeah, thanks for coming down. Really appreciate what you guys are doing.

[B]

And I'll have to keep, keep being honest in your emails, share the industry where you're at and I think, I think the industry will rally around it and help support when you need it.

[A]

It's happening. I mean like what's happened with Dirt World this year is incredible. To be damn near sold out in March.

[B]

That's awesome.

[A]

So it's already, it's like people are really coming along.

[B]

And how many people go to Dirt World?

[A]

1250 attendees. And then we've got about 250 from sponsors, so about 1500.

[B]

Wow, that's awesome.

[A]

It's incredible.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah, it's amazing.

[B]

Our team loves it. Great speaker. I mean having great speakers helps a lot.

[A]

It does. But we're we're refining it a little bit because it's. I think it's more so about who's in the room.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Than actually who's on stage. And so we're still going to have the speakers.

[B]

Yeah. But. Yeah. Who's on stage gets the people there. Well, the value may be from the small room conversations.

[A]

Yes. But now that we've delivered value consistently, I don't think next year we even have to publish the agenda to sell the event out within a few weeks.

[B]

Oh, I would think so.

[A]

And that. And that. I kind of like.

[B]

You're building a. You're building a reputation.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Time. You don't have to have the agenda done before you're selling.

[A]

Yeah. But I want people to just show up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And, like, I don't even know what we're going to do today. And just take them on a journey, which is. I think that's when it gets really fun.

[B]

That's visionary.

[A]

I. I don't see why we can't.

[B]

Our team's excited. We'll send people every year. Awesome. Just keep being awesome. Keep doing it. Yep. Right on. All right, come in. Thank you so much.