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As you know, Ariat is the official Dirt Talk podcast sponsor. And at this point, we've talked plenty about their footwear, their workwear. But now it is winter and boy, is it cold. It was 17 degrees this morning. I had to warm the truck up. But just because it's cold does not mean the work stops. So to get the job done, you need the best, warmest workwear possible. And Ariat has a long list of outerwear, amazing jackets, pants and other goods available now. You can shop at their website, ariat.com Dirttalk that is ariat.com Dirtttalk hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Dirt Talk podcast. This is the Monday edition question and answer. If you have questions for future podcasts, you can send them to dirttalkillwood.com send them to me on Instagram, send them to me wherever. They will eventually end up here. And I have chosen four good ones for today. The first to get right into it. How do you deal with a leader with little experience? And there's no context here, so I'm going to take this in two different directions. First is if I'm a leader above a leader with little experience, I will one acknowledge that they have little experience in leadership and that leadership is a skill. I try not to use people's lack of experience in leadership against them. I try to use that as a point of understanding. We have a lot of young leaders at Build Whip. I'm a young leader. I'm amongst them, so I can really relate. And it takes a long time to build leadership skills. So I think if someone is working hard to become a better leader, if their intentions are pure, I try to be very patient with young leaders because I know it takes time to build up those skills. And if I can help them build those skills, build themselves as an individual and as a leader, they are going to be extremely, extremely effective. And they are likely to stay here for a long time. And even if they don't, they go somewhere else, I think they're gonna be very appreciative of their time here, which is good for us in the long haul as well. So one experience as a leader, you can't really learn how to be a leader without being in a leadership position. And if you're in a leadership position, you're making mistakes. Making mistakes is part of it. You're going to make mistakes as a young leader or an experienced leader. That's just the way it happens. And you can try your best to avoid some mistakes by talking, talking to other leaders or listening to podcasts or reading books or whatever it is. But you are going to make mistakes. And that's where Jocko's concept of extreme ownership is extremely helpful. And that's where having leaders above you that you can lean on is extremely helpful as well. So I try to take that into consideration. When we are dealing with some of the younger leaders here at the company, I apply a lot of grace and patience. I try to put myself in their position and try to pass down what I've learned along the way and hear about what they're learning as well, because I can benefit from that too. The way I think this question was intended, though, was from the other direction. If you are under a leader with little experience, I think the same principle applies. That is, they're in the leadership position. I don't want to undermine them as a leader. I'm still, ultimately, I still roll up to them at the end of the day. And nobody up at the top, leadership or high up in leadership will look too fondly upon people going around people. So, one, I would accept that I am a part of this leader's team. Two, I would put themselves, put myself in their position and understand that they are in a position that I'm not in. They're accountable to people I'm not accountable to. They have potentially information that I don't have as well. They have responsibilities that I don't have. And so just having a level of understanding is really helpful. Next is just also understanding that they have little experience as a leader. So they, they don't know what they're doing. That's, that's okay. They're trying to learn. And maybe I can be in that position too. But to get to that position, I'm going to be best off if I can support that leader with little experience, if I can make their life a little bit easier, even if they are a pain in the ass, even if they're an asshole, whatever it is, even if they're making mistakes, blaming others. The most I can do to support that leader, the more I can do to support that leader, the better. Because that is going to help my team, that is going to help the company, that is going to help my career in the long term. Yes, it's going to require me to swallow my pride, put my ego aside and potentially avoid going around them. But I will probably be better off if I'm able to support that leader. Because even if that leader eventually goes, is fired or whatever it is because they're bad, I want to be viewed as the next best option for that position. If I want to get into that leadership position or I guess that's it. I guess the other way around is if, if they do stay, I'm being abused or whatever it is by a leader. I've done my best, I have supported them, I have used it as a learning opportunity, but it's not getting any better. Senior management doesn't care, which does happen as well. I can go to another company and I can use that leader with little experience who wasn't doing it right as a great example of what not to do when I'm a leader down the road. So I think in either direction, having some sense of understanding, having some sense of curiosity, of humility is extremely beneficial because leadership is a skill. It is very hard and it takes a lot of time to learn. And I am right in the thick of things myself learning how to lead. Next question. How did you scale up starting from only yourself? I think people think a little bit too much about this. I didn't think about scaling up when I started out. I thought about the problem I was solving and how I could best solve that problem. The problem I was solving was workforce for dirt world companies, primarily heavy civil construction companies. When I began a little bit of mining, if I could help them solve that problem through originally storytelling, photo video, social media, we would be good to go. I would be good to go. And as I solved that problem or attempted to solve that problem for more companies, I started to be busier and I started to be asked for more things like video, like websites, like design work. And I had a choice. I could either design or develop those skill sets myself or I could find people with those skill sets and bring them in part time. So that's what I did. I didn't want a design skill set. I'm not a designer. I didn't want a video skill set. I'm not a video guy. I didn't want a web development skill set. I'm not a web developer. I made the decision to double down on social media, on photography, on storytelling for the dirt world and I leveraged others to do the other stuff in a very low cost, low risk way. So this was maybe 6 months, 9 months, 12 months in. It was quite a while of me doing things on my own. But I got to the point where I needed others and I went to people I first knew. So I went to Dan, who's with us today because he was the only guy in marketing I knew at the time and I was trying to build a marketing agency. So I went to him and Asked him how to build a website. And he had a contractor he worked with that he connected me with. She was the only person I'd ever talked to about web development before. Her stuff looked pretty good. So I brought her in on a contract basis. It was 1099 work. It is part time. It's just per contract. I wasn't employing anybody and it was a great way for me to try working with somebody. Dan and I were working part time together as well. He was kind of just helping me on the side as as we went. Then I needed video help. So that's when I brought Kjell into the mix. And I didn't go to Chell and say, hey Kjell, come on full time. What do you want from a salary standpoint? Here's all your benefits. I didn't do any of that. He helped me on the side doing one project to start. I've got this project. I want these clips. Can you do it? How much is it going to cost me? Few hundred dollars. Whatever it is cool. That way he can see how I worked. I could see how he worked. It was almost like I was building the skillset to work with other people. And I was able to try him out. He was trying me out so that six months down the road when it did come time because we had so much work to bring in somebody full time. I was able to then go to Chell really quickly and bring him into the fold because we were already working together. Angel was the same way. I tried him out on a few part time video projects. He was great. We had more and more video work going. I took the calculator risk to bring him in. Chase. From a design standpoint, we were working on a contract basis. I eventually brought him in as well. We've done that with a ton of people. We still use people as contract today to get to know them. They get to know us. And if they are the right fit, we're the right fit for them. We bring them in full time. It's one of the best things we've done to begin with. And before you scale up, I would say figure out why you want to scale up. Do you want to scale up? What does scaling up look like? What are the realities of scaling up? Everybody on the Internet just talks about how you're going to make more money and everything's going to be bigger. That is not the case. I would be making more money, far more money personally had I just stayed on my own or had I just kept the company to five people, 10 people, 20 people, even. I would be making far more money if that was the goal, if that was my reason for being around. I should not have scaled up past a certain point because I have gotten into a whole new set of challenges as a result. But I've always wanted to scale up because my. My desire for scale leads to more impact. I've always built the business around the desired impact within the dirt world, bringing in that next generation. We need the scale. Cool. I know that's just something I need to do to get to that next level, and whatever I need to do to make it happen, I'm gonna do. But there's a lot of people in business that are miserable because they scaled when they shouldn't have or didn't really want to. They were just put in that position. They thought growth was the only thing that mattered. They've just grown, grown, grown. And we can talk about how many people we have and how much revenue we have and this and this and that, when in reality, that can come at a significant cost. That's not talked about. We've experienced it as well. We went through a period of massive growth. I thought it was awesome. We knew what we were doing or talking about. Oh, we have so many people. And everybody was like, wow, how are you doing it? You're so young. This is incredible. We have gotten better and better as a business. Our headcount has been dramatically reduced from its peak. We peaked at probably 80 people. And within the next few months, we'll be at about 40, high 40s, maybe about 50. We have turned some people over. Some people have left voluntarily. We've asked people to leave. We've laid people off years ago. Never want to do that again. We've also spun some stuff off into some other areas to get other teams in different places so that they can focus. But I have never been happier with the team. Our scale currently for what we're doing, and once we get those fundamentals sorted, we can then continue to scale from here. Going from fifty to a hundred is way different from going one to fifty. So why scale? And focus on the fundamentals. Solve problems and you'll naturally scale over time. I feel like if you're doing the fundamentals right, if you're solving a valuable problem, if you are providing value to society, you will. You will find scale along the way if that's where you want to go. And be sure that's where you want to go, because it is a completely different ballgame than doing your own thing or running a small team, which Is oftentimes, I think, a better way to go for people. What's the best way to get a bachelor's in construction management? The best way to get a bachelor's in construction management is free, without a doubt. I would if I wanted a construction management degree, which is a great degree. That's a degree that has damn near 100% job placement. You'll be making 60, 70, $80,000 a year at a school. You could have a company truck. You could have a lot of responsibility right off the bat. You could be working on big infrastructure projects. You could be working across the United States, Canada, you could be working overseas. It gives you so many opportunities, more opportunities than most degrees out of college will offer you. It's a wonderful degree. I did engineering, A little bit different, A lot different, A lot more math, way more technical. If I went back, I would do construction management. So I was in Arizona. If I wanted to do construction management, I would look at what schools in my state have construction management. Okay, Northern Arizona has construction management. Arizona state has construction management. University of Arizona has engineering, not construction management. So I'm in a rule out. University of Arizona, Northern Arizona University. I don't really want to move to Flagstaff. Arizona State. Cool. I'm going to go to Arizona State and I'm going to stay in state. Because at the time, tuition was a small fraction, and still is, of going out of state. I, for the exact same product, was paying a quarter every year of what I would have paid next door in California, for example, or had I gone to Colorado for, I would say the exact same product. So I stayed in state. I, I got scholarship money through Arizona State. If you stay in state, it's for most universities quite easy to get scholarship money from that university. And then through construction management, once you're in the program, you can apply for construction specific scholarships. A lot of construction companies have scholarships. A lot of construction associations have scholarships. A lot of construction material suppliers have scholarships. You can find all of these scholarships on the Internet. And you can go in and you can apply for as many as you want to apply for. And every once in a while you'll get one. And what will happen is you get one, it'll be for $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, sometimes $10,000. And they will just send you the $10,000 check. They'll just send it to you in the mail. It's crazy how much money is available for this career path, this degree path. And that combined with working every summer in the field because I was in construction management. So I was able to work in the field. I was also able to work during the school year, 20, 25 hours a week full time in the field during, during the summer, 60 hours a week, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 hours a week in the field, depending on where I was and what company I was with, making my own money, scholarships to the university, through private and private businesses and associations, I was able to pay for my entire degree. No debt, not a single loan. I didn't touch the money that my father had gave me for college. So I was able to reinvest that. And that's the money I was used, I used originally many years ago to start the business to live off of so I didn't have to pay myself so that I could grow, build it early on. I've talked about that at length, but that is how I did it. That is the best way to get a bachelor's in construction management. I would look at what program is in your state. I would stay in state, I would do that program, and I would work through school and over summer, every summer, Almost every single scenario I can think of that I've heard of, you will have no debt or very, very minimal debt by the end of those four years. And even if you have some sort of debt, you are going into a field that's in very high demand. You'll be able to make a very good living right out of the gate, and you'll be able to put that money away, live below your means, pay that debt off as quickly as possible, and you are off to the races. Finally, last question. What can people in the industry do to help attract the next generation? Obviously, there's a lot of talk about attracting the next generation right now. I am one of those people talking about it. We're talking about it right now. But as I've thought more and more about it, I have realized that attracting the next generation starts with the existing workforce, the current generation. I don't think it's an external problem or solution. I think it's an internal problem and solution. And so to attract the next generation, I, first and foremost, as an individual, would be asking myself, am I a great example? Do I work hard? Do I enjoy what I do? Do I support those around me? Am I healthy? Do I have the family I want? Am I in the financial situation I want to be in physically? Am I where I want to be? I would be asking myself those questions first, and if the answer is no, I'm not physically where I want to be, I don't enjoy what I do. I'm not pushing myself. I'm not challenged right now. My family's not where it should be right now. I'm not living where I want to live. Whatever it is, I would solve those problems first. If this industry is built upon people that like what they do, that are proud of what they do, that are great examples within society, we're going to be fine bringing in that next generation. But there are some very startling statistics that you've probably heard about suicide or substance abuse or divorce or debt. There's all kinds of bad examples within the construction industry. And until we as individuals solve those problems for ourselves, and we as companies and as leaders help our people solve those problems for them, I don't think we necessarily have the right to focus just exclusively on attract, attract, attract, attract. The reality is we're turning over a huge percentage of the workforce every year, turning those people over. So if we just stopped a small percentage of our turnover, we wouldn't need to bring in new people for a very long time, which is the reality. So I would say, am I as an individual, what can we do to attract next generation? Am I as an individual, where I want to be? Am I a good role model for the next generation? And really, honestly, I asked myself that. And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to be a good role model for the people within this company, for the people that listen to this podcast, for the people that follow along on social media, for my family. I know I have a lot of work to do, and that's why I'm working. I feel like I'm working harder than ever to make myself worthy of, of the position that I'm in. So that's step one, step two, talk about what you do, talk about what you do. And you can do both of these things simultaneously. You don't have to be this perfect individual before you can talk about the industry. Talk about what you do. Talk about on social media. That's a great place to go. If you choose one platform, I would choose LinkedIn. Talk about the projects you're on, the stuff you've built in the past, the company you work for, the team you work alongside, subcontractors you work with, the, the, the, the, the, the great inspectors that you found along the way. I don't know what it is. Talk about the industry and what it is that you do. How you're building that road, how a road's built, why curb goes in before asphalt goes in. I don't Know why does sanitary sewer come before water? I don't know. It's common sense to you, but people don't know that. People don't know how the world around them works. And we're sitting here pissed off. All people don't appreciate the construction industry. They don't appreciate it because they don't understand it. They don't see it. And that's on us. Until we talk about it, it's not going to change. So how can you explain what you do, why you do it and how it impacts people? That's a huge, huge, huge thing you can do. And even if you don't believe in social media or you're working at some top secret nuclear power plant, you can't talk about the project you're on. You can talk about the industry from a big picture standpoint being very general, lessons learned in the past or lessons you've heard other people learn. You can keep it as general as possible. You can talk about how stuff is built in general. Well, my company doesn't allow me to talk about what we do on social media. We're building a highway. There's nothing secret about it, but that's the reality. There's a lot of companies that still restrict people on social media. Well, you can still talk about how a highway is built without any reference to what you do day to day, without pictures from your job, without reference to the company you work for. You can still talk about how a road is built even without pictures in general. You can just use words to do that through something like LinkedIn or if you don't want to do any of that. I don't do social media, will never believe in it. That's fine then. Just make people in your world aware of what you do and why. Can you show your family some pictures from work and what you're working on? Do your kids know what you do every day at work? Do they know why you do it? Do they know the impact you're creating? Oftentimes the answer is no. And so if nothing else, just start at the dinner table, start at home, start in your community. Do people know what you do and why you do it? And if we have millions of people, the millions of people in the construction industry talking about the industry and millions of people in the construction industry bettering themselves every day, there is no possible way this industry does not succeed. And when this industry succeeds long term, all of society succeeds long term. It's a really big deal. And I think it starts with us. I am tired of people acting like it's this outside problem that we have no control over. Oh, it's colleges and it's the next generation. They suck and so on and so forth. No, it's none of that. It's on us to solve. And until we look ourselves in the mirror and accept that, nothing is going to change. And the best in class companies right now that are recruiting the next generation very effectively, that are making more money than they've ever made before, that are building the best infrastructure they've built, are doing just this. Are doing exactly this. So that is what I have for Q and A today. Again, if you have questions questions, submit them to Dirk talkillwhat.com send them to me as a DM on Instagram. Whatever it is, get them to us. We'll answer them on the next one. Until then, thanks for listening and stay dirty.