← Dirt Talk Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
This episode of the Dirt Talk podcast is with Jonathan Pease of Rock Solid. Jonathan's the founder of Rock Solid Stabilization and Reclamation, a nationwide specialty contractor. He stumbled into soil stabilization after watching a fly ash demonstration two weeks before bidding a car dealership job and turned a niche no one wanted into one of the most in demand specialties in modern site work. In this episode he reveals why every road, parking lot and data center in America is only as good as the dirt underneath it. And why the industry is still barely scratching the surface on what stabilization can do. I have seen rock solid at sites across the Midwest. The biggest site I saw was out in Louisiana. They were laying down a head spinning volume of lime and cement. After that project, I got to know Jonathan and, and he has just a amazing story. So it was only natural for him to come in here and talk through it. I had a blast with him and I hope you enjoy this episode here. It is. The easiest place to start. Can you just explain stabilization? Like, I feel like a lot of people have still never seen it. A lot of people haven't seen it. It's starting to become way, way more common. But like, what is, what is the purpose of lime or cement stabilization?
- [01:37]
B
The really quick elevator pitch I always give we, you know, if I give people, what do you do? I say we make soft, shitty ground hard and stable again.
- [01:45]
A
That's really good.
- [01:46]
B
That's what I tell people that have no clue about the heavy civil industry. Somebody like yourself that I can dive in a little bit deeper on. On what? I believe it. So the two, you know, like the biggest thing we do or the two biggest things that we do is soil modification, which is modifying the soil. You know, like if it's just wet, you know, we can add different additives like limes or cements or mixtures. And there's some other additives out there that we can do to stabilize it and you know, and that's modification. So just improve what is there. You could also call modification. We're using quick lime to modify the soil because you're chemically modifying and changing the structure of it. So down in Texas they use a ton of it down in the south. And a lot of that's lime. It could be hydrated lime, lime slurry. Quick lime finds it could be all different stuff, but it all will modify the soil and it changed the structure of it so it doesn't react the same to moisture when it comes in later on. And I'm not a chemist or a geotechnical engineer, so I don't know exactly how it's doing some of what it does, but I just know it works. But it does actually modify. And then true stabilization is where there's usually a design requirement like we're trying to achieve a certain psi, a certain something, you know, a certain stability, a certain strength. And typically you're looking for that strength after it's been soaked because you can take pretty much any dirt that not heavy organic content, and you could add water to it, get it to an optimal moisture, compact it properly, and it'll hold up well. And you can do that with topsoil. But as soon as topsoil gets a little bit too wet, gets really greasy, slimy, and you get stuck in it, if it gets a little bit too dry, it turns into moon dust. But if you can, you know, find that fine line with it and keep it there, you can drive semis on it all day long. But yet as soon as it changes, you know, so, you know, and like a lot of the jobs we do, like these wind and solar jobs out in the middle of nowhere, you're lucky if they strip off one or two inches of the vegeta wet vegetation in the topsoil. Sure. And we're treating the next 12 to 16 inches in place, which, most of which is topsoil.
- [04:00]
A
On a wind job, is it mostly the roads that you're doing?
- [04:03]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like in the wind and solar. Just the access roads.
- [04:05]
A
Just access roads.
- [04:06]
B
And very rarely do we do anything under a turbine foundation or you do the, like crane pads. That's where they make the picks when you get out in the middle of a soft field.
- [04:17]
A
Yeah.
- [04:17]
B
A lot of times they'll do what they call the H pads or crane pads, and they've changed the name over the years. So it doesn't scare the insurance companies.
- [04:23]
A
Sure, of course, yeah. Yeah. Because there's never been a problem with cranes lifting heavy things in fields. So it's, it's, it's. One of the benefits is time. Because if you've got wet material, you can't make compaction, you can't build anything on it. And so you can, you can dry it faster than taking a disc than, than just watching, hoping for the sun to come out for a few weeks to dry it all out or using a tractor disc to dry it out conventionally is kind of all you can do to modify the soil in a more traditional way. You just have to let the air. You just have to let the moisture evaporate from the soil. With this, you can take it out Faster.
- [05:04]
B
Yeah. A lot of it is that where you're just trying to dry it. But a lot of times, you get these projects where it's soft and it's. The farther down you get, the softer it goes. So sometimes you're trying to build a crust over the top of it. You know, like in 2021, we went down to beaumont, texas, and did a. It was a rail spur, like loading crude oil out that would come in from the gulf on ships, get unloaded into tanks on land, and then went on to rail to go to the refineries. And the farther down you went, the worse it got. We were. I was there for the test holes, but the test holes were on the north side of the job, where the retention basin went in, and that's where generated the fill for the site. And that was wet. And so if they want to move, you know, 10,000 yards a day or whatever it is. And constantly keep moving and compacting. But if it's too wet to get compaction, that's when they'll do modification and dry it down in lifts. To be able to keep the dirt work going. But in that case, we went down to do the test strips, which was on the south side of the job, and we were there for the test holes. They weren't able to go dig in there yet. Because the clearing grip people didn't get in yet. Well, also, we're doing the test holes, and the reclaimer sank in so bad. That mud was touching the operator window. I'm like, guys, this isn't what we saw up there. Everybody agreed, you know, it was just one of those things that it wasn't the same. So we had to go back to the drawing board. And figure out how we're going to get this job done. What we found out is after the fact was, like, say, 80 years ago, when they did a bunch of dredging of that canal there. They had pumped the dredgings into that south side of the job. But then it grew over vegetation. But it looked like native. Like it had been there for a while, Just all those scrub trees. So then when you went down, There was anywhere between, like, 4 to 12 foot of just, like, a milkshake, just slop. So how do you get out on that? Well, there was a decent crust on the top, but even the clearing grubby guy Started to bust through that crust. And they were using the skidders and stuff like that. So they got the wide tires that can handle some soft grounds. And, you know, so we had to go back. We Ended up getting some of the tractor tillers, you know, three point hitch tillers. And we had tried one that was too heavy that we already owned, so we had to switch and go buy some, you know, a couple from working. And they work great on it, but they're, you know, you can only pull straight, you can't turn. We had to run like you know, half loads or quarter loads with those spreaders, you know, like those five wheel terra gators that you've seen before. And you know, in order to even get out on it, you know, you know, we've been at some of the nastiest grounds in the country, in my opinion, you know.
- [07:42]
A
Yeah, well that's because that's kind of your job is to make the nasty stuff.
- [07:46]
B
Right.
- [07:46]
A
Buildable, which is something most people don't even think about. And I, yeah, I, I came up in Arizona. There's not much for stabilization in Arizona. But then I moved to Texas and that was the Texas. That was the spec out there for roads. Yeah, you had everybody does it. You had to lime stabilize because the, yeah, the. It's so expansive out there.
- [08:10]
B
Correct.
- [08:10]
A
Like you see it, you see a road that hasn't done it. It looks like a roller coaster after a few years. Like the big concrete panels are in all kinds of different directions because the ground is just moving so much. So that was the first time I saw, I saw a reclaimer and anything. I had never seen any of that before. And then I started to do this traveling around the country and I saw some big commercial projects in South Carolina, which around Charleston area as the port started to get real busy, the automotive plants on and so forth. And that's when I started to really see it at scale. Like whoa, there's whole pads getting this stuff now.
- [08:56]
B
Right.
- [08:56]
A
And then from then that was like 2018 at that point. I mean it's just exploded in every corner of America with, I mean I've seen it in California, I've seen it in the Midwest obviously I've seen it in Louisiana, I've seen it. Carolinas. Everywhere. Everywhere.
- [09:15]
B
Yeah, everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Like as a company we've worked, you know, we've worked in about 40 states now and typically on an average year we probably work in about 20 states a year. Know on average mainly the greater Midwest from like Texas up, you know, is our main swath and mainly east of the Mississippi is where most of our work is. But we've literally been border to border where you got coyote trails that you got to worry about. And you see like border Patrol on your job to where we've been pecking, you know, picking up. Actually where we were picking up. Canadian cell towers.
- [09:52]
A
Sure.
- [09:53]
B
Or we're looking at the Pacific Ocean on the west coast or watching the tide flux on the east coast. I mean, we've literally worked border to border and coast to coast. Yeah.
- [10:02]
A
What's the, what's the difference between cement and lime? Like my understand is lime is more drying and cement is more building a structure, handling weak, weak material.
- [10:16]
B
Yeah. So that lime is very good at drying and. Or the modification. A lot of what you see in Texas is the modification going on there where the soil is being modified to be a different structure than what it was before. And so it can handle those moisture, you know, like influxes in and out and then, and then the cement typically gets you strength and retain strength. So to me, the biggest value in true stabilization and quite frankly in a lot of the modification we do is to retain strength after the fact. It's, it's what happens when the moisture comes back into the job. Because most pavement structures that fail don't fail because the pavement structure is inadequate, which does happen because maybe you design it for a driveway, then it turns into a highway for semis. Well, of course it's not going to hold up, but it would hold up a lot better if the subgrade was better. Because what happens on a lot of jobs is the geotechs and the engineers will go pull soil samples, say this, this and this. Oh, well, the existing moisture was 18%, Optimum is 13. So contractor, get it down to 13% and then load up a, you know, a tandem axle dump truck or something and put this much weight on it. And we're going to do a proof roll and we'll see how it works. And if it passes and you can go now put your aggregate base and your pavement structure on top of it. That's, you know, the typical standard wave around the entire country and possibly a lot of the world. And but when mother Nature says, well, actually want it back at 18% or seasonally maybe at 22%, I got it
- [11:56]
A
there, I'm gonna get it back.
- [11:57]
B
Yeah, it's like, you know, that's where she wants it. And that's where, you know, like, that's the one thing we really can't beat. It's Mother Nature, she's gonna always win. And so then the subgrade goes back to a subpar condition from what you assumed it would stay at. And then all of a sudden, even with drain tiles and stuff like that, you can still have issues and, or even proper ditching. I've seen jobs with 10 foot ditches in North Dakota. I mean they're deep and literally just comes up a ditch to the shoulder and you peel the asphalt off. And 95% of the job would fail approval with 4 to 6 inch ruts. Like they couldn't build the job that way. So even when it's elevated like that, you would think how's the moisture going to get in there? But it does so, so it's not always a drainage issue or something like that because you would think there's no drainage issue when you get 10 foot deep ditches. Right now I could see if there's a wetlands right there, which there was some spots on that particular job I'm thinking about in my head. But in a lot of cases you see these parking lots or roadways, you know, five, 10, 20, 30 years later, failing earlier than they should. And they have the load usage that it was designed for. It just. I will guarantee you it's almost always a subgrade failing because water's getting back into it. But if it's been properly stabilized, it will have retained strength. So if it's like if a native soil might have a CBR of say 6 or an 8 and it's in the wet condition, wet state, if it's optimally dry, might have a CBR of 20 or 30. Make it up numbers now. But if you properly stabilize soil with the right stabilizing agent for that soil, you could have retained strengths of you have like 100 CBR more.
- [13:43]
A
And it, it depends like each soil is a little different. And so the geotech will tell you what to put in it to make it. To make it what it should be. Is that how it works?
- [13:53]
B
The way I look at it is, you know, the only thing they can say what the site needs is the site in my opinion because and it's us as individuals and experts in the industry and that's a combination of the geotechs, engineers, contractors, material suppliers and equipment manufacturers. We can then determine what's the best way to fix it. And because you know, like even the first job we did is stabilization or modification, we did it with archaic methods that we would never ever do again, we never did again after that job unless it was absolutely necessary because it just was situational thing. You could only do it that way. But you have to go at it with care. And that first job worked. There's nothing wrong with it still to this day. I actually drive through it quite often when I'm in the area to see how the parking lot looks, you know, but asphalt and concrete, they crack over time, so you're going to see cracks. It's just. It's just part of the lifespan of any of that stuff. But I lost my train of thought here because I do this to myself.
- [14:54]
A
That's all right. That first job, you were. So historically you were a civil contractor doing civil work, and that's how you came up. It was a family business, civil work. And then because I hadn't heard the story until dinner last night, you bid this job, that's an Acura car dealership that had terrible soil conditions on it was going to require you hauling a bunch of material off and bringing good stuff in. But you had seen a fly ash demonstration and we're like, maybe we could just put fly ash into it.
- [15:30]
B
Yeah, it was probably a week or two before I bid this job. So I had bought the original, the original heavy civil company from my dad in 2002. I did an asset purchase of it and I formed my own entity. And then I got into the dirt underground world. You know, we did everything from, you know, stripping the topsoil to replanting the seed on most jobs. And if people had like right away signs for us to put in, we'd probably put the signs up sometimes ourselves. We did everything in between. And. And I bought that in 2002. And then by 2008 or 9, I had like 10x that company and I scaled it, but it actually became kind of little redheaded stepchild within the group of my dad's companies because he started getting into aggregates and he got into asphalt sales, not installation. He was already into gravel pits. So those were his new babies that he was growing. And then I was working for Kiewit out in Arizona on, On a big fiber optics job. And I was having fun. He's just like, hey, when you coming back? So that's how I ended up coming back. And then, you know, and I always knew I'd be back. Just to know when.
- [16:45]
A
How old were you when you came back?
- [16:47]
B
I was 20. I just, I turned. Just turned 25 when he asked me. So it's like at the end of 1999 when he asked me to come back. So then I gave key with three months notice of when I was, you know, you know, you know that I was going to leave this. I'm not going to come back in the middle of winter. Like, there's nothing to do. It's. Everything's froze out. So I'LL just come back in the spring when there's work to do. And then I was basically like a superintendent, kind of helped manage and run jobs in 2000, then 2001, his right hand man wanted to be a partner with me because he knew I was going to be buying the company. And I said, I won't do a partnership but I will give you like a stake, you know, I'll give you a percent of profit, blah, blah, blah. I just didn't want to do an equity stake with them and a couple weeks later said, I'm putting in my notice and I'm going to do something else. So now here I am running the company, doing all the, estimating all the bidding, doing everything. In 2001 for my dad's company, I'd still have him review bids, but his office was probably 20, 25 minutes away from even where we were. So I'm running all the jobs, superintendent, project manager, estimator. And there was me and one other girl in the office that was. And you know, we'd probably doing about three and a half in sales back, back then. So, so I just, you know, I got to, you know, you know, I got, you know, they thrown to the wolves pretty quick with it. And then I, I bought the business as an asset sale of January 1st of 2002.
- [18:17]
A
And you, you financed that through a bank then?
- [18:19]
B
No, I did financing through him for the equipment note. So we, we did a fair market value on all the equipment, you know, back when you used to use Top Bid and used to go look at auction results and you would, you know, we would determine what current market rates were for everything took off 6 or 8% for like what a broker fee would have been if you ran it through a brokerage firm. And then whatever the interest, average interest rate was back then, I want to say five and a half, six percent interest. And then I had a note with them, just Seller Finance and Just Seller Finance. And I, but he gave me till June to make my first payment. So I had some time and I had, I was, I think I was still living in his house. I was living in the basement because I just moved back and I was. And I had been in a couple of apartments and then I came back into his because I had recently started dating, you know, you know, my ex at that time. And so I'm like, there's no reason for me to go get someplace when I'm likely going to be with her. So I just, you know, was living there and then. Yeah, so it's Just one of those things. It was just an asset sale. By the end of 2002, he was current on all his payments. Any operating cash that I borrowed from him was paid off. My vendors were within 45 to 60 days, and my line of credit was current.
- [19:36]
A
Wow.
- [19:37]
B
In my first year, so I was able to take the company when, you know, I started to manage stuff for him. In 2001, for example, we owed. Owed our fuel supplier like, 200 grand of old debt. Like, that's a lot of money when you're only doing like 3 million a year in sales.
- [19:53]
A
Sure.
- [19:53]
B
When you're running scrapers and. And all that stuff, you know, obviously fuel is your next biggest cost behind labor. Typically, you know, you know, obviously, besides your equipment payments and stuff. But it's usually a huge cost for you, you know. And by the end of 2001, I had them current so you could. So I had to turn around it just because intercompany billing was bad and stuff like that. So I just managed a different way, you know. You know, but when you own multiple entities, it's just if sometimes just rolls up to one tax bill, you might not worry about inner billings between pockets.
- [20:24]
A
Yeah. I worried about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
- [20:26]
B
Right. And I worried about the individual pockets because I was running one of the pockets for them. Sure. Well, I wanted to make sure it looked good.
- [20:33]
A
But then since it was completely separate, then you were able to run it 100% as its own entity.
- [20:39]
B
Yeah. There, I believe. I would guarantee you there are still people in the Chicago area that think my dad owns Rocks Holland. I've been on my own for 25 years almost now.
- [20:48]
A
Yeah.
- [20:49]
B
I've literally been on my own.
- [20:50]
A
Yeah.
- [20:50]
B
Like, you know, he used to get like, mad. What are you doing that for? When I first got into the GPS in 2004, everybody was putting a GPS on, like a D6 or D5. Like, everybody was. I'm like, but, man, they're. I watch these dozers just run from one side of the job to run to the other side job. And just constantly tracking around and in grading half the day and driving around the other half day, I'm like, why shouldn't this be on a motor grader? They're all doing the last two, three inches anyways.
- [21:15]
A
Sure.
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B
Let's put on a motor grader. So I went on a thing and we went down to. Actually went down the Phoenix and went down, you know, like, down there to John Deere's, you know, like, little proving grounds there. And. And we're you know, looked at the John Deere like the 772ch, but they also had a 140G or what or H there at the time, you know, like a newer one or no, 143, because I wanted like all wheel drive. So we got to run the 143 versus the 772 side by side. We end up going with the John Deere at that time. And that was our first machine control unit that we had, you know, as a company. But, you know, the point I was getting to is he's like, what are you buying a new machine for? Because I bought a brand new grader to put it on, so everything was tight. I've never bought a new machine, you know, like. Or get like that kind of talk from him, like, well, I think this is the right way to go. I don't want to buy something used and sloppy because we're putting GPS on it different that, you know, it's changing. You know, the market's changing from what you're used to. And by the time I got out of the dirt work in 2010, I think we had 14 machine control units, which back then was a lot like per capita. I think we had more machine control units per the size of company than anybody else in Chicago, if I recall. We had 14 units at that point. We had a D6s, D5s, D8s, D9 with a push block on it. Had GPS on it. Indicate only.
- [22:36]
A
That's cool.
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B
That's midwest stuff, right? Yeah. So as you're, you know, pushing those scrapers that push block and get it, because it's still 11 foot straight blade with a push block, so we could still at least set the grade. We had a lead scraper with indicate only on it. We had 825 indicate on it. We had, I think 815. We had this on stuff. It wasn't really. They were just starting to come out on excavators. We never had on an excavator back then, but, you know, we loved it. And then we. Since 2000, we haven't had. We've had zero.
- [23:02]
A
Were you machine control when you came back? Were you expecting to buy the company?
- [23:06]
B
Yeah, that was the thing. When he called me.
- [23:08]
A
That was the plan.
- [23:09]
B
Yeah. He had called me one day in November of 1999, and him and I had talked for a few days in a row, and he's like, you know, and then all of a sudden, so he calls me again, which we didn't talk daily.
- [23:22]
A
Yeah.
- [23:23]
B
You know, and he's like, I answer the phone, he's like. I'm like, hello? He's like, I'm tired. I'll go home, take a nap. No, I'm tired. I said, well, then go home early. Go to dinner with Mom. No, I'm tired. I said, well, then, like, take the weekend off and go somewhere with Mom. No, I'm tired. I'm like, what are you getting at? This is how I remember the conversation. Whether it happened this way or not, I have no clue, but this how I remember it. And he's like, yeah, like, when you coming back? So I can slow down. Okay, now fast forward today. You know, he's still a working machine. He loves what he does.
- [23:54]
A
Those guys don't slow down.
- [23:55]
B
And he hasn't slowed down. You know, like, go to his house on Easter and he'll be working on a bed. He didn't do the bidding anymore, but he's still working on a bed or some design or whatever. He just. That's how he is, you know. But, you know, so that's how he said, when you coming back? Said, I'll be back for Thanksgiving. We'll talk then, you know, so we're literally walking downtown Chicago. Like, you know, they got all the Christmas stuff up then. Excuse me. And we're walking downtown Chicago. We started talking about it, and we're walking on Michigan Avenue. I just say I'll come back under one condition. That I have the chance to buy the construction company, and I'm not gonna do any partnerships with my siblings because I felt my work ethic and stuff was a little bit different than everybody else's. And. But, you know, and in hindsight, now that I'm in YPO and around a bunch of, you know, like, business people and owners, I think that's probably one of the smartest decisions I made, not knowing why I was making it, because. Yeah, you know, when there's a good, you know, you know, like when you can have a good family business, they can be really great or any partnership, but then when they go bad, they go bad fast. And, you know, there are, you know, we've all seen these companies, and there's some in Chicago right now, multi generational going through litigation and lawsuits because eventually something goes wrong. And I just, you know, so partnerships are tough. And so I made the decision. I said, but I'll come back as long as I have the opportunity to buy the original company and I don't do it with any of the siblings. And that was. He said, fine. So there's Nothing more than that. And then I went back then I gave my notice to Kiewit, like I said earlier. So I worked for them for like a whopping six months. But I got to see that transition. And so when I went to college, I got to work for a small like guy that like, like as you managed storage units, but also had a, like, like a, a like custom whole building company. So I got to work with him doing just oddball labor work. And occasionally I'd do some grading work for him. I remember I did, you know, he was putting up a new storage unit that was like 300 foot long by like 60 foot wide or something like that. And you know, and he had an old, like 1960s case front end loader that had the bolt on back on the back like you used to be able to bolt on attachments to the back. It was one of those, it's an old sloppy thing. And I think it was in the 60s vintage. He's like, I'm like, well, I'll clean up the, like the slab for, you know, get it ready for the, you know, concrete guys. He's like, okay. You know, when the concrete guys showed up, they're like, who graded this thing? Like, we don't even have to hardly touch it. I knew everything, like quality to do it with. It's just because I've been grading ever and doing stuff ever since I was, I started working at 12 years old and got to see a lot of different things. So I like did stuff like that. Then I ended up moving down to Phoenix. I worked for Jay Banakee down there for a year or so while I was going to college at mcc.
- [26:52]
A
Yeah.
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B
And that's actually where I learned and it kind of cut my teeth on estimating and stuff like that, so. And then I ended up getting that job for Kiewit and came back.
- [27:01]
A
It was the just you move was, was savvy because I, like you said, I think there's this like this romantic notion of family business and what it can be. And sometimes it's that way, especially with like you have the intergenerational complexity. Sometimes you then have, you know, brothers, which then put it off to multiple sets of kids. You have siblings from the same parent. Like, and when it works, it's really cool, but the odds of it really working are so slim. And when it doesn't work, it really doesn't work. It really. And even if it doesn't go to like lawsuits, just the, the resentment and some of the things that builds over years, it's pretty wild to see from. From an outside perspective. And. And even siblings. Siblings are just so different. They're all so different. Like me, my brother, my sister. We could not be more different. Completely different personalities, completely different skill sets, completely different desires in life. Even just imagining trying to work together, it would just be like, what a mess because we're just not, like, we're not aligned from a. I mean, maybe value standpoint. We are, but we're all just so damn different. So different. Yeah.
- [28:35]
B
I even noticed earlier on I would have a hard time working with my dad. Love the guy to death. He's a great mentor of mine. Learn a lot from him even to this day and talk to him about stuff. But when we work together.
- [28:47]
A
Yeah.
- [28:47]
B
You know, just, we have different viewpoints on things and, you know, and we could butt heads. And I noticed that early on and just said, I won't do it. And so.
- [28:56]
A
Yeah, that's smart. Yeah. I mean, that might. That's why my dad partially is not talking to me for a very long time, is because. Yeah, he just, he thought in some ways I should run the business one way. And it's like, that's not how this works. And how many businesses have you run? Zero. Okay, well, I'll take your advice on some things, but listen, this is, this is a different game. But I probably could have said it in better ways.
- [29:22]
B
Yeah. Like, he's been in business and still in business, and he's been very successful. And just because one person's way doesn't mean, you know, any one. One way is right or wrong.
- [29:31]
A
Well, and the further you get in business, too, the more you start to believe you understand business. And in some ways that's true, but that's not true because there's, there's a thousand different flavors of business. And so even if you've got this one little category like your business, you've got that figured. That doesn't mean you're good at the 999 others. And sure, there's like, some principles with, like leadership and negotiating and legal and accounting, but other than that, there's, there's so much variety. And I have to remind myself all. All the time of that. And then you could have the same damn businesses in the same damn area doing the same damn thing and doing it two different ways, and both of them could be right. Like, there's, there's not. That's, that's also the complexity of life in the world and building stuff is like, there's not one right way. That's the cool thing, that's why I love this world is because there's. You could. I mean, probably the projects you guys do, like, you're obviously doing it the way that you think should be right, but maybe sometimes the way that you think should be right is not what works with the schedule or not what works with the, with the phasing plan or the other subs on site or the, the weather, whatever it is. And so you're, you're doing it in a different way, knowing there's a better way, but that's just right. It's a dynamic world.
- [30:51]
B
Yeah. When I went to college up at NAU in Flagstaff and I went for construction management courses and, you know, and my schooling for me was I took classes I wanted to take for I'm paying. I didn't intend to graduate when I went and I actually never did. I kind of kicked myself in the butt for not starting earlier because I was almost 21. I was like 20 to turn 21 when I started going to college. So I took a couple odd years off and I tried to do the local stuff, like local community college back home. Work always got in the way, so I had to get away. And. But the professor there, Dr. Greider, would always say, listen, there's, you know, whatever the number I was using that number, he's like, there's 800,000 construction companies out there, which means there's 800,000 ways to do this stuff. I can't teach you how to do what they're all going to want. We're going to teach you some fundamentals and we're going to teach you some of the things like that. Because they had more of a horizontal approach to it, where it seemed like ASU was more vertical and they seemed to have more of that mindset because I was in the AGC student chapter there. So we would do stuff with, you know, like with or against ASU at times. And they had a much bigger chapter than we did because we were a much smaller school and especially in the construction program. But I always thought it was. I liked his perspective. He was, you know, he was more broad based with it. And then he said that same thing. It was just. There's just so many different ways to do it.
- [32:12]
A
So you could almost tell how much experience somebody has though, when they have more of that mentality. But when someone's arguing about what's right and wrong, it's like, like you haven't gotten out too much. You need to go see, see the world. Because that's it's a little silly to think that you know how to do things.
- [32:33]
B
Yeah. And even like in our, our space there's, I would argue that there's best practices for aspects of what we do.
- [32:40]
A
Sure.
- [32:40]
B
Where we run into the challenges is say for example, we went to Shreveport during COVID to do a Amazon.
- [32:47]
A
Beautiful. Yeah.
- [32:49]
B
Right. And but the local geotechs and stuff, they're like, this is how you have to do stuff here. And we're like, but why? Like we think this would work. And they're like no it won't. We're like, well, just let us, you know, because it was a, it was a Minnesota gc, a Minnesota dirt contractor. And also all of us Midwest guys were going down there to go do this job for Amazon. You know, because a lot of these bigger jobs are like the wind and solar stuff we do. We're working for contractors that are from usually the Midwest that are going other places do work. And that's which is why we're going to do the work for these, you know, at different companies in these, you know, working in these different geographic regions. Because we don't have, we only have brick and mortar in Wisconsin or Chicago areas. I say and you know, but we travel everywhere to go do the work for our customer base. And, and they're all traveling for the work too. Typically. That's how we get into that stuff. So we'll get into areas where people are like, well this is how it's done here. Especially like in the stabilization role. We're like, eh, we don't know if that's the case some of it because they're using archaic methods of stuff. Like in the south it is very common to see a pneumatic tanker show up to the job with either, especially with the cement on. Typically not lime, they don't do this but with cement. And they hook up a blow bar to the back of the trailer.
- [34:11]
A
Nice.
- [34:12]
B
And they literally just drive and under pressure blow the cement powder on the ground. And I'm like, How do you guys control anything or the speed of the truck? They do no layout. They do. They just like it's whatever speed they go. What do you do when it's really muddy, like you can't get the truck through it? Oh, we'll bring in a belly dump then and just dump it on the ground, throttle around the dozer. I'm like, what?
- [34:31]
A
Yeah.
- [34:31]
B
Where the best practices are to use a spreader and these spreaders, you know, it just depends who builds them. But most have some kind of computer control on them, you know, the speed rates, you know, and adjust the hydraulic flows of the change of the augers so you can have a relatively uniform spread rate on the ground. And then, you know, in my opinion, every load should be laid out, meaning, you know, we know how many tons you showed up, we know what our treatment rate is, and we go lay it out with, say, flags and put like, a box on the ground and okay, it. This load fits within these parameters, and you'll see people not doing that. So there are things, I'll argue that are best practice, that you. It should be just the way everybody does it, but where, you know, the differences come in. It's like, how do you work with it in a bad soil conditions? And sometimes that's where the equipment comes into play or experience comes into play. And, you know, that's what happened that in that, you know, job in Shreveport, they argued with us. We're like, well, let us. Let's let us do a test trip. So we went and did a test trip and we showed them how you could do a blend. We were doing lime cement blends, which they didn't really do and. Or understand because everybody's answering a lot of the stuff in the salt. Just. We'll just add lime. Well, I might not be the right. It might be fine for the moisture, but it's not going to gain you strength. So. And that's where like, the cementitious materials come into play, you know, and typically, cement's the number one thing we use now for that, you know. You know, some good, classy fly ashes you could use, but you got to use more of it, and it's hard to get your hands on that anymore.
- [36:01]
A
Sure.
- [36:02]
B
Because a lot of that's being used now for the ready mix industry. Yeah. So it's got a value that's almost the cost of cement. So why would you use something that you could use two or three times of it for the same cost? Like, it just doesn't make sense anymore.
- [36:14]
A
Ben, I don't know what you guys are doing, but if you can quit moving around, I don't know what the hell they've got going on back there. So going back to the first job you got, you had this demon. You buy it, you buy the company, you get it to a pretty, pretty good place. You guys are humming. You have this opportunity to bid this job. You saw this fly ash demonstration, and you're like, wait a minute, we could bid this job with fly ash. Instead of hauling it off like they
- [36:43]
B
want to oh yeah, I get this bid for this Acura dealership in Schaumburg or something like that in Illinois. And you know, we're a self performed dirt company and it's literally right between a bank, the dealership and a police station and a high school. They're all right there. And the police station literally touches the property with no trees. They just watch everything happen. There's about 3 foot of unsuitable to haul off and then you had to bring in about 5 or 6 foot of fill to bring it all back up because all the pond cut was super wet. So basically everybody was bidding the job to like remove all the unsuitable and the wet stuff off and then hauling aggregate to bring it back up or maybe some structural, you know, good fill that you could document and classify up. And so I, you know, I had just seen this demonstration that Lafarge put on a couple weeks before that or something. And so I called the guy up, said hey, would you mind coming in here and take a look at this? And he's like, yeah, no, bid it this way. I'm like, all right, okay. So I bid it the way he said we were. There's five people bid it. We were the like, we're the fifth bid, so we're the highest bid. But we're the only one that guaranteed proof roll and we were the only one that was lump sum. Everybody else was unit price and they said they wouldn't do any other way. Since we knew the kind of this little CM that was on the job for the dealership and we knew the small symbol engineer that designed at a time, you know, both smaller firms, they were able to give recommendation like, hey, if we say we're going to do something, we'll follow through with it. So they trusted that and gave us a job and you know, so we had to hire out the, the spreading and the, you know, the procurement of the fly ash was through Lafarge and that was delivered to the job placed on the ground. And then we did the mixing, but we did it with archaic methods with dozers and you know, excavators and stuff
- [38:47]
A
like that, which they'd flop it on the ground and then you would just push it back and forth.
- [38:53]
B
Well, they spread it on the ground at the right treatment rate, right area. Yeah, we had to work with that truck to get it through the ground because it's such soft. So what we did is we ended up borrowing from the pond and put up. But that, but that cut was like 25 or 30%. Moisture was like really wet Gray clay, if I recall correctly. So it needed to be dried quite a bit. You know, it needed to come down a good 15, maybe even 20 points at some points. So it took a lot of material to dry it down. So we'd lay it out in, like, one foot lift so we could still get the truck through it. We'd spread it, and then we would mix it with the dozer.
- [39:27]
A
Okay.
- [39:28]
B
I would never do that again today. It is so archaic and should never be done. It's so dusty. And, you know, the quality control isn't there either. Yeah. And, you know, because one of our, you know, core values is sqp, we call it safety, quality, production. And to me, like, you know, like, of course we all want to go home safe, but then, you know, the next thing, we better be doing a quality job before we're about production. And so as long. That's our daily or order of priorities is how we say it. And so I would never do that because that would not be living our core value today.
- [40:01]
A
Sure.
- [40:02]
B
Of doing the way we did that job then.
- [40:03]
A
Yeah.
- [40:04]
B
And we did. We didn't know any better.
- [40:06]
A
Yeah. But that.
- [40:06]
B
That we just didn't know.
- [40:07]
A
Yeah. Everybody's been there in some way a hundred times over, because that's how you like people. People always. They write to me whenever they're trying to figure something out, and it's like, I don't know, just go figure it out. That's what everybody else has done. Like, there are specs, there are best practices, but that's how this world is work. Like, anybody worth anything in this world has just kind of figured it out. Like, go figure it out. Which, again, it's not like something that the big companies would say and you can't do at this higher level now. But that's where everybody has started, I think every. Every company. That's where they've started. Including a keyword like.
- [40:44]
B
Yeah.
- [40:45]
A
They were figuring it out back in the day.
- [40:47]
B
I think we all still do to this. To this day.
- [40:49]
A
There's.
- [40:49]
B
You have to.
- [40:50]
A
Yes, yes. Yeah, within reason, but yes. That's. That's. That's how the whole thing works. And so you do it, and then the job works out.
- [40:57]
B
Yeah.
- [40:57]
A
And the parking lot is where it needs to be to this day.
- [41:01]
B
Yeah. And, you know, everything passed the proof rolls. We did stuff, and we. The site was about a balanced site, if you could leave everything on site. So basically the only thing we had to really do was, was just, you know, bring in the aggregate base course to put on top before it Was paved. It's really about the only import because it was going to have about a thousand loads of export import type thing. If I recall the numbers correctly, it wasn't a huge parking lot. And then. Yeah, then after that we just started to offer it to our customers as a option to dry in the soil because, you know, we're building mainly subdivisions back then in some smaller big box type stuff. And we just gave it as an option to our customers like, hey, here's how you know, you can treat your soft ground right now. Because we were just mainly dealing with, you know, modification typically just it, you know, something's not passing a proof roll. What do we get to do? Well, you let mother nature just dry it out and take some time, which nobody ever picks that option because, you know, nobody wants to pay to let something sit. Or we can, you know, like, you know, farm it and disc it and flip flop it around and try to dry it and mechanically dry it, which can work. But if you get really wet stuff, it takes way too long. And then if it rains again, it just goes back and kind of like what we're talking about earlier, you know, most reasons why stuff fails is because of the subgrade fails. Well, if it's that wet, it's probably going to go back to that wet. So. And then. And the next one was total stabilization and then the next one to be undercutting, which is usually the most expensive route to go.
- [42:31]
A
And that, that's taking the whole thing down and building it back up.
- [42:35]
B
Yeah. With aggregate.
- [42:36]
A
Yeah.
- [42:37]
B
You know, and usually that's minimum 12 inches or more. And then if you start adding tensar in there or geogrids, I mean some of this geogrid, you can pay for the geogrid for what we can stabilize for. They're getting that for a piece of plastic that gets rolled on the ground with holes in it. And so I've seen this stuff go down for like $9 a square yard.
- [43:02]
A
Yeah.
- [43:02]
B
And it's a labor. And they're $9 square. We can treat with cement sometimes for 12 inches at $9 a square yard and give you 10 times better product. And it's going to get done cheaper, faster, more economic or more environmentally friendly.
- [43:14]
A
But at what point is. Does it go from value add, like. So you're offering it as a value add for projects that you're already doing as a civil company. But at what point are you like, you know, let's make the whole company this.
- [43:28]
B
We're doing some small job in Fox Lake, Illinois. This little like thousand foot, little cul de sac job that's got like, you know, little eight, like eight lot subdivision type thing for this, you know, like, developer at the time. And the ground's really wet. The only thing I got There is a D4. And, you know, now we got to go treat this with, you know, two loads of fly ash or something. It wasn't a big job. And at that point, once after we did that first job, we would hire out the trucking and material to lafarge and they would spread it on the ground. Or we started to work with the spreading contractors and pay them direct. And then we would work likely with Payne and Dolan back then, who had reclaimers. And they didn't want to get into the stabilization side of things. They didn't want the risk side of it. They would pulverize for us. So we would hire out all these different components, and we'd have to take all these things and try to layer it together, make sure everything comes together
- [44:20]
A
at once and layers. Forge was buying it from power plants.
- [44:23]
B
Yeah. They had take or pays back then from, you know, from like we Energies in the different power plants in the area. So they were making a big push to try to find a way to get rid of this stuff instead of putting it in the ground.
- [44:33]
A
Yeah. Because the. The fly ash is the byproduct of burning coal.
- [44:36]
B
Correct.
- [44:36]
A
And yeah, you end up with this fly ash. That became a big problem back in the day with the EPA especially, because they used to just kind of like flop it in a hole.
- [44:46]
B
Yeah.
- [44:46]
A
And then, well, before even engineered landfills, and then they're like, yo, we can't do this anymore. So then everybody had to go to these engineered landfills, which was really expensive, which I think was. Then how do we get rid of some of this stuff? Because then we have to landfill less of it. We can sell it potentially, and there's potential commercial uses for it. And so it started to then, I think, make its way around at that point.
- [45:10]
B
Yeah. And that's kind of how we got into it was from that demonstration and the first probably two years. We didn't. We didn't use anything but fly ash. We didn't. We didn't even know like. Like when we did the first day. But we didn't know this was a thing. I had never heard of it. Now there have been companies around for 50 plus years doing it, but I never saw them, never knew it was a thing. And when we got into it and started doing it, we had nobody from the industry Working for us. That did it. We, you know, you know, we were mentored by air or by LaFarge at first. And working who, you know which one. We ended up buying a reclaimer in 2007. So I think your question you asked a little bit ago, when did I decide to make this leap? And we're doing this small job. So I go back there because I get on my tangents. You know, we're doing the small job. I'm so frustrated with the fact that we're using these belly dump spreaders. So, you know, like LaFarge had built three of these vein spreaders as they call them, that were converted belly dumps that had, they could hold up to like 35 ton of cement in one load. But you're still only getting 25, 26 ton loads. You got a truck that weighs almost 50,000 pounds. You're putting 50 plus thousand pounds of cement into thing. Now you got a hundred thousand pounds that you're trying to drag around a wet site.
- [46:25]
A
Yeah.
- [46:25]
B
And then it's a cul de sac, so it's tight. And so how do you get this? It was just a pain. So I'm all frustrated. Why aren't these things on like off road chassis? And so I just got on this thing, I'm like, you know, I'm gonna go build them. Because they were trying. Lafarge was trying to get a champion to come in that would invest the money into the spreading equipment and be like that arm for them and then. But nobody that was big enough at the time would do it, you know. And you know, you can remember I just started the company two, three years before, like, well, three, four years before that. At this point, you know, you know, I got growth going on. You know, like I said, I went 10x and like six or like, like seven years in size. So it's all leveraged. You know, it was too easy to loan back then.
- [47:09]
A
Sure.
- [47:09]
B
You didn't have to have a business plan for a bank. You just say, hey, I want a loan for some equipment. They just basically give it to you. And that's, you know, hence the whole crisis we had back then. And you know, and I'm old enough to have lived and worked through it and actually have a company through that, you know, last, you know, major downturn and you know, so we learned a lot and about took us out. But we had, you know, you know, so, you know, so we get into the stabilization by being frustrated on this job. Then finally that's like late 2006. And then a little bit right around that same time, we're doing some road widenings with the local paver that we worked with a bunch. And he also had the on site paving to do, but we were being held up by doing the road winding until the on site stuff got done. So I'm there with him talking to the customer, which I think was Lennar Homes at the time. And they're like, oh, yeah. Well, we're waiting for stabilization to get done, but they're two, three weeks out. And they were the big player in the market. They still are. And they're like, they can't be here for two or three weeks. I'm like, well, we can do it for you. We can be here and have it done by the end of the week. They're like, what? I'm like, yeah, like, you stand like, yeah, like, we do it this way. Like, okay, okay, fine. Give us a price. I give a price. They're like, this is your price and you're gonna grade it for me too? Yeah, you got all your curb stakes up. I'm a grading contract. It's what we do. So we'll put it back to grade for you so you can put your stone on it and pass your proof roll. Like, for this price. I go, yeah, for this price. He's like, all right, job's yours. So that's how we get our first job. Kind of outside of our typical customer base.
- [48:46]
A
Okay.
- [48:46]
B
And then he talks to one of his, like, co workers at a different subdivision down the road in Huntley, because that one was in Crystal Lake. And he talks about one in Huntley, Illinois. And same thing happens there. So we give a price, and so we end up doing these two jobs for Lennar at the end of 062. And so between that and being frustrated with the equipment, I'm like, I'm just going to get into this thing because I think there's a market for it.
- [49:09]
A
I see.
- [49:10]
B
I think we can do some work outside of. For the customer base that, you know, Pease Construction had at the time. And so I decided to jump in and I'm like, I went and ordered four brand new spreaders from Stoltz. We were their largest order ever at that time. And I believe we're still their largest customer, you know, at least in the construction side. You know, they also have a big AG division too, so I can't speak to that side. Ordered a brand new reclaimer from working. Ordered four brand new. Four brand new. New lake, actually pneumatic tankers with four brand new trucks to be pulled with them, four brand new C500 chassis to put spreaders on. And then also two of the spreaders were the actual pull style that we could pull with a farm tractor or dozer, which we already had, so we didn't have to buy that. So I go buy all this stuff and people are like, what the hell are you. Even people that work for me still to this day, like, like, what are you doing?
- [50:09]
A
Because that's a lot of money.
- [50:11]
B
Yeah, it's a lot of capital. It's very capital intensive to get into.
- [50:14]
A
Yeah.
- [50:14]
B
And it's a dirty job that a lot of people don't like. And so I decided to jump in and then I finally get introduced to era, which is the Asphalt Reclamation Recycling association, whatever the exact terminology. But something like that, which I'm, you know, like now a past president of. And I joined that through like with Lafarge mentoring me. And I go to the first meeting, I think down in Florida that I went to, and I'm getting introduced to people by him and they're like, wait, are you that crazy son of a from Chicago that ordered all that brand new to get into this market? I'm like, yeah, like, who the does that? This guy, I guess, like. And people like, how old are you at the time? Oh, I was 07. So I was like 31, 32.
- [50:56]
A
Yeah, so, yeah, yeah, my age.
- [50:57]
B
Yeah, it was like, it was like, I think I was 27 when I bought the business in O2, so, you know, five years later. So I was like 31, 32 when I make this decision to do it, you know.
- [51:08]
A
And it is interesting too, because buying a bunch of equipment's one thing, but it's kind of a one trick pony. Like you don't really use a reclaimer for. I mean, there are, there are other uses, but not really. So it's like if this doesn't work, it's not like it's like another D8, you know, like, well, if it doesn't work over here, you can put it over here like a spreader truck. That does one thing. Reclaimer, it does one thing. Pneumatic tanker. It does one thing. There's no other use for this.
- [51:36]
B
Right. And we bought the stuff and just started using it at house and just kind of grew the business. And when the downturn came, actually rock solid. And so I wanted a separate name too because we knew some of our competition could hopefully be some of our customer base, which for a while turned out to be a problem because certain, like, really Close competitors would not even let us on the job, you know, like, anywhere close, unless the GC brought us on.
- [52:01]
A
Okay.
- [52:01]
B
So it became a problem for Rock Solid at first, you know, but so then you had to kind of span out a little bit wider footprint to be able to try to keep a crew busy. We had one crew in 07. We jumped to two crews in 08. And then that's when stuff got started getting really nasty. I think we stayed at two crews for a year or two after that. And then the excavating company started getting in trouble because we have all these developers, and we did a ton of subdivisions then. So now we have all these, you know, small developers. We did some work with some of the bigger ones, but, you know, the Ryan Centrals of the worlds and, you know, guys like that, they, you know, they would get the big, big ones, you know, you know, which is a great customer of ours today. But we used to, you know, compete against them back in the day, big time. Yeah. And, you know, so we had to start to span out a little bit more and do more of the geographic Chicago market to try to stay busy. And then 108,09 hit. We have all these developers going bankrupt, and I was left with about $3 million of bad debt. And, you know, that's hard to recover from because we're already, you know, we've already paid fuel, we've already paid labor, we've already equipment payments paid. And also we're getting paid for nothing because, you know, you know, like, like a lot of us contractors, we go out and we can go do a million, $2 million worth of work before a pay cycle comes or more. And, you know, you know, I always laugh at these like, like, like, like on the residential side of things, you know, the high. I need 50% up front. What the you talking about? I don't get paid a dime from anybody until I'm.
- [53:27]
A
Yeah. 90 days in.
- [53:28]
B
Yeah, 90 days in. I'm like, what are you talking about? But they won't do the work for you. But in the, in the commercial world, it's very normal for us to just go to work on blind faith. We're gonna get paid.
- [53:38]
A
Sure.
- [53:39]
B
And, you know, so you get, you know, you know, like knee deep in the mud of. Of debt with that stuff. And, and, you know, you know, all of a sudden we're in the workout group with the bank, you know, and I'm like. And they're trying to teach us how to go bankrupt. Like, overall company, rock solid was actually doing well, and it had margins. It was the excavating side that got kicked in the nuts.
- [54:00]
A
Was rock solid. A completely different entity.
- [54:02]
B
It was a different entity. Yeah. I would share labor between the two, but everything in it was a different pair, different pa. Pocket in my pants.
- [54:09]
A
Sure.
- [54:09]
B
But I treated it as such, so everything got built appropriately. And then I have. I have a leasing company for equipment, which a lot of people do that's, you know, pretty standard. So the equipment would be owned and leasing then would just be leased back. So. Yeah.
- [54:24]
A
And so. So it was really the market conditions that made you wind down. The excavating side.
- [54:30]
B
Yeah, the market conditions. Because now when you do dirt and underground, at that time, a lot of stuff switched to the public sector, which we always had done, some public and private. Now all of a sudden, or even on a private job, you're bidding against 30 people sometimes, and you win a bid against 30 people, you're like, what did I up on this bid to get it?
- [54:50]
A
But this on the stabilization side of things, you have two or three bidders
- [54:54]
B
you bid against still to this day. That's how it is. And because it's a. It's. It's a very unattractive market for people to be in. Because it's very dirty.
- [55:03]
A
Sure.
- [55:04]
B
You know, there's even a past employee of ours that worked for us for, like, a year. They get hired knowing we dry mud. And if you go back and, like, read the review that he puts on social media, it's like, well, they made me work in muddy conditions. I'm like, dude, this is what we do. Like, this is not anything new. It's not like we pave, you know, only when it's dry out and then. And only when it's above freezing.
- [55:25]
A
Yeah.
- [55:25]
B
And then all of a sudden, we're making you work. Like, what are you talking about? Like, this is what we do.
- [55:29]
A
Better have a good pair of boots.
- [55:30]
B
Yeah, that's what we do. You're supposed. You kind of work in muddy conditions at times.
- [55:33]
A
That's interesting, though, because I thought. Yeah, I assumed, like, well, it just became such a good business that you're like, well, this is just the better business. Let's go in this direction. But your. Your hand, in a way, was almost forced by the market.
- [55:49]
B
Well, it was forced by the market to get out of the dirt world works. Sure.
- [55:52]
A
Yeah.
- [55:53]
B
And then, you know. You know, here everybody's struggling, and, you know, and a lot of the guys did dirt and underground or paving, and they were so geographically tied to where they were, you Know now, you know, don't be a dirt underground guy, could go work anywhere because they can just mobilize just like us. But you know, you're paving people that are tied to plants like they're stuck in geographic region and you know, so also we had this opportunity to start branching out. We already had done like a good sized wind Farm at DeKalb for Blattner Energy at that time. And you know, we had to fight the big dog from it because they tried to use their scale and their size to knock us out of the job. Sure. And you know, but we're still able to secure it. And it was by far the most extreme roads that we've ever seen done on a wind farm. They literally did like 32 foot wide roads. Like it was insane what they did. You won't. You don't see anything over like 18 foot now. Well yeah, it was just how they built them back then.
- [56:50]
A
Yeah, they, they over engineered it back in the day. And then the trailers were a lot different. They weren't as advanced for the blades possibly. Yeah, yeah. Cuz now, I mean some of the. Now some especially up in the mountainous terrains like the trailers that they run now, high dollar stuff, but it's, it's like the roads are really engineered to the trailers and as the trailers have gotten a lot more advanced for the blades, they've been able to suck them in quite a bit. And then you've got the environmental impact as well. They want to say.
- [57:19]
B
Right, yeah. And you know, and we've been in that, in that wind and solar market since like, like 09 or something like that. When we did, you know that then we started to like get some jobs that were outside of the market for some of these, you know, like back then, you know, you know, it was Mortensen and Blattner, they did the lion's share of, of the wind. The wind work because solar wasn't really a thing yet.
- [57:39]
A
Still do in a lot of ways.
- [57:40]
B
Yeah, there's a lot more players in the market now.
- [57:43]
A
Sure.
- [57:43]
B
But those were the two big dogs. They were both from Minnesota. And then we started to just work for contractors that work for them and just kind of grew from there. I don't think anybody can say that they've done as much wind and solar as us because we, we probably have done over 500 projects in that space because we, you know, we do so much of it for the big guys and we had for years. We don't do as much for Blattner anymore. But you know, you know, I don't think anybody else, because we were doing like the biggest jobs in that space for the longest time. And, you know, because even 2011, I think. Yeah, it was 2011. We picked up that flat ridge which was south of Wichita in Kansas, and that was the biggest single wind farm to go at that time that had like almost 300 turbines on it.
- [58:29]
A
Yeah, because out of the recession, the government started to spend quite a bit of money on this stuff too.
- [58:35]
B
Yeah, it was all the, all the tax credits and stuff they gave. So it's a big surge on there and we just were lucky to already kind of be in it and just kind of rolled with it. Yeah. And then just started rolling through that then, you know, so it was early 2010 is when I decided to get out of the dirt underground. Because, you know, and then, you know, and then when you go through a workout, you have to pay expensive forensic accountants that the bank makes you hire to audit your books. I don't remember this is if this was 09 or if this was 10. I think this might have been 10. And this guy comes in, he's like, you know, for two, like two months or so, you know, like that she does this audit. We got to pay this big check to them or we can hardly pay our vendors and stuff.
- [59:16]
A
Oh, yeah, sure.
- [59:17]
B
You know, we're cutting people's payroll. We're, you know, we're like, you know, like, you know, like most people got like a 10% haircut on wages because people are going bankrupt left and right. Like, like, what's your option? Where are you gonna go? So everybody just kind of dealt with it. We haven't even had one gentleman working for us that he felt he shouldn't get a haircut because he was managing the rock solid side of things. I said, no, this is all or nothing thing. And he didn't agree with it and he left. So we said no. This is, we were, you know, we're. This is a team thing. This is what we're doing.
- [59:45]
A
So you just wound down the excavating side, sold off assets and sold.
- [59:49]
B
Yeah, we were forced to by the bank. They're like making us sell like stuff in like November. I'm like, let me sell it in the spring. Cuz it's better to sell in the spring than it is in the fall. And they're like making me sell things and I'm like, you know, so I probably, I probably lost close to a million dollars in equity just off of them forcing me to sell her. They needed to but then they. But they saw rock solid, doing well. And after this guy comes in on, like, it was like, may. I think he's like, you know, and I have this meeting with the bank and him, and he's like, by July 17th, I think that's the date. It was a Friday. They will need a $750,000 cash infusion just to make payroll. So basically his opinion was, if I don't have an investor, then I need to shut down.
- [60:33]
A
Yeah.
- [60:33]
B
And at this point, the bank's teaching me words like stalking horse. You know what a stalking horse is? I have no idea what a stalking horse is. Like, well, it's a way. It's mechanism buying back your equipment under a new name. Like, why would I do that? Mm. This makes sense, because banks, as smart as they are, they're not very smart. They're very siloed.
- [60:48]
A
Well, but that's the irony is the whole financial situation that was caused. Was. Was caused by the banks.
- [60:55]
B
Yeah.
- [60:57]
A
That's the irony of it.
- [60:59]
B
Yeah.
- [60:59]
A
It was like, kind of entirely their fault, but other than that.
- [61:02]
B
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So. And I just said, no, I think he's wrong. And I. Like, I have a semester of accounting in high school, and I probably only took it because I was at that time dating the teachers. You know, like, actually. You know, like, actually, ta. That's probably why I signed up for that class, so I could be by her in the morning for all I remember. But that's like, my accounting background is that I never had any other. You know, I just have always loved math and, like, math and. Because, you know, everything we do math involved, especially in construction.
- [61:33]
A
What's your dad say about all this? Did you try to go to him to save it, or was that out of the question?
- [61:39]
B
No, I. You know, I. You know, I just never want. You know, after I saw just there's so many competitors, I said, I'm just, you know, because so many people didn't have any other option to just fight through. Yeah, rock solid. We had an option where we were actually had margin. We're making money on that side. So I'm like, why don't we just shut this down and just, you know. You know, just go with the one thing. So in the course of a year, we're like a third the size now, you know, because we carved off all that, but, you know, because rock salt had some growth and. And then after 2010, we just winded down a few jobs, cleaned some stuff up, and 2011 on, we've just been the stabilization that's crazy. Yeah. Like on that job and it. Like in Kansas, we still had a 345. We still had some N dumps. We still had a 963. And. And we were on this job and we kept catching them because, you know, there was these. It was. It was the biggest wind farm to go in Kansas in the middle of the biggest oil field in Kansas. So now there's oil lines everywhere. Well, now they're out there locating them. So there kept being these issues. Well, we'd have to stop because they got to build these blisters. I'm like, well, I have a excavator and a dozer and stuff back home. I should say dozer, you know, like high lift. And so I got end dumps that I can put behind that I still own, that I can put behind my new. You know, I could take my tankers off. So let me immobilize. So that we ended up working on a TNM deal. Then if we got caught up, we would then go build blisters. So we then were still doing some dirt work. So blister is building blisters over the gas line. So the gas lines are only so deep. And the thing. It's like a crossing. It's a crossing over top of them. But they use dirt to minimize the pressure on the pipe.
- [63:18]
A
Okay. Okay.
- [63:18]
B
So you had to build them up like that bridge, like a four foot high bridge. But had to be like, I don't know, 800 foot long, you know, where it tapered down to zero. And then we could stabilize over the top of those then. But we couldn't do. So we kept having all these issues and they wouldn't let us cross the lines unless the blister was built. So we. So it was like everywhere. So we ended up building these blisters. And, you know, so we did a little bit of dirt work that year, but that was specific for that customer, you know. Then we ended up getting rid of that 345 and that 963 after that. In the end, dumps. So it worked out, but it made the job double in size for us because we were able to do door work. And there's some other FDR things that popped up on it because some of the county roads all fell apart.
- [63:56]
A
Was it like mentally. Was it. What was it like mentally transitioning like that, winding a business down while another one was going crazy? Or was there just so much going on that you were just blocking and tackling?
- [64:10]
B
There was a lot going on. I was fortunate to have a couple, you know, like folks in the office, they took the kind of that brunt of the back end stuff and dealing with the phone calls more than I did. But I, me personally, I went back out in the field and I would go manage jobs and I go. I'd be on the road for three, four, five months a year. You know, I got little kids at the time.
- [64:34]
A
I was gonna say you had a young family at this point.
- [64:36]
B
Yeah. And I would like, I'd make sure I'd be home for the first day of school or something like that. But then I would like to fly back on a Saturday night, go to the first day of school on Monday morning, and be back on a plane and back out to North Dakota or whatever on like Monday night. I did that stuff where I'd be gone for two, three weeks at a time, come home for like 18 hours and then turn on and go back again and just, just wear yourself out, you know. But I could go out and manage the jobs and sometimes be on the crew and you know, some of the cruise you go on and, you know, you know, we'd be doing, you know, jobs where you might need six, seven people on it. We're getting it done before because there's like myself and then there's some other guys that are still with us to this day. We all were good enough that we could cross do this stuff. And we just, we just work ourselves to the bone and, you know, and if I'm out there operating and running stuff, like in the very beginning, I'd be like on a job in Texas running a motor grader with a headset on, reviewing a bid while I'm grading. And I'd be running the grader, running the roller behind me, moving the equipment on the job. So I'm doing the work of like two or three people and managing the job. Now I'm the foreman too, still reviewing bids. So you think about that. I'm cutting probably 4 or $500,000 of extra costs out of the company. Well, when you're only that big, that's a huge percentage that we're saving.
- [65:53]
A
Sure.
- [65:54]
B
So I like to think that's one of the reasons to help dig us out. Because you know that four or five hundred grand a year extra is, you know, you know, all that gets a big percentage and that could make or break you. And it's all about cash flow. And, you know, we had like three years of no line of credit coming out of this, working off just cash, you know, and then, you know, but those in the office that were doing, you know, they're doing with all that back end stuff and they did a phenomenal job keeping that going and keeping people off our back. But when it's all said and done, everybody got paid every dime they rode. I think a couple people asked to take a 6% haircut because we had to take a 6% haircut. Otherwise, you know, we never filed bankruptcy. We learned a lot from it and we've been in a much better spot ever since then. So it took years to dig out.
- [66:42]
A
Yeah. But you, you were, you, you got a lot of the solar and wind work and then the oil field stuff was like 2013, 14.
- [66:53]
B
Well, we did our first job up in North Dakota, but most of the stuff we did up there was dot faced.
- [66:58]
A
Okay. Yeah.
- [66:59]
B
And so at that time, the state of North Dakota only had done like three cement jobs that I, that I recall or know about. And then they let out this 26 mile FDR job. And FDR for people was full depth reclamation.
- [67:15]
A
Yeah.
- [67:15]
B
So that's like recycling the asphalt and the aggregate base below or in a, in a roadway. Yeah. And sometimes even into the subgrade.
- [67:24]
A
Well, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Brief explanation. You've got a road that it just sucks.
- [67:29]
B
Yeah.
- [67:30]
A
And you don't want to put new asphalt on it because it's typically a subgrade issue. Yeah, oftentimes. So you pulverize everything. Your asphalt, your base, your subgrade, Sometimes you mix it all up and then you put cement into it as well and then you pave over that.
- [67:48]
B
Right. And in this particular job, they designed that, but I drove the job and afterwards the job was awarded. So we were the prime sub on the job, working for like a Minnesota contractor. And, and that was Rachel Contracting up there big time. Yeah. And we had done a bunch of work with them and the like in the wind side of things. That's how we, we were, you know, in with them and, and I talked to them first about it and I went to the state, I go, you guys realize your problem isn't, you know, so they're doing an FDR job where they're just doing the top 12 inches. Well, when you looked at the cross section of existing, you're really only in the asphalt gravel layer. And I think they said the asphalt was only 3 or 4 inches. The asphalt in spots was like 6, 8 inches. So the pre pulverizing went a lot worse than will be assumed because of that. And some of that they did give us a little bit of money back on that. The State did. But I said your issue is your subgrade. And that's the job I was referring to earlier when you got 10 foot deep ditches because there was a lot of stuff these deep, you know, these ditches were deep. I said your problem is your subgrade because you'd be driving along and there'd be a mile of road that'd be perfect. But you come over a hill and then all of a sudden there'd be a pothole that'd be 8, 10 foot wide and 200 foot long. And I think what had happened, I think it like a terrible accident happened where either car came over or motorcycle came over the hill and ended up getting hit head on by a semi. So now you're north of Watford City, you're in the middle of the Bakken, you got all this expansion of oil going on. So now all of a sudden you got a road where there's hardly any truck traffic. And all of a sudden there's hundreds of trucks a day on these roads and they're just obliterating them is what happened. And they were just in like panic. I don't panic multi way to say it, but they're in just this mode. They had to just rebuild and fix things. So you know, the way construction like, I mean, I'm up there and I was watching, I think actually Bemis was doing a job up there and I'm like, you know, and they're just, there's like silt fence, like into the lake or whatever. I'm like, man, if you did that in Chicago, you'd be in jail. Like the stuff you could get away with in North Dakota at the time sure was just unreal. And you know, not that they were doing anything wrong. I'm not saying anything negative, just it's just what it was.
- [70:00]
A
Yeah. Because they, they went up there because it got, they're doing residential and they dried up. So they just sent their scraper spreads up to Wyoming. North Dakota.
- [70:09]
B
Yep.
- [70:10]
A
Yeah. So this, so then this must have been what, 2011?
- [70:14]
B
Yeah, that was 20 at the end of 2011. So we had done that flat ridge earlier in 2011. And then we pick up this job up in North Dakota and for us it was going to be over a million square yards of treatment, you know, between, you know, pre pulverizing and treatment. And then I end up talking the state into, along with Rachel, like, let's redesign this thing. Because your issue is actually your subgrade, not what you're treating. You're just masking the problem. It's Kind of like a mill and fill. Mill and fill on a parking lot or roadway. Most times it's just a waste of money because you're not really fixing the problem that's going on. And sometimes it's a great alternative to.
- [70:48]
A
Depends on what. Unless it's just worn asphalt.
- [70:51]
B
Yes.
- [70:51]
A
You know it's been there for.
- [70:52]
B
For a decade. But a lot of times they're fixing parking lots with mill and Phil when they're just. What's going on? Is the subgrades failing? I just dealt with one at a less schwab in Salt Lake City. That exact same thing going on. But other budget doesn't allow them to possibly fix it the right way going forward. So it's just kind of like these things. You shake your head at it, but it is what it is because you know, like it's all about budget. And then we do this job but we. We show the state like you know, I talked to them, they end up agreeing with me and I didn't. I had nothing other than driving the site. Just looked at it and I could kind of tell. And then I you know us with Rachel, we talk him into doing a soil stabilization. So we. So everything got pre pulverized then laterally displaced. Say the northbound lane into the southbound lane. The road was closed except for local traffic. And we would pre pulverize all laterally move everything to the one lane. And we treated the sublaid a blade and dozers and they just moved the. You know they savaged about 8 inches of the gravel and moved it to side. So we still had a few inches of gravel left on top of the subgrade. As soon as you put a water truck or anything down there after you stripped that gravel off, bet you 90% of the of the road had 4 to 6 inch ruts in it.
- [72:01]
A
Sure.
- [72:01]
B
Because that's. That subgrade got wet again. So we did a 12 to a 15 inch treatment rate on that job depending on what was where. And probably about a 5. I think there was a 6% treatment rate at cement on that one. There was no mix designs at first, but they were done on the back end. But I told them you're probably going to need 6% and 4% in the end. That's exactly what they needed to do in the two. And then wanted to do an emulsified aggregate base course because that asphalt gravel blended together. We could use an emulsion or a foamed asphalt back in and done kind of a. It would have been more of an FDR technique but it would have been done after the fact. So. But you, you would could have made a cold in place asphalt for different reasons. That was not chosen. I won't say why. I think that was on. On error. But. And then, but what they ended up going, excuse me, with a ctb which would be a cement treated base. So there was, you know, the cement treated base sitting on top of the cement stabilized subgrade and there was probably about 3 or 4 inches of aggregate in between the two. So salvage aggregate. I think we salvaged 10 inches, put it back. Then we treated 6 inches on the top. If I recall numbers right now. So you end up having this cushion layer between the two cement treated products that act as a cushion layer. And then we even chip sealed on top of that. Because the original bid was just to do a 12 inch FDR then import 9 inches of aggregate gravel and put it on top of the road and turn the paved road into a gravel road.
- [73:34]
A
Oh wow.
- [73:35]
B
So we're like. And it's. And it's a 26 mile long highway going all the way up to Tobacco Gardens there. You know you're like up north of watford city off 1806. So you know, you know they describe all this stuff then. So they end up retreating this road this way. So when the road was done, they actually had a chip sealed road that was striped that they were supposed to have a gravel road. And when it was all said and done, I think it saved the state either a million or $1.5 million because of the aggregate cost is so expensive. They had to haul it from I
- [74:06]
A
think Montana to avoid the import. I see.
- [74:09]
B
Yeah. And even then trucking was a big issue up in North Dakota in 2011. Like you just couldn't get trucks. It was a huge risk. So Rachel is trying to minimize their risk on the trucking side of it. Utilize what was already there because there's already this acid sitting there. The asphalt and gravel. And really why the asphalt and gravel failed from the trucks driving on. It really wasn't because the asphalt gravel failed. It's because the subgrade failed. So we're able to kind of show all this stuff. That was the end of 2011 and people, everybody watched that job in 2012 we didn't do any work up there at all. Nothing. Next, you know, 2013 on it just exploded with. With cement stabilization net. You know, next thing you know all the counties are doing it. Because I really attributed it was that plus we started doing some demonstrations up there in live seminars and you know, and trying to grow that Market. And I, you know, I like to think we had a really big influence on developing the stabilization market up in North Dakota.
- [75:03]
A
Well, and. Because the. But even the whole time, it's been an educational process. I mean, you guys are probably still educating right now as much as ever.
- [75:11]
B
Yeah.
- [75:12]
A
Because it's like as, like, obviously there was a lot of work involved, but from a timing perspective, getting in on the market was great because you were getting in when it was still pretty unknown, underutilized. And then it's just been like one new use after another. Like the. The wind access roads. Then you get into now the. The oil fields popping off and the trucks are kicking the shit out of the county roads. And now you need to make that more solid. And then, like, we'll get into it. But the big boxes and then. And then the manufacturing and then the now the data center stuff, it's just been like one new thing after the other of all of these new uses for the same. The same thing in a lot of ways, which is crazy. It's remarkable, right?
- [76:03]
B
Yeah. And there's been people pushing it for years. You know, we've been into it now for, Well, I say 21 years because we kind of started getting into in 2005, but Rock Saddle will be 20 years old and, you know, feel like next year.
- [76:17]
A
Wow.
- [76:18]
B
You know, so we've been in it for a while. We're not, you know, like the new guys in the block anymore, but we were back then, and it had been around. I mean, it. It's kind of been being done in the industry for 75, 80 years around here. And I think there's even ancient ways. It was done back in the, you know, ancient Roman days, kind of like, you know, like, even concrete was developed, you know, 2,000 years ago. Then the kind of recipe got lost. Sure. And, you know, without, you know, you know, concrete, we, you know, we would not have modern civilization. Well, concrete, steel, we will not have modern civilization. But just. That's just it.
- [76:51]
A
That's it.
- [76:51]
B
And, you know, a lot of people don't even understand, like, that, like, the number one recycled product on the planet is asphalt. I believe that's still true to this day.
- [76:59]
A
By weight.
- [76:59]
B
By weight. By weight. Yes, by weight.
- [77:01]
A
By weight. And they. They get. It's a little cheating because it is rocks. So they do get that. But. Yes.
- [77:07]
B
Yeah, by weight it is.
- [77:07]
A
And. And they do. Yeah. And that. Yeah, there's There. There's arguments to. And from that, because it's like, well, are you recycling it by just, like, using it as road base, like. Yeah, maybe.
- [77:21]
B
But I, I would say it is.
- [77:23]
A
Yeah.
- [77:23]
B
And some of it's being put back into the hot mix, some of it recycled and put additives back. Like you can put, you know, emulsified asphalt or foamed asphalt back into it. And it'll last for.
- [77:33]
A
Which is cool.
- [77:34]
B
It'll last for decades again. And you could actually re. Recycle it again.
- [77:37]
A
Cold in places.
- [77:38]
B
Cold in place, hot in place and. Or fdr, a lot of them you can redo multiple times again and again.
- [77:44]
A
And I think it's underutilized. I think that's crazy underutilized, especially those county roads and that kind of thing.
- [77:51]
B
Yeah. Even with the growth that you were kind of saying that we, you know, we see it more now. You know, I've said for years, and I have nothing to base this on other than a hunch, but that, you know, maybe 15, 20 years ago it was being used in 5 or 5 or 5 or 10% of its potential is being used where stabilization and stuff could be used. Maybe we've doubled that. We're doing maybe 10 or 20% of what the potential is. But there is if we use, you know, these different techniques that I'll say error represents, you know. You know, from any, anything from hot in place all the way down to the soil stabilization modification side of things. Things. There's not enough contractors, equipment or material to do it to its full potential, in my opinion.
- [78:35]
A
Sure.
- [78:36]
B
And you know, and you think when we go do a big job, like you like, like an rpl, you know, data center down in Louisiana or we put in. I don't know, I think I'm going off memory, but I think we did about 280, 000 ton of material on that job in like in like 15 months, like. And in like 250 of that was like in nine months, you know, like, you know, you have 100 loads a day, seven days a week just getting pounded into that job. Cement and lime.
- [79:04]
A
Yeah.
- [79:04]
B
It's day in and day out. There's no one supplier that can handle that. Or they might be able to handle it, but then they can't handle anybody else and they can't supply any other customer. So we get these big jobs like that. We got to source this stuff sometimes from 3, 400 miles away. So it really becomes a logistical job.
- [79:21]
A
But that and that, but that's like we're almost in right now like the golden age of stabilization and big site work packages right now. Because it's, it's. You're getting hit from Both sides by three sides. 1. The scale is enormous. Unbelievable. Like in some cases too enormous. Like with the Utah thing right now going around.
- [79:46]
B
Yeah.
- [79:47]
A
40,000 acres. Okay.
- [79:48]
B
40,000 in the middle of nowhere.
- [79:50]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 40,000 acres with 9 gigawatts.
- [79:54]
B
Yeah.
- [79:55]
A
So more than the entire state of Utah of power. So size one. Schedule. The schedules are crazy because the money involved is just so wild. So schedule and then you're building on sites that no one has ever wanted to touch. Like not even the. Not even the big box guys. Like it's so uneconomical that they're. That they haven't even looked at it. And they were looking back in 20, 20, 20 21. They were looking at anything they could get their hands on.
- [80:29]
B
Right.
- [80:29]
A
And so it hasn't. And residential developers, like it hasn't ever been touched. And so you have all three of those things coming together. Huge piles of money. We need it done yesterday. And the place sucks.
- [80:41]
B
And which is like. Yeah. And I probably add this probably fourth one. The technology changes so quick that we've had jobs even halt. Because they had to redesign things because the technology changed that they had to redesign how the building would be built. From what I understand. So that's a fourth component of the timing. That's. That's. I think that puts stress on the time for things to get done. Sure, sure, sure, sure.
- [81:04]
A
Yeah. Okay.
- [81:05]
B
And then it's. I think it's somewhat of a race to who gets stuff built first. That has it because like most of it'll get overbuilt most likely. Which, which can. Does happen. You know, you see that with big box. All of a sudden it's like boom, boom, boom. Also next thing you know you just see you know like product available everywhere. Sure. And then they don't do anything new because they went so quick trying to be first to market.
- [81:26]
A
Well yeah, because like building. Building one of these things for a customer is one thing thing. But building them spec.
- [81:33]
B
Yeah.
- [81:33]
A
That's a completely different.
- [81:34]
B
Right.
- [81:35]
A
That's a completely different animal. And I think that's what happened with the big boxes is like we're just. Once they started building them spec, spec, spec, spec, spec. Okay. It works. If there's demand there, demand stops. Well who's gonna be buying a 500, 000 square foot warehouse?
- [81:49]
B
Right. And you'll see these million square footers sit around all over the place while they're building another new one. But it's not build to suit. So yeah. Somebody's like, well I'd rather just build my own instead of take something that's just sitting there and maybe retrofit it. It's crazy.
- [82:00]
A
It's crazy.
- [82:01]
B
You see it everywhere.
- [82:02]
A
Yes.
- [82:02]
B
You know, even like Salt Lake City where I live now, you still see the product. There's still big box going up, but it's not as busy as it was.
- [82:09]
A
No, it was crazy a couple years ago. Gangbusters a couple years ago. And then it just stopped. And I think that the civil construction industry, the earth moving industry would have, it would have been a huge pickle if it weren't for then the big battery plants and then the data centers started. But it was a lot of manufacturing at the time. And then the data center thing, because no one talks about how that market just evaporated almost overnight. But no one talks about it because it's like, well, we've just gone over here and it's gotten even crazier. So like we thought that was as crazy it was going to get. And then now it's like this is 10 times. This is way beyond what that is. Which is. It's just, it's just crazy. The, I mean you're seeing it more than most. Like the schedules are insane and this and that. But I was laughing with you at dinner last night. It's like all this talk about AI and data centers and how advanced everything is going into these buildings is, but you still have to put it on dirt that can't move. And you guys are the guys making it not move. So it all still rests upon dirt and it still comes down to mixing the right amount of cement into it.
- [83:23]
B
Yeah, yeah, I know. We just got off a job in, you know, I'll take Eagle Mountain, Utah. That for that very reason the soil wasn't suitable enough to put the foundation on, that they undercut the foundations up to eight feet below and then brought it back up with, you know, actually cement stabilization and 8 inch lifts to, from what I understand, to handle the differential settlement. Because you can't have the settlement with all the fiber and all the technology, wires that go into everything. They can't have stuff pulling apart is what I understand. And yeah, so you'll see some of these jobs just because of the, the demand, you know, look, but maybe a typical big box would have been okay on that soil. The data center wasn't. Yeah, well, that's.
- [84:06]
A
The chip fabs are the, the next level of that too. They're like TSMC in, in Arizona. It's probably the most advanced building ever built in Human history. Because it, it the environment to make chips has to be perfect or else it doesn't work. So the building cannot move one bit. There can't be vibration, there can't be a speck of dust within these buildings.
- [84:29]
B
Wow.
- [84:29]
A
Or else it can ruin the entire process. That's insane. 12 months of chip manufacturing work. It's just. But that's why it costs. That's why they're spending $150 billion on it. And even if you would have talked five years ago about a company spending $150 billion on a building, you would have been like, the Manhattan Project didn't cost. And I don't, I don't actually think it did, I think. But it's like, but that's the scale that's happening right now. And that's not the only one. That's. There's now the big Micron facility up in New York that just kicked off. And there's the one in Ohio, intel that like the jury's very much out on. There's another one in Arizona, Intel. They've been building onto that one for 20 years. Just one after another after another after another. And then you've got all the data center stuff and they're just getting bigger, bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Every time you hear about the next one you're like, wait, how big is it? What are they doing? How many acres? How much power? And it's. But it's somehow. Pencils. Yeah, I guess.
- [85:31]
B
Yeah. These are crazy, you know, crazy sites. The one that we did in Louisiana was what, five miles by one mile? That was the overall site.
- [85:38]
A
One of the more. Yeah. Remarkable sites I've ever seen.
- [85:41]
B
Yeah.
- [85:41]
A
Yeah. Unfortunately, the, the top secret social media company building did not appreciate our video. But to even see it was just unbelievable.
- [85:58]
B
Yeah. We're starting phase two today actually on that. And we've been told that there could be hour to two hour traffic jam just to get onto the site.
- [86:09]
A
Because it's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Which is the only place you can find thousands of acres, like middle of nowhere. But when I was there, they were just moving dirt. I didn't even get to see the buildings. And so I'm sure the building site now is just like someone kicked an ant pile.
- [86:24]
B
Yeah, I've, I haven't seen myself people. I think there's two or three thousand people working on that site right now.
- [86:28]
A
Amazing.
- [86:29]
B
And they're getting ready to start the one right next door to it at the same time in conjunction with it.
- [86:33]
A
Amazing.
- [86:34]
B
And We've already been told it's going to be probably as much or more soil work to do as we did on phase one. And yeah, in phase one was ginormous.
- [86:44]
A
Yeah.
- [86:44]
B
You know, probably the biggest soil stabilization job in the, in the country. Well, you know, like, like, like in 20, 25.
- [86:51]
A
And I, I had seen you guys, it probably, it probably was, yeah, I,
- [86:54]
B
maybe one of the biggest ever, you know, tonnage wise.
- [86:57]
A
Maybe when I tell people, because I'll tell people ton, like some of the tonnage you guys put down out there. And they were like, what the fuck did you just say? It's like, yeah, yeah, that's what they did.
- [87:09]
B
Yeah. I like, I actually love when I, you know, get to meet some people and different things and they might have a radio mixture division or something like that and then I'll talk to them about tonnage. I'm like, well, you know, we buy this much ton of cement and they're like, their eyes always go pie. And I'm like, like what? I'm like, yeah, we use way more than you do. Trust me. You know, you gotta be a big, big player before you're gonna out buy us on like on cement probably.
- [87:30]
A
Well, that's why because I'd seen you guys in passing in like the Midwest working with Wittech and some of the other guys out there. The like you talked. The spreader tractor trucks that you have, they're silly looking to somebody that's never seen them because they have one tire in the front, two in the back, four in the back, four in the back.
- [87:50]
B
Yeah, yeah. So like it's a five wheel Terrator that we started using. They don't, they don't build them anymore. So.
- [87:56]
A
Okay. But there's, yeah, they look, they look funny though because. Yeah, there's that one giant fat wheel in the front. So I saw you guys for, for years with that kind of stuff, but then the Louisiana job, because I thought you guys were. Must have been 50 years old seeing that job and just the scale and, and how much you guys were putting down out there. Because I'd never, I'd never actually been around your guys up close until, until that one. Yep, they were cool with us and messing around with some stabilization.
- [88:25]
B
Yeah, yep. I wanted to be there, but you know, we found out like the night before. Yeah, I couldn't get there.
- [88:29]
A
It was, we, we didn't set that one up right for, in 10 different ways, unfortunately. But that was the first time of all jobs I see up close for you guys working, that's the first one I see up close. And so I just think that's the standard. And to even do something like that, it's like, all right, these guys, they're not messing around.
- [88:49]
B
Yeah.
- [88:49]
A
Because to even be at the table to just deal with the volume alone is unbelievable.
- [88:55]
B
Yeah. It's, you know. Yeah. That's unreal to us even still sometimes.
- [88:59]
A
Yeah.
- [88:59]
B
And it just changed, leapfrogged in matter of a year. Like what a big job was to what a big job is. Kind of like you said, the data, it just, it's, it just transformed. These jobs are 10, 20, 30 times the size of what big box was.
- [89:13]
A
Sure.
- [89:13]
B
Some of these things. Yeah.
- [89:14]
A
It's an order of magnitude.
- [89:15]
B
Yeah. It's extra astronomically different.
- [89:18]
A
Yeah. But it is amazing. Even still the opportunity that you guys have with, with stabilization or fdr with fdr like. Yeah. Data centers aside, the FDR potential in the US with how many road miles there are and how many road miles and how, how terrible some subgrade is like.
- [89:41]
B
Oh boy. Yeah. I mean. Yeah, they you know. You know, because most budgets like a lot of things that like only have this much to do each year. So they just keep picking away at it to make it slightly better, but they're still not improving the overall. But if they could just get a chunk of that budget up front, they could, you know, in the course of say 10 or 15 years, they that that repair budget could have just paid for a complete rehab that will last decades. Yeah. After that there was a job we bid a few years ago in North Dakota. I forget the town name now, but the town had originally cement stabilized and chip sealed all the roads I think in the 60s and then in the late like 2000, like before 2020. So I don't know, maybe 20, 16, 17 time frame they rebid them again to just be re. Cement stabilized and rechip sealed.
- [90:37]
A
Wow.
- [90:37]
B
And they had curb and gutter on them. So they were going to actually read. And they did do it. We were the second bid on it. So we did not get it. I think we lost it by like 17,000 bucks. You know, because that's the, that's your, you know, that's your, you know, obviously lowest bid public bid market or most work we do is in the, in the private sector now. So you can negotiate or you can get a job based on experience or moderates or you know, capacity where in the public space. As long as you qualify, you get the job. And they did have issues on that job more. I think it's more grading on the back end. But, but they redid that those roads the same way they built them 60 years or 50 years before. It's incredible. It's incredible.
- [91:17]
A
Yeah.
- [91:17]
B
A lot of people don't know that you can do that with a lot of these processes. You just got to re engineer it and sample what is there and then test what's there and see in the lab if it works that way. And usually it indicates a pretty good indication of it. And then the next best thing is maybe go out and do a test trip in the field to make sure that the idea works in the real world sense. Because it's actually weird. You know, a lot of times the mixed designs out of a lab, we'll get better performance off of field testing than, you know, than what the lab says. And it's some weird thing. We, you know, even like, even the geotechs we work with, we can't really don't understand why they're in a controlled environment doing everything with like, you know, measuring everything to the, you know, like to the milliliter or the gram or whatever they're measuring stuff to. And we're out there with you know, you know, eighty hundred thousand pound machines like working in a dust and you know, in the wind and you know, varying site conditions. And we can a lot of times get better performance and better strengths than what they got out of the lab.
- [92:17]
A
Are you using all different geotech firms depending on where you are?
- [92:22]
B
Really depends. I mean a lot of times if you're on the site, they'll have a geotech that's already going to be doing the testing. In certain spaces you tend to see like in the wind and solar thing you see the same few. And then you get to the big box side of things, especially the big data centers, you'll see the big firms like the terracons of the world. But when we need to get mixed designs done, we tend to work with one or two labs, especially one out of Chicago that we really trust, Midland Standard Testing. And they've been great. We've brought material from all over the country.
- [92:55]
A
So you just send them a box
- [92:56]
B
of dirt, we just send them buckets of dirt and say hey, do this mix design. And I don't think not one of his mix designs has ever failed us. We've actually challenged other mix designs that other companies did because we didn't agree with it. You know, we've had wind farms where you know, for example, they're like, oh, we want 6% lime and 6% cement. Like why? Like we just did five wind farms all within 30 miles of here, and they all had 5 or 6% cement. So why does this need so much? You know, and the. You know, the fear that, you know, that I. And, you know, and I'll say we have is if a project gets too expensive and they. Because people only remember the process or what is like, oh, it was stabilized, but it's too expensive, or it was stabilized and it failed, but maybe failed because we didn't do it the right way or the right treatment rate to write something because we weren't allowed to. To. And, you know, so as a company. Company, we've had very few failures after the fact. You know, it might be some craftsmanship things here and there where. Or a machine wasn't a spreader, wasn't spreading. Right. Or something like that. Or it could have been a soil change. And some of those things, you know, you just go fix them, you know, or maybe get. You know, you have to. You know, they have to undercut because it's just so expensive to mow in. Maybe just undercut a small area. But for the most part, those don't really happen. You can usually see if a project isn't gonna work right away. You know, I was on a job myself in Texas that I went down and I pulled the samples myself, like. And I'm anal when I do them. If I know they're gonna strip four inches, I'll take four inches off, put it to the side. Then I'll take the next 12 inches and put that in the bucket, and I'll even measure the holes. And I make sure it's a. You know, it's got the vertical walls on it. So it's like kind of like a plug went into the bucket.
- [94:35]
A
Yeah.
- [94:36]
B
And so I'm just picky that way and brought all the samples in myself. And it all came back as a lean clay. So we go out there and just to do a cement stabilization on it, because with the lean clay, and I'm watching the stuff. This is just outside Corpus Christi. And I'm like, man, this stuff is acting like a fat clay. It's coming out really chunky out of the back of the tiller. And I literally, still to this day, could take you to that site and show you where I took the actual sample, because they still show up on my go. Google Maps, all these. All these locations and pin drops. So if you ever open up my Google Maps, there's all these little blue dots on the screen. It's kind of funny. Mine's the Same way, you know, and so, you know, we're only like 100, 200 foot away from one of the samples because I had no plan set when I knew I. So I didn't know where stuff was going, so I was pretty close to one of the spots. So I called up our dispatcher at that time. I said, hey, just give me, like, two or three ton of lime. I don't care what it's gonna be. Slurry. You can be hydrated quick. I don't care what it. Just give me some lime here. Didn't even tell the customer what I was doing at this point, and. And I put down some lime that night and, you know, let it start to mellow, because when you're doing a modification like that with the lime, you're. You're actually wanting it to chemically change that soil. So it takes time. So a lot of the state specs in Texas, for example, you put it in, you got to let it mellow for 48 to 72 hours, and then you got to come back and sometimes remix it with water.
- [95:56]
A
Okay.
- [95:56]
B
Reintroduce water again. That's how it changes it. So we're kind of doing a version of that with this. And so I put down a couple percent of lime, mix it in, let it mellow just for the night. Not even the full, like, 24, 48 or 72 hours. Then we added cement the next day in, and that one test section was actually the one that had the best performance. The entire job got switched to that, where the entire job originally showed that it was lean clay. I'm getting off on a tangent. And it's. And it's just weird how that can happen. Even though you can do all this testing up front, it may not be what you actually find. And that whole job ended up going to an LKD pre. Pre cut to modify the soil. And it's the old cotton fields there that are flat. So when it does rain, they're designed to hold water. And they had some big rains come in while we were there, too. So then. So basically, we had to adjust the lime content to bring down the moisture and modify so we could use the cement at the same treatment rate in the end, actually ended up being a. I think it was a zero change order to the customer, because the way we're able to do it and the cost of that material, I don't think we could do that again today because we can't get that. That cheaper material. It's just not available.
- [97:05]
A
Sure.
- [97:06]
B
But there are times that we've been able to do change orders on jobs and not actually have an impact. And I think, you know, and this is something I did not hit on, I think that's what also makes us unique as. As a, you know, specialty sub is like, say it is because we were our customer, we were a dirt guy, we were a site contractor. And, you know, not that everybody working for us has that pedigree, but there's enough of us from the old guard that, you know, you know, I can still go hop on almost any machine on a site and go do something. I might be rusty, but I can run the scraper, run the dozers, excavators, graders, you know, all that same stuff that everybody else is doing. And a lot of our guys came from that old guard. Even some of our operators still to this day, like, used to be on finished grade crews or else mass grading crews back in the day. So we kind of understand our customer and what their needs are. And I think that really helped us grow the business because we're able to look at it a different way than what other, you know, other contractors that maybe didn't have that same background.
- [98:08]
A
Sure. Because you're always working for grading crews.
- [98:10]
B
Ultimately, we're typically working with or alongside.
- [98:13]
A
Yeah. Like, they're excavating for them or the gc. But you're. You're tied at the hip.
- [98:18]
B
Correct.
- [98:19]
A
Yeah, it's the same process.
- [98:20]
B
Correct. And then if we're. If we're more in the road side of things or the FDR side, then we're usually tied to the paving side of it then, because, you know, so we're either working for a paving contractor, dirt contractor, gc, if we're really lucky, working for the developer or the owner, too. Sure. If we can get to that level. That's. That's really. And then if you start working with these developers and the owners that are long term, you know, like holders of the project, if they just want to flip the thing and get it out, it's hard to sell to some of them because they just looking at what is the cheapest way to build this thing. I don't really care what happens to this parking lot in five years because it's out of my warranty.
- [98:53]
A
Yeah.
- [98:54]
B
Not saying it's the right way to build it, but that's just how some people do build things. And then there are people who are like, no, we plan on holding on to this asset for 20, 30 years. Years. So they look at it a different way. And we're working with Some people even in Utah right now that they've seen us come in and like fix the bad stuff on the back end of the job, we're like, whoa, wait, like that where they did stuff, it actually held up all winter long. There's no issues. Now they're starting to talk to us on the front end like, okay, how can you help us when we start the job?
- [99:21]
A
Sure.
- [99:22]
B
Because they're seeing that there's a long term benefit for them. And these are owners that are going to hold on to it. And now they're starting to understand that if you start with a good foundation and you start well and your subgrade is your, your, your original foundation, that holds up the foundation and you know, like it holds up the structure. Yeah, it's, you got to start there.
- [99:41]
A
But it's, it's a biblical principle that gets swept under the rug so often, which is, it's just amazing how or, or just never thought about. And that's again, that's, that's to me every time I've seen stabilization one. It's amazing to see like it doesn't just work if you haven't seen it. It's, it's incredible how solid the dirt turns into. Yeah, it gets rock solid, but, but I mean it makes complete into a, like damn near a concrete highway. And you can just run on that thing as much as you want. It's not going anywhere. Anywhere. It's incredible to see it in action. But it's, it's also like when you, when you, when you see it happening, it is pretty straightforward. You're spreading, I know there's some science to it, but you're spreading some powder on the surface and you're mixing it in. That alone you're putting then a ten billion dollar building. It's, it's incredible how you can get so lost in the AI this and that. But it still comes down to we're gonna put some powder on the ground, we're gonna mix it in.
- [100:55]
B
Yeah.
- [100:56]
A
And that's gonna hold the whole thing up.
- [100:57]
B
Yeah. Even, even parking lots of our own. We've literally just cement treated the subway like say 15 inches deep and put 3 or 4 inches of like, like a recycled asphalt screenings blend on top of it as a cap, which 3 or 4 inches is not very structural. And that parking lot spender for seven, eight years, I don't think there's a single pothole in it. There's, there's a local like pallet company that stores like 30 of their trailers there. They're in and out every single day, you know, with their spotter truck in and out. So there's truck traffic on it. And, you know, and that's in Wisconsin. So your freestyle cycle is extreme, you know, and, you know, you know, because it's not like our winters just freeze up like they used to, you know, and so that's when everything falls apart during those cycles, typically. And the moisture influx in and out and not a single pothole. So, you know. You know, we also practice what we preach by using it on our own projects or our own stuff, you know, not that we do a ton, you know, but when we build our new shop and facility in, like, Salt Lake City, it's all crap ground there. A lot of that's the old lake beds, silty, Just garbage material. And we're gonna. I'm gonna use it wherever and whenever it can because we want to show people, like, this is how you can build a site. Because even some of the way they move the dirt out there, like, the old school logic was like, oh, it's soft. Just start hauling in a rock until it gets hard again, and just start pushing it into the mud. Like, no, we can just come in and treat it, like, 16 inches deep at, you know, 7, 8%, and we'll give you that crush that you need to get on there, and we can do it for, you know, half the cost or a quarter of the cost. Like, why wouldn't you look at this. Yeah, and we're starting to get people to really see that.
- [102:39]
A
It's pretty cool. Oh, it's exciting. Yeah. Well, appreciate you coming out.