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- [00:00]
A
We've never had a bad review from any customer ever. And we're going to keep it that way. The minute you stop caring about the customer, the minute your business model is down the drain, I don't care what, who you are, what, what you think, that that is how it works. And if you can't take care of them and make every customer happy, I'm not saying you won't occasionally have one. That may be being difficult, but whatever. If you care about your business, bend over backwards and fix it.
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B
Anders Olufsen is an army veteran master craftsman and successful business owner who founded AF&F Carpentry, a high end remodeling company known for its LU coastal homes and historic restoration projects.
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A
One thing I've noticed is that every customer is substantially different in every aspect. One person may like, you know, wood slats like that. One person might like, wallpaper. One person, again, it is very fine tuned and the more we fine tune it to each individual customer, the better the feedback we get from those customers. Because, I mean, I could pitch, you know, the same thing to everyone and a lot of the customers will take my recommendation. I have a different approach on how I run my business. I follow heavily esoteric, hermetic and kabbalistic studies and I think that's a huge aspect on why I'm successful.
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B
Give me an example of like, what's a, what's a key implementation that you have in your life that leads to more success?
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A
So it spans the globe like a super high Internet Elvis Presley. Today, Apple is going to reinvent.
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B
It's not over until I win the Living your Legacy podcast. For those who live to leave a legacy that's extraordinary.
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A
The impossible has happened. Oh, that is sensational. Jordan, open Chicago with the lead. You said Paul is the fastest man on the planet. You can live your dream.
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B
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the Living youg Legacy podcast. Today I am joined by Anders Olafson. Did I get that pronunciation correct?
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A
You did. Perfect.
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B
Perfect. I can breathe a, a breath of fresh air now. But Anders, how are you doing today?
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A
Good. Doing good, doing good. The weather's nice down here.
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B
Sunny South Florida.
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A
Coming from Maine. So we were snowing when we left.
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B
Oh, you were snowing all the way?
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A
Yeah.
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B
My sister's based out of Toronto and she told me she hasn't left the house in six weeks.
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A
Yeah, no, it's bad.
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B
Yeah, it's, it's rough up there. But you just finished filming your episode. Talk to me a little bit about what can the audience expect to learn about you in your episode.
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A
I have a different approach on how I run my business. I follow heavily esoteric hermetic and kabbalistic studies. And I think that's a huge aspect on why I'm successful, what I've looked into, what I've studied. I mean, I'm up early every day reading specifically about those three things. And I know it's not the most exciting thing to most people, but once you start to read it, it is life changing, I think.
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B
You know what's funny? It's funny that you bring that up that it's like not exciting to most people. When I think about the, the term excitement, excitement for me comes from curiosity, right? So like, if I don't know about something and I'm curious about it, then I can get excited for it. So anything that I don't know about, I can get excited for it. So in that I hope you guys out there in the audience can get excited about learning about. How does that inform the way that you structure your business, the way that you do business, the way that you deal with people?
- [03:38]
A
It covers a lot of how the world works, down to quantum physics, to manifestation to what you need to implement in your life if you want to be successful. What creates good habits, what creates good discipline? What. What, what rewires your brain in a way that you will be able to implement and create basically what, whatever life you want. It is that easy, in my opinion, but it's just. It's not easy to get started. But once you get into it, it becomes extremely addictive.
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B
Like, once you get that ball rolling,
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A
it gets very addictive. It's. It's hard not to want to read about it every day, all the time. Because once you understand that there's a lot more to how the world operates than just your 9 to 5 job or how everything around you seems to be operating. It isn't. It isn't quite the world isn't quite what it seems, I guess would be the best way to put it.
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B
Give me an example of like, what's a. What's a key implementation that you have in your life that leads to more success?
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A
So big thing, it goes over cleanliness. So keeping your home clean, clean, keeping your body clean, truly treating it like a temple. It's again, your whole body is electric. You know, the cleaner your body is, the better the electrical. Electrical signals travel from your neurons that you have in your feet, your knees. You have neurons everywhere in your body, not just your brain. Like everybody associates neurons with you think with your heart you think with your muscles, you think with your feet, you think with organs. They all have neurons that are all part of your thought process. And the better you take care of your body, the better you eat. The more you exercise, the better and clear your thought process is. I mean, you can solve problems that most people wouldn't even dream of being able to figure out in 15 minutes. It really is taking care of your body, treating it like a temple, and then implementing everything else that you're learning through that process. Then after you see how much more efficiently your brain works, doing this, you know, cutting out. Don't eat fast food ever. I mean, I don't ever eat any fast food. I'm vegetarian. I know that's a little. That's a little intense for some people. I will eat meat if it's kosher, but that's the only exception I make. Meditate in the morning workout.
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B
That's a big one for me.
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A
Absolutely 100%.
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And it's for me, it needs to be in the morning specifically. I have to get a win in earlier, early in the day.
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A
Absolutely.
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Because, like, I did the whole thing if, you know, you work, you work a 9 to 5 and you'll think to yourself, like, I got to go through traffic in the morning. I'm not going to wake up at four to be at the gym at five to then be in traffic by six or seven and then. But once I implemented it earlier in the day, because before I used to do it after work, come home from work, I'm already exhausted. Going to go into the gym, I'm going to give like 70% effort.
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A
Yeah.
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Not going to get the proper workout in that I know I need.
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A
Right.
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And I'm operating off of like brain fog. So I don't even remember, like my workout plan. I'm not writing things down. I'm not tracking my progress.
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A
Right.
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B
It bleeds into everything. It's funny that you bring up, you know, keeping your body clean, but not only that, the way that it functions towards your nervous system. You ever see a diagram of the human nervous system?
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A
Central nervous system? Absolutely.
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So the brain and the central nervous system is. That is the truth of what we as humans are. Everything else is just kind of a flesh suit.
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A
Sure.
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You are a nervous system piloting this fleshy suit. That's all just protection for the core of what we are is the nervous system. So keeping that part on lock and key is like super, super important.
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A
The key to being successful and being able to navigate life successfully and being happy and feeling good. About yourself. Absolutely. Again, yes. Everything else is just a show. Essential nervous systems where your consciousness, your subconsciousness, where everything that makes you you thought process wise operates from 100.
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B
Now, I have a little bit of a background in psychology. My dad's sports psychologist. He works with the Olympic committee for jama. And a big thing that he always preaches to me is to try and get in, get in control of your limbic cortical region of your brain, which is your emotional center. Right. You have your processing center, the computer that is your brain. And then you have the emotional center which is the one that tells you, oh, you're not good enough, you're not going to be able to do this. I'm too tired to do that. If you can get ahead of that part of your brain, then you can achieve a lot more than you would if you were just kind of letting that part of your brain do whatever it wants.
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A
You're, you're lower in your higher self. Yeah. And again, you, you have that voice in the back of your brain, but you're the shot caller. You get to make the decision on. Again, everybody has intrusive thoughts. Everybody has things that put themselves down or, you know, you come up with excuses to not take the hard road. And every time you accept that excuse, like, oh, you know, I should make my bed, I should do my laundry, but I'm not going to. Is, is, is you making an excuse in your brain to not do what you know you need to, and then your brain becomes wired that way and you implement it over in every other aspect of your life.
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B
How you do one thing is how you do everything.
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A
Everything. Absolutely. 100.
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B
Now, I want to take a moment here. We're going to kind of pivot a little and I want to just talk about your business specifically because I can tell that you're very organized, you're a very conscious person in the way that you do things. Talk to me about your business and the way that you're helping people out in the world.
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A
So I own a General Contracting Company, AF&F Carpentry, and we cater to mostly high end homes. So I have a strict hiring process where I hire very good high end carpenters that are paid very well. So we're usually chasing the high end work and they're organized, ordered, clean people. That's an important thing for me because if you can't implement the policies and structure that I need to know that it's going to expand and excel this business, which they don't have to believe everything that I Believe, of course, everybody can have their own and be their own individual, but you have to be clean, ordered, organized, aligned with company policy values. What we're trying to do, what the mission is, that is, it is finding people, or at least foreman, that are on that level. And again, good people, good family men, or they don't have to have kids, of course, but if they do, all that matters. Again, you can tell a lot by somebody on how they're at home or how they are as a person outside of work.
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B
It's interesting that you bring up, you know, just having that sort of core mission. Right. And making sure that people are aligned with your core mission. I think the number one thing for, you know, a lot of our audience, they're entrepreneurial, they're business minded, they want to be the next big CEO, the next big founder. I think an important distinction to make is that as the CEO, you, in the beginning, you wear a lot of hats, right? You wear pretty much every hat.
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A
Every single hat. Yeah.
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B
But once you're able to create structure and create, you know, systems standards, procedures, and you have a core crew operating around you, I think the biggest thing for a CEO at that level, once you get there, is to make sure that you are a leader that others will follow. Like, you have a core mission, you have a core standard that you can align people with, your fine people that align with that core mission. You know, I built a company with a buddy of mine, and we had said at an event we were speaking at that he and I had the exact same mission, so we might as well. We want. We wanted to go to the same destination, so we might as well just carpool. Yeah, I used to say that all the time.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Find the people that will carpool with you because they want to go to the same place you want to go.
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A
Absolutely. That's a. That's a good analogy. 100%. That makes perfect sense. But yeah, yeah, that makes lines right up exactly with what I'm saying. Yes.
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B
I want to get your take on just where. Where do you see? You know, a lot of CEOs are in the business of expansion and, you know, rapid expansion at that. What is your take on the way that you see your business unfolding in the next five, 10, maybe 15 years?
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A
So we will always cater to high end coastal homes for building and remodels as that's what we love to do. And it's nice to be able to take nothing and make something beautiful. You know, beautiful wainscoting, crown molding, high end cabinetry. Custom built by us just to see it go from nothing. Now we're in commercial work also. Is it as rewarding seeing commercial work go up? No, but it's still, you're building something from nothing. And then what we also are going to start transitioning to is government contracting probably throughout New England. So again those buildings can be depending on, you know, rewarding. But I just, I, I don't find commercial work as rewarding as I do the high end stuff because those customers at the end are, you know, ecstatic about the work you've done, super happy. The commercial work, the business owners just want the job done and I mean they want it done to standard and done well, but they're not, you know what I mean? You actually get to see the smile on the customer's faces for the actual home builds and whatnot. So it's, it makes a difference that personal connection you have with them compared to what you know, a business owner would do. But we do want to expand into government or are currently actively just about to start going into government contracting just to expand the business on that side to hopefully have, you know, 10 crews doing government contracting and commercial work. 10 crews doing high end home builds and then obviously the office staff and whatnot. But that is, that's, that's, that's the future and that's where we are going Just now.
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B
You're part of the build process. Are you also a part of the design process at all?
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A
Yes. So yeah, we do design. I actually have a secretary who does some of our designing also. She's gotten really good at it just out of just me telling her over the last year to hey, practice this, practice this. But I pay her to do it. So it's not, she's doing it on her own time, but she has been doing her own time because she's so interested in it, the design process. There's so many programs and apps out there nowadays. It's not super complex like it used
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B
to be with AI. Now there's so many ways to get like a cool render of something.
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A
You can do anything with AI nowadays. I mean there's a, there's a, there's an app or program for just about everything.
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I'm utilizing it in film. I, I'm right now actually working on like creating a mock ad that I want to pitch to Nike.
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A
Yeah.
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And I've just made the whole ad like just through AI.
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A
Yeah.
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And you can do a lot. Like there's entire substacks that you can build out where you'll take cling 2.5 and then take a screenshot from that, run it through Nano Banana and then run it back through clean 2.5. And there's so many different apps in that space that I'm using.
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A
Kind of like playing AI against other AI to make it better as you keep downloading the next.
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B
Certain models are better for building, you know, stills. And then you knew there's a different model that you'll send that still to to get motion to add motion. And then there's a different model even that you can send it to to craft lighting. So if I want the scene to be lit in a particular way, like I could shoot this right now, send it into nano banana. Nanobanana now has a 360 degree lighting app that you can change the lighting in a room. It'll create a screenshot with that lighting, then you'll take the video that you're trying to apply that lighting to and it'll create an AI version of that same video but with your updated lighting settings.
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A
That's pretty cool.
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B
So now I don't need to own, you know, $40,000 worth of lights. Now I can just say, hey, I'm going to shoot this scene however I want to shoot it and I'll light it later.
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A
Yeah, we, we've cut our estimating process down using AI drastically. So it's called handoff. AI is what we use and it has cut what, what would used to take three days to do an estimate can be done in a couple hours now. And that's with you. Fine tune, fine going over find comb. You still want to confirm everything's correct because if you send out a contract with incorrect anything on it, you still have to eat whatever it says. So yeah, still takes, but the fact that it goes over it so much faster, some of them you can upload blueprints to and it can do an estimate off that. Again, you still have to go over everything, but AI has definitely mainlined and made substantially easier or faster and still does it relatively efficiently. But the time it saves you is nightmares.
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B
Crazy.
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A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
The reason that I had asked about the design process is because I've, for the last couple of years I designed spaces like this as far as like podcast rooms, podcast build outs, stuff like that. So like production design is where my head is at. Yeah, but I always want to, you know, touch base with people who are in that world because like when I'm designing a space like this, I'm trying to think about ways that light is going to interact with different things. So I know what paints I want to use on the wall, what kind of textures I like behind in the backgrounds, it seems. But I always like to talk to designers about like what their ethos is as far as, you know, how to design a space to elicit a certain feeling.
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A
Yeah, it, it depends on if the homeowner is looking for functionality or aesthetics.
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B
For me it's all aesthetics, which in
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A
some people it is. And then some, it just depends. It depends because it depends on what, what they need the room for or what the layout of the house is going to be for whatever reason. Some people have special needs children and then functionality becomes a lot more important to them than aesthetics. And that's just one house we're working on now. So that's why example I had in the top. But again, it depends on, on the customer because one, one thing I've noticed is that every customer is substantially different in every aspect. One person may like, you know, wood slats like that, one person might like wallpaper. One person, again, it is very fine tuned and the more we fine tune it to each individual customer, the, the better the feedback we get from those customers. Because I mean, I could pitch, you know, the same thing to everyone and a lot of the customers will take my recommendation. I'd say about 80% of the time if I say I think this would be better.
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B
Yeah, because you're the expert. I want to go to the expert. And I don't know anything about this arena. You tell me, you have to learn
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A
them, you have to learn the customer and learn, learn their aesthetic, sit down with them, what colors do you like? What, what, what do you like? And then go through their house, what they have currently, you know what I mean? Because that'll give you a idea if they've done work already or if not, you say, how do you feel about these lights? But it's just, it's just you have to spend a good four hours with them, go walk around the house, discuss on what makes sense to them. Some of them even have photos of their old homes. And that'll give you a really good idea on what they like for aesthetics and functionality and whatever it is they're, they're going for. And that's the biggest thing. Once you can fine tune that process to, you know, efficiently talk to somebody and figure out either via personality or them telling you directly. Because again, you can tell a lot of stuff on people's personalities on which they might like more. And you recommend this and like, oh, I really do like that. I'm glad you mentioned that. I'm glad we went that route instead of the way I wanted to do it. It's learning them.
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B
It goes back to even what you were saying just at the beginning. Being able to operate at a high level. You do a lot of work that involves having a high degree of intuition. You've got to be able to be intuitive in different scenarios. Like, you're dealing with a different. For every person is a different, completely different scenario. And so you need to be able to follow your intuition on a lot of different decision, make decisions that you make. So, like, being operating at that high level leads you to have a lot of good intuition because you don't have to worry about whether my brain is going to send me a good idea or not.
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A
Right.
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B
I make. I take care of my brain. I expect it to send me pretty good ideas.
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A
Exactly. And in 99% of the time, it does. I mean, every once in a great while, you're going to be like, oh, it wasn't the best idea. And you reflect on it and be like, all right, let's not do that.
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B
It's usually halfway through the job, you're like, oh, I don't know if this was a good idea.
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A
No, it does, it does. But then it's happened. It's happened a couple times, not often, but. And then we'll be like, hey, we'll change this for you at no cost. If it was special, if it was my idea, and I'm like, yeah, I don't like this, but okay, no problem. You know what I mean? Again, the. The goal is to keep the customers happy in all aspects, man. We've never had a bad review from any customer ever. And we're going to keep it that way that you have. You have to again, because the minute you stop caring about the customer, the minute your business model is down the drain, I don't care what, who you are, what, what you think, that that is how it works. And if you can't take care of them and make every customer happy, I'm not saying you won't occasionally have one. That may be being difficult, but whatever. If you care about your business, bend over backwards and fix it.
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B
You know, my next question was going to be for the CEOs, for the business owners out there, what's the best key piece of advice that you would give them?
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A
But I think that that's it.
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B
That would be it.
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A
That is it.
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B
As we sort of wind down here, I just want to, you know, for the guys, if you're still Tuned in at this point, I want to make sure you check out Anders episode that is going to be coming out shortly after this podcast drops. So keep an eye on that. You're going to get a full dive, deep dive into his story, into how his business came to be. You are, you're doing incredible work. And I think putting the customer first, putting your client first is, you know, the biggest lesson that we can impart on any of you who want to get into the world of business. Want to be able to put an offer out to market, keep your customers needs at the forefront of everything that it is you do and you're going to succeed in some way, shape or form. I think that's like the best piece of advice you can give anybody.
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A
Absolutely.
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B
Now, for people who want to connect with you online, find you on social media, where can they find you?
- [21:04]
A
Yeah. Oh, we're on Facebook. AFF Carpentry. We have a website, AFF Construction.com. those would be the best places. Google. Of course we're on Google. We're on like 42 different platforms. So if you look up our company, it'll pop up on a lot of side apps also too. So pretty easy to find.
- [21:23]
B
Perfect. And we'll make sure we throw that in a little dropdown somewhere here on the screen. I don't know where we put it. But guys, again, make sure that you check his episode out. It's going to be coming out shortly. This has been another episode of the Living youg Legacy podcast. And brother, it has been a pleasure having you on the show.
- [21:39]
A
Thank you so much. Thank you.
- [21:41]
B
I'm looking forward to seeing the work that you continue to do with those government contracts and with everything you have moving forward.
- [21:47]
A
Thank you.
- [21:48]
B
Thank you for being on the show. And guys, again, I'm your host, Jason Tyler, and we will catch you guys in the next one. Sam,