Brian Gottlieb – $3000 start-up to $1 Billion in Sales– scaling the right way

It hit me, I call my wife. I said I couldn't talk.

I squeaked out the word. It's done.

We always knew we had a special culture.

We started surprising veterans with free shower systems.

It was a fake sweepstakes. He was the only entry and the

giveaway was a was a day at Lambeau Field and a night at a

hockey game. We wheel him out on the ice, we

thank him for his service, we point to the Jumbotron and we

show that when he left, our guys snuck into his home and made it

handicap accessible. That just put us on a journey

that says this is who we are. So far to date, we've done over

$5,000,000 worth of free showers for veterans.

That's the kind of stuff that gives people more than just a

paycheck, more than just a job. It gives them a mission.

You can give somebody a job, but how do you make the pivot point

in their life to say I as a human being am fundamentally

different because of the experience I had working for

that organization? Hey there and welcome to From

the Ground Up Show, the show where we inspire and encourage

the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the

stories of those that have been there, done that, and are still

getting it done. Building a life that they love

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And again, thank you for joining us today.

I am joined by Brian Gottlieb. Brian is an entrepreneur, an

author, and purpose driven leader best known for founding

Tundra Land Home improvements and scaling it into a nationally

recognized company built as much on culture and people as

performance. In his book Behind the Hammer,

Brian pulls back the curtain on victories, failures, and deeply

personal moments that shaped his leadership philosophy, revealing

how purpose, vulnerability, and service became the foundation of

his success. Today, he works with leaders and

organizations to build mission driven teams, sustainable growth

and meaningful impact, bringing a rare blend of real world

experience and human honesty into the conversation.

So, Brian, thank you for joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Yep, beyond the hammer. I finally got a shirt with my

book name on it. You know, I mean, doing all

these podcasts, like why don't I promote it a little bit?

So so thank you. Thanks for the plug.

That's great. And I understand when you

started your company, you started with a $3000 investment

in your garage and in 12 years you built it up to more than a

billion dollars in sales. Is that correct?

So it's what started. It was $3000, a plastic folding

table in the back of a friend's warehouse.

From that initial, initial business, it grew into three

separate businesses. One of the companies was called

Jacuzzi Bathroom Model out in Arizona.

Another one now was called Renewal by Anderson Windows.

I had a couple of those locations and my Tundra Land

business, which had multiple locations.

The three businesses combined had about 600 employees.

And yeah, we had cumulative sales of just nearing a billion

dollars and which is pretty cool, considering starting from

nothing. But that's the fun ride, you

know? That's part of the fun of it

all. That's awesome that that's

incredible. I can't wait to hear more about

this story. So to start with, we like to go

all the way back to the beginning with all of our

guests. So like, can you tell us a

little bit about your childhood? Yeah, it was 1863.

No, I'm kidding. It wasn't that long ago.

I, I grew up in New York and I think the thing that I remember

about my childhood, you know, I've always been a hustler,

whether it's having, you know, raking lawns, having a paper

route, all that kind of stuff. And, you know, for me when I was

younger, probably like a lot of entrepreneurs, I, I, I was

terrible at school. I barely graduated.

In fact, my wife and I joke about it, that I probably put

more work into doing the minimal amount of work than I did if I

would have just done the work. But yeah, barely graduated,

barely, barely graduated high school.

College wasn't my thing. But I got this job when I was

like 17 years old or 18 years old, and it was selling pots and

pans door to door. And I loved the idea that I can

knock on some stranger's door. I'd give them a spoon ring.

That was that's what it was called.

It was popular back then in the 70s.

Give them a spoon ring to come inside and do a demo of pots and

pans and then, you know, a couple hours later, walk out

with a check in your hand. And I just loved everything

about that and was making more money than my friends were and,

you know, just took me down a path that, you know, turned out

to be a pretty good one for me. That's great.

That's great. So you, you kind of started off

your career in sales, is that fair to say?

Yeah, that that would be fair to say.

And, and, and it just stuck with me, you know, the whole, the

whole way through. I obviously there were different

evolutions to my journey, right. And just in case we didn't touch

on it, I no longer own any of the businesses that I built.

I sold all three businesses to three different buyers.

Two of them I sold to two different private equity groups

and one, my renewal by Anderson business, I sold to my executive

leadership team. So oh.

That's great. Congratulations.

Thank you. Yeah, It's been fun.

Been a great journey. Yeah.

Well, we, we will circle back up and hit that.

And I want to hear more about what you're doing since your

exit. So but you, you mentioned that

college wasn't really your thing.

So I assume no college education or did you get started and then?

I went to, I went to Suffolk Community College for two days.

Yeah, two days, Yeah, I made it through two days.

I would actually for I for criminal justice studies,

thinking maybe I wanted to be a cop, which it's really silly.

But anyway, yeah, it just wasn't, it just wasn't for me.

And that's OK. Although, you know, as I, as I

write about in my book later on when I turned 52, and I know

we'll get into this later, that the, the business was at a

point, you know, I think the thing that we as entrepreneurs

have in common and we really have to normalize it, that at no

point in our business, you know, do we really ever fully know

what we're doing because we're doing things we've never done

before. Right?

When my company was 2 or $3,000,000, I never ran a 2 or

$3,000,000 company and I never ran a $10 million company and I

sure never ran $150 million company.

So when I was in my early 50s, I needed to get more education to

figure out how, what type of leader do I need to be for my

business. So I ended up applying to

Harvard Business School and they accepted me under their

executive education program. So a few years back I actually

graduated from Harvard Business School.

I'm an alumni of Harvard Business School, so.

Wow, congratulations. Yeah, Yeah, we got that a little

bit backwards. My mom is smiling from up above,

I'm sure. That's great.

You you build a massive business and then go get your business

education. That's right, exactly.

That's awesome. So you're you're doing door to

door sales selling pots and pans.

How do you get from pots and pans to a construction empire?

Yeah, so the thing about pots and pans, it's great, but it is

a grind. The little little back story of

a pots and pans demo. Look, if you're in the home

improvement business, you want all the decision makers present.

You want the husband and wife sitting at the kitchen table so

you can tell your story, so you can close and leave with a

check. In the pots and pans world, you

don't want the husband anywhere around.

You want the mom and the daughter.

That is your demo, right. And I used to sell waterless

cookware. And it was questions like, Mrs.

Jones, don't you believe when your daughter leaves the house,

she should have the finest cookware available for her next

home? And it was Quest.

It was really a cheesy presentation, but it was it was

a mother and daughter. It was a mother.

And I used to get my leads out of the yearbook.

So I would look for for women that were graduating from high

school. And those would be the doors I

would want to knock on. So it's just a very, very

different business. Yeah.

So a friend of mine had a, had a, had a glass company and I

went to work for them and I started doing glass work and

construction work and then fell into the sales side of things

and just absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved it.

So that's how I got into it great.

And never looked back. Yeah.

So you're you're doing sales for a glass company and is it safe

to assume that's the warehouse that you launched your business

out of the back of? No, I didn't launch, I didn't

launch my business until 2009. So it was very, I, I only had

the business 12 years. I, I launched it, built it up to

what it was in 12 years and sold it.

But I, but I worked for a glass company and worked for a couple

of home improvement companies, eventually found a, a good role

years and years ago at at four season Sunrooms.

And I would sell sunrooms to company to people and became a

sales manager. And I really loved being a sales

manager because I loved the idea that I could help other people

realize their potential. Well, not just realize it, but

also reach their potential because both of those are

important. And I decided that how do I make

a bigger impact out of this? So I wanted to start my own

consulting business and I started what's called

Silverstone training many years ago.

And I had a sales training business and I would do business

consulting and sales training across the country for home

improvement companies. And it was just, it was, it was

a great experience for me. It's great.

It's great. Oh man.

So it sounds like you kind of came into the the construction

field a little bit from the backside.

You were training sales before you launched your own company.

Yeah, before I launched my own company, what was really fun

about it is when I would when I would tour companies, I kept

this journal. I kept this book and, and inside

of the journal, I had two sides on 1/2 lists that I kept.

One list was, Gee, if I ever start my own business, I'm

definitely going to do this. And the other side was, if I

ever start my own business, I'm never doing this because I saw a

lot of things in 2008 where companies were just, they got so

far over their skis on, you know, bad decisions and running

out of marketing dollars. And, and it just, it, it taught

me a lot about, you know, if I, if I'm going to, I'm getting to

see a lot of companies. You know, when you, when you can

visit hundreds of companies over several years, you see a wide

variety of, of, of things out there.

It's almost like APHD in business combined with I made a

point to read a business book every week.

So it was just a so I felt when I started my business, it was

just, it was just time to get off the road, Eric.

I was just done living in hotels and eating, you know, hotel food

and sleeping in hotel beds and just waiting.

It being stuck in airports. It was just a grind and you

know, missing my kids birthdays and just wanted to get off the

road. So I decided, well, let me just

do this on my own, not knowing I was going with no intent of

building what I built. By the way, that wasn't the

plan. That wasn't the grand plan, it

was just getting off the road and creating some income.

So what did those early days look like?

How do you start to create an income with $3000 in a plastic

folding table? Yeah.

Well, well, the first rule of business is to stay in business,

OK. So if if you think about it, you

you have to make a lead, you have to make a lead, you have to

sell a lead, you have to install a lead.

That's what happened. So I in the very early days was

really a cool discipline. Back then, one of the things I

saw when I was consulting is, as I think I mentioned that people

got over their skis and they didn't have marketing dollars

anymore. They spent it in bad ways and

they couldn't generate leads. And I decided early on that I

always needed money for marketing.

So I set up a separate bank account and I took 7% of every

check I got, whether the check was for $50 or for $5000, I took

7%, stuck it in a separate account.

I always had my marketing dollars ready to go so I could

prepaid for marketing things. But also because what I launched

my business in 2009, there were a lot of companies that pulled

back on advertising. So I was able to negotiate a lot

of pay for performance type of lead generation programs,

whether it was in Valpak or you name it.

I said, hey, look, you need, you need advertisers and I need

customers. Let's just drop an ad.

We'll do a special phone number and and I'll pay you per lead or

I'll pay you per sale. So, and that was just a

discipline that stuck with the business all the way until I

exited it. So it allowed me to just, you

know, how do I generate the next lead?

How do I turn that into revenue? And how do I get it installed?

And you know, it was a it in the beginning.

Look, it's a grind, you know it's a grind, but, but you know,

but it's something that you have to do.

Yeah, yeah. So what did sales look like that

first year? Yeah, well, I remember that the

this was in, by the way, in Appleton, WI where there are

more cows than people. OK, so it's already a little

harder to find leads, but I remember the the first

opportunity to set up it was called a a home show, but it

wasn't like the normal spring home shows that that that cities

do. This was a show put on by the by

the Appleton Mall. It was the first time they ever

did it. So I signed up for it was

business was brand new and I didn't even have a display.

OK, I did it though. I had a projector because I used

to do sales training. So I took my projector and I

built a slideshow and I built the plywood wall and I just

showed a slideshow on it while I tried setting appointments.

But there was like nobody at this show.

I set one appointment. I said, I managed to set one

appointment for this gentleman and I remember going out to his

home and trying to sell him a sunroom and it was about a

$42,000 sunroom. And I was thinking to myself,

Yep, if this guy buys today, I'm going to be able to stay in

business. If this guy doesn't buy, I think

I'm out of money and I might be have to have to close the doors.

So, so clearly I wasn't going to leave that home without a yes,

but but you know, but you know, Eric, when you think about it,

those early day disciplines are so important in an organization.

And I think what happens is as a business starts getting bigger

and bigger, we get away from those fundamental disciplines

that are so necessary for survival.

Yeah, absolutely. You can see that again and again

and again. And I know if you if you study

the statistics of successful businesses, as they start to

scale, there's usually a pretty significant dip in margins.

And I think a lot of that is as the the founder gets more and

more removed from being the guy with his hands on everything,

you lose a little bit of that discipline, you lose a little

bit of that touch. And it takes a while to

cultivate the culture to bring that back.

Yeah, Eric, here's the truth. When you're starting a business

and the founder is the only employee, the business's success

or failure comes down to how well that entrepreneur can

execute. OK, the moment you try to scale

your business, you have to do so by adding people to your team.

OK, now they're the ones that are executing.

Now, the business's success often falls on how will the

teams execute both when the owner's watching and when

nobody's looking. This is why, you know, and as I

write about in my book, if you want to build a business, you

have to commit to building people.

It it ultimately comes down to that the the lid of the business

is directly connected to the lid of the capabilities of those on

your team. An organization can't outgrow

the capabilities of the people that work for them.

So that's why when you think about what is really the role of

the leader, it's to grow and develop others in many ways.

Great, great. Well, I know you mentioned

earlier that kind of the impetus for wanting to start your own

business was to have influence and be able to help people and

coach people. What is the earliest memory you

have of being put into a position of leadership and how

did that cultivate that? Desire.

I think a lot of us, a lot of us come up with our whether it's

leadership or parenting, right? It's that same list, right?

If I ever become a parent, I'm definitely doing these things

and I'm never doing those things, right?

And I think the same is in leadership.

We've all had a boss that maybe did some stuff that was great

and other stuff that we say, my gosh, this guy was a jerk, you

know, so we, we try to find our own way of that.

But I will share with you really interesting epiphany that I had.

And, and, and I think it's interesting because, because it,

it significantly changed my life.

I was probably, I was probably in my late 40s and when I would

do sales training for people across the country, I would

always do a one page survey. I'd give them a paper survey to

fill out on their, on the sales training seminar.

And it asked questions like, you know, what's one thing that you

learned? What you know, what is one thing

you're looking forward to implementing?

What is one word that would describe Brian's presentation

And the word that kept coming up

was inspirational. Inspirational.

Now, mind you, I'm doing sales training.

OK. I thought I would see things

like I learned how to be a good closer.

I'm now ready for that next lead.

I thought I would hear all these testosterone statements.

But what I heard was what was written was that was like the

most inspirational thing I've ever been part of.

I feel ready to take on the world.

I have a new belief in myself. Brian's an inspirational person.

I never thought of myself as inspirational.

I never thought of me as a, Gee, I'm an inspirational guy.

At that moment I thought, what if I go all in on that?

What if, what if, What if others see something in me that I don't

see in myself? And what if I go all in on that?

So really when I started my business, it wasn't just about

starting another home improvement company.

I wanted to build a business where where people could really

feel part of something much bigger than themselves, where

where it was more than just a company.

It was a brand that was woven into the fabrics of the

communities that we serve. It was somewhere where our

customers could be Co producers and believe in our mission

statement and want to and want to see us successful.

And the team, the team all felt like owners in the business and

all had an opportunity to grow that that that was truly the

difference maker. Well, twice now you've mentioned

your your list of do's and don'ts that you had as you built

and scaled your business. Were you able to stay true to

that list, or were there a few things that you changed your

mind about? Look, so so let's talk about

that for a second. Yeah, I think we stayed really

true to it. Look, one, one of the things is

that you know, everybody, because when you have $3000,

it's not like you can go out and hire somebody and give them a

big salary, OK? You can pay them for a week and

then you're done, OK? So I had to come up with with,

with not only not only pay for performance marketing, but a lot

of variable compensation structures for people to give

them a small amount of salary, but a lot of upside.

That was a discipline that stayed with the business all the

way until I sold it. But I also like to talk about

that, that, that word discipline.

You know, I think there's, there's too much emphasis on

social media talking about the importance of documenting your

systems and processes. Now I know that's a what, but

you have to document your look. I'm telling you there's too much

emphasis put on systems and processes and not enough

emphasis put on the disciplines of the business.

Systems and processes are the what of what you do.

The disciplines are the why of what you do.

Disciplines are timeless and a business would be better off if

they don't have good systems and processes have really clear

disciplines that you can teach everybody on the organization

because then the business will be better off because of it.

I'll give an example. One of our disciplines.

Look early on the lead is sacred, OK, That's a discipline

that stayed with the business. The lead is sacred.

When we're done with the job, we get paid 100% in full.

We always run a full sales presentation every single time.

You know, these are basic disciplines of the business.

And I think a business owner can think about, maybe take a day or

two or three and think about if I look at each department, what

are two or three timeless disciplines that we need in our

organization? In order to hit our aspirational

goal, after that, the systems and processes will come to you.

The disciplines are almighty. Yeah, that's good advice.

I can, as you're speaking, I can see that playing out of my own

business. I don't know that I would have

used that same language, but we've had some things that have

carried through for 41 years of this is this is how we do it.

This is what we do. And yeah, I think that's that's

vital. That's a, that's a good thought.

I'm going to have to Mull that over a little bit more.

Yeah, and I think you know, you, as you mentioned, as a business

starts to grow, you often see that that dip in, in

profitability and there's a reason for that.

And I, I think it's this, look, when we we had this saying, we

had this three word saying when the business was early and it

was just sell shit, OK, That's what you want to do, just sell

shit. All right?

Didn't matter if you made any money.

And we, we built some beautiful projects that we didn't make any

money on and we didn't make any money on it, but they were sure

were beautiful for the customer. And yet we were able to sell

stuff. And that is because when you're

trying to scale without the right, without the right

structure and the right desired outcome, you have a lot of chaos

inside of your business. It's very chaotic.

And chaos can produce revenue, but discipline produces profits.

And it takes a while to realize that that, yeah, we're we're

generating revenue. What disciplines do we need to

spend from revenue to profit? And when you do that, you know,

it really does put a lot of things in order for the business

leader. That, that's a good phrase

there. I'm going to write that down and

save that for later. Chaos can produce revenue, but

discipline? Discipline produces profit.

Correct. That's gold I I might put that

on the sign and hang it up in my.

Office. That's good.

Stuff right there. Yeah, Yeah, I'll, I'll also

share with you that in a chaotic world, right, and you're trying

to lead A-Team and you're almost like kind of trying to hold the

wheels on the bus from falling off, right?

Just trying to keep everything together just, you know, and,

and there are all kinds of problems that come with that.

And you've got a maybe an employee issue or some kind of

issue or process issue and you try to fix it.

You try to get in there and fix it and look, there's a big

difference between being right and being influential when

you're trying to change people's behavior inside of the

organization. If something's not going right,

you could be right all day long that you need them to do

something different. It doesn't mean they're going to

do it. You have to be able to be

influential and that takes leadership and, and I think the

more we can recognize that again, I in my book, I get into

this in, in quite in a lot of detail that, that the culture of

your business, we what is the culture of a business, right?

It's how people think, act, how people think, feel and behave

inside of the organization, how they how they think, feel and

behave. That doesn't matter what you

want your culture to be. That is your culture, but also

along that lines, your culture is shaped by the lowest level of

acceptable behavior. So what ends up happening is

when we tolerate certain behaviors, we're actually

setting a new standard and that's never good.

So we have to be in front of that.

As difficult as it is, the the what we tolerate, we actually

attract more of. So we have to be very careful as

business leaders, what do we deem acceptable because that is

who you're going to become. That's great.

You just went ahead and answered my next question.

I was going to say it With a small organization, I've found

it's really, really easy to have a great culture because the the

founder, the owner, the leader is right there.

You're working side shoulder by shoulder with them, and as the

business scales and grows, you know, how do you maintain that

culture throughout? But I think you just nailed it.

It's what you tolerate. Well, that's one piece of it.

You know, the other truth of it, Eric, is if you have today in

your business, you can be a fantastic decision maker, right?

And you are, you're a great decision maker, right?

You're a business leader. You're a great decision maker.

You can solve problems very quickly at at at scale.

The challenge becomes that when when you solve a problem in

isolation, you're actually robbing somebody of a training

opportunity. So you have to be more patient

even when solving problems. The other piece of it is to

recognize that that as the business grows and grows and

grows, you, me, we get further and further and further away

from the customer and we might not necessarily be the best

decision maker in that problem anymore.

So that is a real issue. We can start to make decisions

in an ivory tower because we're too far removed from the

customer. So we have to change as leaders.

We have to develop others. We have to get them to be good

decision makers. We have to teach them to make

decisions. We have to teach them one very

important thing that that, you know, it's OK to be wrong, just

don't be wrong for long. And we have to teach people it's

OK to make a decision. My son, by the way, who's one of

the owners of the Renewal by Anderson business that I sold

and they'll do, they'll do $120 million in revenue this year.

It's a big business. He's got three things that he

tells every new hire that that that is unacceptable,

negativity, disrespect, inaction.

And I love that. I love that.

I love the idea that that he doesn't punish mistakes.

He frowns upon inaction because that's what really stops the

business from moving forward. And as you know, Eric, you have

a business. I had a business.

If if there's a problem, if the customer, if we did, if we

screwed something up. OK, let's say we screw something

up. We, Yeah, we're human.

If we can't solve that problem right away, by the time it goes

up the org chart and gets to my desk, the customer doesn't want

that problem solved. They want a brand new house

because I broke their house and now they want a new one.

So that becomes a really bad customer journey.

That's why we have to empower people to be good decision

makers. I like that.

One of my favorite little quips is do something, even if it's

wrong. Right, right.

Do something, even if it's wrong, and then learn from it,

right? Yeah, and indecision is a

decision. If you don't act, things are

happening anyway. So, and look, I, I get it when,

when we're all in on our business trying to empower, I

think, I think what happens is we unintentionally become the

leader we never wanted to be. Let me fill you out what that

means. We don't, I don't think anybody

that runs a business says I want to be a micromanager.

That's the type of business I want to have.

And yet, and yet, because the nature of the fact that we're

all in on our business, right? We're all in on it.

Our life depends upon it. Our, our if, if our business

fails, it's, it's, it's, it's a disaster for, for our, for our,

for ourselves, for our family, for the people that work for us.

So we tend to try to hold on to a lot of decisions.

We tend to try to control every single aspect of the business

and that is micromanagement. I'm sorry, that is so we default

to micromanagement unintentionally.

Look, it's not like it's not like we went to Harvard Business

School and created this grandmaster plan to build some

large home improvement or home services business.

What probably happened is you worked for somebody, that person

was a jerk, so you decided you want to do it on your own.

You get a little bit of traction.

Next thing you know, you need to hire a couple people.

And before you know it, Oh my gosh, I got a business.

And like I said earlier, I have no idea how to run this thing,

OK, but I've got a business. So look, empowering, letting go

systematically training and developing others and letting go

by empowering. It's it's a process.

It takes patience. It's not a light switch that is

on and off, but it's something that you have to move forward

with if you really want your sanity and if you want to sleep

at night. Yeah.

So what did that process look like for you?

How did you train the next generation of leaders?

And how did you know when it was time to let go and let them take

care of it? Yeah, well, what happened was I

was sitting in my office at the time.

I probably had 100 plus employees, okay.

And we had we did all of our marketing in house and we had a

massive marketing budget, you know massive.

In fact when I when I sold my businesses, our marketing budget

was $21 million a year. That was our marketing budget,

OK. So we were spending a lot of

money on leaves. Try, try letting go of that.

OK? Try.

OK, you can empower somebody else to spend all that money a

year. OK.

But anyway, but I was sitting at my desk and they were like two

or three marketing people and then a sales manager behind them

waiting outside of my door because they needed to ask me a

question so they can go ahead and do their job.

And I'm looking at this line and I'm like, this is this is this

is ridiculous. OK, This is ridiculous that

there's a line of people waiting that I'm the bottleneck.

I said this can't be I, I actually, then the very next day

I went shopping, I decided to remodel my office and I got, I

got rid of my desk and file cabinets and I put in a giant

flat slab desk with no drawers in it because my feeling was if

there's a piece of paper in my office, it's in the wrong place.

It means somebody's not empowered to do their job.

And that set me on the path of saying I need to model my

business like a training organization.

And, and that means that every single thing is a training

opportunity. And that also means, by the way,

that I have to hire people that are trainable.

Hiring somebody that's not trainable if you're a training

organization doesn't do you very good.

So, so it just put me on a giant journey of saying, OK, what are

some of the core things that I need to teach and what is the

best environment to teach them? And how do I know the teaching

stuck? And that was my, my, my goal.

That was my, that was my role. Awesome, that sounds great.

When were you most afraid during the process of building your

business? Three days before payroll, every

two weeks. Look, you know business, yeah,

we talk about purpose and purpose changes, right Sometimes

your only purpose is stay in business.

Other times your purpose is to, you know, maybe make a positive

impact in this world. Our role as leader changes and.

And outside circumstances affect that.

Sometimes you have employee issues, competitor issues,

vendor issues, financial issues, and these are all the headwinds

that face business leaders. And the truth is that sometimes

we have to be a peacetime CEO and other times we have to be a

wartime CEO. And, and it is a difference.

And if I may share a story with you, I hope you don't mind.

When when we started doing the, the vast majority of our

business was one day bath business and replacement

windows. That was our business, right?

One day baths and replacement windows.

When when we started getting traction in the one day bath

space, I remember we did an early home show.

It was in January 1 year and normally at this it wasn't a big

home show, but we would typically set about 30

appointments at this home show for one day baths.

This particular year, even though the attendance was strong

and our marketers were very good, we only set like 7

appointments. And the reason being is because

all of a sudden everybody in our community wanted to become their

own one day bath company. And we had a dozen companies

selling one day showers out of nowhere.

So look, that is a problem, right?

And I had to shift from being a peacetime CEO to being a wartime

Ceoi had to say how, how do we not let this take our business

down? Because if we don't react to it

now, if these competitors gain a tremendous amount of of, of

momentum, we're going to have them for life.

It's going to be a problem. How do we how do we win?

And we decided, and I got my team together and I asked them,

I said what percentage of our business comes out of home

shows? And we came up with the number

5%. Five, 5% of our business comes

out of home shows. Mind you, our average shower was

$10,000 at the time. OK.

So if our, if 5% of our business comes out of home shows, what

percentage of the business of all these startups is going to

come out of the home show for them?

And we kind of agreed that was like 90% of their business was

going to come from these home shows.

So we felt we have all these other home shows coming up.

Can we take them all out at once?

We never talked about price at a home show.

That was one thing. We don't talk about price at a

home show. We want to sell the appointment

and get the home and do a presentation, except now.

So what we decided to do is we got on the tops of all our

displays giant signs that said showers 34953495.

OK, that's that was below our cost.

OK, It costs more than that to produce it.

So I thought, you know what, I can lose money on 5% of my

business and it's not going to affect the rest of my company

very much. But my competitors are going to

be given a very difficult choice.

They're either going to have to do showers for 3495 and probably

not make any money and go out of business, or they're not going

to do showers for 3495 and not set any appointments at the home

show and probably not stick around.

And what it was the way it was a wartime decision inside of the

business. Now, you might say, gosh, Brian,

you're a real jerk, OK. But I'm trying to win for my

team. And, you know, the following

year we only had like two or three bath companies in our home

show. After that, it was just a but.

But the point of this is whatever the situation that you

as a business leader are facing, you have to decide, you know,

what are you going to do about it?

You know, are you going to be a wartime or are you going to be a

peacetime CEO in this moment? So what gets me nervous?

Look, it's always risky, right? When you have to, when you have

to do things that are a big risk to the organization, when

sometimes when you have to go all in on an idea and you don't

have all the facts and you don't know the outcome.

But ultimately that's what builds the character of the

people on the team and the and gives the business confidence

that if you can overcome this, you can overcome anything.

That's brilliant. I love that story.

Thank you for sharing it that it's a very analytical decision

to like you said it, you know, the math works.

We're going to lose money on 5% of the business to protect the

rest of it. It it really was an investment

in marketing, not losing money. I imagine there's a lot of

emotions that go with that, that threat, that decision and how to

address it. How do you balance the

conflicting emotions of people coming into your space,

threatening your business, having to give stuff away

cheaper and and losing money and stay in that analytical space to

make those good decisions? Yeah.

And again, that changes too, right?

At scale At scale a new competitor coming your business

doesn't it doesn't move the needle, right?

It doesn't move the needle. It's it's always going to be

somebody popping up and popping down.

And ultimately I learned that I don't need to focus on my

competitors. I need to focus on our own

business. OK and, and how do we and and

how do we constantly challenge how do we challenge the customer

journey every single day? How do we say to ourselves, how

do we just, instead of making our product our point to

differentiation, how do we, how do we make operational

excellence our point to differentiation?

And I'll, I'll give you an example of that.

You know, one of the things we looked at in our business is

that we're selling a shower today and the shower is not

getting installed for six or eight weeks, like a lot of, you

know, this big. But then we've said, well, how

long does it actually take to get the materials?

Oh, it takes us three days to get the materials.

OK, well then what is all this other slop?

It's all operational inefficiency, right?

What if we could, what if, what if we could take, what if every

single shower that we sell, What if we can install it next week?

What if we could do that? What, what would we have to be

excellent at to sell something today and install it next week?

And look, and we moved our whole business that way, but and that

is by the way, much more difficult to compete with.

So now when we're working a home show, we can set 200

appointments, we can run them all in a couple of days and we

can probably install the shower before a competitor even has a

chance to call them. So now it's no longer about the

competition, it's about how do we just deliver a better

experience to the customer and make that our winning advantage.

And and by the way, when you get that right, talk about fending

off competition, operational excellence is a lot more

difficult to replicate. It is.

That's brilliant. I'm starting to get an idea of

how you built such a large business so quickly.

Yeah, it was a fun run. I know you spent a lot of years

learning from a lot of different businesses.

Is there a time that really influenced or, or maybe a

specific job or position that kind of gave you this visionary

thinking and, and starting to look at things differently and

the ways that you can differentiate yourself?

Yeah, the early on when we first started selling showers in 2012,

several of my friends were selling the same shower.

And we created this this group, we were all friends.

There were twelve of us, different businesses across the

country. I'll name some of them in a

moment. OK.

And we called ourselves The Dirty Dozen.

Actually the manufacturer, one of one of the vendors named us

The Dirty Dozen. We we, we then started calling

ourselves the Big 12. But we were a mastermind group.

We built our own mastermind group where was we as owners

would get together once a month, but we were friends.

But we also got our marketing managers to get together.

We got the sales managers together, we got the production

managers together, we got the recruitment departments together

and these and we're all trying to figure things out.

One of the companies in our in our Big 12 was a company called

West Shore Home. At the time they were doing

maybe $20 million a year in revenue.

Another one was Reborn Cabinets, another one was New Pro home

improvements. Another one was a Lenco Max home

together. Together our companies totaled

under together under $100 million in revenue.

It two months ago. Those companies in revenue total

just under $3 billion in revenue.

We all grew together. We all learned from each other.

We we were vulnerable together. We didn't show up to be the

smartest person in the room. We showed up to really help each

other. And you know, it's interesting

when you when you surround yourself with like minded people

that you're not competing with all trying to accomplish the

same thing and you don't try to have all the answers, but

instead try to come up with the right questions.

Boy, you can really build something great together.

And, and by the way, most of us sold our businesses at the same

time too, by the way. That's great.

Congratulations. Yeah, thanks.

You've talked a lot about kind of the growth in your business

and growing as a leader. Like you said at every stage,

you've never run a business, you've never run a $3,000,000

business, never a $10 million business.

Did you ever feel like the business was growing

significantly faster than you were as.

A leader, yeah, yeah, 100 percent, 100%, yeah.

Many times I felt like I was just trying to hold the wheels

on, like I mentioned earlier. And.

And I think we, we have to question ourselves that just

like the business, the, the business can't outperform the

team's capabilities, the team can't outperform the leaders

capabilities, right? They're not going to, it's not

so and, and, and sometimes we were holding the business back.

Look, I, I think that, I, I think that a business leader is

never going to have all the answers, right?

When they have to make a decision.

If you're waiting for, for all the facts to make a good

decision, you're going to be waiting a long time.

So. So what?

But you can gain momentum by making decisions without all the

facts and they turn out OK, but then also trusting in your team

to help you make some of these decisions.

But yeah, many times I felt the business was growing ahead of

me, which is again, why I went to Harvard Business School.

I needed to, I needed to be a different type of leader.

But in all fairness, that's why you know, podcasts like what you

do, Erica, so important people can you know, this stuff is

this, this information is available.

There's there even the theme of what you do for the next

generation of leaders. And I love I love mentoring

younger people and I mentor a lot of people today.

And and they don't have to they don't have to make the same

mistakes that I made. The the other truth is that in

in 2009, maybe it was 2010, I remember talking to my

production manager and I said, man, you know what I really want

to do? I want to build a $10 million

company. At the time, that was unheard

of. Today, there are so many

examples of these big organizations that have scaled.

There's so much, there's so many more paths to get there that

there are so many more examples to follow that you don't have

to. You don't have to reinvent the

wheel. I think, I think the most

difficult thing to realize is that the biggest challenge with

business, one of the biggest challenges is that as an

organization is growing and scaling rapidly.

What tends to happen is we start to add a system, add a process,

add a person, add somebody in the org chart, add another

system, add a process, oh, something went wrong, we need a

process for that on and on and on.

And then we start to take on more products.

And then we're doing it this way and we've taken what was a very

simple business and we've made it highly complicated.

And, and it's a challenge because to grow a business, you

really have to remove the complexity because that's what

makes a trainable business. A simple business that's

repeatable is highly trainable and highly scalable.

But the truth is Eric, it's easy to make a business complicated.

It's very difficult to keep it simple.

It's easy to over complicate things and complexity is the

absolute enemy to execution. The more complicated the

business is, the more difficult it is to execute.

So I think that that regardless of the size of your business,

you have to ask yourself is, is my company?

Are the different departments trainable?

Is it, is it simple enough? Can I teach, can I teach a

salesperson in a couple of weeks how to sell everything that we

offer? Can I teach an installer in in

3456 weeks how to install anything that we sell?

You know, if not, you might want to think about, you know, is

that the type of business that's scalable?

And if not, what should we do about it?

That's great. That's great.

So how do you go about attacking those complexities and

simplifying it? If you're in a business that's

already kind of gotten out of control and got more complex

than it should, how do you correct that course?

Yeah, it it all starts in my opinion a with viewing

everything through lens of the customer.

OK, see is what does the customer journey look like?

The other thing that I highly recommend is you take your

entire timeline of your business from the time you generate a

lead to the time you're done and paid.

And you put all the different interactions that have to

happen. It be in in your company with

your with one employee to the other employee or to you're an

employee to the customer or you name it.

And you just put little hash marks everywhere there's an

interaction because first of all, everywhere there's an

interaction is an opportunity for friction.

OK. And that's those are all

opportunities for friction. Whenever two people interact

with each other, there's an opportunity for friction.

And you say to yourself, is this necessary still?

Is there a better way to do this?

Why are we still doing it that way?

Look, it's going to be a long line if you're a big business

and, but, but it's going and it's going to be, it's going to

be a grueling process because we get, we get so stuck.

No, we have to do it this way because of that.

But a lot of times what happens is we create these ridiculous

systems off of anomalies off of like one time we had this one

issue with one random customer once in our lifetime.

So now we have this big cumbersome process.

So that never ever happens again.

I mean, you know, is that really the right decision?

Those are some of the things. But then also really it goes

back to empowering, empowering the people inside of your

organization that at the team leadership level that they're

always looking for their how to optimize their business, how to

make their business more efficient, their business inside

of the business. That's great.

So sorry, it just popped into my head as you were speaking there.

You know, when you're going back and attacking some of these

processes, trying to simplify things, is there a simple way to

distinguish the the disciplines that we discussed earlier versus

some of these processes? Because especially maybe a

middle manager in one of these companies, there might be a

discipline that's vitally important to the company.

This is how we do it, and there's a reason.

Yeah, it. Might easily get confused with

one of these processes of. This is why we do it this way.

That needs to go. Yeah.

So let's pretend for a second. You're my production manager,

OK. And we've got and we're trying

to look at our business. We have an issue with a customer

or whatever that thing is. If I go up to and I say, hey,

Eric, what happened on Mrs. Jones's job, your first response

might be, well, the sales Rep sold it wrong, right, or

something like that, or the installer didn't show up and

you're going to start with people.

And what we have to do to get to the truth is we have to separate

people from process. I would be much better off if I

say to you, Eric, we've got an issue with misses or misses

Jones's project. OK, leaving the people aside, we

have the right people. Where in our business is either

the process broken or do we lack of discipline that we need?

In your opinion, where do you think our process broke to allow

this to happen? So when you make it, when you

focus people on process and not people and on discipline and not

people, you're really going to get to the truth.

And and that's again a key step in growing a business.

A lot of wisdom there, I know. Yeah, when you start addressing

problems, it usually starts with a lot of finger pointing.

And so. If you eliminate the people and

where did the process break that, that's good.

That's another key discipline. In fact, if you ask me the the

single most important discipline in business, single most

important one in my opinion, is being able to forecast your

targets and then hit those targets with a high level of

certainty. OK, I'll share with you why I, I

do keynotes across the country of this industry all the time

and I'm on a million podcasts and I, I can ask the audience,

you know, how many of you in the audience?

And I would challenge your listeners, your viewers on this

right now, How many of you need to make a key hire in your

business? Want to make some?

You want to hire somebody in your organization, but you're

afraid to take on the overhead. You don't want to take on the

overhead of this additional hire.

I get that, I get that. But the truth is this that it's

not that you don't want to take on the overhead, it's that

you're not confident in the targets you're going to hit for

2026 and therefore because of that, you don't want to take on

the overhead. So not taking on the overhead is

a symptom. The problem at the root cause is

lack of confidence in the either having targets or hitting

targets. The business has to hit targets

with a high level of certainty. The business owner can't do it

by themselves. It has to be the people inside

of the business that help you not only craft the targets, but

also have to speak to them on a daily basis, on a daily basis.

The thing about this industry is that every single person in the

organization, in my opinion, should have a daily target,

should have a daily target, a daily KPI that they not only

speak to but also compensated around.

It's part of their variable compensation structure.

The more the business gets great at hitting targets, the more you

empower people to have to speak to their targets every single

day, the better they're going to be at decision making to hit

those targets with a high level of certainty.

And the more the business is going to grow with a high level

of certainty. To me, that is the really the

secret sauce to growing a business and empowers people to

make great decisions and, and, and also gives you the ability

to sleep at night. And then if for some reason a, a

department, let's say once again, Eric, you're my now

you're no longer my production manager, you're my sales manager

now. OK.

And let, let, let's say you've missed targets for a few days in

a row. You know, the way I need to

approach that then if I'm trying to help you build a Better

Business inside of your business is I have to essentially ask you

3 questions. Number one, what were the

reasons we're missing target #2 what steps are you taking to

correct it? And #3 by what date will we be

back on target? What this allows you to do as a

leader inside of that business is, first of all, identify the

root cause of the problem, formulate a plan, and then

create a timeline to solving it. This is empowerment.

This is how we empower people. We take these kind of

opportunities and we use them all as training opportunities.

That's great. Yeah.

It, it sounds like you were very successful at building a, a

strong culture in your business and that's something you're

you're pretty passionate about. Do you have a, a story of maybe

an incident that influenced that passion?

Is is that something you've always done well, or is that a

lesson you had to learn the hard way?

We always knew we had a special culture.

Our our mission statement was to do well and do good.

And what that meant was the purpose of business was to make

a decent profit, but do so decently, OK to do so decently.

So that was just part of the fabric of our business.

What really ignited our culture, though, from A to, to to bring

it to life was there was in the bath business is a very

interesting business and you when you go into people's homes,

there's a portion of people that are just looking for a more

beautiful bath. But there are a lot of people

that are doing it because their bathroom is dangerous.

And we would go into homes where we would see veterans with that

were proud that proudly served our country, that were petrified

to take a shower in their own home because their bathtub was

impossible to step over. And they're trying to hang on to

the shower curtain where they're trying to hang on to some that's

not. And they're afraid to slip and

fall in their own bathtub. And, and they don't have any

money to do anything about it. And there are no real government

programs to help them. So what we started doing was we

said, you know what, how do we how do we do something about

this in a meaningful way? And we started surprising

veterans with free shower systems when in, in crazy ways.

The first guy that we surprised his name was Mike Alstine.

He was a, he was in, he was an Iraqi war veteran who came home

from Iraq, was diagnosed with Ms. And like that, bam, he was

in a wheelchair and we heard about his story and we had him,

we worked with his mom. So he approached his mom.

We had Mike enter a sweepstakes, but it was a fake sweepstakes.

He was the only entry. OK, So he entered A sweepstakes

and the and the giveaway was a was a day at Lambeau Field for a

tour of Lambeau Field and a night at a hockey game.

So surprise he won. And anyway, so he goes out of

his house at like 11:00 AM to Lambeau for a tour and we meet

him at the hockey game at night and we wheel him out on the ice.

Mind you, he has he has no idea who I am.

And you know, we thank him for his service and we point to the

Jumbotron and we show that when he left his home at 11 AM, our

guys snuck into his home, crashed his bath and made it

handicap accessible for him. And and that just put us on a

journey that says, you know, this is who we are.

You know, this is what it means to do well and also do good.

This is something that isn't just writing a check to a non

profit. This is something that everybody

in the organization had to participate in to get Mike a

safe bathroom in a day. So from that we founded a

program called Bass for the Brave.

OK, where Bass for the Brave still going on where we surprise

veterans with free shower projects across the country.

So far to date we've done over $5,000,000 worth of free showers

for veterans on veteran's day across the country, partnering

with like minded home improvement companies all at the

same time on veteran's day. So we've helped 350 veterans

have free safe shower systems in their home.

That's the kind of stuff that lights me up.

That's the kind of stuff that that to me gives people more

than just a paycheck, more than just a career path, more than

just a job. It gives them a.

That's awesome. That's great.

Those are some great stories though.

Yeah. And since your exit in the

business, is that program still going on?

It is. It's still going on.

We were in. We did it just this past

November. We were in 21 states with Bass

for the Brave, helping veterans with free shower systems.

Yeah, it's still going on. If there's a contractor

listening that would like to partner with you in that. 100%

be the best way for them to join you.

Yeah, reach out on my website, briangottlieb.com.

Shoot me a note, say you want to participate.

My goal for 2026 is I want to be in all 50 states.

With it, I want to be on all 50 States and I think we're going

to do it. So it's a really cool program.

It makes everybody in the business feel good.

And by the way, when we crash a veterans bathroom that day,

we're not just doing the shower. We get the entire community

involved. We have the fire department

coming out to the home and changing smoke detector

batteries for the veterans. We have the elementary schools

writing thank you cards for the veterans.

So when they're opening them up on the day of their crash, you

know, there's not a dry eye in the house.

We have neighbors bringing food over.

We have the, we had the high school band coming out and

doing, you know, songs for the veteran out in the street.

We had the Police Department presenting the colors to the

veterans. We, we make a big, big, of

course the media comes out. They tell the story.

It's just a day to celebrate someone and, and, and it's

transformational when the day before we crash their bath, they

have a shower that, that they're afraid of.

The day after they can clean themselves in the safety of

their own home with the dignity that they deserve.

And if it and it's the least we can do to serve them and and

their, their life from just that one little instance is is

changed forever. Because we take taking a shower

safely for granted. We take it for granted every day

when we think about it, right. But when people really struggle

with that, it's a big issue. So anyway, it's it's a worthy

cause. Reach out to me, I'd love to

sign you up for the program. That's awesome.

Well, we will make sure we get that information in the show

notes. I'll shoot you an e-mail when

we're done here and and make sure I get all the information

right because that's something that I could really get behind.

That'll be great. We'll all we don't do baths, but

I'll have to hook you up with some contractors here in

Wyoming. See if we can make that happen

and add another state to your list.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Look, you, you as a business

leader, you have a choice, right?

You can give somebody a job, you can, and you're happy to pay

them. You can give them a career path

and you're happy to advance them.

But how do you instead? How do you make their time with

you, however long or however short it is, become a pivot

point in their life to say, you know what, I as a human being am

fundamentally different because of the experience I had working

for that organization. How do you how do you create an

environment to give people a chance to do their life's work,

that thing that they were born to do?

And when you do that, I'll tell you what it's it's like if you

want to build a mighty ship to sail across the ocean, sure, you

can hire a whole bunch of people and teach them how to swing a

hammer. But if you first get those

people to yearn for the open sea, they will build a more

magnificent ship than you have ever imagined.

When I share with you that it was the team that built a more

magnificent company than I could have ever imagined, it couldn't

have been done without them. And yet, and and they know it.

They were a part of it and it's something that we'll always

remember. That's awesome.

You, you've got me fired up. I want to come.

So I know you mentioned from the very beginning you threw 7% of

all revenue into marketing. You have this culture inspiring

people. You've done a lot diving into

the community, providing for veterans.

What other pieces are there to your strategy for growth, and

how did that strategy evolve as your company grew?

Yeah, well, the ultimately business is all about execution,

right? Vision without execution is

called the hallucination. You're going to have, you're

going to have the greatest vision in the world, but if you

can't execute on it, you're going to be in trouble.

So, so you have to be able to execute, right?

You have to, and not just execute, you have to execute at

a high level and with consistency.

In fact, it's my belief if you can do that, you can win in any

market with any product, regardless of the competitive

landscape, you can win, OK, and, and, but to execute, you have to

be able to measure execution, which comes back down to daily

targets. People, every single person on

your team deserves to know whether or not they had a

productive day at work. They need to know that.

And if they don't have a daily target or KPI to look at, how do

they really know if they had a productive day?

How do you as a leader know if they had a productive day?

So look, when we're trying to grow a business, we cannot,

cannot discount the importance of KP is and target driven and

execution because ultimately that's what's going to define

the success or the failure of a business.

So if we get dive into the weeds a little bit, this is something

that I've struggled with a lot for maybe the the lower end of

your team, the the laborer that's maybe just a helper for

an installer or something like that.

What kind of KPIs do you put in place for those people that

every day they have different tasks, they do them differently.

You know, they might have an install that goes really well

and really smooth and then one that they're fighting against.

How do you shape a AKPI that's specific enough to motivate them

and measure what they're doing, but open enough to allow the

variability in their job? Yeah.

I mean, look, if if it's a, if it's, let's just start at the

beginning of the organization. If it's a marketer that's

setting appointments at A at a show or at a, you know, or, or

knocking on doors there there can be a piece of compensation

based on the result that you expect out of that cost that's

associated with it, right. So there's a variable cost to

it, right. If it's an installer, you're

trying to do a certain amount of revenue in a certain amount of

time. OK, That, that there's, there's

too much emphasis put on margin and not enough emphasis placed

on what's called dollars per crude.

You see the margin. Oh, we run a 60% gross margin.

We run a 50. We run a 80% gross margin.

Great. I need more information.

OK, first of all, what are you calling your gross margin?

But more importantly, here's a pen, OK?

Let's say I'm in the business of selling pens, OK?

And I can buy this pen for $10 and I sell it for $100.

I can go to the bar with you and brag about, yeah, my business

has a 90% gross margin, but if I'm only selling 1 pen a day, I

don't have a very good business. All right, when we think about

we need in business, yes, we need a certain margin, but we

also need a certain amount of dollars per crew day every time

we send a truck out. How much revenue do they need to

bring back? That creates an opportunity for

variable compensation. Once you know that math, I need

a certain amount of revenue brought back and there can be a

compensation structure, a variable component driven to

that around whether you know, productivity bonus, something

like that. Same thing with the production

manager. If you have somebody that's

running those crews well, they probably have a certain amount

of revenue done in paid revenue. If they need to collect every

single day, that means there should be they should that's a

number they can speak to everyday.

This is my target was what we actually did and and should

affect their compensation from a variable standpoint.

So we we can we can find variable comp everywhere if we

look forward hard enough. Yeah, that's awesome.

You're the first person I've found to speak about that.

That's something that I, I have not yet applied it to comp or I,

I never did, but that was something I always looked at

when I was bidding jobs. You know, everybody has their,

their formula for bidding jobs and you get to the end, you

figure out all your expenses and have a standard markup.

And I never did that because you need dollars per crew day.

You know, time is my limiting factor, sales is not my limiting

factor. Time is my limiting factor.

So I want to make so many dollars per day.

I want to make so many dollars per per unit of effort because

like you said, if you're selling stuff that's worth nothing but

you have a huge margin, you're making less money than if you're

selling something with a small margin with a lot of dollars.

And so we need a way to level that and make sure you're not

spinning your wheels. You need to make sure that

you're earning the amount you need to be earning per unit of

effort or per hour or crew day. I'll give you a great example,

the one day bath business, OK, versus the full remodel bath

business, All right. If I'm selling a shower and when

I sold the businesses, the average sale is now up to

probably we'll just call it ±15,000 dollars for shower

system that's done in a day, OK. That means every time we're

sending a crew out, we're getting $15,000 in revenue.

Sounds like a great idea. If we had a vanity to it, why?

We're already at in the bathroom.

Why don't we sell toilets and vanities?

All right, that sounds like a great idea.

Challenge with that is regardless of the margin, it's

going to add a day to the job. And can I get another $15,000

for a toilet and a vanity? Probably not.

But now I just doubled. I just cut my dollars per crew

day in half. So it allows you to make

business decisions. When you talk about removing

complexity, that's a key piece in removing complexity.

But selling a shower and a vanity and a toilet and flooring

adds such complexity to the to the project.

Oh, our average ticket goes up. Yeah.

But our dollars per crudity goes down and our and our complexity

goes out. The freaking window is is off

the charts. So the we, we, we even chose to

exit certain products because we couldn't hit a certain dollars

per crew day that we needed. We did the exact same thing.

We we measure everything in dollars per crew day, profit per

crew day. And that shaped the way that I

did business for a long time. And you're the first person I've

ever talked to that didn't think that idea was just crazy.

Everybody else, it's a great discipline.

It's a great discipline, yeah. Oh man, well you made me feel

better. About the decisions I.

Made. So was there anything that

significantly delayed your growth?

And if you could do it differently today, would you?

There there's a saying that scared money can't gamble,

right. That's, and I think one of the,

one of the challenges that I think not just myself, I think a

lot of business leaders struggle with is when you have excess

cash, those few times you have excess cash.

No, when you have excess cash, excess capital, what is the most

strategic way to deploy it, right?

What is the really the best way to deploy excess capital?

I think a lot of business leaders get frozen.

They don't know the best way to deploy excess capital.

They're afraid to take risks on marketing, you know, because,

and maybe it's because they're not tracking marketing well or

because they don't have a good way to process appointments once

they get them that they're just not a marketing machine, right?

We have. So I think those are the things

that stand in the way of business growth that slowed me

down until we got better at, at things where the business was

much more predictable, much more mechanical.

I, I, I see it all the time. I, I see it all the time with

companies that are, that are complaining about a certain

marketing, marketing doesn't work, doesn't work.

But the truth is they're not tracking it.

They're not the first one to call the customer.

They don't have any kind of a speed to lead program plugged

into their business. They, they have no great way.

They don't, they don't run a formal sales process.

So everybody's selling something a little differently.

And, and so that it's just not a scalable business.

So all these other sort of things.

So of course we blame marketing and why I don't want to take a

risk on marketing. I'm OK taking a risk, you know,

on on a marketing source. I also, by the way, follow the

analogy that try things with excess capital, but think about

bullets before cannonballs, right?

Fire bullets at it, see if you can hit the target, and if you

can't, stop firing bullets at it.

It's OK to be wrong. Don't be wrong for long.

But if you start hitting the target with bullets, start

launching cannonballs at it, man, that's a good thing to

launch cannonballs AT. And don't be afraid to go all go

all in on it. But I also, which brings me to

another discipline of the business.

I also believe that no one lead source should be more than 20%

of your business. No one lead source should be

more than 20% of your business because because if that source

for some reason stops working, you're in big trouble.

So not only should not only one lead source be more than 20% of

your business, you should always replace the bottom 20% of your

lead sources every single year. Now, you can't do that unless if

you're tracking everything. Can I, can I give you one more

discipline that ties into business growth?

Sure. OK.

You have to run a batting order in your business.

Have you ever heard that expression?

A batting order? No, Right.

You're in the business of making leads, turning leads into

appointments and appointments into sales.

You and I, Eric, could go on a tour.

We can go get a, we can go buy a Volkswagen bus, one of those old

cool ones, right? Those things that you live in,

right? And we can go on a cross.

We'll take your podcast on the road, all right?

We're going to go on a cross country journey and we're going

to look at companies across the country.

We're going to look at their sales report on any given month,

all right? And then we're going to look at

it again by removing the bottom 25 or 30% of performers and the

business will look totally different, right?

It'll be a much Better Business, right?

So how does an organization do that intentionally?

How do you always remove the bottom 25 or 30% of performers

intentionally to give them a chance for retraining?

There's only one way to do it. You always have to have more

salespeople than you have appointments so that you can

intentionally run a batting order so that your top

performers are getting fed 1st and your bottom performers are

back in for retraining and you want about 25 to 30% more sales

reps and you have appointments. Those are the kind of things

that if you do systematically in your organization, you're going

to grow a beast of a business. It's going to grow very

intentionally and that is running a batting.

OK, that's some good advice. Is there a major mistake that

you wish you could have avoided? Yeah, well, like a long list of

them, right, A long list of them.

But ultimately, I think I, I used to think, I used to think

that not going to college was a mistake.

I used to think that was a big mistake.

And in fact, I beat myself up on on it for many, many, many years

that gosh, if I only went to college.

I remember before I started my business, I was applying for a

job because I still want to get off the road.

So I thought knocking on doors, seeing if I could get a job at a

few places and I had a lot of good interviews, but because I

didn't have a the, the degree, I wasn't hired for the role.

Thank goodness I didn't go to college.

Thank goodness I wasn't hired for that role.

My life today would be very, very different if I would have

taken that job. Look, I had we had the exit of

our dreams right Beyond beyond. It's multi generational wealth

from building these businesses and selling them to private

equity and to my team. That would have never happened

if I took that job because I had that degree.

So I think sometimes the things we think are mistakes might not

necessarily be mistakes if we just give it enough time to wait

for it. You know, some of the things

that the opportunities I wish I would have had are thank

goodness that didn't happen because it ended up opening up a

totally different door. That's how I view mistakes.

How about that? That's great.

You keep jumping ahead and stealing.

Some of my favorite questions, that's one of the ones I like to

ask is about beneficial mistakes, mistakes that might

have been a mistake at the time but ended up turning things

around. So.

Look, we've taken on products we shouldn't have sold.

You know, I've kept employees longer than I should have.

I've terminated people that I should have kept.

I've made a lot of mistakes inside of the business.

But each time I made a mistake, we learned more and more about

how to be a Better Business. Yeah, there you go.

We did an interview a couple weeks ago and he said that he he

doesn't make mistakes, he just has learning opportunities.

That's right, yeah. And experience is that thing you

get right after you need it, so yeah.

Well, you dove right back into education there.

That was something I wanted to hear a little bit more about.

So you skipped college coming out of high school.

You said that was a great decision, but eventually you

wound up back in school and. And not just any school, Harvard

Business School. So what are your thoughts about

a formal education today? Yeah.

What it What advice would you give for young people trying to

make that decision? Yeah.

And, and again, to be clear, Harvard Business School is a

very, very, it was a very different type of, of

environment to learn in. First of all, it was an

executive education program that was for business owners and it

was you, you had to have a minimum revenue of $10 million

to even be accepted. And it was really cool because

look, what I hated about school is I hated tests.

I didn't like being called on to read out loud all that nonsense.

I had a DDI was all over the place.

The way you learned at Harvard Business School is they teach

everything through a case study and a case study is like 20 or

30 pages of some businesses going through some issue.

It could be the headlights at Toyota aren't fitting in the

car, or it could be Netflix is trying to negotiate a purchase

and and you're the head negotiator.

How would you deal with this? So they put you if the case

study has limited information, so you have to, you have to

solve the case study on your own.

OK, that's your first silo of learning.

There are three silos. The second silo is you go to

Harvard Business School. You live in a dorm with, and

your dorm is with seven other business leaders from 7 other

countries with seven other business areas of expertise.

And you then talk about the case again and you try to solve the

problem as a team. Then the third silos of learning

is you're at you're in a classroom with a Harvard

professor that challenges you to break this case down with 149

other people from 49 different countries.

So you get a worldwide perspective on problem solving.

And it's just, it's just, it's a cool learning environment.

But the other thing about it is you're going there for a very

different reason. You're not going there for a

degree. You're going there for a very

specific challenge you're trying to solve in your business.

And so is everybody else. You get to be real, have really

deep conversations with people about how they approach

leadership and all those sorts of things.

It's it's it was transformational for me.

And, and I met, I made friends all over the world, which is

great. But Wolfgang Puck was one of my

classmates, by the way. And, and when, when he in fact

his, that's why his, his little blurb is on the cover of my

book, this little Wolfgang Puck quote on the cover of my book.

So he, he had a fourth grade education.

That's all he's got. When he went into his dorm room,

he opened up the dorm room and there's a computer sitting in

the dorm room of his own little private bedroom.

He never turned a computer on before.

He didn't know how to turn it on.

He never had to use one. So this is pretty interesting.

Tyra Banks was in my executive is in my alumni class, just all

these crazy. This guy, Ron Deshea, who's one

of the founders of America of American Idol was in my class.

He's get this wide variety of really talented, smart business

people. Some of the companies are, you

know, multi, multi billion dollar companies all there for

the same reason, trying to solve a problem in their business.

So it was really cool. Yeah.

That's awesome. That sounds like an incredible.

Experience. Yeah, it was amazing.

Yeah, it was amazing. So your kids, for instance,

would you recommend that they go into college out of high school?

Would you recommend they don't? Do you support them either way?

What would be your view on kind of formal education?

Yeah, look, I think that there's, you can make a lot of

money by getting out of school and jumping into the blue collar

trade. You know, I, I did a keynote for

the huge convention, that's what it's called and it's window

washers and power washers in Nashville.

And there were 2000 business owners in that, in that room.

And they're they're all in there like, you know, 19 to 24 years

old out making it everyday, knocking on doors and building

businesses. I don't think formal education

is important as it used to be. I think that there are plenty of

paths to be successful without it.

I do think that mentorship is important, that pot watching

podcasts, that networking, that getting out of your bubble is

important. And, and look, I I think there

are certain things that you need to learn how to do.

You have to learn how to read APL and a balance sheet.

You have to understand KPI's, you have to there are certain

things, there's certain things you need, you need to understand

what it means to be a great leader.

You know that that's not necessarily taught the PNL and

balance sheet. Yeah, you can learn that at

school. But but learning how to be a

great leader, learning how to make a lead and sell a lead,

you're not going to learn that in school.

So I think, I think it's different strokes for different,

different folks. We've got six kids, two of them

went the university route, the other 4 didn't.

And they're all very successful in their own ways.

Awesome. Well, congratulations, Deb.

Thanks. Six kids doing well, That's

quite an. Accomplishment as a very

fortunate father as well. Yeah.

Well, ultimately, as a parent, do you have kids, Eric?

I do I have 3. And how old are they?

They're soon to be 11/8 and four.

Right, So, so you know, as a parent, right, we, we want our

kids to be successful. Of course we do.

But our, that wasn't, that wasn't our benchmark.

Our benchmark was how do we just raise decent kids?

Let's focus on decency. OK, Let's raise and, and let

them define what success looks like for them.

OK. But ultimately, if we focus on

decency, I, I think we'll, we'll always be better off.

And that's true in business, in life, in raising kids.

Let's just be decent. That's great.

That's great. I was chatting with my dad

recently and he was talking about when he started his

business and he said that his primary goal was to do it right

and if there was money leftover at the end of the job, that was

just a bill. So that's right.

Yeah. To do, to do, to do the right

thing the right way, right. And, and I think that's also

important from a leadership standpoint is that, you know,

it's leaders responsibility, making sure that their team is

working on the right things the right way, right.

That's that's a leadership fundamental.

How do we make sure that our team is actually focusing on the

right things and doing it the right way?

Because often we can focus on the wrong things and it doesn't

usually come out so good. It's a lot of wasted calories.

Yeah. Is there a viewpoint or a belief

that you held pretty strongly early on and as you've matured

and experienced growing your business, your view or your

opinion changed? That is a great question.

A We have to believe that we that abundance is available to

us. And when I think about the years

I spent beating myself up for not going to school and thinking

this is as good as I'm going to get, blah, blah, blah, blah, and

all that, I got this little thing.

I keep it on my desk really handy.

OK, you like it. OK, here's what it is.

It's this little chattering teeth, OK, And these chattering

teeth, they tell you all kinds of things in your ear.

They tell you all the reasons why you shouldn't do something,

why you're going to fail at it, why you're no good, why you

don't deserve it. And we got to take these teeth

and we got to put them on the shelf.

OK? You deserve to have a wonderful

life. You deserve to be successful.

You deserve you have it in you to be a great leader.

It doesn't matter what your education was.

That doesn't matter. It it what, what matters is how

are you showing up every day? What what difference do you want

to make in this world? And that's available to anybody.

It's it's what is your attitude, your energy, and your

willingness to learn. That to me is the most important

thing. The rest of the stuff is just

noise. Energy and attitude has nothing

to do with talent at all. It has nothing to do with

talent. It has to do with attitude.

And we get to control that every single day.

So the chattering teeth can go take a hike.

I am limitless and that's how I choose to think.

That's awesome. That's I have a lot of Henry

Ford quotes that I like, but that's probably one of my

favorites is whether you think you're think you can or think

you can't, you're probably right.

That's right. Yeah, yeah.

And and you know, what comes with that, by the way, in old

fairness is when we think about as a leader and we're growing a

business, we're not sure what we're doing.

And we we're in what's called FUD, right?

We have FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt, right?

We're not sure. And what then starts to creep in

is imposter syndrome. Then we start to think, am I

really the right leader for this business?

Am I? Who am I to say that this is the

way to do things? All of that stuff is nonsense.

It's all nonsense. And again, it, it just holds us

back and, and we all, we deserve more than that.

So you business owner, you took the risk.

You are exactly where you should be and there's a whole lot more

to be done. So get to it, man.

Amen. Good stuff that that probably

ties into my next question here. What is something you wish you

would have learned earlier, not necessarily about business, but

about yourself? Well, obviously the idea that I

can be an inspirational leader, OK.

And that, that, that when I was younger, I used to take music

lessons and I, I played like the keyboards, but terribly.

I played the guitar horribly. I played the trombone terribly.

I even tried the clarinet couldn't but but I like being

creative, but I couldn't play a music instrument.

I tried singing, but I Can't Sing.

So I tried drawing, but I can't draw.

So I all these things that I, that are classic being creative,

I can't do. But I'm creative and I want to

be creative. I learned that you can be

creative with people. I learned you can be creative

with business. I learned there there's so many

different outlets for the things that we are passionate over that

I could be creative with business and people and, and,

and words in a book and those kind of things.

And, and so I, you know, had I learned that sooner, maybe my

life would be different. But again, I have no complaints

to where I'm at today. So I think everything happened

in in the right time. The I think there's a saying, I

hope I get this right. When the student is ready, the

teacher arrives. And what you know what that

means is the teacher is always there.

It's just the student is always isn't always ready.

The the teacher is always there. But are we as students always

ready to learn? Maybe not.

It's good stuff. I can relate to that as well.

I think I've always had kind of a desire to be creative and

yeah, want the music. I loved music.

I have no tone, I have no ear, I have no rhythm.

Terrible. But I've found creativity in in

business, in designing a roof system.

I can be creative. And then cooking is my latest

one. That's great.

Taking up cooking and I really enjoy that so.

Yeah, I will share with you what we took my my love for music

that with my poor execution of music, what we did in our Bath

business, we applied that to our, our bath company.

So when we would set up our shower displays, it was all part

of the whole do well, do good kind of thing.

We did a bunch of weird stuff like this.

When we had set up at a music festival.

We would put like our our shower systems there to set

appointments. But instead of putting like

soaps and towels in the displays, we would put

microphones, speakers and music instruments in there.

And we would challenge people to come on by and sing in our

shower. And once we got a certain amount

of people singing in our shower each year, we would send a kid

to music school for a year. And we did that year after year

after year. And, you know, then we built a

whole campaign. Showers that make you want to

sing inside of them, you know? And so I think you can apply

music to a lot of things, creativity to a lot of things.

I love creativity and marketing. Yeah, that's awesome.

It sounds like you're very gifted at it.

So what has been your biggest win as a leader?

The single biggest win as a leader is that there are no

fewer than 40 upon 40 previous employees that work for me that

now have their own business and are doing things the right way.

That to me, when I think about the tree, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the branches that have come off of the business that

all of that now they're hiring people and they're employing

people and, and I speak to most of them on a very, very regular

basis, mentoring them and helping them.

I'm just so freaking proud of them.

I'm just so proud of, of the leaders that they've become and,

and running the business that they, that the right way, the

righteous business, the taking great care of their team, their

customers, their community. It's just, it's just humbling.

How about that? It's just humbling.

So that that's my big claim to fame.

So you've talked a lot about growing, talking about your

business outgrowing you, fighting to keep up.

I know you said at one point in time you were reading a book a

week. You had your experience at

Harvard Business School. What have been the most useful

resources to help you grow as a leader?

Well, I think the resources change at different times,

right? It was the whether it was my our

mastermind group, the Big 12 or just, you know, it's, it's so

interesting that when a business gets big, the other thing that

tends to happen is that you start adding layers and layers

and layers into your business. And a shepherd should smell like

the sheep, right? A shepherd should smell like the

sheep if they want to be a Good Shepherd.

And what happens is as the business grows, you start to get

further and further away from the customer and you stop

smelling like the sheep. OK.

And some of the greatest learning experience is actually

talking to our customer. Just how about I just take time

and talk to our customer, see how are they seeing the

business? That's a big deal and it's a

challenge for businesses because I see it all the time that, that

the business has gotten so big that nobody has time to talk to

our customers. We only, we only talk to the

pissed off ones, not the happy ones.

And, and, and like business meetings talks about like labor

cost and material cost and all these other KPIs.

When do we talk about our happy customers?

Who brings those stories to the table?

And I think the business can get very transactional that way.

And if we want a relational business and relational people,

you can learn a lot by listening to your customer and asking them

things about your business and about how you how, how they view

you. It'll certainly teach you a lot.

They're a great teacher. That's great.

What motivates you to keep going when things get hard?

Yeah, it's like like 2 driving forces, right?

It's hating to hating to lose and loving to win, right?

So I, I think, I think that inside of every problem is an

opportunity. I do believe that I believe that

the flip side of every problem is an opportunity.

You want to, you want to wallow in sadness over the problem.

Good. You got, you got 15 minutes to

do that. You better quickly get to what's

the opportunity very, very quickly or nothing's going to

get solved. You know, I think the other

thing is, and I write about this in my book, it's one of the

pillars. There are 5 pillars in my book.

One of the pillars is that it's called leaders are aware of the

echo of their voice. OK.

And what that means is that, look, as you, as you lead A-Team

and you, you, you're, and as your team grows, so does your

influence with that team grow. And as you become more

influential, people are going to decide what type of day they're

going to have based on the kind of day that the leader is

having. If the leader seems stressed out

and nervous, the team is going to feel stressed out and

nervous. So leaders have to be aware of

whatever that echo is that they're sending.

And I think part of part of leadership is always being aware

of that. And look, we send it.

It's not just the echo in business, it's the echo at home.

It's the echo, the echo of being present.

Look, I'm on a I'm on a podcast with you right now.

Imagine for a minute, hold on a minute.

My phone is ringing. I got to take this call.

Give me one second. Hello, this is Brian.

I'm going to, you'd be like, Brian, you're on a freaking

phone call. I start texting somebody, you're

like, Brian, we're on a podcast. What are you doing?

We never think of doing that, but we do it all the time when

we're having a conversation with our wife or we're trying to do a

one-on-one with a teammate. You know, being present sends a

much better echo than being distracted.

And I think when we think about the echoes that we want to send,

I think that's as important a leadership principle as

anything. Yeah, that's good stuff.

I I don't know that I answered your question, but it's OK.

Whether whether it answered the question or not, it's great

content. It it was a rabbit hole that we

went down. So I, I want to dive in a little

bit. You exited the three companies

that you built. I know that can be very

emotionally complicated. What did that season of life

bring for you? Yeah, it is an emotional roller

coaster, right? It just OK, there's, there's the

sausage making of due diligence when you're going through the,

the documents and the, the, the rectal exam, we'll call it, of

the business, you know, all that stuff, but you know, they, they

were well run businesses. So that part was a little

easier. But it's also it's also

understanding the why up to exit, right?

I, I was at the point where the business had gotten so big that

I found myself becoming more and more risk averse than

entrepreneurial and driven. I I was also concerned that, you

know, if I ever get hit by a bus, look, I got a great

leadership team, but do I really want my wife stepping into my

role in running this business? I didn't think that was fair.

Plus because because we had a great team and I was very, very

focused on building the bench strength of the business, of the

team. We really drove leadership deep,

deep into the roots of the organization.

So we had layers and layers, layers of people that were being

exposed to leadership. It's one of the reasons why I

took on a new product or opened up another market.

It wasn't necessarily strictly revenue based.

It was because I've got this great leader and they're looking

for something to do and if I don't do something with them,

I'm going to lose them. They're going to go off and do

it on their own. So why not give them a chance to

run their own store or run their own product line or run their

own, you know, open up in another state.

So what when you have a business with that people that have

strong legs and a lot of heart and want to run fast, I felt it

was time to pass the baton and and transition the business to

organizations that that could give them the next level up in

their business. So that was one of the those are

the reasons I decided to do it. Was it?

Plus, there were other things I want to do in life, right?

I wanted to write a book. I'm working on my second book

already. But but yeah, it was an

emotional process. It's the drama of you're going

through the negotiations with the with the with the private

equity groups and you know, they're like, OK, pencils down

until we solve this problem drama.

Yes, there's a lot of that, but you know, you get through it and

I will share with you that the when I sold one of my

businesses, when I sold Tundra Land, that business that was

sold for a lot of money, right? What's they all sold for?

A lot. But for some reason that one hit

me a little different. Maybe because I was so

emotionally connected to it that I was sitting around my office.

And though we got done with all the paperwork, after two months

of due diligence, the money gets wired.

Everybody agrees. Yep, money wired, done.

Deal is closed. Bam, just like that.

OK, hold on. I get my phone.

It hit me like a wave. I pick up my phone, I call my

wife, I stand up and she's low. And I said, I couldn't talk.

I couldn't freaking talk. I couldn't get a word out of my

now me. I could talk all day long.

You see us on our podcast being not being able to talk is like,

what are you? What are you doing?

I had to get outside and I go and I said to her, it's, it's

done. It's done.

I squeaked out the word, it's done.

It, it was just this emotional wave that hit me that that it

was I was, I was walking away from a chapter in my life and a

moment in time that not just was transformational for the people

that work for me, but was transformational to me.

And and now it was time to do the next thing.

And it was anyway, it was just really cool.

It was really cool. It was really cool.

That's great. I have no regrets.

By the way, 00. Awesome.

Well that's good to hear. I actually just recently exited

my company as. Well, Congrats.

Not nearly on the scale that you were at, but I've run it for 12

years also and now we're moving on to the next thing.

And I learned a lot through that process.

It was a very daunting process. Like I said, not nearly on the

scale that you guys were at, but for the the business leader

that's maybe looking to the future, looking in that

direction, what advice would you have for someone to prepare both

practically within the business and emotionally for that?

Process. Yeah.

I'm so glad you asked that question.

I, I, but before I answer it, I want to ask you a question.

When you when you got the letter of intent for the first time and

you opened it and you read it, how did you feel?

I was relieved. I I can relate to a lot of the

things you said. We got into the roofing

business. My dad had started the business

and I was already working in it. I was pretty good at it.

I saw the opportunity. I saw the opportunity for

growth, but it maybe was not. It wasn't my life's passion.

The idea was always to kind of run it for a little while, get

some financial foundation underneath us and then probably

move on to something else. Yeah.

And this came a lot faster than I was expecting.

My, my plan was probably more a 20 year plan, not a 12 year

plan. Yeah.

And so there's a lot of relief and excitement of like, yeah,

man, this is coming faster than I thought.

And, and where we headed. And I can relate it to a lot of

what you said. I think again, we grew a lot in

the last few years of our of running our business.

And the impetus there was not my ego or my growth or my bank

account. But I had a lot of these leaders

that I'd raised up in the business that they, they needed

some upward movement. They needed somewhere to go and

I had nowhere to promote them to.

So we just started trying to grow just to make some room for

them. And kind of like you said, it

got to a point where I just didn't have the gas in the tank

to keep pushing it the direction it was going.

And so getting some new blood, some new energy to, to help it

keep moving was the right decision for my employees.

It was the right decision for the organization.

And it, it allowed us to move on to this next phase of life and.

Very exciting. And see what's next.

Yeah. Look.

So look, the advice that I would give to somebody that's thinking

about one day exiting is to understand a few things.

The first thing is we are not in the business unless if you're in

like HVAC or something like that, if you're in roofing or

siding or replacement windows or one day baths or that kind of

stuff. There is no previous book of

business that they're buying. They're buying the future.

All right. That's what buyers are buying.

They're saying, what is the likelihood that this company can

perform at the targets that they're saying they're going to

perform at? What is the likelihood they're

going to be able to generate the leads and the sales and and the

revenue that they're saying their buyers buy the future, OK?

They're buying the future. And therefore you have to first

of all prove that you're good at hitting your targets for the

future, but then also you have a team that's capable of

delivering on it. OK.

And, and look, if you're not, if, if you're not taking a

salary out of your business, but the business is making some

money, it's probably not a real business that's sellable.

You've got to get it to an organization that is able to pay

you and make a good, good percentage of net profit.

And that you have your systems and processes put together, that

you have a leadership team, they have some bench strength that

you're able to hit targets and you have a clear vision that

everybody understands. And you're on accrual accounting

so that you can get through due diligence because if you're not

on that, it's really going to be a problem.

Due diligence was, oh man, I had no idea that you could go that

deep into our financials. That was a whole another thing.

Yeah, the first business I sold, my Arizona business, they were,

there were 40 people on the due diligence team that were buying

it that that I was dealing with. And, you know, it's, it was a,

it was a slog, but we got through it.

You know, we got through it. Get get a good CP, get a good,

get a good CFO. I would say that get a good CFO

to make sure they're looking at your books to understand the

industry. Don't work with your local

attorney, work with an M&A attorney, Rob Macklin, somebody

like that, that's really good that understands the industry

that knows how to get deals done.

Because selling a business is very different than than helping

you with a customer that didn't pay you.

It's a totally different skill set.

So get yourself a good team around you.

It's going to help you through due diligence.

Those are some of the other things I'd say.

That's good advice, good advice. So you talked about the

emotional response to selling tundra land is was there a

similar response with the others?

And I guess what order did this all happen in?

Yeah, I, I first sold my Arizona Jacuzzi bath business and that

was good. Look, I was able to still stick

around and work with them just as a consultant in the business.

But, but again, but I didn't, I had a team move to Arizona that

started the business. So while I was attached to the

business, it wasn't that same depth of of emotional

attachment. So that that business sold

first. Then I once I sold that

business, I'm like, OK, one down to to go.

I can't wait to sell the other two.

So look, I was excited to sell Tundra land.

I'm I'm really happy with Leaf Home enhancements is the company

that acquired it. They are owned by Gridiron

Capital. And yeah, I was the great buyer

for the business. And then when I sold my renewal

by Anderson business, I was just excited to look.

I could have sold it to a lot of people.

It was a big business. It was it was actually bigger

than tundra land from a revenue standpoint.

And I could have sold it to. I had a lot of choices, but I

wanted to sell it to my leadership team.

I wanted to give them a chance to have generational wealth as

well. And I'm just, I'm so proud of

what they've done with it. They've taken it to a whole

nother level than when I owned it.

They've really exploded it. And and I'm still involved in

that business as the chairman of the board.

So I'm still on the board. And yeah, I just love working

with them. So it's just been, it's again,

it's all love. It's all love.

Yeah, that's great. How was that process different

selling to an outside private equity firm versus your internal

leadership team? Yeah.

Well, look, I, I, I didn't have to sell my leadership team on

what the business was. They knew what they were

operating it anyway, so they understood.

And it was, it was for me, it was more rewarding to sell to

them just to kind of see the I, I just got a text from one of

them yesterday. He sent me a picture of his

house that he just paid off and that he's so grateful because he

just bought this house a couple years ago and now he paid it off

that he couldn't have done that without these.

It's just that kind of stuff, you know?

It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool.

That's awesome. I'm, I'm really looking forward

to having some of those stories myself.

We we started down the process with a private equity firm and

it kind of fell apart and we ended up selling it to my

operations manager. Oh, that's great family.

So yeah, yeah, that's fantastic. Good for you.

Yeah. So you know how it feels.

It's nice to see them do something with the business.

It did. I was excited to sell it to

private equity. I was far more excited when we

got to keep it in the family, so to speak.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah.

And and, you know, so once I sold the business, that's when I

decided it's time to write a book, which, you know, I'm so

happy we did. Yeah, man, and it's a great

book. Beyond the Hammer, is that

right? Beyond the Hammer And what's so

surprising is when I wrote it, I, I started writing it as like

a leadership book. And I'm like, this is like every

other leadership book out there. I want to make it very

different. So as, as you know, the book is

split in two parts. The first half is a business

parable which follows the life of this guy George, who's a

contractor. And you see the troubles he's

got with his business with burnt out employees and pissed off

customers and inconsistent results.

And you follow George as he meets this mentor named Marty,

where the five pillars of leadership are revealed to him.

And you watch how as he plugs them into his business, his

business really changes. So that's the first half of the

book. And the second-half of the book,

I shift from storytelling to strategy, where I go deep into

how to plug the five pillars into your business.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

I just got notified Forbes was my publisher.

I I've sold now 40,000 copies of Beyond the Hammer in the blue

collar industry. That's like so many companies

using it. They're buying not one.

They're buying 5 and 10 and 20 and 100 of them.

It's been, it's been great feedback.

So I just love it. Yeah, it's been great.

Congratulations, that's awesome. Yeah.

So now I'm on my next book. Yeah.

So my next book is a sales book. It's going to be the same thing.

It's going to be another business parable, but I'm about

1/3 of the way done with it. I hope to have it done halfway

done. Hope hopefully be done around

April or May so. OK.

And are you going to split this one as well with the the parable

followed by the strategy? Yeah, and do a great audio

version. The audio book, by the way of

Beyond the Hammer. I happen to have a copyright

here. The audio version of Beyond the

Hammer is, is ridiculous because here's the deal.

I have no problem speaking in public or reading a book or

being a narrator, but but being a narrator of a parable that's

with different characters and character arcs and issues going

on and drama, that's not my thing, right?

We, we already talked about that.

From my creative side, I, I feel I I read the second-half of the

book, the strategy side, but I wanted somebody really cool to

read the parable side and my favorite.

Book narrator of all time is this guy named Eduardo

Ballerini. He used to be an actor on The

Sopranos and he does a lot of like James Patterson books and

these big like books of drama and and mystery.

And I got I reached I cold called him and I asked him if

he'd read the parable and he did.

He read the parable for me. So it's it's the legendary voice

of Eduardo Ballerini bringing my characters to life in a way that

I can only imagine. It is so good.

And then of course I read the second-half.

So the audio book has just been just really, really, really fun

book to listen to. That is awesome.

That is awesome. What was it like getting to work

with kind of a hero might be a strong word, but it but somebody

that you've listened to their work like that before?

Was that a little surreal? Oh, it was surreal.

When I got the first draft of his audio book back, Kathy and I

were in. We were in either Italy or

France at the time. Maybe Italy, sitting in a our

hotel room listening to this thing and it was like just

overwhelmed with joy, gratitude and emotion.

Just hearing your your story come to life.

I can only imagine if somebody ever creates a movie out of a

book that somebody writes, I can only imagine what that feels

like. Yeah, that'd be pretty cool

hearing this voice that you listen to high level production

all the time. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Telling my story?

Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Was there an inspiration for how you chose to structure that

book? The the character, the main

character in the mentor, people ask all the time, which one are

you? Are you the mentor or are you

the guy being, you know, that's struggling in business?

And the answer is I've been both at different times, you know, it

just depends, you know, And so, but again, I wanted something

that was very much relatable to our industry, that was highly

actionable, that was not speaking over people's heads,

that people can say, you know what, this if when I plug this

in, it's going to make a difference in my business, but

it's approachable and I can do that.

So, so there's, there are a lot, it's full of Nuggets and a lot

of simplicity as well. So it's, it's quite again, I, I,

I promise whoever gets, and it's available on Amazon, by the way,

you can get it on Amazon. You can get it in on in Barnes

and Noble too. You can also in, in January.

Once again, it was there last January.

It'll be there this January at the airports, at those center

tables at Hudson bookstores. It'll be there as well.

Oh, yeah. But but get the audio book.

You really love it. Yeah, well, we'll make sure we

put a link to all of that in the show notes.

We'll link the audio book and the book on Amazon there.

I've not finished it yet. I'm excited to get the rest of

the way through it. So.

It's great. Yep, onward and upward.

You know, I'm just going to share with the listeners.

Look there, I think there are a couple of, there are a couple of

things to consider that when you're building your business.

The first thing is that that you know, you only build a business

when you commit to building people.

And when it comes to building people, if you want to, one of

the pillars of my book is that you have to model your business

as a training organization. And if you're a training

organization, you have to follow the belief that if it's, if it's

not written down, it doesn't exist.

You might think there's a way of doing things because it lives in

your head, but that doesn't mean anybody else is going to do it.

It's got to be written down or it simply doesn't exist.

And you know, and along with that, that the the reward to it

all is that when you go all in on really building people and

you see people doing things that that they need that they didn't

even think possible before, you will realize, like I realized

that the two most important days of your life are the day that

you're born and the day you finally realize why.

Wow. That's good.

That's good. Well, that might dive into my

next question here. It's my favorite question.

Are you a person of a particular faith background?

And if so, how has that shaped your leadership journey?

I'm not, I'm not what you would call a religious person.

I'm what you would consider be, I guess, a spiritual person.

I respect all people's belief systems.

I believe in, I believe in myself and I believe in people

too. You know, again, the first

pillar of the book is the idea that belief is transferable.

And if I want to raise the lid of people, they have to 1st

believe they're capable of doing it.

Just like we all have those chattering teeth in our ear that

tell us we can't do stuff and we're asking people to do things

they've never done before. So if I want them to to, to get

to that next level of growth, I have to let them know why I

believe in them. I have to provide what's called

evidence based belief. I believe in you because I've

seen you do XY and Z and that's why I know you can do this.

That's a necessary thing to help grow people.

Is that faith-based? It's faith in people, right?

And I think that's kind of a cool faith to have.

OK. I can appreciate that.

Is there anybody that you would like to see on the show,

somebody that has a really interesting story or maybe

somebody that works in a really intriguing industry that we

could learn more about? Yeah, I think there are a few

people that I'd suggest that. Chris Hermes is the owner and

operator of USA Showers. He runs a great business, very

highly disciplined business leader, does a lot of cool

things. The way he's running his

business and in the community, he'd be a great guest.

There's a gentleman that I think of, his name is Joe Downey, and

he's one of the top sales leaders in the country.

And his the way he approaches training and developing people,

he's got a story worth telling and somebody probably worth

having a conversation. Awesome, awesome.

Well, thank you. I might reach out and see.

Happy to connect with them 100%. Yep.

All right. And our last question to either

fuel or settle the debate, if you have the job to do with the

cordless tool, which brand do you reach for?

Well, so that's a very easy, easy decision.

There are two things that are required if you're going to have

a home in Wisconsin, which we do that.

The first thing is you have to be a Packers fan.

And the second thing is you have to use Milwaukee tools.

So that's just an easy 1. So that's that's more of a

religion than what we talked about earlier.

Big Red, it is so awesome. Well, Brian, thank you so much

for joining us. Again, the book is beyond the

hammer. We'll have links in the show

notes. You also do some speaking,

consulting, coaching, engagement.

So we'll get your website, LinkedIn, the show notes as

well. And I really appreciate you

making the time. This has been a lot of fun for

me. I think our listeners are going

to really appreciate it as well. Thank you, Eric.

Appreciate it. Thanks everybody.

Have a wonderful day. Yeah.

And thank you guys for joining us here on From the Ground Up.

If you're interested in reaching out to Brian, check the show

notes. If you guys want to be on the

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