Grant Gilmore – From Racetrack to Roofing Prodigy – Building and Growing a Roofing Empire

I never really had experience learning how to drive a stick shift.

And that's how I learned was literally on a race car

And that was a

costly way to learn how to drive race cars, but I got the hang of it.

it's hard to walk away from a quarter million dollar a year job to get

$45,000, $50,000 base.

was like, I'm really going to do this.

I got to take a big step backwards in order to take a step forwards.

we scaled from 6 million to 10 and a half.

And then we went from 10 and a half to 20.

Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, where we encourage and inspire 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 they love with their heart, their hands, and their hustle.

I'm your host, Eric Loden.

And if you guys are enjoying the content, if you appreciate what you're doing, if you could help me out, leave a five star review, subscribe, like, follow, share.

That's the best way to get the content out there.

Today, I am joined by Grant Gilmore, and I am really excited to have Grant on the show.

Grant has had kind of a meteoric rise in the roofing business, helping grow AMW into a regional powerhouse serving Northwestern United States.

And Grant is an amateur race car driver, a husband, and a father.

So

Grant, welcome to the show.

Hi Eric, thanks for having me on.

Yeah, we're excited to dive in.

So.

absolutely.

We like to start each show getting a little bit of your background.

So where did you grow up?

How did you grow up?

Help us get to know you a little bit.

Absolutely.

Well, I'm I was born in California and I moved to Oregon when I was two years old I grew up in a little city called the Lake Oswego and you know, just really fell in love with

Oregon and its nature and Really just kind of had a great childhood and a great life Went through private schools I went to a boarding school for a while

Then I really started to uh fall in love with business when I ran into college.

Okay.

I think you're the first person I've talked to that has gone to a boarding school.

Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Was it something local or did you go away to school?

it

was, yeah.

So I guess it kind of starts out with my father.

He was, uh when we moved into uh Oregon, he had a job at a company called Ford Graphics and he was kind of a middle manager, kind of put in place to refine systems and processes.

And he was pretty good at that.

So he, they gave him a promotion to vice president and

regional on the West Coast.

So for 20 years, he was flying to Seattle every Monday and coming home Friday morning.

So I had an interesting childhood where I only got to see my dad on the weekends.

But that left all this time in the middle of the week uh that I was a little bit unruly and my mom kind of had her hands full.

So she found a boarding school in a...

in McMinnville and I was on a five day schooling program where I would be dropped off on Monday and I'd come home on Friday, similar as my father.

It was actually a good experience and a not so good experience.

It was hard to just kind of have two different lives.

uh I did that for seventh grade and then I came back to a full

full time for eighth grade and then we found a local private school for high school.

But I always, I didn't really do well in large classes.

I had a bit of, I guess you can call it ADD or just not great at sitting in one spot.

So that was always kind of a struggle, but it has its upsides too.

Yeah, I think that's common for lot of business leaders is not many of them were the straight-A students, uh elementary school, middle school.

I think most of us got a little bit of the ADD, ADHD going on.

yeah.

Did you grow up with any siblings or were you an only child?

No, I was an only child.

ah That was a whole nother part of my life that I had to reconcile.

Because you find out once you hit real life that being an only child and having everything all about you all the time isn't really the greatest way to branch out.

Okay.

So with your own children, do you plan on having just one or are you hoping for uh siblings there?

man, well, I was on the fence that we actually had a home birth and it was a 30 hour labor and Reed was 10 pounds.

So it was a full on like traumatic experience almost straight out of saving private Ryan.

So we're actually happy with one child.

We never want to go through that experience again.

And we're very grateful that everything worked out.

Yeah.

Good to know.

My wife is an only child too, so that's always fun.

man, yeah, you guys have a lot of figuring out to do and I'm sure there's some um personality clashes there.

very strong and independent personalities, but we always find a way to make it work.

Good for you.

That's great.

So I almost had to lead with this question.

I'm super excited to hear about it, but we got to do the background first.

Now, tell me about the race car driving.

How did you get into that?

perfect segue.

So my father, he was working really, really hard.

He ended up putting himself in a position to help take his company public.

He was one of the regional vice presidents.

So he got a nice share of stock, the company went public like 2007.

And I was a junior in high school.

He just turned 50 years old and he was able to retire.

So I get my dad back and one of his favorite things to do was like racing and cars.

He grew up in California.

That's a huge car culture.

And here actually in Oregon, we had a really nice um hub of incredibly talented uh Porsche builders.

And one in particular was called Embry Motorsports.

He's a world renowned vintage Porsche builder and mechanic.

And he had this beautiful racing program where you could buy one of these older 1950s, 1960s, 356 Porsches.

And it would be a arriving drive.

So he would have anywhere from like 10 to 18 of these cars.

He'd take them all out to the track.

He'd have a full pit crew built.

And you would just show up, enjoy the party, learn how to drive these vintage cars.

And it was a great time.

So my dad did that for a year or two.

Um, and they, they booked a trip to Daytona in Florida and a couple of weekends before that trip, his car got hit by another car and he couldn't take that car to Florida.

So he ended up buying a second one and he was like, Hey, let me take the second car.

I don't want to miss this.

Did this trip.

I have to be there.

So.

And Marie got him a second car and he, he, took it, had a great time racing on day Daytona, really big banks.

You know, you're in an old 1958, three 56 Porsche on these banks.

You know, it's a wild experience.

So he comes back home.

He was like, Hey, I have a second car.

That's it's in grant is 18.

Let's, let's get him racing.

So I never really had experience learning how to drive a stick shift.

And that's how I learned was literally on a race car that was.

very difficult.

didn't have a first gear, had a really hard cam, so you just had to really drive the piss out of the car to get it to perform.

And that was a oh costly way to learn how to drive race cars, but I got the hang of it.

I'm in high school and I'm believing to go travel up and down the West Coast to race vintage cars with all these incredible people that all have different stories.

If you're racing vintage cars, then...

you get to meet other business owners that have telecoms that are investing significant money into these portions.

And you just get to hear their stories.

And there are lot of down to earth people that just knew how to navigate the world on their own terms and they're living their best life.

So when you get to see that, it really opens your eyes at, you know, where can you position yourself now in order to take advantage of time to get to where you want to go.

And that got me my first real taste of like good people, blue collar backgrounds with the ability to do what they want whenever they want to.

And that's kind of what fueled my fire.

So my dad meets a fellow, they're in California racing on Thunderhill Raceway and he meets...

a guy running an Alfa Romeo.

Typically we don't speak to people who own Italian cars.

There's a big riff there, but this guy was a pretty cool guy.

And they were sitting down at a bar and his name was Mark Carpenter.

And he asked my dad, like, what does your son do?

And my dad's like, well, my son, he's graduated college.

went into finance, the big crash happened.

And, you know, he's selling copiers.

And...

He was like, wow, Mark's mentor said if you could hire a copier salesman, you should hire them.

They're incredibly good at generating new business.

So Mark's like, hey, I want to hire your son.

And my dad's like, well, what would you do?

He's like, I run a commercial roofing company.

And that's how I was able to make a segue from sales into commercial roofing.

It was through a relationship that was built through racing.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, we'll dive into the business side real deep here in a little bit, but um I want to hear a little bit more about your car.

What do you drive now?

Are you still driving a vintage Porsche?

No, those are really expensive.

We sold that.

I moved into BMWs.

So I had a vintage 2002 BMW that I raced for a while.

And then I got into these older BMWs called an E30.

It's a 1989 chassis.

And it was a pro three grid where you had 18 to 25 of these pro three cars where these purpose built sedan BMWs.

That was a really fun class, very aggressive driving.

lot of bumping, a lot of wrecked cars.

So I've raced that for two years.

Then I moved into racing my dad's car with him, which was a 1978 911 Porsche.

I spent some time in that car.

That was a lot of fun.

And now I have a newer model, Endurance E36 BMW that I was racing for endurance races.

And those are

completely different game.

Those are six to eight hour races and you have a team and it's a lot of wear and tear, but you get a lot of seat time.

Okay, can you tell us a little bit about your setup?

What do you do to that BMW to get it race ready versus something that we might see on the street?

Oh man, you get a very nice sponsorship.

So you make a good relationship with your bank account and then you close your eyes and you start writing blank checks.

Where I'm at now, we did have a racing program where we built two purpose-built race cars with our logos on the side.

you it's a, go through the entire car.

Like you strip it down to the...

to the bare chassis, you want to get it as light as possible.

You want to get as mechanically sound as possible.

And then you want to put on all the really cool race parts, the fuel, the fuel lines, the endurance fuel tanks, the really nice braking systems, all the control arms, all the

bushings, all the gaskets.

I mean, you go through every single piece of these cars and then you get a really nice machine that's really fast.

Okay, so how does it compare like uh weight wise and power wise?

What kind of a difference are we talking about between a race ready BMW and the stock?

Yeah, I mean, there's different ways to build your car and you can, you know, we always liked a little bit lower horsepower car, but a light, very agile car.

So the horse, the weight to the horsepower to weight ratio is in your favor and you have to keep the momentum up.

So it's really about like, I would rather corner and break than go fast in a straight line.

And that that's where you build your skills.

And that's where you can take advantage of.

nicer tires.

You really want to use that contact patch and keep your momentum through the corners.

So you know a lot of people think you know like these Ferraris or these high-end Corvettes those street cars are really fast but you put them next to my

I the 1995 BMW that I retrofitted and I will be seconds faster around a racetrack just because it's a purpose-built race car.

It's really hard to compare but you can spend $185,000 on a supercar.

It still won't have the same performance capabilities as an actual purpose-built race car.

Yeah, that's interesting.

know I'm, a car guy, but not a race guy.

And I've noticed, uh, you know, the, big head to head right now is the Ford Mustang GTD and the Porsche are kind of competing for the fastest times on the Nuremberg track.

And, uh, yeah, neither one of them is the most powerful car out there, but they beat a lot of cars with way more horsepower.

They were built to, to race.

They were built for the track.

Like you're saying, is that accurate?

Oh yeah, they're engineered, know, that's the thing.

Engineering's come so far that you can really squeeze the performance out of their cars.

And, you know, I'm really excited to see what happens in the future with some of the advancements that they're making.

It just gets, it gets to the point where these cars are too fast for the road, that people can still buy them.

Yep.

I had a crotch rocket in high school that was that way.

You know, the fastest speed limits in the country are 80 miles an hour and that bike would do a hundred miles an hour in second gear and had six gears.

You couldn't ride it legally.

So awesome.

imagine being 18 years old and learning how to race cars and then you have a nice BMW for the street.

I mean, I over 15 speeding tickets and multiple street races.

was going down.

I'm very lucky to still be here.

I was going say I'm kind of impressed you still have a driver's license.

I'm not sure I would.

Great.

Well, you brought up you're headed in the car racing direction, maybe not headed down the right path.

What turned you around or got you back on track?

Well, you know, the thing that my father did well is, you know, once you get out of college, I'm done supporting you.

So if you want to go live your life, you have to go figure out how to finance it and how to fund it.

And I'll give you all of the tools, but that's about it.

So I graduated college with a business major and a minor in philosophy.

I didn't really know what I was going to do.

The economy was in shambles.

And I went into the first place that could offer me a job.

And that was a financial institution, you know, trying to build a book of business to sell mutual funds.

And that lasted for about three months.

And they're like, no, this isn't gonna work.

So then I went to the second best place that would offer me a job and that was selling copiers.

There is a really interesting copier company here in Oregon where they would put you on a very low-pays salary and then they would give you a commission plan.

That was my first time ever seeing that.

It was a great experience and a terrible experience because it was like the Wolf of Wall Street of sales.

You would make 40 % of the net profit.

and you had to make 50 to 60 cold calls every day.

You were working from 6.30 to 7 a.m.

to 7 p.m.

mandatory.

At the end of every day, they would get a 30 rack of beer and put it in the office and you had to drink beer.

That was part of the culture.

And your job was to basically cold call and find appointments and build value and sell these copier systems or printers.

And the successful reps that were doing that, they were making $600,000 to a million dollars a year.

And when you're 22 years old and you're like, I get a drink in the office, I get to try to make money and I get to see all the success.

And it was just a wild ride.

Um, but inside of that, they provided really good sales training and they taught you like the key fundamentals of

you know, going out in appointment setting and finding buyers and going through a sales process.

And you have to go through hundreds of sales processes and hit so many objections and you have to lose so many deals in order to figure out your flow.

And once you kind of understand those mechanisms, then you're like, hey, I can put time in and I can get money out.

And then the better I get, the less time I can put in and the more money I can get out.

It's just you have to have the uh mental fortitude to just show up and just learn every single day.

So I did that for about a year and had fallen out with the ownership of the company, which is a common theme for me.

uh And I went to their competitor and that's where I went from a very uh kind of morally loose, unethical, sales-driven, results-oriented company.

to a corporate company and I've never really seen corporate yet.

So I segued over there and I worked for Rico and I saw the proper kind of management tiers.

had a sales manager, had Salesforce, I had like all the time management systems in place and how terrible it was ran.

But you can still find ways to...

to succeed and ironically that's where I found my wife was at a comp company.

But I stayed there for about a year and half and I found ways to navigate their internal systems um to create better commissions for myself.

So I was able to figure out how to work the comp plan and I was making twice as much as my peers um just by reconfiguring their estimated models and.

selling a bunch of copiers.

But it's a complete burnout.

So by the time my father got in touch with Mark at Columbia Roofing, I was ready to leave the industry.

So I went from there and that's when I segued right into commercial roofing.

And that was when I was 24 years old.

Okay, so you're done with copiers.

uh You've seen a couple different corporate structures or uh cultures and now moving into roofing with Columbia Roofing.

What was your role there?

What were you doing for them?

So I was primarily just a salesman.

So they just wanted to bring me in there and shake things up a bit.

Because typically the structure is you bring an estimator that came out from the field or had some previous experience with roofing, then couldn't talk about it and sell it.

It's not very often that you just hired some random person off of the street and teach them what roofing is.

If they have sales skills, I can...

teaching what roofing is and then I was kind of like that experiment.

Um, and I was taking some of the bad habits from, um, copier sales into this job, which took me about a year to straighten out because you know, when you're in a prospecting

heavy, uh, loose kind of sales job, you know, you'd like to drink a little bit.

do some minor alcohol abuse, a little bit drug abuse, and you're just

rolling with life, just trying to stay one step ahead of it.

I think at this point, a good commission check was $2,000 $3,000.

My best month, I made like $7,500.

I had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account and I was living at a townhouse that my father gave me for $1.

That was part of the tools.

He was like, I'm gonna give you a place to...

to live, but you got to figure it out.

And I had all my friends live with me.

So I had two other salesmen.

One was a service writer.

His name was Chris.

He was living with me.

I had another copier salesman living with me.

And then I had another buddy.

So we had like four or five salesmen living in this one house.

And that was my life.

You know, we just partied and made money and you know, that's your early, early twenties.

That was the halfway home.

So I went from this like,

kind of college mindset to, this is a career.

Like the first year at Columbia Roofing, I really realized like I can make a career here.

I have to grow up.

And that was like the real education.

So I get transferred into Columbia Roofing in the first two weeks, the sales staff leaves.

So they were all like, the company had culture issues.

They had a bunch of things going on behind the scenes and

I show up and that's right when I think two or three of their core salesmen leave the company.

So it's just me and one other guy there.

And I'm like, this was a nice, well-running, family-owned commercial roofing company and they just lost all their guys.

And it's like, oh my God, what did I get myself into?

So it allowed me to like do what I do best.

Like I knew how to reach out to customers.

I knew how to prospect and manage territories.

I knew how to organize the chaos and figure out where the value is.

mean, and that's, that's the greatest thing about commercial roofing.

Like you have to buy a roofing system.

can't just not buy a roof.

Like when you have to buy a roof, you have to buy a roof.

That was the easiest thing ever.

Like you cannot convince anyone to buy a computer.

No one wants to buy a computer.

Right?

Like you have to like literally meet with them three or four or five times and take their hand and like get them to sign the contract.

But with roofing, they're like, yeah, no, I have to buy this.

So what I started to find out is not even really knowing commercial roofing that well, just knowing the sales process, I was able to start churning contracts and really getting

numbers on the board quick.

And that's something that they were all really impressed by.

They were like, who is this kid?

My first year, I sold close to the company record of sales, if not.

I sold over like three and a half million dollars, which back then that was a lot of money for your first year of sales.

I didn't really know what I was doing.

The other thing I did really well is I started to refine their whole sales process.

They typically you would go on a roof, you'd write a scope of work, you would put a number on it, and then you would submit that through to the customer.

And that was so backwards for me because I, that's not how I buy.

If someone just gave me a scope of work with a big number attached to it, I'm not, I mean, that doesn't inspire me to move forward.

So I started building these proposals where I build 40 to 60 page packet on why they need to buy this system.

And here's all your upsells.

And that kind of helped to build the foundation for my entire future was building these tools.

Yeah.

So at that point, you've worked for the maybe more upstart culture, copier sales, just sales at all costs, young, drinking, partying.

You moved into a big corporate job and got to see corporate.

And now you're working for more of a family-owned, family business culture company.

What were you able to pull strengths and weaknesses from all three of those and how does that experience play into how you would run things today?

Yeah, I mean it was a bit of a dumpster fire in a way.

mean, as things started to scale up and as we started to refine the sales systems, that created growth and that company wasn't really ready to grow.

But I was like, I need to make money.

I need to get a comp plan.

They never had a commission plan.

So we got comp plans.

ah We started a

We branched into Seattle.

We bought a company in Long Beach.

I grew into the regional sales manager and through five years there, every single year we had a new president.

So imagine having a new leadership structure every single year for five years straight.

That takes a toll on culture, right?

And then also...

creates a lot of volatility, creates a lot of difficulties in operations.

I think I joined there when they were around six, seven million.

I took them to like 15, 16 million.

We built out a bunch of new salesmen and systems and processes.

But eventually you just get kind of burnt out because you don't have the right foundation to scale the company.

And what I learned over those five years is it would be easier to design a company from the ground up than to fix this one because there were key items that needed to be

changed.

Yeah.

Okay.

So that brings us probably to closer to current.

Your next move was from Columbia to AMW where you are now.

Can you tell us about the impetus for that change and what that jump looked like?

Yeah, so it did.

It just, got to a point where I needed to find what the next steps were.

And we had a new operations team.

One of the main, the operations manager and I, we saw the same things and he was, he was Morgan and he met oh Ken Dixon.

at church and Ken owned Architectural Metalworks, which was a small specialty sheet metal shop.

Ken had a background in roofing, so he knew about it and he knew the family and he knew the company I was working for.

So I was able to go and get coffee with him.

We just got coffee and we hit it off and everything was just kind of flowing and it was a complete different personality than I was used to working with.

It was way more, hey, you know, let's try this out.

to say yes and we're going to have an open conversation versus no you have to do things this way blah blah blah so I was like okay there's something here let's start talking

about what making a change would look like so you know I'm still at Columbia Roofing I've built an incredible sales team I great relationships with all my salesmen that I've

trained personally I've hired personally Chris my my roommate is working at Columbia you know

My other roommate was working at Columbia.

So it's like I'm living with my company and my team and I had to tell him like, guys, I'm moving on.

I sold this big job.

was a beautiful contract at like 42 % margin.

Um, I had the contract signed and I gave it to the owner to sign off on.

And he was a little upset.

I don't know why he didn't like the contract.

He wouldn't sign it.

And I was like, okay, if he, if we're hurting for.

for sales, I'm bringing you this beautiful $300,000, nicely well sold job and you're not gonna sign it to just make me angry, then I'm just gonna leave.

So that's what I did.

So I packed up and I left.

And that was the start of the perfect count back.

So I took about a month off, I bought a boat, I went fishing, kept in contact with all my buddies.

And everything was just kind of rebalancing in my life.

had, I married Megan.

I had a wife.

I moved into this bigger house in Lake Oswego that I couldn't afford because I left my company.

I had to sell that house.

took a $25,000 loss, which was a really hard thing for me to do at that time.

I sold the house.

I moved right back into the townhouse and, um, I had to like reset my life so I can.

forward to ramp up the new company.

And that was hard.

I mean,

it's hard to walk away from a quarter million dollar a year job to get back at, you know, I took a $45,000, $50,000 base.

was like, I'm really going to do this.

I got to take a big step backwards in order to take a step forwards.

So I got everything in, in line, and I had all the energy there.

And I started with AMW and

What I didn't know is everyone at AMW didn't really know that I was starting a roofing division.

So Ken knew, but the rest of the company really didn't understand who I was or what I was doing.

that later to find out that Ken might not have been the greatest communicator, but he knew what he was doing all along.

Just not everyone was on his same page.

So I show up to work and I'm in...

the smallest office you can imagine.

It was a utility closet.

had no windows.

It was like four feet by six or seven feet.

I mean, we were talking 35 square feet was my office and that's where I set up shop.

And that began the saga.

Okay.

Okay, so where do you go from there?

You're, uh, AMW's primarily a custom sheet metal shop doing architectural metal and you're launching a roofing division basically by yourself.

Is that right?

Yeah.

And so you've got 35 square feet, a computer, and you're supposed to be running a roofing division.

How do you get it off the ground?

That's the beauty of it.

oh the first day I was able to secure an appointment on this beautiful roof and Ken and I are going up there and we started talking about our business plans and we're walking the

roof and we're looking at it and we do a full takeoff.

They wanted a sheet metal siding package and uh the roof hatch as I'm coming down the ladder.

It was a faulty roof hatch.

The wind hits it at the perfect time, hits me on the head and I fall off the ladder straight out to concrete about 12, 13 foot drop.

It was a big drop, but I was able to kind of turn as I was falling and catch myself.

And I basically pancake out on this concrete floor.

I broke both of my arms.

I lost my front tooth and I suffered a severe concussion and I had to go to the emergency room.

That

That's a tough first day, right?

That's a workers comp claim.

Everybody in the company is like, well, who is this guy and what is Ken doing?

And it puts you on a recovery arc that's going to take, you know, six months to a year.

So that's, so I had to start, had to like the first two months, I was literally in my townhouse with two fractured arms banging out my business plan.

and my marketing materials.

And at this time, there was upheaval at Columbia Roofing.

my, like one of my best friends, Chris Woods, he was fired because operations kept dropping the balls on his projects and his customers were getting upset.

He was getting upset and there was a new president involved and they're putting heads.

So they fired him.

So we just hired him.

We, we, we picked them up.

So now I have.

My buddy here is also going to help out in sales.

uh Columbia also fired a foreman.

So we picked up the foreman and that was our main service guy.

And then they uh were also kind of not paying out on commissions and they let go of my operations manager who felt cheated.

So then in like two to three months after my fall,

All these people started to get let go.

were opportunities and we were able to kind of keep the wheels on the bus and get enough billings and we just hired them.

Like we took the risk and all of a sudden we snapped our fingers and we have like three or four employees within the first four to five months.

So that kind of created the nucleus.

you know, meanwhile, I'm just kind of building the systems and the processes and the foundation to start.

And that

is like the first year when you start your company, it's not really about growth.

It's just about getting the foundation built and engineered in the right way where you can't grow.

And that's when we hit COVID.

Okay, well, we'll get into that.

I'm sure there's quite a story with Kobe, but I want to roll back.

So Ken's running his business doing metal, doing well at it, it appears from what I know.

He meets you, you guys are having coffee chatting.

And within a few months now, he's not only hired you, he's launched a whole other division in his company that he hasn't been doing at all, and then hired three or four guys.

kind of on your recommendation.

sounds like he took a pretty big swing on you and bet a lot on you.

What is it that you told him during those coffee dates that convinced him to go all in on you and your business plan?

Well,

I have five years of experience in this marketplace and I had a really good book of business and there was a great opportunity to leverage that.

It's one thing to start a company from like absolutely zero.

It's another thing to have some relationships that are pre-existing.

And I was able to leverage some of those.

Of course I had a non-compete and of course Columbia tried to sue me, but there's ways where you can get referrals and you can build business off of business.

So, know, the first year we did $2.8 million in revenue.

had 19 contracts sold.

And that was, that was back in 2020, right?

Right.

Like when COVID hit, but it was, it was, we were able to produce enough immediate success that helped kind of build the small building blocks that kind of led up to year two, year

three, year four.

Um, most of the time when you start a business like this, you're really not going to get an ROI till year three.

But in year one, we were, we were able to break, break even, you know, we had a really.

low overhead model.

That's really important.

Okay.

All right.

So you're getting off the ground 2020 in the middle of COVID.

Where do we go from there?

Everybody took their foot off of the gas.

When COVID hit, it gave everyone an excuse to relax.

And that's when we just started making cold calls.

mean, every single day, every single night, emails, LinkedIn, prospecting, refine our systems so we can just get on roofs.

And people might not buy in COVID, but they're going to buy the year after or the year after that.

So the more momentum you can create by just setting, um, just, uh, uh, just setting appointments and talking with brokers and property managers and building owners, the more

you will, um, just create momentum for the following years.

So we went from 2.8 million in 2020.

We're going through COVID.

In 2021, we did 6.3 million.

So that's like, that's a pretty big jump in a short amount of time.

Yeah.

There's not a lot of roofing companies that hit 2.8 their first year and even fewer that almost triple that the second year.

So.

that was like a stress test, right?

Because now,

you know, labor, you just can't hire 20 guys to go out and do all this work.

So, you know, we obviously had a really good relationship with a subcontractor company that was able to provide us certified foremen and crews.

They didn't have the quality that we wanted, that there were bodies to get on roofs, and then we would have to train them our way to produce perfect roofing systems.

And getting that perfect in roof is obviously the foundation of any roofing company.

It's quality.

If you don't have quality, you don't have a roofing company.

I don't have a background in putting on roofs.

I've never really put on a roof system before.

I've done lead calls and I've done tear off days and I've done it, but not like eat, sleep, live, install.

And that's where your operations team come in.

They have to have that knowledge in order to get that.

quality there.

You never cut corners and you build a foundation of providing for the customer.

And that's what we've learned how to do in the first year after COVID or after 2020 was how do you run four to six jobs every single month, provide the quality and churn it out

profitably.

And that just stressed us everything.

I mean, you break everything.

You make every single mistake.

You try to learn from it.

You might have to make the mistake two to three times before it really sticks.

We didn't even know how to estimate.

I had to teach myself how to estimate.

know, I mean, I can't, I have so many stories of things that we did wrong, but you have to go through that learning phase in order to get to a place where it is refined and you can

turn around projects perfect the first time to actually create a pipeline.

So the first two years were really just figuring it out.

uh And at least we had enough sales where we could bankroll our mistakes.

That's kind of how it turned into.

Gotcha.

Is there one mistake that really sticks out in your mind that you lost a lot of sleep over and um helped you learn some of those lessons in a significant way?

yeah, mean we have a couple.

Probably the one that kept me up at night was, there was a year, I think it was either...

looking, yeah, no, it was in 2021.

We had two people fall off, fall off or fall through roofing systems.

And that was a wake up.

mean, that was, you know, what are we doing?

Are we, are we moving too fast?

Are safety systems not dialed in?

Like what happened?

So the first one, oh the contractor had his harness on, had to go back to the eve just to work on some flashings, never clipped in.

He was clipped in, but he un-clipped, walked to the ladder, walked back to take care of something, and literally just fell over the eve.

uh It was a lower roof and there was a sidewalk, but there was one grass patch between two concrete patches and he fell onto the grass patch.

So that was, you know, that was a wake-up call.

He was okay.

It wasn't a, it was a big deal, but he didn't have long-term lasting injuries.

but it really kind of taught us like safety has to be the number one consideration and stuff happens that is outside of your control.

So you have to plan on that.

Prior to that accident, we had someone fall through a roofing system, go through a warehouse, drop 20 feet right onto a Porsche.

Yeah, so we're working on this guy's building and he typically...

He his Porsche outside.

They didn't want to park it outside because we're working on the roof so he moved it inside.

Then they were cutting through plywood and the dude cut the plywood out from around himself, fell through, landed on the rear window of the Porsche, shattered the glass that

took all the impact.

He was, I mean, he went to the hospital but he was walking by the afternoon and...

He was eating tacos by the end of the day, but no one just has a 20 foot fall.

And you know, we were so lucky.

Like if that Porsche was not there, we would have been done and he probably wouldn't be here.

Those are things that make you look at this career path and really understand that it's a simple job, but it's incredibly risky and you have to focus on the fundamentals before you

start scaling up and biting off more than you can chew.

I had to buy that car, fix it and sell it and that was an 80, $90,000 mistake.

Yeah.

But that all happened in the first two years.

We got our feet under us and in year three,

we scaled from 6 million to 10 and a half.

And then we went from 10 and a half to 20.

Wow.

So that brings us to year four.

um Are you continuing to grow?

Do you think that's a sustainable arc?

This year we're down.

Oh, sorry, we went from 20 to 22 and then this year we're pacing about 16, 17.

So we kept on trying to continue the growth, but we're a really small marketplace.

mean, Portland is about as small as they come.

I think last year we won the award for being...

number, we were the number two volume installer for Versico nationwide, which is a cool little feather in the cap.

um But we've kind of hit our first layer of growth restraints based on there's only so much market share you can grab in this smaller market without having to really work.

you have to work a lot harder to get a smaller share.

So that's kind of, you know, our ideal position is to keep refining our internal strategy, but to start branching out of it, looking at different markets and coming up with like new

strategies to pull, you know, four to six million out of two or three different markets.

And you can double your company from 20 to 30.

But at some point, you know, growth isn't the main objective.

When we started the company, everyone involved, we kind of had a chip on our shoulder and we had an outgrown, we had to prove ourselves.

The marketplace didn't like us at all.

This is an old uh boys club where new, there's been no new commercial roofing companies at our scale in the Portland market for at least, for a long time.

It's been like.

the magnificent set up here in Portland, and that's it.

So to break into that market and take away a lot of market share, you really face a lot of headwinds with developing your book of business.

So you have to find your competitive advantage and you have to find your niche, and our niche was our salesmen and our sales process.

and our proposal process and how we educated and consulted our customers and gave them different options and really led them down this path of we're going to give you a bunch of

facts about your buying systems and you know if you want to go with us we're going give you the best value we're going to give you the best quality we're going to we're going to

do this faster on time and under budget and we have to perform on these five met metrics in order you know

to keep you as our customer.

And we've done that.

And that's how we were able to grow really well.

But it's been tough.

It's been tough.

sorry, at some point, you stop looking at the numbers and you want to focus more on like your culture and on the long-term view of the company and finding other things that are

more important to you than just the results and just the money.

And that's been.

kind of the maturity arc that I've gone through as a business leader, and to be less data driven, less results focused, and more oh kind of culture focused.

That's the transition that we're slowly making.

Awesome.

Yeah, I think a lot of businesses go through that.

um Can you tell us what does that look like inside AMW?

What kind of things are you guys doing to focus on the culture and what kind of a culture are you shooting for?

What I'd like to have is an appreciation culture.

um Everybody in any company, particularly smaller companies that have to perform at a certain level, you're really trying to get the best out of your employees every day.

And they have a lot of responsibilities.

Like I have two people on my operations team, I a service manager and an operations manager and they manage all the field guys.

for two people.

I'm 16 to 25 million dollars on their back.

You know, we have sales teams that have to get in and do the dirty work and work really hard to win every single one of their projects.

And everyone has these high expectations in order for us to keep the lights on.

So it's how do you make them feel appreciated and how do you try to keep the stress off of them as much as you can so everyone can live the life that they want.

live in their own way.

That's uh something I'm working on engineering.

One of my flaws as a leader is I'm very analytical and systems driven and empathy is something that needs to be learned.

But we are definitely getting there.

Headed that direction.

I know you shared when you were in high school and you got to rub shoulders with a lot of the other race car drivers.

Many of them were uh successful in the blue collar spaces.

They were business leaders.

And you mentioned that that was kind of an inspiration for you that you got to see these guys that worked really hard and then got to enjoy the benefits and were living a life

they enjoyed.

maybe earlier in life than the average retirement.

It sounds like that's kind of the goal of where you're building now, both for yourself and your employees.

Is that a good way to look at it?

Yeah, that's great way.

This company is just not all about me and goal.

You really have to build it so it benefits everyone in some ways.

um That's why I have a pretty aggressive compensation plan put in place so my team can m provide for themselves very good living.

I take a lot of pride in that.

If you engineer your company well enough where you have a low enough overhead, you can pay your people.

that's the first step.

Make sure they're paid well, and then you give them the time off that they need, and then you have fun doing it.

If you can do all three of those things, you're not going to have a lot of turnover, and you're going to invest in your employees, and they're going to stick around and...

They're going to take care of you if you take care of them.

Great, I like that.

That comp plan, how is that structured for different people?

Do you guys do a lot of commission and performance-based bonuses?

Is it pretty heavy on a base?

What does it look like to take care of your people on that level in a way that inspires performance?

So in copiers, they would give you a base that you could barely live on and then a high comp plan.

So I provide a base that you can make a decent living on.

So like your average salesman, you're going to start at making 80 to $90,000 base.

And then I'm to give you a comp plan that says 10 % of the gross profit.

So you can sell a million dollar deal at, let's say, 30 % margin, 10 % of that.

you're doing pretty well.

You should be able to gross 30 to $40,000 checks per bigger deal.

And we have some salesmen, I want you to sell three to 4 million at year two or three, but the people that really build their book of business and they really get things ramped up,

they're selling eight to 10 million.

They're making three to 500,000 a year.

Wow, on the sales side, that sounds pretty good.

What does that look like for uh more the operations side?

How do you incentivize those positions?

So it's based

on keeping the estimate intact.

So your gross profit has to stay above a certain level.

And that's a function of our fixed overhead.

But I have it paying out over a 27 % gross profit.

And then they get 1 % of what they're able to create.

So if we sell $20 million a year and you keep it over that level, that's a $200,000.

mission plan plus your base salary so my ops guy should be making between 250 and 310 thousand a year and my service manager she represents about a million dollars of decent

margin work and that's more of a it's a it's a it won't pay as well but she should be able to clear a hundred and

ten to a twenty five thousand.

Okay, yeah, that sounds like a great comp plan.

And of course, in Portland, that doesn't go as far as it does out here in Wyoming, where I live.

But ah yeah, sounds like you really care about taking care of your people and that's paid off for you.

Yeah, mean, there's people on my staff that make more money than I do.

And that's okay.

That's how it should be.

I mean, they show up and they do the hard work every single day and I just help orchestrate it.

And if you can orchestrate it, then you can find this nice, nice place.

Yeah, great.

Well, I know you said when you first showed up at AMW, the rest of the company kind of looked at you like, who are you and what are you doing here?

How do you and your roofing division fit into the rest of the company now?

Has that shifted?

Are they glad to have you?

Well, you probably know something about roofers.

They can be uh very prideful.

They're independent and they're a bit standoffish.

So we relied on the sheet metal division for all of our coping caps and counter flashings.

And as we grew, it was difficult to get orders processed.

And there was some friction on a kind of a business performance level, but as a kind of personality level, everyone

got along, we're all the same type of people.

But what we did is we put a lot of pressure on performance.

Because when you have a six day roofing job, I need my flashings ordered in on day one or two, and I need to get them on the roof by day three or four.

And I can't take my equipment out of there and bring it back just to put on sheet metal flashings.

Like I need it now.

So the first couple of years were pretty tough.

just trying to build out the systems and the processes to hold people accountable on like, hey, you I have to hold my staff accountable for placing the right orders.

I have to hold them accountable for processing the right orders.

And then we had a manager inventory and ordering systems.

When I started at A &W, they were a $5 million company.

We grew them to 30 million, trailing 12, four to five years.

I mean, that's an incredible growth.

You're talking to totally different companies.

It's all about design and how you kind of build the scalable processes.

And a lot of companies can't get through the first iteration of design refinement.

Once you start looking at a company uh as a system of organized processes and designs, then you're able to kind of boil everything down to a tool or a function.

So what it took was rebuilding the machine so it functions at a very simple yet efficient pace.

And that takes a lot of kind of personality checks and a lot of changes and organizations have a hard time changing.

So I was really a change agent in creating a bunch of these systems.

So it was really tough.

People didn't like us.

We were butting heads.

were sharing space.

It was hard for roofing to create more revenue than sheet metal that gave us a inflated self-importance aura.

And we basically

just had to just humble.

Everyone had to just take a step back in order to take a step forward.

And that's where we're finally headed.

Okay, I'm picturing that episode of the office where they got bought out and the sales team's commission structure changed and uh the atmosphere there changed a lot.

Is that an inaccurate view?

Uh, you know, it's been a big, yeah.

mean, when you get a taste of success and you start winning and you have that momentum, it, you know, when you go from a $10 million company to $20 million company, just in one

year, I mean, you get, uh, a lot of momentum and feelings, but it also creates ego and like ego is the barrier to change.

it can be a barrier to uh progress.

that has to get, you have to go through the success to get to the ego and then to get to the rebuild.

it's a big learning curve and uh we're just grateful that we were able to get to the other side of it.

Okay, well congratulations that that sounds like you guys are doing really well.

So, I know you've talked about a few ups and downs and setbacks.

What has been the most difficult thing so far?

Well, I mean, personally, everything, when your company is your life, it's easier to manage your company.

But then when you realize like you have a family and you have a life and you have a newborn, your whole life changes and things that you use to value, they're not as

valuable, you know?

So really it's finding that work-life balance and personally understanding where your priorities are.

and then oh managing both to the best of your ability.

In America, our culture rewards this work ethic and these hundred-hour weeks and really taking on these heavy lifts inside of your organization and being the leader that has the

charisma that can manage sales operations estimated.

of it but it comes at a price and then comes at a sacrifice and you know for me I found that that sacrifice wasn't really worth it.

I'd rather spend more time with my family and do less racing and more you know building for our future and that's been my biggest challenge is managing my health and my family.

Also keeping a successful company afloat through the turbulent times.

It's all about balance.

Yeah.

I know this is probably a silly question.

You guys have grown so fast and gotten to be so big, but was there something that delayed your growth to a degree that if you had to do it over, you would do differently?

Um, I think, I don't think our growth was delayed.

I think we just grew too fast and had to learn all the lessons in a very short amount of time.

know, um, cause you have to add on crews, you have to add on staff, you have to make a lot of decisions that you've never had to make before all within one summer cycle.

mean, our, our roofing season is eight months long.

So every year we have to fit in 70, 80 % of our revenue in eight months out of the year.

So when you see that style of growth, you are probably buying jobs that you shouldn't be buying or you're taking jobs on at too low of a margin.

So, you know, I think we've probably left, we probably did things the hard way.

We probably could have sold jobs for a little bit more money and done less of them.

And that would have been a lot easier for everyone, but we were so bought into winning at all costs that it did.

It created a lot of stresses.

And when you stress your system out, you stress your people out and you internalize that.

So there was a lot of learning lessons packed into a small amount.

There's some good advice there.

Thank you.

Is there something that you've changed your view on or changed your opinion about through the process of building your company?

I think, I mean a company is a sum of its people.

So, you know, you really want to protect your people and you want to find the right people for your company.

I think as an owner, it's a lot easier to have a business partner that can help manage blind spots.

There are some things that I'm not good at, there are some things I'm not, I don't want to be good at.

And you really need to be able to just take a step back and acknowledge that.

You know, there are some things that you don't want to do and hire people that are very competent for those items and just organize it or organize your people, organize your

strengths and then boil everything down to the most simplistic nature of each function.

And your goal as a business owner should be, I want to work the least amount of effort to get the

best return on that time.

And when you can start really refining your systems, it's going to put you in a much better

place.

That's great.

I appreciate that.

Do you use, you talked a lot about finding the right people, different personality, different skill sets.

Do you have any resources or um personality tests, things like that, that you use to help determine that balance and getting different types of people and the right people in the

right places?

Or is that something that you just kind of feel out and figure out as you go?

That's

the million dollar question, right?

Because when you interview someone, you're not really interviewing them, right?

You're just trying to see the best in that person to see if they can match the skill set you perceive that they need to have to do well in your organization.

So, you know, I just, I like to be direct.

I like to have a very good description of work.

And then when you really want to define the position or the...

that they're going to fill and then understand each item that they're going to be working on has a certain skill trait that you need to see if they will be competent in or at.

So once you understand exactly what you need to hire them for then you really need to find that personality type that's going to fit that space and then you need to have relentless

training.

Just relentless training and

you'll know in the first four to five weeks if they're gonna work out or not.

And if they're not really the right fit, you gotta let them go and find another one.

And the better you get at hiring and managing people, the more core strength you're gonna have.

Because eventually that person you're gonna wanna have grow and take on more responsibilities, find the next step in your organization.

it's about just...

creating the right system, finding the redundancy, and then really trying to find the personality that fits for it.

I still haven't cracked the code in that system yet.

It's people, you know?

Yeah, it sounds like you are really good at having well-refined systems and processes and defining that well.

Would you say that's one of the biggest strengths that you have and in your company?

Yeah,

I mean, every company that wants a scale to that size, you have to have somebody that's orchestrating the inefficiencies.

Every construction project is going to have hiccups.

There's always going to be problems, but you just want to focus on the top four or five big problems to solve, write them down and then refine it.

then in three or four months, check off the next four or five problems and really like navigate your change.

And by the end of the year, you can look backwards and you should see all of those little things will add up to a big result.

So it's really just about just isolating the granular pieces and then, you know, through refinement, through conversations, through meetings, through getting input, through

getting buy-in, you will create that change.

But it's a hands-on thing that takes a lot of time at the beginning.

But if you do it well enough over time, you're going to create this culture of uh allowing change to happen, allowing people to make decisions.

And I have people underneath me that are now refining and building their own processes that I'm not aware of.

I think that's great.

They're finding efficiencies in their own job and they're able to make that change.

So it's like, if you start your company with this kind of change culture, it will allow that to take place.

And then...

It's being done without you even knowing about it.

That's the sign of success.

And that's gonna really allow you to grow in the future.

That's great.

Yeah, I know that's a huge step as a leader is when you find out about a problem after it's been solved.

And it feels pretty good to have your people take care of something without even needing to involve you and see that they did it well and did it right.

yeah, and everyone makes mistakes and you

can't harp on them.

You say, okay, try it, try it again.

Great.

Have you made any beneficial mistakes?

Something that was a mistake at the time, but in retrospect, it allowed you to learn a lesson or open a door that now has been a benefit.

Yeah, I call those happy accidents from Bob Ross.

We have happy accidents all the time.

And building strategic fender relationships or uh accidentally estimating a job wrong, that turns out to be right.

mean, there's...

There's always an accident is how you perceive it.

So anything that happens that isn't intentional, if you can learn from it or create a positive behind it, then it's a net positive.

Yeah, that's a good way to look at things.

If you could go back and do all this again, would you choose to do so?

Yeah, yeah, I would.

It's been a life altering decision.

It's amazing how close I came to not making that decision for any salesmen or entrepreneurs out there that are afraid to take the job.

I'd say you have to have faith in yourself.

And if you know your stuff and you understand how...

to be successful, because you've had success previously, then go out and do it.

My hard part was being a little risk-inverse financially.

That's why I have a partner.

He's the majority partner.

He's benefited greatly from our relationship.

If I had to do it over again, I wish I had...

put myself in a position to really uh mutually benefit from this growth.

And I didn't think I could be this successful or create a team that would be this successful.

And three years later, boom, there it is.

It was manifested.

So if you can do it on your own and you have the means to, you should.

And then when you bring in a business partner, always get a very nice ironclad agreement that's lowered on.

wouldn't ah have a handshake agree agreement.

You have to look out for your future self.

And that's very difficult to do when you're making so many decisions every single day.

It's like, what does future grant kind of want?

You know, what is the agreements that future AMW needs to have in place?

And that's hard part.

It's like, how can you predict

six to 12 months down the road in order to make sure your ass is covered.

So there's a lot of mental math to do it right, but if you can navigate that well, you're gonna be set.

Okay, have you guys been able to figure that out as you've moved forward?

Have you made some changes to adjust things so you're happy with everything?

Yeah, yeah, you know, we've come to a really good spot, it took, you know, whenever you have a business partner, it's like a marriage, you have your honeymoon phase, then you

have your figuring it out phase, and then you have, you know, bumps in the road.

But that's kind of where that humbleness comes in and trying to let go of your ego and

just work as a team and, you know, work.

Not for what's gonna be best for me in one year or two years, but what's best for us.

And that's kind of where we've all arrived at, that it's been a process.

It's not easy.

That's great.

Well, if I can commend you on that, just the short amount of time that we've known each other, ah just the language you use, the way you talk about your business, I've seen

incredible growth in that and you and maturity and man, I aspire to run my business the way that you do someday.

You're doing a great job and uh I can see it even just in the limited interactions we've had.

Thanks Eric, I do appreciate it and you know,

we're in this exciting time.

Like the next generation is moving into business.

The Baby Boomers own so much market share of these companies and they have an iron to grasp on and they don't want to let them go.

But eventually they're going to have to transition.

They're going to have to transition to the next leadership shell.

And that's, that's going to be our generation.

We're going to have to show up and do things a little bit differently.

And we're going to have to engage the younger generation differently.

And that's a very results oriented generation too.

So everything's going have to change.

And if you can be in front of that change and you can be in front of that management

next way of doing things.

Because it is going to go through a generational life cycle and that's kind of what we're in the middle of seeing.

Also, this industry is getting gobbled up by private equity and that's a big thing.

There's two sides of that coin and it just depends on if you can find yourself in the right place at the right time, the right team, it could be really beneficial, but it can

also be very impactful too.

So for the millennial or the Gen Z out there that doesn't have a direction, doesn't know what they're doing, but they're interested in a trajectory like you have had, what advice

would you have them to prepare themselves to uh launch a business or partner with someone or take over a business from a retiring boomer?

How can those people be preparing themselves to go into business the way that you have?

best skillset I think you can really have is being able to work backwards.

So if your end result is here, how do you work backwards and get to where you are right now?

So if you can build that out just roughly and then you say, okay, what are my next steps?

Well, here's the next step and here's the next step.

Here's the next step.

And you can kind of focus on that end goal and kind of simplify your route to it.

You'll get there.

Whether that is an income goal, an equity goal, conversations, you need to have legal agreements that need to be put in place.

You have to educate yourself on every step of the way so you have a clear path forward.

Now, if you don't have any experience with that, you're not going to get there.

until you have a job where you can get some education.

know, about five years at Columbia Roofing, I had five different vice presidents or presidents.

I saw five different leadership styles.

I saw five different ways for it to fail.

And I had a very good education on what ran the company, oh what worked and what didn't work.

So when I got into a position of actual making decisions, I knew how to navigate that well.

So, you know, get your foundation experience.

Like if you wanted to go into HVAC, become a basic HVAC tech, go become an estimator, do some house calls, sell it, really understand the business model.

And then you can branch out and either buy company or start your own.

But you need to have that foundation experience and then the ability to backwards.

That's great advice.

And I know you brought up kind of on the job education and education there.

I know you also have a college education.

uh Could you speak into maybe the different skills that you learned in the two different areas and uh maybe put some weight on one or the other?

Do you use much of your college education in your current role and how important do you think that is?

College might not have given you a ton of like, a ton of like just like hard skills, but it gives you the ability to critically think.

And I think the ability to critically think is probably one of the greatest abilities and traits you can look for.

Also coupled that with a background in philosophy, you kind of learn how to see things from multiple perspectives and understand that.

You you might be right when you think or you might be wrong when you think you're right.

uh critical thinking skills, definitely I'm not.

I was never a great college student.

I had a really hard, I had to work harder than most kids just to get B or C.

But when it came to business, I had a straight A.

I like, I understand money and I understand business well.

Cause that's like a, that's a separate language.

It's good to learn the basics of that language and to get the vernacular behind it.

that helps, know, a good vocabulary really helps kind of differentiate yourself when you're in a conversation.

You're gonna have a lot of high-level common conversations.

I you're gonna meet with bankers, you're gonna meet with business owners, and that's what basic sales is, and you need to be able to speak their language.

So that's something that's worth spending time on.

And then the ability to present is a huge ability.

In college, you to go through all sorts of presentations, but now I do PowerPoints in front of property management companies, anywhere from eight to 15 people.

I get sales presentations.

I do proposal pitches for why you should buy my product.

So the ability to explain difficult scenarios in very simplistic form is a key trait in being successful.

presentation skills are huge.

you know, just basic, those basic skills kind of create a successful business leader.

And if you're passionate about that, figure out what you're worst at and then start practicing it and you will get better.

I was born with a speech impediment.

I still stutter.

Like I have fear of meeting with people and a fear of public speaking.

All of those things were just terrifying.

But you have to work through it.

I mean, someone who stutters has to pick up a phone and make 50 cold calls a day.

Are you kidding me?

Like, it was terrifying.

But I failed.

I mean, I failed for years, but those failures led to success.

And that's just, you know, everyone has a similar story.

And you got to start somewhere.

yeah, that's what I got.

Persistence.

think that's a theme that comes up a lot.

You got to stay at it and be persistent Yeah, just an interesting side note You and I kind of met and connected for the first time a little over a year ago We've been collaborating

and working together in a few areas and even on a project together.

But here 15 years after graduation as we met for professionally we found out we did go to school together and

actually, Loden and Gilmore, we walked across the graduation stage together, probably separated by only a few people.

What are the odds?

Isn't that crazy?

it's pretty interesting to run into, run in such small circles and really never meet and connect later on.

So, um yeah.

What was your thoughts on our education?

man, I enjoyed college.

I felt like I matured and learned a lot in school.

Um, I don't know that I, like you said, I didn't gain a lot of hard skills that I use very frequently.

Um, but I think there's a lot of maturity just in that time period.

So my stance has always kind of been when I speak to young people or give advice is

Um, if you have scholarships or an opportunity to go to school for free, absolutely take advantage of it.

I wish I would have seen the educational opportunities I had earlier for what they were, uh, in high school and college.

I checked the boxes to get the grade, to get my certificate.

And now I'm like, I'm spending significant money to learn and struggling to learn things.

like, man, I had experts in this field.

ready to teach me and I was young, my brain was working better, I had more time and rather than seeing it as an opportunity to maximize education, I saw it as a checklist.

So um if you have that opportunity, take advantage of it.

If you have a dream, it is a career track that requires it, find a way to make it happen.

But the number of people that just go to school, because that's the next thing they think they're supposed to do.

um

Especially if you're going into debt to do so, man, I think there's other places, other ways to gain that the education you're talking about of critical thinking,

decision-making, relationships, presentations.

put yourself in positions to learn those things where you're getting paid instead of having to pay to do it is kind of my thought.

So I don't know.

What do you think?

Would you agree with that?

exactly.

I think that sums it up really well.

And if you can put yourself in a position where you can be on a compensation plan at a younger age, uh then you can really learn sales.

And if you can learn sales, then you can run a company, if that's your goal.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great.

think, uh, you know, from 14 to 25, there's so much maturing that happens in that period.

There's so much education that happens in that period.

And whether you go to formal education or the workforce or other forms, mean, today's age, it's changed even since you and I were in school, the amount of information that's

available, the education that you can get for free.

ah

has just blown up exponentially, but someone that takes advantage of those 10 years from 15 to 25 to maximize your education, whether formal or not, you're going to be way ahead.

Absolutely.

Another thing also worth noting is everyone's gonna pick up bad habits, you know?

And I always wrote my bad habits down so I can understand, you know, things that I probably should work on.

And we all have them.

uh Phone time, like if you're younger and you're glued to your phone, that's something that you should probably start talking to yourself about.

It's like, how much time do I wanna invest in this screen?

processing knowledge that might not go anywhere?

And what can I use this time for?

And that's, it's harder and harder to really focus on your future when you have so much data coming at you every single day.

And there's, there's this beautiful time in your life where you're just not that important and you want to take, you want to take advantage of it, you know, like when you're 21 to

25, like,

That's the beautiful time of your life.

know, once I started and actually getting traction in my business, my life, your life completely changes.

I mean, you're not having as much fun.

You're having all sorts of responsibilities.

You have monthly quotas.

You have deals.

You're winning deals.

You're losing.

And the higher and the better you get at your job, the more problems that you have to fix.

And then when your time just becomes solving problems, that's a rough go, man.

Like you get paid well.

Like you have decent weekends, you know, you can go to a fancy restaurant, but you look back at that time when you were 19 to 25 and you're like, man, those were the glory days.

So just, just use your time as best as, as you can and just be, be grateful for it and just work on yourself and it'll take care of you.

I love that advice.

I want to go back and revisit that to identify the problems with yourself and deal with them, work on them.

I love that you said you actually wrote them down.

I think that's a skill that is lacking, not just among young people, but in our culture today, we've kind of gotten this message of love yourself, follow your heart, you are who

you are, be who you want to be.

I mean, I think

be your best self is a better message.

instead of, like you said, we all have negative traits, we all have bad habits.

Instead of just, this is who I am, deal with it.

Be a better you, fix the negative things, maximize the positive things.

And I love that advice to write it down.

um think if very few of us take the time to sit down and think about our negative traits, but even those that do that,

kind of you think about it, you know it, that's maybe something you know about yourself, but to actually write that down and set it as a goal to work on it, that's some good

advice there.

I think that's gold.

Did you pick that up from somewhere or is that something you just did on your own?

No, I got, I was in a bad spot and I sat down and I wrote down all my bad habits and I had a list of good habits that I had and I had more bad habits than good habits.

mean, we were drinking and smoking and abusing drugs, not having great relationships with women.

I I was a degenerate and when you sat down and looked at yourself and you said, wow, this is where I am right now.

I need to change these bad habits.

I need to make good habits.

That took a lot of intention.

It took a lot of self-realization.

And you kind of have to come to terms with your ego and really realize that there's probably some personality traits that aren't going to benefit me in the future.

I got to take her future grant.

that was my growth period from 22 to 25.

at Columbia Roofing, they had this thing called an 8 a.m.

huddle where you had to be at the office at 8 a.m.

every day.

And it was tough to get there hungover.

So I had to sober up, man.

I had to sober up and uh come to terms with where I was.

But after a year or two of that, man, you're in a much better spot.

And that's the momentum that you need to get in front of your life.

It's just too easy to have the years fly by without really making progress.

And that's all part of the journey and part of the path and everyone experiences it differently.

But you gotta be open

to it.

That's incredible.

It takes a really humble person to do what you're describing and to go through that.

And it's an impressive thing.

I know I've had some similar experiences and usually it was kind of hitting a rock bottom, so to speak, getting, getting smacked in the face with a significant problem that it took

to wake me up and realize that I needed to change.

needed to mature.

needed to do something.

Was there a particular impetus or motivation that caused you to sit down and really look at that?

Was it just the 8 a.m.

huddle or was there something else?

Well, you know, mean, kind of hard to put my finger on all the bad decisions and what one really led to that just change.

But when you start to get success and when you start to feel like you're on the right path, it's a good feeling and you just, you want more of that.

I realized that when you're on the wrong path, that's not a great feeling.

And that sometimes leads to more negative feedback.

But once you get yourself in that positive feedback loop, that creates momentum and you have to have some discipline to stay on it.

That's hard with people with ADHD.

You just want to do all these other things all over the place.

So you need something to tether you back to your plan.

You're not going to be perfect all the time.

You're going to have a step backwards here, here and there.

But as long as you know and you have that compass and you listen to the compass, you'll work your way through almost anything.

It just takes time.

That's great.

I love that.

know a lot of people kind of gets caught in that shame cycle of you, make some poor decisions.

Like you said, most of the time, even the things that you think you're doing for fun or excitement, it's that feeling afterwards that brings you back down.

A lot of people get caught in that shame cycle of feeling bad about a poor decision leads to trying to feel good by making another poor decision and it spirals out of control.

uh Somebody that feels like they are kind of stuck in life and are looking for a turnaround and they want to get on that momentum of feeling good because of the good

decisions.

What advice would you give them to try to break that shame cycle and get on the cycle of building uh positive feedback?

I always, I listen to audio books from Jim Rohn.

So, know, like self-help, motivational speakers, just people that have...

good words to describe the hard feelings and the psychology of your state of mind, right?

So when you're in a negative state of mind, have negative psychological effects on your decision-making cycles.

And there's not a lot of hope.

You got to turn that thinking around.

So you got to teach yourself how to see the positives and you got to take care of your body.

You got to eat the right food.

You got to do some form of exercise.

I bought a sauna and I sit in that thing every three or four days.

It just feels good to detox.

You got to take care of your body.

You gotta take care of mind and if you just start making better fundamental decisions for your life It's going to naturally put you at their spot It's the same way of a salesman

like if you have a high-performing salesman They are not emotionally stable, right?

You have competitive type a people that have to win deals to put food and money in their bank account to take care of their families you are going to deal with Volatile people

you're gonna deal with

with people that aren't slumps, you're to have to figure out how to pick people up and put them on the right track.

You're going to have operations teams that make mistakes.

You're going to have pissed off customers.

Like you have to become a master of managing people's emotions and expectations and navigating it very efficiently and effectively to create buoyancy in that part of your

company.

Then you got to deal with all the financials and all the analytical stuff.

I mean, there's so many

facets that you have to be able to emotionally manage that you have to be the sale.

So if you ever want to be put in a spot of being a leader, you have to learn how to manage the wins and your sales so you can navigate the rough terrain.

And let me tell you, when you have supply chain issues, have tariffs, you have different presidential leaders that is affecting your economy, you have a volatile stock market, it

is

going to become increasingly harder to navigate.

So you have to become increasingly stronger and more agile.

Yeah, that's great.

say, I meet with a friend once a week to kind of connect, decompress, support each other.

And, uh, we were considering the other day that, the problems we get together and talk about now are so much bigger than the problems we used to have.

And a problem that was almost debilitating five years ago, that's just Tuesday now.

Yeah.

Um,

You mentioned a lot of kind of caring for yourself, getting yourself healthy and setting up for success there.

You bringing up the sauna reminded me on my to-do list.

I have a sauna at home as well that the control box went out this week.

So I need to order a new one of those and get it in.

But um what does your routine look like to make sure that you are healthy, well rested?

Eating nutritious food, taking care of yourself.

What kind of things do you build into your routine to make sure that you are a peak performer and ready to tackle those big problems that you face?

Great question.

So I spend between $1,500 and $3,000 a month on health and wellness.

That's a large part of our budget.

My wife is a nutritionalist.

I could not have done anything without her help.

She really created balance in my life and she addressed cooking and food and just giving me a healthy place to flourish.

My health journey that it kind of started a couple years ago.

I was diagnosed with Lyme's disease and then I went through a bunch of testing and I had a lot of mold in my system, 14 different markers that were in the red, super high amounts

of.

mold that kind of shut down my internal detox systems of my body.

So I was feeling really bad.

Stress is definitely not a help with that.

Through this blood testing, we were able to isolate and found that it was actually diagnosed with blood cancer as well.

I kind of three years into my business, I kind of had to take a step back and said, you have cancer, have Lyme's disease, you have mold.

you just have a newborn and your energy storage is completely depleted.

Like, what are we going to do?

How do we solve this problem?

Well, I started doing research and I got a hold of a natural path who is incredibly gifted when it comes to isolating problems, finding the root causes of it, and then building a

supplementation plan to start to systematically fix.

each layer of my health onion.

So starts with food.

You know, a lot of people are dairy intolerant and they don't know it.

I'm one of those people.

oh I try to stay away from dairy, uh gluten, low amounts of soy.

So I'm not really focused on eating processed foods.

Most of my meals are homemade and I really do well with high protein.

vegetables and grains, low grains.

Second thing I do is I have an EWAT system at my house which is exercise with oxygen therapy.

Fills up a giant bag full of pure oxygen.

I try to do that two or three times a week on my exercise bike.

You feel amazing when you exercise with oxygen.

That's an incredible help with detoxing my body.

I do IVs with

nutrients once to twice a month.

IVs are awesome.

They give me enough vitamin C, D, Mag, Zinc, Glutathione straight into the bloodstream.

I have between 10 and 15 supplements that I take to bind with the mycotoxins and the mold in my system and make me feel better.

Those are huge help.

I do red light and I do sauna.

So it's like, it's a, it's a freaking program just to keep

keep me at normal.

But what I found is after two years of this, all my markers are basically better.

I'm working on my last two markers.

My Lyme disease is tornant.

My blood cancer, it's just, it's a low grade blood cancer.

It's a central thrombocymia.

I have too many platelets in my blood.

My bone marrow creates more platelets.

If it gets up too high, I have to go on.

a medication for the rest of my life.

They say you can't, nothing I can do can affect my platelet levels.

But after I started these routines, I dropped them from 900 to high 600s.

That's a 30 % drop.

Okay, maybe you can't affect them.

So, you know, like all of these layers of kind of just like health systems.

They make you feel better.

You know, it's not the greatest situation, but you gotta make, you know, you gotta make the best you can out of it.

And then you're really grateful for the time you have, because you just don't know what is gonna happen.

And that's, that's been, it's been a separate journey.

man.

So somebody that doesn't have maybe the specific health problems that you have, but just wants to increase their health to become a peak performer.

sounds like you've been through the gamut of everything.

What's the one or two things that had the biggest impact that you think they could see the most gain for the least investment if they don't have the $3,000 a month to put into

health?

No, you're going to get 80 % of your gains by understanding what your body does not digest well.

So what causes what foods are you currently eating that cause low-grade inflammation?

So you figure out what those combos are.

And a natural path has these tests that will say, you shouldn't eat this and you shouldn't eat that.

OK, great.

Now I know what I shouldn't eat.

I'm going to stay away from.

from those.

Within two weeks, you're going to feel great.

ah Some easy supplements that go with what you shouldn't be eating.

So whatever your body is, not the main building blocks.

Like what does your body need in order to function a little bit better?

Is it magnesium?

Is it zinc?

Let's identify those.

And then just basic exercise or some sauna.

Like, you just feel better, you just sweat it out.

Those three things are not that hard to do.

They don't affect your life negatively.

It's gonna help out a lot.

And then you manage your screen time.

Stay off the phone as much as possible.

Build some boundaries.

Thank you.

That's some incredible advice.

So have you uh taken the plunge into cold plunge yet?

Is that something you're interested in?

I love cold plunge, I haven't bought one yet.

I do it as much as I can and it is a love hate.

It is a love hate for sure.

Okay.

man.

Well, it sounds like you've been through some, some difficult things in life.

Even just talking about your health there.

Um, you've struggled through a lot, and you seem to have a very positive attitude.

You keep going, you keep pushing, keep grinding.

talked about perseverance.

What motivates you when things get really hard?

Why, why haven't you given up?

For me, it's not like, it's just life.

Everyone's life is gonna get complicated in other ways.

I'm very fortunate that I have a great family and a great wife.

And my parents moved in on the lower part of our lot.

So my problems aren't real problems.

They're just things I need to find solutions for.

I'm lucky that I have the ability to have some control over my life.

There's a lot of people that don't have that or they're put in a position where it's going to take them a lot more work to get to where they want to go.

So, um, I'm just, you know, I, I don't, I don't really know.

think you just do the best you can with what, with what you have and you worked every problem backwards and, you know, just figure it out.

Okay.

Well, I know we've talked a lot about growth and maturing.

know you've just learned a lot of hard lessons by figuring it out and engineering a system in your business for your life.

But you also talked about some audio books you listen to.

Are there any particular resources that you feel have been most beneficial in your maturity and growth?

Um,

I can't point to one, you know, you just have to say yes to everything.

If have a hard job, say yes, figure it out.

Like just have a very short term memory.

Don't, don't dwell on, on mistakes.

And then when you're in the right place in your life, strive for change.

Cause it's going to get busy and it's going to get crazy.

you know, um, just try to.

create space for you and use that space to the best of your ability.

Okay, so this is one of my favorite questions.

um Are you a person of a particular faith tradition and if so, how has that shaped your journey building your business?

Yeah, so I never grew up with religious background.

I would say that I'm spiritual in many ways, but I'm more just like philosophical.

I'd rather have just be a good person, treat people well, use them as a means and themselves and not as a means to an end.

So if you view everyone as their own person and you're just trying to enrich and better their life, you know, they're going to do things that

you don't agree with.

They could leave your company.

They could go work for a competitor.

mean, I've had lots of, lots of people go on their own journey.

And if you can just support them in that because that's what they want to do, that's all you can do.

You know, you can't hold resentment.

uh Try not to be as judgmental, but your goal is to create this kind of utopic company where everyone benefits from each other.

And if you can kind of relate that to your life, then you can find harmony and it's a lot easier said than done.

And it's always in balancing that it's really just, you know, through your own life and through your own trials, you'll find your own balance.

And if, uh, if, if, if you can achieve that in your life, that's a successful life.

And that's just kind of my, those are my ideas and my ideals.

Okay.

Well, thank you for that.

Who would you like to see on the show?

Do you know anybody with a cool background, a cool story, a really interesting niche in their market that you'd like to learn more about or hear more from?

I think you should figure out where vintage racers are in your area or fly to a vintage race car track and you should meet some of these crazy older guys that have these seven

figure cars driving them on the edge.

Those guys have some wild stories.

Okay, all right.

Well, I might have to see if you can hook me up or introduce me after the show here.

uh Last question, to either fuel or settle the debate, if you have a job to do with the cordless tool, which brand do you pick?

Ah, mean, Hilti's a great place and DeWalt is a follow-up.

Okay, awesome.

I think that's the first Hilti answer we've gotten and we're getting close to neck and neck here with Milwaukee and DeWalt.

So chalk one up for DeWalt.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much, Grant.

I really appreciate you joining us on the show.

um If someone wanted to reach out to you, if they need some roofing services or are interested in picking your brain a little bit, would you be open to that?

And is there a way they can get a hold of you?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, they can reach out to Eric and Eric will give them my contact information and email.

They can call me direct.

It's all good.

Okay,

great.

Well, thank you so much.

I really appreciate you making the time.

And thank you guys for joining us here on From the Ground Up Show.

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So again, thank you and until next time, keep grinding.