Brent Garrett – From a $5,000 Truck to a Better Business

Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show,

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by telling the stories of those that have been there,

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Building a life that they love with their hearts,

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So

Today, ~ I'm excited. I think this is gonna be a fun conversation.

I am joined by Brent Garrett. Brent is the president of Serious Plumbing

and Air Conditioning, the creator of the best business program,

and author of 30 Days to a Better Business.

Brent started his career with five thousand dollars in a beat up truck

and has built that into a very successful business.

He spent a few years trying to wrangle his business into shape with hectic effort.

before getting serious about building systems,

discipline, and true leadership.

Now he shares those secrets with others through his writing,

speaking, and coaching. So Brent,

thanks for joining us today.

Erick, thank you so much for having me.

I'm looking forward to this.

Yeah, I think it's gonna be fun.

I know you sent me a copy of your book.

I got to read through a little bit,

~ and we've communicated a little bit in the run up to this recording.

you just have a wealth of knowledge and experience and some great stories.

I think we're gonna have a lot of fun.

I'm looking forward to it.

appreciate it. You make sixty one sound and sound a lot better than ~

th than it probably should.

Well, you look good for sixty one and and you got a lot going on.

I appreciate that.

~ we'll dive into all your business ventures and everything you're doing.

But we like to start every show just getting to know you a little bit

and ~ you know, what kind of a upbringing,

what kind of a history produces someone that does the things that you've done.

So do you mind going back clear to the beginning and telling us a little

bit about your childhood and what things were like growing up?

Yeah, sure. I I was born in the Midwest,

Illinois, and ~ better part of the first fourteen years were spent there.

My ~ my dad was a Korean War veteran and had had a scholarship,

football scholarship to go to to the University of Missouri,

but he was also a reservist, even in high s a senior in high school.

And so at seventeen

He he went to Korea and came back and went to work,

started a family and worked at the local hammer factory in Bushnell,

Illinois. And and you know, don't even try to Google it,

it may not show up on the map.

It's a small place. But ~ he was an apprentice plumber on the weekends

to make extra money that our family you know,

didn't come for we came from humble beginnings.

And ~ and so

you know, it's three ways you get into the plumbing and air caching business.

You either marry into it, you're born into it,

like I was, or you had a buddy who needed a strong back and a weak mind,

and you never left the business.

So my dad was that latter part and he,

you know, really worked hard and and kind of was one of those like about eighty

percent of the business today,

two, three trucks, right?

Never scaled his business, but man,

put four kids through college.

And I my my start in the plumbing business started on the end of a shovel at 12.

And and and I'm gonna fast forward through some more of this,

but but ~ he was so committed to us going to college.

I was a first generation graduate,

got a degree in marketing and accounting,

and I broke my dad's heart when I told him that I wanted to start

my own plumbing and air machine business.

And

He I made him the promise that I would go to work for a life insurance company

because if I he told me if I was gonna start a business,

if if I could learn how to sell first.

And any anybody out there that's ever sold life insurance,

~ let me tell you what, that is some hard,

tough lessons. And ~ I really enjoyed it.

It was the best advice he ever gave me.

I went to work for New York Life after that.

I ~ had look I had a fifty page.

business plan and five thousand bucks.

And you're right, a beat up astro van in Richardson,

Texas. And I started that from scratch five years later.

I know you're a big reader, Erick.

I read The E Myth by Michael Gerber and Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Mm-hmm.

by Stephen Covey. And and those those two books helped me ~ move

to selling my company in five years to a Fortune 300 company.

And ~ man, I got so much experience at Service Master on how

to get some corporate polish and communicate a little better.

And I got hired away by a headhunting firm and became the CEO and president

of a regional company in Memphis,

Tennessee called Letic Management Group.

They were a multifamily ~ fee base manager.

And ~ from there I went right back into private ownership,

started another company here in Dallas from scratch again.

And we raised our kids. I did a little keynote speaking workshop training

and if you read my book you'll you'll you'll learn quickly that I I

got hit with some really tough life questions.

And I chose family first and got off the road,

quit teaching and coaching and keynote speaking.

And Jenny and I have worked together,

that's my wife, for over 20 years.

And she and I are working on another book called Thirty Days to

a Better Marriage That Works. We have we have worked together and I mean she's

Okay.

she is my true partner in many,

many different senses of the word,

but

We we work together and and there's there's a lot to learn on that.

And there are a lot of small businesses out there that ~ out

of necessity work together. and so we're we're we're working on that.

But ~ I said that if I ever got back into coaching and writing

and and keynote speaking, I wouldn't do it just for the money.

So what what I am doing is I'm coaching a small community of skilled trades owners.

Who want to grow and scale their business without compromising their values.

And so that's what I'm doing now.

Just right on that other side of that wall are 30 employees here in Dallas,

Texas, in this hot weather, taking care of people in their homes.

And my son is over there working and learning and growing.

~ and help them with the business.

It's just a blast to watch them do well.

I don't own a job, I own a business and I coach the coaches.

So I hope that got the summary.

That's awesome.

I like to give a forty second answer.

It's hard to go from when I was born to sixty one in forty seconds.

So

man, good stuff. And ~ I like that distinction.

You own a business instead of a job.

I think ~ especially in the skilled trades,

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So

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well, let's move into that a little bit.

you said your first business that you started,

~ you took it from a a startup to selling out to a Fortune three hundred company

in five years. what did that look like?

What what was the process? How did you get started?

Yeah, well, you know, I think after about six months,

I was out of the truck. I and I moved quickly into that.

I think there are five stages of scaling a business.

I moved quickly into that teaming phase is what I call it,

where you're bringing on team members and you're taking hats off.

And that's really that first level for a business owner to think about who not do.

And and so

that's really tough for some folks.

~ what I I wanted to get out of the truck.

I had a vision for where I was growing the business,

and ~ and so at that phase,

you know, we we clicked along for a couple of years.

I I told you I I read Michael Gerber's ~ book,

The E myth, and he talks a lot about process and and we worked a lot on process,

and here we are in the age of AI,

and ~

That was like in the mid 90s. So a lot of my competitors or people that were

in the business, they didn't even have a PC.

and ~ you know, so we bought our first computer.

I remember like the first year.

~ I remember when we first started running calls.

W I Erick, I I don't know how old you're probably do you remember thermal fax paper?

wow, okay. Okay.

So

behind the curve here in Wyoming and we were still doing business by fax when

I got started in the industry,

Yeah. So, you know, we

so

were scheduling calls with thumbtacks on a cork board and had Monday,

Tuesday through Saturday. And those thermal pack fax papers where we would

get calls from a home warranty company is w is a big part of our growth initiative.

but ~ we we were we were pencil and paper for a long time and then

so I grew

a relationship with those folks from American Home Shield.

They were owned by a company called Service Master.

And so they came and approached me about buying the business.

And I joined their executive team there and worked there for two or three years.

We did a roll-up of the plumbing and air conditioning industry,

about a $500 million roll-up. And I did mergers and acquisitions,

leaned a lot on my finance and accounting background.

And it was just a great experience.

I learned a lot. There was a gentleman named Bill Pollard at that time

who was the CEO of Service Master.

And they were a a publicly traded company with a heart,

a purpose, and a vision. And it just really rang true with me.

And ~ I learned a lot with my days at Service Master.

Yeah. So I I've got a couple questions there,

~ just about that business startup.

But while we're on the topic, I mean,

five years is a pretty short time to have built a business

to get somebody's attention like that and especially to be kinda on the front

end of a big roll up. what was special about what you had built that

got people's attention and and kind of put you in that place to

to help initiate that roll up and be part of that process?

I think ~ number one was we I was always reading a lot,

learning a lot, and and I was very focused on the client experience.

I told you that I came from the Midwest and I grew up in a small town and

and I just I was in a you know the Dallas area,

Richardson's in Dallas, and I just brought a small town client experience,

customer service approach.

And we grew our business not through a lot of marketing tactics,

but through referral. I gotta tell you,

I am a reader, but the best business book I've ever read in my life

was The Tortoise and the Hare.

Slow and Steady wins the race.

And so I brought a small town approach.

Amen.

We still do. We we spend significantly less on marketing than

my competitors.

On the average, we spend somewhere between four and seven percent

of total revenue in marketing.

The industry average is about 15 to 30% for growth companies.

And so, you know, there's a really good accounting lesson in that too.

And when I work with our clients,

Yeah.

you know, my value proposition to them is the fee you pay

me is about 20% of what I'll save you in marketing dollars.

And so it's a philosophy in the Midwest.

We say that you can shear sheep about three times a year.

You can only skin it once. And and our philosophy is repeat customers

and recurring revenue. And slow and steady wins the race.

Well, you know what? When you're in a major metropolitan area and you do that,

it's a little unique at times.

I have no judgment about other people's business models.

But it did accelerate our our growth.

I was open to selling be not so much because of the money that I got for the sale,

but I needed some polish.

I needed some experience and scaling and communicating and managing

and HR and and and Service Master did that for me.

And and so we probably could have.

Okay.

just kept growing the business,

but I wouldn't have developed.

And ~ you know, that's that's one of the things I tell young people that

are in a job. And I I tell I my my kids are 26 and 29.

They're young adults doing great.

And when they got out of college said never take a never take a job for the money.

Take the job for what you can learn.

~ and then the second one is not mine,

guy named Jim Rohn, he's not with us anymore.

He passed away, but he said, work on yourself harder than you do your job.

And so if if if I there's my first,

Mm.

there's those are my first two little nuggets that I would throw

out to your listeners from a from a 61-year-old guy.

Work on yourself harder than you do your job.

And and take take a job or or work.

For what you can learn, especially in the first ten years.

Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, those are great little nuggets.

you mentioned you know, you started your business,

you you kind of had a vision for growing it,

you wanted to get out of the truck.

and you talked about that process.

I think that's something that's difficult for a lot of business owners,

and especially those that are moving from kind of a practitioner

to a business owner.

How do you fill those roles when you're in that teaming process?

~ I I interview a lot of business owners and some of them say that they

~ hired too fast and had too much burden on payroll and couldn't keep up.

And others say that they hung on too long and were unwilling to let

go and that limited their scale.

how do you know when is the right time to hire that next role,

bring on that next person? How do you find that balance?

Yeah, I think ~ first of all

The leader-owner mindset has to be a shift to who not do.

Okay? Everything that makes you successful in that solopreneur to first couple

of team members is that you're resilient,

you're independent, you're hardworking,

you're driven, okay? And you're you're an individual,

and you derive a lot of identity from what you do.

Okay, well, what gets you past and to that next level,

everything that got you there can keep you from moving to that next level,

right? So the first thing you have to say is,

look, I've got, I'm wearing a lot of different hats.

That's what I what I work with,

folks. Which hat do you not like the most?

And then, and and I think that's a a a little bit of the the emyth

and and all these books I've read,

but

Let's get that hat off that you don't even like doing.

Okay? And and and they're all ears.

Well, here's the next phase.

I'm gonna tell you a story that I what I had to do in that to to make that happen.

And and you you do things and you don't even realize it.

And and I want you, I want to share with you I've lived every one of these phases.

And I want to say to your listeners,

I have been inches from bankruptcy.

And I've had commas next to my net worth.

And thank goodness I haven't been close to bankruptcy in quite a while.

But I'm telling you, there are these little lessons at each phase.

I found myself in the office with folks out,

but every time there was a problem,

I still had a truck with tools and that.

Man, I would go out and fix it.

And I started to realize, hey,

you know what?

I have to take away the ability to do that to force me,

and this may not work for everybody,

but to force me to help.

Get the team to take care of the problem.

Because let me tell you what, in business,

we're all going to have problems.

I guarantee you, I've got three different problems right now in this business,

and there's some adversity around it.

The one promise I can make is we're all going have problems,

right? So what you need to be as a business owner is a problem solver.

And don't worry about all of them.

Pick the right one, right? Well,

what it resulted in, Erick, was me looking and going,

you know what? The only way I'm going to quit doing this.

is to put somebody else in that truck and get rid of those tools.

Then I didn't have the option,

right? ~ I think you've heard maybe the stories about leaders and ships,

meet medieval wars where you know the leaders would land and burn the ships,

right? There's no option to go back.

Well that's that was my form of burning my own ship.

So I gave all my tools away. And and that and that hopefully is a metaphor

For when you're at different phases,

number one, let's replace the hat that doesn't fit well.

And let's get rid of the things that would cause us to run to and

fix the problem that forces us to work with a team and say,

okay, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna work with.

who is gonna do that. And then that's a whole different little bullet list

on bullet point list on how do you effectively manage and lead.

And that's when I started to realize that man,

I needed some training in that.

And that's really what I learned at Service Master was I was realizing that that

I could learn a lot more about how to lead and manage people.

~ so I took a job and got paid to get trained about how to to kind

of round out these gaps. And

So I hope I answered your question,

but sometimes you got to burn the ships,

sometimes you got to get your give your tools away.

But but it's real easy to get rid of the hats that you don't join.

And that's really what scaling's about.

And you get to a certain point where you get really excited about she go,

wait a minute, I don't own a job anymore.

I own a business and I'm doing what I love and everybody else is doing

the stuff I don't want, I don't love to do.

And here's the really cool thing.

There are people in the world,

if you can just grab that and understand,

you know, the creator of this world,

none of us all have can do it all.

It the joy is there's somebody else that loves to do what you don't love doing.

And you build a good team, it's a lot of fun when you come to the office.

Yeah, that's good stuff. I can relate to a lot of that.

I was the the guy that kept tools in my truck for way too long and ~ when when

a fire started I was the first one to grab the fire extinguisher and jump

in and that that was probably a detriment to our growth for a while and once

I quit doing that, just like you said,

that's when it got to be a little more fun.

~ it got to be exciting to to manage an organization and own a business rather than

a job.

Sometimes it'll save a marriage too.

Yeah.

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I know y you mentioned you know,

starting your business when things were still run by fax and and buying your first

computer there in your first year of business.

you've run service businesses through the tech revolution.

~ w what is your stance on that now?

Are you an early adopter? Do you kind of wait for proven systems?

~ are you one of the guys that hangs on to legacy systems and waits until

you have to upgrade? What's your approach to tech in a service business?

I've always leaned in on that.

And I think ~ but but the computer's never going to fix the leak.

So let's talk about how we use technology and what problem

are we solving with it, and never misunderstand that the magic moment,

at least in my business, is when our technician is in front of the customer

and that magic moment's taking place where.

They're solving problems for our clients and customers.

So technology has always been something that is solving a problem,

number one, not because it's really cool.

And I break down technology into there's bleeding-edge technology,

and there's leading edge technology.

And we try to stay right around.

maybe a year behind leading edge technology.

And that's that's for us in our industry.

If I'm a year, what I always found,

and I've found through the last 30 years,

if I'm a year behind leading edge technology,

I'm about five years ahead of my industry.

Now there are industry segments where gosh,

if you're not right behind or on the wave of bleeding edge technology,

You may get wiped out. I get that.

I have the luxury of being ahead of my industry by being just a little

bit behind what I call leading edge technology.

So what's that look like? About two or three years ago,

we moved from a Microsoft environment to a cloud-based,

well, cloud been with us for a while,

a while. But we moved to Google Suites.

And we kind of stayed in that environment that obviously led us a year or

two ago to be a part of Gemini,

which is you know, pick your flavor,

Chat GPT or Gemini or whatever you're and that's back when we were probably

a year behind the AI craze.

you know, a Google platform's gonna be pretty up to date.

So, you know, two or three years ago,

Yeah.

we were

We were getting better at writing our emails,

a little better at process. we looked a little smarter,

we looked like we made better grades in English class,

and it we were it was speeding things up,

and our research got quicker, right?

And so here in the last six months,

we're starting to use AI agents

Okay.

and we're exploring codecs.

and creating our own applications,

but we're a little cautious. there's quite a bit of talk,

you know, we're a VOIP system on the phones,

quite a bit of talk right now about bots and how we use them and how they learn from

our voice phone calls that learns how what's our culture,

that kind thing. And so I'm now the strategy guy in the company going,

I have just had a conversation about two hours ago.

And somebody said, hey, we can have this up and running by tomorrow.

I said, hey, whoa, whoa, tap on the brakes there.

You know, let's let's look at this.

Let's talk about what problem we're solving.

It's not an if, but when. So I feel like we've stayed there with technology

in our lane and maybe in roofing.

you know, there are a lot of things that are consolidating.

A lot of neat things going on with technology.

We shouldn't be spooked by it.

A lot of my clients are are a little just spooked by it,

or hey, I, you know, is this really gonna put me out of a job?

And you know, those kinds of questions.

so my my philosophy is stay just just about a year behind leading edge technology.

But by the way, bleeding edge,

I like it. I think

bleeding's not good. Bleeding's expensive,

No. Yes.

and it's still in what I would call a beta test,

okay?

Yeah.

You spend three times as much for something to find out that you bought

Yeah, why don't we just get the research?

the wrong one.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah, exactly.

man. Good stuff. Yeah, I can relate to a lot of that.

I I love the focus on solving problems.

That was a big part of the the DNA that I tried to build into our company.

I I made a kind of a a personal rule a couple years ago that I don't

buy anything that solves a problem I didn't know I had.

It i if you call me selling something

Yeah, exactly.

I'm not buying. I ~ when I have a problem I find a solution instead

Yeah, you know what?

of ~ hearing about a solution to realize I had a problem.

So

I gave you a couple nuggets on the a few minutes ago.

Let me give another let me give your listeners something.

We I'll give you a real practical use is we use notebook LM.

Okay. Because what I'm trying to do is get our coaches to be better trainers.

And so Notebook LM, I ex ~ introduced it to them.

And it'll take, let's say, a a document that's either a checklist or

Some process you want to teach your technicians or office folks.

And it will take that script or that information that you might speak from,

and they'll it'll turn it into a deck for you that you can train and speak from.

So you're working maybe with a field leader who's a little uncomfortable anyway

about doing training. It's a form of public speaking.

There's an example of how to make that a little more entertaining,

a little more attractive to the eye,

and you know, maybe a little easier for somebody to communicate things.

that's that's that's one real practical way that we're using AI and technology.

It you can download it, it's free.

That's the best kind. So well,

Yeah.

I know you built a a successful company scaled and sold in five years,

and then you spent a portion of your career in MA kind of rolling

up similar similar companies. what types of things make a company most appealing

for acquisition?

Man, that's a great question. And I ~ I will tell you there there are

two or three things that I think,

yeah, I can just speak in our industry,

okay? Let me give you a little some data points here.

~ the residential skilled trade plumbing and air conditioning market potential

or annual revenue is somewhere around $120 billion.

A year. Okay. And so some pretty interesting facts.

15% of those contractors

are controlling about 60% of that $120 billion.

The other 80 to 85% are doing things

that the 15% aren't. Okay. And so,

and I'm getting to your question,

and that is is that there's a huge equity roll up in my industry,

but they're only interested in that 15%.

And interesting enough, right now,

the equity game, and none of them have 1% of the market share,

right? It's still crazy fragmented.

But of that 15%, that they own about 30% of it.

And we could talk for another two hours about equity.

And I know you don't want to do that.

So, but to your point, let me just tell you what the things are that

the 80% aren't doing that the 15 are.

And I will tell you that the 15%,

what they're doing, are the things that you need to do to get your company.

In a best situation. Then I'll talk about what team I would put around

you and some of the mistakes I made when I sold my company.

So of that 80% are a million and a half or less,

the average is about $400,000 a year in revenue.

So those contractors, we're gonna talk about role pricing,

inventory, time, compensation,

and marketing. Okay. And this is what they're doing.

We already talked about it. They're doing,

they're not hooing.

Ha ha ha.

And I've I've heard say

it's not my take, but think think like an owl,

okay? Who, who, not do,

okay? The on pricing, they're they're usually charging for time and material,

and their average gross margin is 35 to 45%.

And ~ their inventory, they're making a lot of trips to supply house.

They're they're they're billing about 20 to 25 percent,

or sorry, 20 to 25 hours of a 40 hour week.

We can talk more about that one,

dive into it. The other one is the time.

It's open into schedules instead of instead of using what is Parkinson's law.

We talk about that more. But if I give you two jobs,

Erick, and your job's to work eight hours a day,

I know I'm I'm speaking to a roofing guy here.

How long do you think it's gonna take you to two do those two jobs?

Yeah. If I give you five and you've got to make

Eight hours.

your daughter's dance recital by 530 and you have five calls to do and you know it,

how long is it going to take you to do those?

I'm gonna get it done about four and a half.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, or or at least eight,

right?

We have to compress time. Those eighty percent contractors aren't doing that.

And a lot of that's because they're still doing so much,

they don't realize and they're not managing their team as efficiently as they could.

Compensation, I think we already know that I I don't want to say

the word clock milking, but that's really what's going on there.

Yeah.

And and so marketing is word of mouth reliance.

So let's talk about what those 15% companies are doing that are controlling

60% of the of the total market share.

They delegate leadership. They are on a flat rate platform that's somewhere

between 50 and 55%. There are companies out there charging 60 and 70%.

That would be the skin at once thing.

I your sheer it three times a year,

you know.

You can fool some of the people some of the time.

They're just not going to call you back.

I mean, I just know that from experience.

They have a rolling warehouse on their trucks.

Their trucks are stocked. It's a one-stop repair.

they they're time boxed, which means that Erick,

glad to be here. Love to talk about all those repairs.

The problem I have here is that you have a stoppage in your home,

and I'm here to take care of that.

Let me go diagnose that I've got five calls today.

Okay. We can certainly take care of some of those things that aren't as pressing,

but I want to get this taken care of.

Now the now the customer's working with you within the time frame to

fix the problem they asked you for.

Mm-hmm.

It also mitigates their impression that you're there to upsell them

all day long and camp out in their home.

That's a strategy for some companies.

That's not one for us.

They're performance-driven. They are getting paid either by the job

or they're being paid and incentivized to be efficient on completed calls,

maximizing, communicating, surveys with the customer,

and then marketing. They're consistently spending somewhere between eight

and twelve percent. So two more things.

One is they have a consistent and and an accurate.

Ability to provide somebody with three years' financials.

I'm putting my accounting hat on now.

That's balance sheet, PL, not so much cash flow,

but you need to be able to show that potential purchaser

of your business. Number one, what's your growth rate?

How how ~ confident am I on the accuracy of your financials because that's

how they're going to value your business?

Mm-hmm.

Here's the X factor. If you own the business and don't run the business,

they're going to pay you more money for it because it runs without you.

You have systems and processes in place.

So that those last five or six things that I just talked about.

Now, the one thing that you didn't ask me is well,

how do you build a team? If you want to go sell a business,

you will save the fee that you pay a business broker to negotiate on your behalf.

Because guess what? The equity players do this every day and they've done

it all their life and they're the sharpest people in the business environment.

You're gonna do it once. A business broker knows how to communicate

on your behalf and represents your interest.

Yeah.

Does that make sense? So, so that's the first one.

man, yeah.

A really good closing attorney,

a really good CPA. And then the third one is is this is the one I didn't have around

the table that I should have. I sold the business in 99.

And if anybody knows about that environment,

I sold it for about 80% stock and 20% cash.

Guess what happened to the market in 99?

Right?

Yeah.

I should have had a financial advisor around the table.

I would have collared that stock and protected my investment.

I didn't know what a collared stock was.

I do now and wish I had known then.

There's number three. That's it.

Yeah. Good stuff.

So I hope I answered your question.

But those are the things I would do if you're preparing that.

If you, if you don't, if you don't have those in place,

get with a business coach.

and start working your business to a point and get it ready for sale.

There there's good stuff there and I didn't necessarily do it with

any foresight or any ~ education or knowledge,

but you hit so many of kind of my core values and the way I ran my business there.

I I gave talks to my crew about Parkinson's law probably once a week.

it i I I was talking about Parkinson's law before

I'm impressed that you know Parkinson's law.

I knew that was what it was called.

~ I had read the study. I think it was Harvard did the study that resulted

in Parkinson's Law. I had read that study and would talk about it all the time

and I had been talking about it for probably a decade before I realized

it had a name. but yeah.

Yeah, I really

shouldn't be surprised because I looked at your reading list or your book list

Yeah.

on your website. You are a leader who reads and and you probably are going

to run into that. But it works,

right? Hey, I it anybody out there listening,

man. Yeah.

if you run a company, just do this for a week.

If you give somebody a task, say,

look, I need to hear back from you in 15 minutes on this.

And if they look at you like 15 minutes,

okay, 30 minutes. Is 30 minutes okay?

I'll be back to check with you.

Watch how fast it gets done. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it just in I've I've only scaled and sold one business and

~ I I didn't know what I was doing most of the time I was running it,

but those few tips you gave there just nailed everything that I learned through that

process and even the business broker,

when we went to sell our business,

I heard it said a long time ago.

It's been something that ~ I always listen to is I heard it as an an analogy

to a poker game.

you know, in every game there's a sucker and if you don't know who it is,

it's probably you. And I think it's true for negotiations as well.

So i i if you don't feel like you're in the power seat and a negotiation,

someone's probably taking advantage of you and you need to build that team,

you need to have advice, you need experience around you to make sure that you're

being protected and taken care of.

If you're wondering how I had that list in my head,

I I was about ready to send out another broadcast to podcast host.

And the topic is what to do with your business or what to know before you sell it.

Yeah

You know, and and so I'm not that good.

It's just was fresh on my brain.

It's a great question. didn't know that one was coming,

but it it's on everybody's mind right now.

~ well, you mentioned that you kind of disappointed your dad starting

a a plumbing and air conditioning business.

What was it that attracted you to that business?

Why did you decide to go all in as an entrepreneur to build your

own business instead of using your education and going into another field?

Yeah, I think ~ number one, I already knew the business,

so to speak. I knew I wanted to start my own business.

~ being an entrepreneur is a life sentence.

That's what Dan Sullivan says,

and I agree with him. Once you once you I was a quarterback in college,

once once you play the position quarterback,

it's just not as much fun to go play wideout,

right? You'd rather be throwing the ball than catching it.

Okay. Well, it being an entrepreneur,

if it's in your if it's in your bones,

it's with you forever, no matter.

That's why people will fail five times to succeed.

They just it's in their blood.

Okay. So I knew I wanted to start a business.

I already knew a little bit about the business.

But I told you I got a marketing and accounting degree.

Marketing, I had a great senior level instructor said,

look, one of the best things you can remember in marketing is

if everybody's doing this, do something that makes you look different,

right? Well, when I looked at the plumbing and air conditioning business,

there weren't a lot of and I think I I was kidding you before we when

we did the warm-up that on my notes.

At the time in the 90s, I was an unconventional career transformer,

but I wasn't a Gen Z, I was a Gen X.

What?

Okay. I just saw a space that had so much opportunity,

and it it had really favorable net income or profit margins

in comparison to other business models.

I went, hey, wait a minute. Everybody's everybody's being a computer programmer

or they're doing this or they're going to work for corporate.

I think I'm gonna do this. And and as,

you know, what is it, the road not taken by Robert Frost?

Yep.

I took the road less traveled and that made all the difference.

I just I just took a path that wasn't as traveled because I saw less competition

in my opinion.

Yeah. Good stuff. I I picked I I picked it up from

My dad did not see that.

a ~ a a like tactical book,

not a not a business book, but w again a a quote I love is when everybody else

is looking left and right, you better be looking up and down.

Well, as a quarterback, remember there's somebody back behind you running after

you too. You might you might not want to stop.

huh.

You might get run over too, right?

Yeah. ~

We're both saying the same thing.

Good stuff. So y you've built two two successful successful businesses

from the ground up in kind of this plumbing and H VAC sector.

what was the most difficult step in building those businesses?

You know, the first one was so new to me that,

and things happen so fast that I think I want to focus in on the second

one because I made some real mistakes,

Okay.

and I assumed that it's simple and it's easy.

Okay. Starting and running a business is simple if you keep

it to the basics. But it's not easy.

And

The second one I started, I made a million dollar mistake.

I was out on the road speaking,

keynote speaking, and workshop training on Tuesday through Thursday.

And I said, this is easy. I'm just gonna hire team people,

fund it with money, and let it run,

and I can do this. And I kind of watched it on Monday and Friday.

I'll get to the two lessons I learned all this.

Two more nuggets coming off to this one,

but it was six months.

To the day last time I had checked some financials.

I had looked at bank accounts.

It wasn't like we weren't weren't watching the financials,

but not to the level of looking at it every day.

Okay. I come home,

Erick, on a Friday, and I write about this in my book.

Cause I want your listeners to understand,

I have failed so many ways in so many different types of mistakes,

right?

I'm I'm thinking life's great and I'm on the road a hundred and twenty days

a year and and there's some trappings about speaking and and you start

to believe your own press clippings and it's it's I learned a lot of lessons there.

But

The lights go out in the office.

And I'm in Texas, it's summer.

We have brownouts and blackouts.

You know, we have electrical flow issues.

I'm going, wow, there must be something going on.

I go next door and my neighbor's lights are just fine.

We were late on paying our electric bill.

I had an accountant person handling the counting,

not an accountant, that went past.

And it was a wake up call for me.

This is what I want to share with you though.

This is the toughest lesson I learned.

I had already been going through my kids,

were four and six then. It was bothering me being on the road.

Something was tugging at me that wasn't about business,

that my life wasn't in balance.

And I took a stack home and look,

we were a million dollars in debt.

This company was bankrupt. But emotionally and spiritually,

I think I was reaching a bankruptcy that I didn't know.

And so I looked through that.

Mm.

I had lunch with Jenny the next day,

my business partner. I said, Look,

I don't know how to tell you this,

but we're in a deep hole. And I don't know that we've been wiped out personally,

but that business was on a final thread.

And we had a real hard heart. And I said,

I I really, this is a wake-up call for me.

I want to get off the road. I was saying goodbye to a really nice income,

but I said,

I gotta get my life in order. This business,

I don't know if I can save it or not,

but we're gonna give it a good try.

And we did save it. But I'm gonna tell you,

sometimes things happen in your life.

You know, we're talking a lot about business and how we make our living

and how we pay our bills, but there's a much bigger game being played in our lives,

and that's the choices we make about what matters.

That business.

Nearing bankruptcy and those lights going off were a metaphor for me

to turn a different light on. And that was a light that I knew was always

in my life, that I had made a commitment to years ago.

And the what I would say about that,

it was my toughest lesson to learn in business,

but it saved my life.

So, you know, here I am at 61.

That was I was 41.

But here was the other piece. There's a lot of pride involved in the business.

And I had to admit that I had really screwed some things up.

The two lessons that I learned from that is number one,

and then an interesting, I already sold the business,

right? Successful business. I'm learning a lesson that I should have already known.

You can never, as an entrepreneur,

let go of the financial ownership of your business.

It's the failure for most. And most companies after five years will

be out of business. And a lot of it is because of just poor cash management.

And there I was at 41 looking at going,

Mm.

how could you, an accountant, an accounting background,

successful business soul, be in this position?

It was pride. It was pride and ignorance and what I call willful willful ignorance

because I knew what to do. I just didn't do it.

The second one is, and I hope we get to talk about this a little bit,

you can never delegate the culture of your business.

You set the rules, you set the tone,

you set how we're gonna go to market,

you set how we're gonna treat each other,

because that's what ultimately allows you to scale and grow your business.

Because if people don't know how they're supposed to do their job,

and here's more importantly, why.

Our why in our business is to make lives better.

What we do is plumbing and air conditioning.

But our why is to make lives better for our team first,

our customers second, and our vendors third.

So I never delegate the responsibility financials

and I never delegate the culture.

And that's why that company almost went bankrupt,

is because I took my eye off that.

So that's the biggest lesson I learned.

That was a tough one.

And we we we saved it through sales because sales covers a multitude of sins.

And man, I had about a million sins at that point.

Good stuff. Man, I think ~ you and I would get along really well running

a business together. We're we're pretty aligned on a lot of these things.

I know that I interview a lot of business owners and I hear again

and again and again, know your numbers,

know your numbers, know your numbers,

stay on top of accounting. And ~ that was the one thing I was never willing

to let go of in my own business.

you know, doing MA, the ~ quality quality of earnings report is a big deal.

Yeah.

And I didn't know that you could do that deep of a dive into someone's accounting

until I went through it. But ~ w when we were negotiating with a couple

of different firms and and looking at the buyout,

w what I estimated the result of our quality of earnings to be was like

two percent off of what the accounting firm came up with after spending three months

and three hundred thousand dollars investigating our accounting.

I had it down

almost exactly what they came up with.

'cause you you gotta know your numbers.

You gotta know where you're at.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. Good stuff.

~ when were you most afraid?

You you just talked about realizing you were a million dollars in debt,

I think I was pretty afraid right then.

is that yeah.

I I will tell you.

you know, it it's something that is with most small business owners

or entrepreneurs, they they have two problems that they may or may not be aware of,

but the two problems that are with them is liquidity.

How do you get your how do you get your money out of your business?

And the second is exit strategy.

You know, are you gonna sell it?

You're gonna pass it on, you're gonna sell it to your employees,

or you're just gonna close the doors up.

They usually don't think and plan for that.

but there are other problems that we're always going to have in business.

I I tend to say this and I mean it,

I I always I'm a little I'm a little scared somebody will misunder misinterpret

me saying this. But because of my accounting background,

if I don't have cash problems,

my money's not working hard enough for me.

Okay. And so one of the things that's with.

Most small business owners is that liquidity thing,

okay? Is managing cash, managing payroll,

those types of things. But I have solid financials and I know,

and we I talk to my clients about this.

You got to know what a qu a quick ratio is on the balance sheet.

Got to know what your ~ current ratio is.

And then there's an acid test ratio,

and asset test is really telling you what's going on,

and that's all about.

How much cash do I have to meet my future obligations or payables?

Now I'll get out of the technical,

but those are that's something that's with my clients that I see is most

of what causes them pain. the the cure for that is to know your financials.

So those are the day-to-day things,

you know, what are we gonna do to move money here or there?

If you get to owning a business,

then your planning should be.

How do I have these emergency account funds?

Because problems are going to happen,

unexpected things are going to happen.

That's going to bring peace of mind and make you more strategic about your

decisions. But then there's that extra level of how am I going to build a legacy?

You know, what types of things do we want to give back to?

What do what are we going to do with our resources?

What can we do for our team to strengthen them?

How do we how do we take our key team members and take

The option away that they will ever leave the company because somebody might entice

them away for a another couple bucks,

right? These are strategy things that free up your brain,

but they are things that can cause you a lot of pain.

You lose a key employee that's been with you for 10 years,

they know everything about your business.

Guess what? You're back doing their job.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What kind of bench drink you're growing?

So I think those are some of the common daily problems.

~ that are that are always there.

Yeah. Do you have any ~ silver bullet advice there for taking care of that team

and making sure that you build a a culture and environment

and incentive package that causes them to stay?

You know what, I'm glad you brought that up because let me tell you what,

AI, I I used to be so intimidated by the interview process when somebody would say,

Well, and I was like, Man, I want this guy on our team or this this person

in the office. This is who I want.

And they say, Well, I was making this over there,

and I want 20% over that. And you know,

okay, how do I come back with that?

Because I knew it was a kind of a a car trading kind of conversation.

Here's here's my nugget. AI is a great tool.

And one of the things I use, I put in ~ you know,

what's the average compensation in Dallas Fort Worth for

a residential licensed plumber in residential service?

Could you also please provide a standard or typical job description for that?

Boom. I mean, it's 30 seconds,

right?

And so now when somebody says,

hey, I'm making 120 over here,

well, you know what? I'm fine with doing that.

you sound like you can do the job.

It doesn't scare me, but the average compensation for a licensed plumber in Dallas,

Texas doing what we do is $60,000 a year or $65,000 a year.

They slump down in the chair a little bit.

And now you have a real conversation.

What I say is number one, pay bases that are commensurate.

That's an eight dollar word for comparable to others.

Okay.

Pay a base there, or maybe in the first 30 days,

you say, Man, I really want to bring you on.

Our standard environment,

you already know we've got the business,

we can do this, we can provide these things.

Here's the benefits package. But it's just standard.

First 30 days, we pay 10% less than the base.

And if you're there, we'll pay you 20% off your starting.

So we'll give you a 10% bump in 30 days if you can do the job.

And by the way.

We'll also put a monthly bonus if you do these things.

And that's when you talk to them about your culture statement.

I usually have one on my desk.

I'd hold it up. I don't have it right now.

But here's the culture statement.

And guess what? All you have to do are these four things for the first 30 days.

You have to show up on time, do what you say you're going to do,

follow through, say please and thank you.

And the reason that is, is that you need to build trust in us.

I promise you we'll do those four things.

If you'll do those four things,

Will bump you up. And then your bonus structure will be for the value

you create in the business. And when that's how we get to that 120 number,

here's what happens: the person that knows they can do that,

they already want to be a part of your culture or not.

And they go, Yeah, I'll do that,

I'll take that. Or they'll counter and say,

Hey.

How about if I take that deal,

but I've got to have this? Okay,

that's great. Now we're at a 65 number,

we're not a 120 number. Okay?

Don't get suckered into a bad deal.

But our philosophy is we're gonna pay a base or slightly higher than the base,

but you got to show us you can do what you all these things you said you

can on your resume. Sometimes it doesn't always work out,

Erick. You know that from your experience.

So we we put a win-win compensation agreement and we put it in writing.

Not as a contract, because we're a at-will employee state,

but but we put it in writing. Most companies in our industry will never

put a thing in writing because they they they can't back up the word.

Many, not not all of them.

I love it. I I I feel I I

But that would be my advice. That would be my advice.

feel like I'm interviewing myself here a little bit.

That's ~ it that

Well, I I'll tell

you one thing. I want your listeners to know that each one you go,

man, how did this guy figure all this out?

Because every one of them has been some painful,

expensive lesson, right?

And you go, man, I'm not gonna do that again.

You know, I told you we're all gonna have problems.

Some of your solutions, your problems just come from the pain of mistakes,

right? Good questions.

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. That

that was one of our core values was,

you know, our job was roofing,

but we're here to solve problems.

You gotta solve problems and think ahead.

What are the coming problems? How do we not experience these problems again?

How can we get in front of it?

And ~ I love that. That was always my pay structure is we're gonna pay

a a base that's comparable to the market.

Make sure you got your bills paid,

you you're comfortable at the base.

But then we put together a a performance based incentive that is the win win.

If you help us win, we're gonna share with you.

And if if you don't help us win,

life gets hard for all of us. So it it builds that incentive to to win,

to go out and kill it and ~ yeah,

good stuff.

~ well I know you talked a little bit there about culture.

You you mentioned earlier we wanted to come back to it.

You said you never delegate culture.

what type of a culture do you try to cultivate and how do you go about doing that?

It's so I

~ my business, I I've never ever come to work,

and I mean that. I love what I do.

I've been very blessed to actually get to do and find what I love to do.

And what I do is I get groups of people to work together to a common goal

to where they can thrive and be successful.

And that started a long time ago.

I mean, when you're in a huddle with

10 other guys, you're leading a group of people toward a common goal.

And my common goal is not to get killed.

And so, and and my faith and trust were in those other 10 guys that they were going

to help be aligned with my goal.

So I learned at an early age,

that's what I do, and that's what I love to do.

From a personal belief system,

I believe that this, there's there,

I believe that there's an order to this world.

Okay.

And it's all around us, and we can see it in the physical,

just like gravity. And if you don't believe in that natural law of gravity,

Erick and I want to see you jump off a two-story building.

And we if we we're all for you.

If you can fly, that's great. But we have a lot of evidence that says,

mmm, probably not, right?

And there's so many physical natural law examples in the world.

There's there's gotta be an order to this world,

or you believe.

That it just somehow all fell into place and all fits together out of chaos.

And so I, you know, my my simple little brain thinks that hey,

there's probably order to it. There are also those things unseen.

And so in our organization,

we start from an understanding that people who tend to do good things,

good things happen.

And people who choose get rich quick,

a win-lose agreement, if if you want to go really dark,

people who who ch who choose dishonest or evil things,

they just never seem to get ahead.

Okay? And it's not transactional,

right? It's it's it's over time.

And so the first thing

Mm-hmm. They might win for a period

of time, but it catches up to

Exactly, exactly. So, and this is not new stuff.

It goes back to Plato and Aristotle,

4,000 BC. It's called natural law.

And it's evolved and it's become different.

And and you know, somewhere around 1000 BC,

there was ~ quite a an article written by a Pope from the Catholic Church about

natural law.

And and so there's something to that.

And our choice here, you know,

Covey says, think when when, right?

choose the right thing, do the right thing.

Our culture starts here. Do your best,

do the right thing, and treat people fairly.

From there, there's behavior. Show up on time,

do what you say you're gonna do,

follow through, say please and thank you.

Our why is to make lives better.

We do it four different ways. We do it one by serving each other,

two, by focusing on progress,

not perfection. We are not a yell and scream environment.

My dad taught me a lot of really good things,

but he brought back from the Army a drill sergeant mentality and a voice level that

came with it. We are not a yell and scream environment here.

We're gonna the the third thing we're gonna do is we're gonna help you develop,

we're gonna train.

We're gonna break you down into two types of team members.

Are you a can't or a won't? If you're a can't,

we're gonna train you up. That's our job.

We're your leader. We have to make sure you can do the job.

If we know you know how to do the job and you're a won't,

I'm sorry, we're gonna trade you to the competition.

We don't fire anybody, they make a decision to play on another team.

And then the fourth thing we have to do,

I mentioned this about Bill Pollard at Service Master.

One of their key components at Service Master was to grow profitably.

Not because profit was the goal of Wall Street,

but because it's the way that we reinvest in the company to live our why.

And our why is to make lives better for our team members first,

customers second, vendors third.

And that's our culture. And it's on it's on a laminated sheet.

They have to bring it to every training meeting,

along with something to write notes on.

And that's I have a I have a forty page employee manual,

but everything you need to know about being successful in our company is

on one side of a piece of paper.

And that's it.

Love it. That's fantastic. That ~ is very similar to my company's values

and what we did internally training people.

That that's fantastic. So well you you mentioned there,

~ reinvesting in the company. We talked a little bit earlier with your accounting

background and and knowing your numbers.

What was your approach to capital reinvestment?

How how do you view that? Or what or

What kind of a percentage did you reinvest?

What kind of things do you reinvest in?

Yeah, I think ~ number one, we're always asking the question,

what can we do better for our team?

what portion can we reinvest in our team?

I think we're at the phase where we're making stronger commitments

to key leaders because we're on on a scaling phase to go.

We we we have about seventeen trucks.

I think I mentioned to you thirty team members.

We're on our way we we do a little over five million in revenue.

And and always say this about growth.

We want to be best at something before we're biggest.

But we're on our way to 10 million over the next three to five years.

if we're not growing the company,

then we're not creating internal career paths and opportunities.

Can't promote within if you don't have something to promote them to,

right? And so we have a competitive environment.

We're trying to secure those leadership positions.

That we know we need for that next level.

So the short answer is we save our coins

to reinvest in the future in our people.

And so, you know, we're paying it forward a little bit

to that position to help incentivize them to get to that.

G give them a reason to learn new things,

right? Give them a reason to stretch.

Mm-hmm.

And we we're not always able to promote from within.

Scaling means we we might need a new capability at that next level.

We might, you know, because of my accounting background,

I probably need to the tool metaphor.

I probably need to let go of the computer at some point and have a controller.

But you know, technology leverages that.

We'll know when that happens, but that's probably something we need to invest in.

So so we reserve capital for future investment.

And and that could be assets too,

it could be trucks, it could be.

~ infrastructure. It also we're we're we're vertically integrating the business.

So, and what I mean by that is at what point do we own our building instead

of rent it? You know, if we get to a point where we can invest our capital,

now we're starting to build a legacy.

Man, one of the greatest strategies you brought up exit strategy.

I did do mergers and acquisitions.

It did a lot of due diligence,

like you talked about, the best business models I saw were

People own their building and lease the building back to the company that bought

their company. I mean, that that is mailbox money right there.

That is brilliant.

Good stuff. That's where I'm sitting right now.

Yeah. Good for you.

So good stuff.

Is there a lesson that you wish you would have learned earlier?

~ what would I tell my younger self?

First of all, I don't want to I don't want to promote my book,

but I've gotten this question a number of times.

My book, the first three weeks,

is a narrative between an a sage business owner and a solopreneur.

And they've said, hey, are you

Are you Evan or are you Carl? And I said,

I'm both. And so if you really want to,

I don't, I don't mean to tease the book,

but if you want to know what I would say over three weeks to myself,

younger self, there it is. Here's what I would tell you from

~ a spiritual standpoint. I was scared to death at 20.

I didn't come from a lot of money.

I'm a little emotional about it.

It was very serious for me to move from where I was.

What I would say to that younger twenty year old is it's gonna be okay.

There's a plan.

Because keep working hard, work on what you have control over,

and it's going to work out. And ~ and it did.

Erick, you just did it to me. Way to go.

Let me clear up a little bit. That's what I would tell people.

If you know you work hard and you have a belief system and you choose

to do the right thing, it may not monetarily work in the moment.

Don't think transactional.

But don't give up. Keep working.

Keep swinging. And I think over time,

if you choose the right thing,

the good thing, I think there's an order to the world where you'll be rewarded.

It may not be you'll be Bill Gates,

but you're gonna be okay. That's my answer.

Yeah.

man, there's some wisdom there.

There's good advice there. So is there an opinion you once held strongly that you've

changed based on your experience?

Yeah, I think I was way too quickly dismissive of somebody's work ethic

or their culture or their belief system.

And I learned to be more patient and realize that sometimes

the problem's not the problem,

the problem's the way somebody's looking at the problem.

And I should spend more time introducing a new way to look at

an old problem than being dismissive.

That it's a character flaw in somebody.

What I've learned over time is I've seen some really,

really talented, sharp people develop in our company.

And they don't hold the same belief system that they did 10 years ago

or five years ago. I think early on I could have done a better job of not being,

I'm saying dismissive, but in my mind going,

that person's this, or

This person doesn't have that ethic or or that that character piece that that's

so necessary. over time I realized I can't change people,

but I can model something that maybe they haven't seen before.

And just to be a little more patient,

slow and steady wins the race.

Good stuff, the tortoise and the hare every time.

Yeah.

So if you could start all over,

go back to coming out of college and ~ do something different,

w would you or what would you do differently?

I almost died in 2014. I was on an O2 bag for 45 minutes.

Didn't see any light, but I had a peace and a calm that came over me.

And it was one of those moments where you know,

afterwards, people I I'll just let you know,

I'm gonna fast forward through the story.

I wake up in the ER room after 45 minutes,

and there are nine people in there looking at me like,

And and the look on their face was like,

you were almost dead. You were dead.

And you could just see it on their face.

And I would get a lot of questions from friends.

Hey, has that changed your life?

Is that has that changed you in any way?

I was forty, fourteen,

that would have been. Yeah, I was probably close to fifty,

somewhere on there, I think. May I got the ma wath wrong on that.

So, what would you do different?

And I said, you know what? It hasn't changed a thing.

I'm going to continue to live the life I have.

It it affirmed it. But one thing I don't do anymore

is I don't equivocate, or if there's something to be said that

I believe somebody needs to hear in encouragement,

in my support, in my love for them,

both in family and business.

At times I probably was a little more political and go,

you know what, I yeah, I'm probably not gonna do that.

From that point on, I've never held back.

now I've learned to be hold back on some things that are rolling around

in my head that probably should stay there,

but I don't equivocate. So if I looked back,

I would say to myself, man, if you have a thought about somebody

you have a connection with that you think they need encouragement.

Or you should take some time, or you should not leave anything

to risk about somebody knowing how you feel about them,

how committed you are to them.

Do not let that sit in your head.

They need that. That feeling is there,

that emotion is there. That might be the one thing that makes their life just

a little bit easier and keeps them.

from doing something that might be extreme.

And so I wish that I had learned that lesson sooner.

and I'm not proud that it took me almost dying to learn it.

So that was a really good question.

Great.

think I would have come up with that in any other way.

So I really don't talk a lot about it because people are going,

A a great answer, some

man, did you see a light? Or is that sorry,

I didn't get any of that, but I will tell you this.

Everything slowed down. I had a peace and a calm that came over

me like I can't even explain.

My only regret and the moment was,

and because I'm telling you, Erick,

I went into anaphylactic shock.

I couldn't breathe.

And I knew it was over in my mind.

My only regret was I wasn't gonna be able to say goodbye to people I loved

and cared about. So those are the lessons.

That's a big one.

there's a lot of wisdom there and ~ man,

you're you're full of nuggets of wisdom today.

~ this is gonna be a great interview.

I appreciate it.

You're just a great interview.

That's

what you are.

What mistake has cost you the most money?

Whew. ~ taking my eye. I mean,

come on, a million bucks. I th we already covered that.

Yeah.

I'm sorry. I I can't give you a better one than that.

That that tops the list, huh? It's good stuff.

I just took I took my eye off the ball.

Yeah.

My

when I took over the business,

my dad always told me, you know,

dance with the girl that brought you.

That I think as entrepreneurs we can get that squirrel A D,

you know, there's always something better.

I wanna do this, I wanna do that.

You talked about kind of ignoring the business because you were speaking

and coaching and and doing all of that and that business that provides

the foundation for your income.

It deserves your full attention.

So

Yeah, I

can I can look back at that. I really want to make the point.

The million dollars, it you know,

that that was a lot of money. But what's the cost of losing a marriage,

your kids not turning out well,

because you just didn't spend the right time,

didn't make the right choices,

that's far more costly than a debt you had in the business.

So, yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely.

And i I have found in my own life anyway,

when you get your priorities in order,

things work. It i y you know, when you put when you put your family first,

my business tends to thrive. I w when I allow the business to come over my family,

i I struggle. I I it was difficult.

~ the the problems in the family arose that

created problems at work and when I get my priorities in the right order,

when when marriage comes first and kids comes first and then the business,

like life just went better. That my business thrived when it

was priority number three or four rather than when it was priority one or two.

~ has that been true for you? Yeah.

I mean, I I just think ~ reflection.

I I personally like to do it early in the morning at 61.

How old are you, Erick?

I'm only thirty seven, so

Yeah, Erick, I've been 37. You've never been 61.

I'm

And there's a preparation there,

it just seems to set your brain.

And you know, when you're starting to get to a point where you think there's

no there isn't enough time for anything,

that's when you really need to sit down and look at what you're doing because it's

not that there isn't time to do,

it's what are we choosing to do?

And ~ when our brain is clear about our priorities.

I think we just make better decisions day in and day out with

our interaction with people, our business and everything.

I mean, we're kind of drifting off the business discussion,

but they're they're in they're intertwined for sure.

Yeah. Well and when you get the priorities right,

I I'm gonna go back to what you said.

You know, I think it's pretty evident there are there are natural laws that

you know, within this creation,

within the world, there are things that come together and when I

put some boundaries around my business and put my family and my priorities first,

I was working less and finding more success.

Yep.

i

you know, those eighty, ninety hour weeks when everything was frantic

and everything was on fire and I had to do the business and family had to suffer.

I I found less success there than when I said,

This is what I have to give. These are my boundaries.

I will give a hundred percent in this time or at this time.

And then I have to go take care of what's important.

my business thrived more with those boundaries than when it was

the number one priority.

Yeah, and I and I and I think it I I want to add to that,

and I said I wouldn't talk much about what I the coaching I do,

but my position statement is I work with a community of skilled trades owners

that want to scale and grow their business without compromising their values.

And I think the time we've spent together,

the reason I want to say that is I said it's a small group of people.

That's a unique person, right?

~ it's a small group that wants to achieve that.

and it because we've spent so much time talking,

it makes sense because it all starts with your belief system and who you want to be.

And here's the thing about skilled trades.

I think most really good skilled trade technicians,

their core is they want to make lives better for their customers.

They want to do a good, honest job.

And there are there's plenty of white noise out there about get rich quick,

about the path is you need heavy marketing,

you need to upsell, you need to close them seven times.

And I'm just telling you, that's what we're hearing.

We go this way. And it and it and it's exactly what you're talking about.

It's as simple as gravity. And and my clients sometimes go.

Yeah.

I had no idea how simple or how easy this was.

And you're saying the same thing.

Well, I get I get I get the culture set,

we get our processes in place.

I'm I'm working less, I'm I'm I'm achieving more.

And I don't mean just financially.

Yeah.

I'm achieving I'm growing an organization that's thriving and and living without me,

and I'm not the answer to every problem.

It's the most liberating thing in the world.

it is. And I I think the caveat you know,

when you're growing a business,

starting a business, there's gonna be the eighty hour weeks,

the ninety hour weeks. Like there there are times when you have that problem that

Absolutely.

you have to solve, you put in the work.

But if the eighty hour work week is the norm for you,

if that's every week to the detriment of everything around you,

~ that's a problem and eventually the cracks are gonna show.

~ y you know, building a business,

you said it's hard work.

It it's a lot of hard work. I heard a quote recently,

~ you know, entrepreneurs are the only people on earth that will work eighty hours

to avoid working forty. it there's a lot of work that's involved there

and it's hard work, but if that's the norm,

if that's every week and if it's to the detriment of everything around you,

you're not serving your business well.

You have to take care of first priorities first and

I I I see businesses thrive more when the owners take care of their families

and themselves first and then the business comes after that.

So yeah.

It changes who you are. Yeah. I agree.

Yeah. W what has been your biggest win as a leader?

Mm.

My marriage and my kids doing so well.

I have my son, both both son and daughter were college athletes.

my daughter was a D1 academic All-American.

my son just amazed me.

and they're thriving right now.

They're

They're working and getting their MBAs.

They they have a great work ethic.

you know, a marriage of almost twenty-eight years.

It's just it's just that's it.

I I I it's it's not it's not selling a company and it's not being a

CEO of a corporation and it it I I would I would I hope that these next twenty years

that I spend, because I've got a twenty year plan,

And is helping other business owners achieve that.

The one thing about my coaching is,

is if you've been with me more than three years,

let's say we take you at that,

you're in that 80% bucket. If in three years we're not real close

to owning a business, I failed you and you need to fire me.

My my goal is not for them to continue to need me,

but to learn what they need to do to stay there and move on.

And my goal is if if if there's something second to what I just told you,

biggest accomplishment would be ~ a fraternity of owners that that would

buy in and and and have some of the

joy and satisfaction and hear about their kids doing so well and that kind of thing.

So

Yeah. Good stuff.

I one of my regrets is that I never saw your business in action because

it sounds like it was a great company.

They're still going and still doing well.

But yeah, I think you and I would get along really well.

We seem to share a lot of values and strategy even.

So was there a turning point in your career?

I know you mentioned you came from pretty humble beginnings and ~ kind of

~ that was a big adjustment to make.

Was there a point where you c were able to kind of take a sigh of relief

and like I I've made it. I've got a level of

Comfort, a level of success. I'm I I I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

There were certain stages where I would take stock

in where I was.

and and certainly felt more at peace about some financial things

or things are heading the right direction.

But to be totally authentic with you,

I have a plan and it's to get to the next bend in the river.

And and I've always been motivated

Off of 90-day plans and goals and those types of things.

So there's something in me that that continues to go,

hey, you know, we can get a little further down the road.

And that's that's what I wanna share.

You didn't ask this question, but a guy named Dan Sullivan,

the strategic coach, I went to him in my 90s as well.

And he has this illustration called The Gap.

You could probably look it up on YouTube and find it.

But Dan says that there are three different positions in your in your

in your progress. There's where you came from,

there's where you are, and there's where you want to be.

And he calls that where you want to be the horizon line.

And so no matter how hard or how fast we run to the horizon line,

there's a new horizon, right?

So, but there's a danger in only looking forward because that's the negative area,

right? It's always a critical parent in your head saying,

gosh, I'm not there. I'm not there yet.

I'm not. And it's not like that for me.

And the best way to get out of that is go take stock five years ago

and where you were and where you are today.

And the positive comes from where you've come from and the progress you've made.

And however you want to measure that,

if that's financially or emotionally,

spiritually, whatever. But you also have to get reconcile that successful people

are always moving forward toward the horizon line.

But if they don't realize that that horizon line keeps moving,

that's when you become psychotic.

You know? And so yeah,

Yeah.

there were stages that I looked back and went,

man, I'm

I'm not where I was and I'm glad I'm not there and I've made some progress,

but don't lose your mind over not being there.

You know, I th I think you and I would say,

Yeah.

hey, look, I I I have huge admiration,

some envy.

In our pre-call that you live in Wyoming and can go fly fishing anytime you want.

You look out. If you come to Dallas,

Texas, Erick, it's not the same scenery.

It's pretty flat and a lot of buildings,

okay? Great place to make a living,

but it's not Wyoming. Right? Just you know,

there are a lot of things around us that we take for granted that

are huge blessings. ~ so.

Yeah.

I love it. ~ That's great.

I know I didn't answer your question.

I think I just rambled on about that,

but there's something in there.

I think there's there's something to that though.

I knew when I chose to come start a b or continue a business and live

my life in Wyoming, there were some limitations.

We're we're a small community,

there's some economic limitations,

but it was where I wanted to live and I go to places like Dallas and

I look around and I'm like, my gosh.

somebody showed up here with a little bit of capital,

the the opportunity is unlimited.

There there's just development happening.

There's new businesses. There's people.

There's the the economic movement is massive.

But I I I chose to live at great fly fishing,

I I I gotta tell you.

you know?

I gotta

tell you a story. I I know where the intersection was.

It was it's highway six thirty-five and Coit Road.

And I think I had been here for six months.

I grew up in a town of less than a thousand people.

I was not a farm boy, I was a small town boy in Illinois.

And the largest place I'd ever been was where I went to school,

and I think there was twenty five,

thirty thousand people there. Not

Terribly large. It was in Arkansas.

I remember sitting in my truck watching cars go like crazy around

me and people waving their hands and screaming each.

And I had this very surreal moment.

It's like we all remember things in our lives.

I'm going, what have I done and why am I here?

I mean, it's just, there are just those moments,

right?

What advice would you have for a young person today that wants to

do what you've done, that wants to build a businesses in the or build

a business in the home services sector,

that that wants to be successful,

that wants to aspire to great leadership and and become what you've become?

Yeah, some of the advice I gave throughout this this conversation,

don't take a job for money, take a job for what you can learn.

And I've I have five people that have come through our business that

own their own business. And they call me all the time.

And I'm not running a prison here.

If somebody's ready to go start a business,

I'll do everything I can to help them.

But make sure that you've got the basic tools.

To to own and run a business. Hey,

you you need technically to understand how to do the job.

You need some leadership experience.

You need some management experience.

If if you can get some office experience and understand systems and processes,

don't ever steal from somebody,

but tell them, hey, look,

I want to learn this, I want to grow.

One of the things I always tell folks is that if you interview for a

job and don't get it, ask them why and why did they pick somebody else?

Or could you work for free for 30 days?

And if you can prove that you can do the job,

can you have it?

And will you pay me for the work that I did if I did it well?

I mean, and and say, look, I don't have a job right now.

And if I find one, I'll take it.

But I'd like to show you that I actually can do this for you.

I work hard, I show up on time,

I do what I say I'm gonna do, and I follow through.

And I'm gonna do my best and do the right thing and treat you fairly.

I bet you if they really have that position,

Erick, I know you as a business owner,

that'd turn your head, wouldn't it?

Yeah,

absolutely.

Maybe don't go 30 days. Give them a week.

See, let let me let me interview by helping you.

When I leave, I learn something.

You get free work. How can that not work?

Erick, that's hard to say no to.

I always say it's not over until you say it's over.

Yeah.

And that's not a hard close. It's just,

Ha ha ha ~

what are you gonna do for the next week while you're interviewing for another job?

Because you don't have this one.

Learn something from it, right?

Yeah.

So

You know, have a plan. You know,

the squirrel analogy, I love that.

One of the reasons that small business people fail,

and we talked about misappropriation or or mismanagement of cash,

lack of a sales plan. Some just don't have the experience ready to do

the job and they don't have a plan.

Awesome. Well, I know in addition to running your successful business,

you also have your book. We've talked about that a little bit,

30 Days to a Better Business, and you ~ run the Better Business Program.

who are those products tailored towards and what can they expect to get out of it?

Sure, that that book was written it for what I was telling my younger self

and it's done in a narrative style.

So it's it's 30 days to a a better business,

and it's broken down into 1200 word chapters and about you know 3031 chapters.

So each week is a theme, and the first one is sales.

Because sales covers a multitude of sins.

The second one is leadership, because that's the next thing you really need

to have an understanding on to scale your business and team the business.

And then the third week is planning.

The fourth week, if I get you to read that far,

maybe they'll work through the accounting piece.

They'll probably put the book down and then come back to it later

and read week four. I don't know.

~ average book, people don't read past the third chapter,

but ~ the fourth the fourth week is about accounting,

KPIs, finance. It's the stuff that's real textbook like.

Okay.

The first three weeks are in a narrative.

It's a storyline between an old older established business owner

and a solopreneur. So those things are highlighted at the end of each chapter.

There's a challenge and some bullet points and some things to think about.

What's the one thing you could do tomorrow in in light of this thing right here,

or what happened to this character?

And then the fifth week is about.

what successful or great companies have in common.

And they do. They have they have a great client experience.

They have a great sales and marketing process.

They have a great HR or team member process.

They have great numbers.

I mean these are things that every great company has and and it's almost like

gravity.

It's a natural law. It's what you have to have to get there.

And then if you make it that far,

there's an epilogue in the back and I'll tell you exactly where my heart

is and why I'm doing this and and what I believe in.

Awesome. And so I know you do some some coaching as well and you have

Yeah.

the Better Business Program. who is gonna be the best fit for your better business

program and your coaching? Who's your ideal client?

Yeah, we're

we're looking for folks that either are quickly moving to what I call

the messy middle. And the messy middle is the third phase of scaling a business.

In my the numbers can change. I don't know what it would be in roofing,

but but it's when the owner is hitting a ceiling of complexity.

where things things are getting a little out of control for them.

They can't they can't seem to have their hands on everything.

Here's the true tale of the messy middle.

It's when you are half the size and you are making twice the amount

of money than you are right now.

Okay? And that's and those those are different,

that's a, that's an area. That's where you might be close to bankruptcy.

You might be stuck

You may be contemplating going back and making your business smaller back when

you could control it and understand it.

We move those those contractors and owners,

small business owners, to a three-day retreat with us and

If you want to talk to me about that,

go to my website. You'll get a free 30,

40 minute conversation. It'll be just like this,

Erick. It's just like, hey, what what's your pain point?

What's what are you working on,

right? You'll know, I'll know if you want to work with me.

If not, I'm going to give you two or three things to go away and implement

in your business. And you get that for free.

I'll give you a an e-version of my book.

for that conversation. what we do is we take it there.

The the big back end is I work with a mastermind group clients that

we meet every week and they talk about their business.

But what's neat about that is that group is a community of believers.

And I know you would understand this.

If you're a small business owner,

you can't talk to your buddy who works at the factory about

the struggles and challenges you have.

Yeah.

Mastermind thing is something that came out in the 1920s where it's

a process where we share our biggest problem in our business,

and you get you get the strength of 10 other people or 20 other people

in the room going, hey, and it's a control process.

I had that same problem. This is what I did.

So you start learning from the best practices from everybody.

But here's the thing that that mastermind also gets in the back end.

Yeah.

They get everything I do in my business.

I'm not hiding this under a bowl.

Mm.

I give it to you. You will save what you pay to be a part of that mastermind

on your marketing expense alone because a lot of the marketing products that

we have and that we do, we give it to you with your logo on it.

So the way we move to that in between is we have a three-day retreat.

So

Basically, you can call me, we'll talk for 30,

40 minutes, and you can go off and do it by yourself.

Or in the three-day retreat, we do it together.

We talk about sales, leadership,

and business planning, and you're ready to go.

And then you can do it on your own.

Or I give you and do it for you in the back end of the mastermind.

So that's that's that small group that we talk about.

That's that's that's what we do.

Yeah.

It's not, it's it's tortoise in the hair,

man. It's not it's not a get rich quick,

it's not.

It's not me telling you, hey, you just need to go close to the customer more,

you know. we're coming from that natural law.

Yeah.

But I will tell you, up front,

that's a program to move you from working with me

to not needing me anymore, because that's the goal.

The goal is you shouldn't need me or you shouldn't need my coaching.

Yeah.

You might give me a call, but I'm not gonna charge you for it.

I'm gonna look, you've already done it.

And it can happen for you. It really can.

Sometimes these things just need a little tweak,

Good stuff. That yeah.

you know? Little tweaks can mean big things.

That's great stuff.

That's that's ~ kind of the heart behind this show is yeah,

like you said, if if you own a business and run a business,

most people, especially if you're in a a smaller area,

your peer group doesn't get it.

It it can be very lonely. y you know,

whether you're

really struggling and have some big problems or even have some awesome success,

you you can't tell your bowling buddy that.

They they can't relate. They don't get it.

It seems like you're complaining or bragging when you're just trying to share life.

No.

And so getting around like minded people and hearing from people that have been

through similar struggles and and had similar wins that that month that

you make more money than you've ever imagined you could make before

and you're excited about it.

y you can't tell your buddy that works for a salary about that.

You know, it it

and and Erick, I I maybe you're the one who's never had that problem.

I don't want to assume this. But when I talk to you about the challenges

of cash and making payroll and paying out of a different pocket

Mm-hmm.

for somebody because you had a team member that needed a new set of tires,

you know exactly what I'm talking about,

right? ~ you know, it it's

Yeah.

It's a fraternity of people. And so people think they join for me to coach

and give them the nuggets and I do and I help them and I talk through their

business. But what happens with this community is it's it's a group

of people that they don't ever want to leave.

You know, some of these folks travel on vacation together.

Yeah.

I mean, it's it's it's special,

yeah.

Yeah. Good

stuff. Well, if somebody wants to get a hold of your book or wants to engage

you for coaching or become part of one of your mastermind groups,

what's the best way to get a hold of you or get a hold of those resources?

Yeah, so ~ it's real simple. You go to Brent Garrett.com

or the skilled tradescoach.com,

either one. You can find me, connect.

You'll hit a button that says connect.

Might ask a few questions to add a little bit more to that conversation we have.

and you'll book a 30, 40-minute conversation with me.

I'm not going to sell you a thing.

I'm gonna talk about what your big problems are.

And I'll tell you what I do, but it's all focused on helping you with

a few good ideas about what that next bend in the river is.

And ~ man, maybe we make make the trade business a little easier to understand,

a little more successful. And I'll give you an e-version of the book.

I'm not I'm a big believer that ~ I read a little bit of scripture,

it bread cast upon the water comes back tenfold.

I don't do what I do because I'm going to get something for our for it.

I just know that there's this natural order of the world that if

you help enough people get where they want to go,

you do too. So that's it. I say just go to the website,

book a conversation with me. You'll talk to a really nice lady named Kate.

She'll find a time on the calendar for us to talk.

And you know, you get some free stuff and some free advice and a couple things maybe

to help your business. That's how you get in touch with me.

Good stuff. Well, we'll include all of that in the show notes so

the listeners can just click on a link there and ~ get right to your page,

get right in touch with you quick.

~ this is my favorite question that I ask of every guest.

~ are you a person of a particular faith tradition?

And if so, how has that affected your leadership and your career?

Yes, I am a person of faith.

I am I am a Christian. I was raised in the Catholic Church.

I'm a Protestant now. I go to a Methodist church here in in Plano,

Texas. I contemplated going into the ministry at when I was in college.

I realized that that wasn't my calling.

but the church needed strong lay people.

I made a decision,

you know, when I was in college to choose a path that

was not what I learned at home,

and that's made all the difference in the world.

And I ~ will tell you that while I'm a Christian,

I don't pretend to understand how this world is put together,

but I know there's an order to it.

I talked to you about natural law.

I think something or somebody,

somewhere, created this.

And it's okay if we don't completely understand it.

And I don't know the path or all

the paths to understand that, but for me,

the path that I found.

Led me to a deeper understanding of that.

And so that's my belief system.

I'm a big believer in this concept of grace.

I don't believe that that creator is connected with us because

of what we do, but it's out of a free gift given to us.

And the way we repay that is not because we owe it.

It was freely given. That insults the giver.

It is because we believe in that that we share it.

And that's my belief system.

Good stuff. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

So I know i you mentioned you have a twenty year plan.

Yeah. Good question.

can you i give us a little insight?

Yeah.

What what is next? You've built multiple businesses,

you've ~ been a CEO and a corporate officer for large public companies,

you've bought and sold countless companies for others.

~ what's next? Where do you go from here?

You know, I if if you have listeners that are in the forty-five to sixty range,

I want them to turn the volume up,

okay? Because COVID taught me some stuff and and and

I think I became aware of some things.

I started looking around me. I'm at a stage in my life where my friends

~ are retiring. And I told you I love what I do.

And

One of the things that I found that keeps me young is working with younger people.

Okay? It keeps me relevant.

but what I'm seeing is in some of my friends who might be retired,

not all of them, just some observations.

That they were really successful at the top level of their businesses

and their lives. And I when I'm talking about that,

I'm talking about I make up the bottom half that makes their top half possible.

Okay? These are really successful people.

But some retire

and some don't have a purpose.

And

What I've realized, you talked about that horizon line.

I've got a 20-year plan. I've got a lot of stuff I want to do.

My challenge to that 45-60 group is:

if you love what you do until you know what you want to do next,

don't quit doing it. Because it adds purpose to your life.

I think it keeps you young and it keeps you in some habits that

are probably a little healthier.

And I'll just leave it at that.

Okay. Good stuff and good advice.

is there somebody that you'd like to see on this show?

somebody with an interesting background and interesting business that you'd like

to learn more about?

That's a great question. I'm going through my Rolodex in my head of folks.

Yeah, I'll give you one. Gentleman named Warren Lentz.

He is in Austin,

Texas. One of the sharpest and progressive business minds I've

met in last 10 years. He runs a staffing company for skilled trades.

And I I just think he has a very unique background.

I think he has a very interesting life story.

And I respect him a lot. I think I think ~ I think it would be

a a great conversation with Warren.

I I respect him a lot. And and he does he does a lot of our staffing

Awesome.

for our company and has done a tremendous job.

That's how I met him. To that point,

you know, you you meet other business owners and you strike and

and we've shared business models and talked,

and I just think he'd be a great guy for you to talk to.

Wonderful. Well, I might see if you can make an introduction here in

the next couple of days and see if we can get him on.

Absolutely. Yep. A hundred percent.

Awesome. Well, our our last question to either fuel or settle the debate.

as somebody that spent a a career in the services industry,

if you have a job to do that requires a cordless tool,

which brand do you prefer?

I'd have to say Milwaukee. I mean,

we we we've I think ~ we have two or three install trucks with Milwaukee

packouts and all that stuff. I will say that

90% of the the things that we buy in terms of

Tools, equipment, supplies are with the largest supplier for plumbing there,

it's Ferguson supply. You probably heard of them.

And ~ man, we get Milwaukee tool flyers all the time.

And that's what if if I the way I said that is like,

gosh, I don't I'm not on the tools anymore.

and at 61 power tools probably don't need to be in my hands,

but

All the guys have Milwaukee tools,

so I'm that's probably what I would say.

All right. Good stuff. Well, Brent,

thank you so much for joining me today.

You are a wealth of knowledge,

a wealth of experience and I really appreciate you taking time out of your

day to share that with us. So thank you.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this.

Thanks for having me on. You run a really well-run professional

podcast, and I can tell you put a lot of preparation into it.

Thank you so much. Hope you'll have me back sometime.

Yeah, that'd be great. We might have to get an update on your 20-year plan here

in a year or so. So yeah.

Thanks a lot, Erick.

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

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Until next time, keep grinding.