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

It hit me I call my wife,

I said, I couldn't talk.

I squeaked out the word it's done.

We always knew we had a special culture.

we started surprising veterans with free shower systems

it was a fake sweepstakes, he was the only entry, the giveaway was a day at Lambeau Field and a night at a hockey game.

we wheel him out on the ice.

we thank him for his service, we point to the Jumbotron, and we show that when he left our guys snuck into his home, and made it handicap accessible that just put us on a journey

that says, this is who we are.

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

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

more than just a job, it gives them a mission.

You can give somebody a job,

But how do you make a pivot point in their life to say, I as a human being,

and fundamentally different because of the experience I had working for that organization.

Hey there and welcome to From the Ground Up Show, the show where we inspire and encourage the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the stories of those that have

been there, done that, and are still getting it done, building a life that they love with their hearts, their hands, and their hustle.

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Make sure you click that auto download button to make sure you're getting the downloads every week.

And again, thank you for joining us

today.

I am joined by Brian Gottlieb.

Brian is an entrepreneur, an author, and purpose-driven leader best known for founding Tundra Land Home Improvements and scaling it into a nationally recognized company, built

as much on culture and people as performance.

In his book, Behind the Hammer, Brian pulls back the curtain on victories, failures, and deeply personal moments that shaped his leadership philosophy, revealing how purpose,

vulnerability, and service became the foundation of his success.

Today, he works with leaders and organizations to build mission-driven teams, sustainable growth, and meaningful impact, bringing a rare blend of real-world experience and human

honesty into the conversation.

So Brian, thank you for joining us.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

Yup.

Beyond the Hammer.

I finally got a shirt with my book name on it.

know, mean, doing all these podcasts, like, why don't I promote it a little bit?

So, so thank you.

Thanks for the plug.

That's great.

And I understand when you started your company, you started with a $3,000 investment in your garage.

And in 12 years, you built it up to more than a billion dollars in sales.

Is that correct?

so it's what started it was $3,000 a plastic folding table in the back of a friend's warehouse from that initial initial business.

It grew into three separate businesses.

One of the companies was called Jacuzzi Bathroom Model out in Arizona.

Another one was called Renewal by Anderson Windows.

I had a couple of those locations and my Tundra Land business, which had multiple locations.

The three businesses combined had about 600 employees.

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

which is pretty cool considering starting from nothing.

But that's the fun ride, know, that's part of the fun of it all.

That's awesome.

That's incredible.

I can't wait to hear more about this story.

So to start with, we'd like to go all the way back to the beginning with all of our guests.

So can you tell us a little bit about your childhood?

Yeah, it was 1863.

No, I'm kidding.

It wasn't that long ago.

I grew up in New York.

And I think the thing that I remember about my childhood, I've always been a hustler, it's raking lawns, having a paper route, all that kind of stuff.

for me, when I was younger, probably like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was terrible at school.

I barely graduated.

In fact, my wife and I joke about it that I probably put more work into doing

the minimal amount of work that I did if I would have just done the work.

But yeah, barely graduated high school.

College wasn't my thing.

But I got this job when I was like 17 years old or 18 years old, and it was selling pots and pans door to door.

And I loved the idea that I could knock on some stranger's door.

I'd give them a spoon ring.

That's what it was called.

It was popular back then in the 70s.

You give them a spoon ring to come inside and do a demo of pots and pans.

And then a couple hours later walk out with a check in your hand.

And I just loved everything about that and was making more money than my friends were.

And it just took me down a path that turned out to be a pretty good one for me.

That's great.

So you kind of started off your career in sales.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah, that would be fair to say and it just stuck with me the whole way through.

Obviously there were different evolutions to my journey, right?

And just in case we didn't touch on it, I no longer own any of the businesses that I built.

I sold all three businesses to three different buyers.

Two of them I sold to two different private equity groups and one, my Renewal by Anderson business, I sold to my executive leadership team.

So, yeah.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, it's been fun.

Yeah.

Well, we will circle back up and hit that.

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

um But you mentioned that college wasn't really your thing.

So I assume no college education?

Or did you get started and then?

went to Suffolk Community College for two days.

Two days, okay

Yeah, I've made it through two days I would actually for I for criminal justice studies thinking maybe I wanted to be a cop which is really silly But anyway, yeah, it just wasn't

it just wasn't for me and that's okay although you know as I write about in my book later on when I turned 52 and I know we'll get into this later that the business was out of

point, know I think the thing that we as entrepreneurs have in common and we really have to normalize it that at no point in our business

Do we really ever fully know what we're doing?

Because we're doing things we've never done before, right?

When my company was $2 or $3 million, I never ran a $2 $3 million company, and I never ran a $10 million company, and I sure never ran a $150 million company.

So when I was in my early 50s, I needed to get more education to figure out what type of leader do I need to be for my business.

So I ended up applying to Harvard Business School, and they accepted me under their executive education program.

So a few years back, I actually graduated from Harvard Business School.

I'm an alumni of Harvard Business School.

yeah, yeah.

My mom is smiling from up above, I'm sure.

That's great.

You build a massive business and then go get your business education.

That's awesome.

So you're doing door-to-door sales selling pots and pans.

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

Yeah, so the thing about Pots and Pans, it's great, but it is a grind.

The little backstory of a Pots and Pans demo.

Look, if you're in the home improvement business, you want all the decision makers present.

You want the husband and wife sitting at the kitchen table so you can tell your story, so you can close and leave with a check.

In the Pots and Pans world, you don't want the husband anywhere around.

You want the mom and the daughter.

That is your demo, right?

And I used to sell waterless cookware.

And it was questions like Mrs.

Jones.

Don't you believe when your daughter leaves the house, she should have the finest cookware available for her next home?

And it was really a cheesy presentation, but it was a mother and daughter.

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

So I would look for women that were graduating from high school, and those would be the doors I would want to knock on.

So it's just a very, different business.

But yeah, so a friend of mine had a glass company, and I went to work for them, and I...

started doing glasswork and construction work and then fell into the sales side of things and just absolutely loved it.

Absolutely loved it.

So that's how got into it and never looked back.

Yeah.

So you're doing sales for a glass company and ah is it safe to assume that's the warehouse that you launched your business out of the back of?

No?

launch I didn't launch my business until 2009 so it was very I only had the business 12 years I launched it built it up to what it was in 12 years and sold it

But I worked for a glass company and worked for a couple of home improvement companies eventually found a good role years and years ago at at Four Seasons Sunrooms and I would

sell sunrooms to company to people and became a sales manager and I really loved being a sales manager because I loved the idea that I could

help other people realize their potential.

Well, not just realize it, but also reach their potential, because both of those are important.

And I decided that how do I make a bigger impact out of this?

So I wanted to start my own consulting business, and I started what's called Silverstone Training many years ago.

And I had a sales training business, and I would do business consulting and sales training across the country for home improvement companies.

And it was just, it was a great experience for me.

It's great, it's great.

man, so it sounds like you kinda came into the construction field a little bit from the backside.

You were training sales before you launched your own company.

Yeah, before I launched my own company, was really fun about it is when I would tour companies, I kept this journal, I kept this book.

And inside of the journal, I had two sides, two lists that I kept.

One list was, gee, if I ever start my own business, I'm definitely gonna do this.

And the other side was, if I ever start my own business, I'm never doing this.

Because I saw a lot of things in 2008 where companies were just, they got so far over their skis on bad decisions and running out of marketing dollars and.

It taught me a lot about, I'm gonna, and getting to see a lot of companies, when you can visit hundreds of companies over several years, you see a wide variety of things out

there.

It's almost like a PhD in business.

Combined with, I made a point to read a business book every week.

So I felt when I started my business, it was just time to get off the road, Erick.

I was just done living in hotels and eating hotel food and.

sleeping in hotel beds and just waiting at being stuck in airports.

It was just a grind and missing my kids' birthdays and just wanted to get off the road.

So I decided, well, let me just do this on my own.

Not knowing, I was going with no intent of building what I built by the way.

That wasn't the plan.

That wasn't the grand plan.

It was just getting off the road and creating some income.

So what did those early days look like?

How do you start to create an income with $3,000 and a plastic folding table?

Yeah, well, well the first rule of business is to stay in business.

Okay, so if if you think about it You have to make a lead you have to make a lead you have to sell a lead you have to install a lead That's what happened.

So I in the very early days was really a cool discipline Back then one of the things I saw when I was consulting is as I think I mentioned that People got over their skis and they

didn't have marketing dollars anymore They spent it in bad ways and they couldn't generate leads and I decided early on that

I always needed money for marketing.

So I set up a separate bank account and I took 7 % of every check I got, whether the check was for $50 or for $5,000, I took 7%, stuck it in a separate account.

I always had my marketing dollars ready to go so I could prepay for marketing things.

But also, because I launched my business in 2009, there were a lot of companies that pulled back on advertising.

So I was able to negotiate a lot of pay for performance type of.

lead generation programs, whether it was in Valpak or you name it.

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

Let's just drop an ad.

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

So and that was just a discipline that stuck with the business all the way until I exited it.

So it allowed me to just, how do I generate the next lead?

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

And, know, it was in the beginning.

Look, it's a grind.

You know, it's a grind.

But it's something that you have to do.

Yeah.

So what did sales look like that first year?

Yeah, well,

I remember that the this was in by the way in Appleton, Wisconsin Where there are more cows than people?

Okay, so it's already a little harder to find leads But I remember the first opportunity to set up it was called a home show But it wasn't like the normal spring home shows that

that that cities do This was a show put on by the by the Appleton mall.

It was the first time they ever did it So I signed up for it was the business brand new

and I didn't even have a display.

I did though, I had a projector because I used to do sales training, so I took my projector and I built a slideshow and I built a plywood wall and I just showed a slideshow

on it while I tried setting appointments.

But there was like nobody at this show.

I set one appointment, I said, I managed to set one appointment for this gentleman and I remember going out to his home and trying to sell him a sunroom and it was about a $42,000

sunroom and I was thinking to myself,

Yep, if this guy buys today, I'm gonna be able to stay in business.

If this guy doesn't buy, I think I'm out of money.

I might have to close the doors.

So clearly I wasn't gonna leave that home without a yes.

But you know, Erick, when you think about it, those early day disciplines are so important in an organization.

And I think what happens is as a business starts getting bigger and bigger, we get away from those fundamental disciplines that are so necessary for survival.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You can see that again and again and again.

And uh I know if you study the statistics of successful businesses, as they start to scale, there's usually a pretty significant dip in margins.

And I think a lot of that is as the founder gets more and more removed from being the guy with his hands on everything.

You lose a little bit of that discipline.

You lose a little bit of that touch and it takes a while to cultivate a culture to bring that back.

Yeah, Erick, here's the truth.

When you're starting a business and the founder is the only employee, the business's success or failure comes down to how well that entrepreneur can execute, okay?

The moment you try to scale your business, you have to do so by adding people to your team, okay?

Now, they're the ones that are executing.

Now the business's success often falls on how well the teams execute, both when the owner's watching and when nobody's looking.

This is why...

And as I write about in my book, if you want to build a business, you have to commit to building people.

It ultimately comes down to that.

The lid of the business is directly connected to the lid of the capabilities of those on your team.

An organization can't outgrow the capabilities of the people that work for them.

So that's why when you think about what is really the role of the leader, it's to grow and develop others in many ways.

Great, great.

Well, I know you mentioned earlier that kind of the impetus for wanting to start your own business was to have influence and be able to help people and coach people.

uh What is the earliest memory you have of being put into a position of leadership and how did that cultivate that desire?

I think a lot of us a Lot of us come up with our whether it's leadership or parenting, right?

It's that same list, right?

If I ever become a parent, I'm definitely doing these things and I'm never doing those things, right?

And I think the same is in leadership We've all had a boss that maybe did some stuff that was great and other stuff that we say my gosh This guy was a jerk, you know, so we try to

find our own way of that, but I will share with you a really interesting Epiphany that I had

And I think it's interesting because it significantly changed my life.

was probably in my late 40s.

And when I would do sales training for people across the country, I would always do a one page survey.

I'd give them a paper survey to fill out on the sales training seminar.

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

What is one thing you're looking forward to implementing?

What is one word that would describe?

Brian's presentation style.

And the word that kept coming up was inspirational.

Inspirational.

Now mind you, I'm doing sales training.

Okay, I thought I would see things like, I learned how to be a good closer.

I'm now ready for that next lead.

I thought I would hear all these testosterone statements.

But what I heard was, what was written was, that was like the most inspirational thing I've ever been part of.

I feel ready to take on the world.

I have a new belief in myself.

Brian's an inspirational person.

I never thought of myself as inspirational.

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

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

What if, what if, what if others see something in me that I don't see in myself, and what if I go all in on that?

So really, when I started my business, it wasn't just about starting another home improvement company.

I wanted to build a business where

where people could really feel part of something much bigger than themselves, where it was more than just a company, it was a brand that was woven into the fabrics of the

communities that we serve.

It was somewhere where our customers could be co-producers and believe in our mission statement and want to see us successful.

And the team all felt like owners in the business and all had an opportunity to grow.

That, that, that was truly the difference maker.

Okay, well twice now you've mentioned your list of do's and don'ts that you had.

uh As you built and scaled your business, were you able to stay true to that list or were there a few things that you changed your mind about?

Look, so let's talk about that for a second.

Yeah, I think we stayed really true to it.

Look, one of the things is that everybody, because when you have $3,000, it's not like you can go out and hire somebody and give them big salary.

You can pay them for a week and then you're done.

So I had to come up with not only pay for performance marketing, but a lot of variable compensation structures for people to give them a small amount of salary, but a lot of

upside.

That was a discipline that stayed with the business all the way until I sold it.

But I also like to talk about that word discipline.

I think there's too much emphasis on social media talking about the importance of documenting your systems and processes.

Now I know that's a what, but you have to document your, look, I'm telling you, there's too much emphasis put on systems and processes and not enough emphasis put on the

disciplines of the business.

Systems and processes,

are the what of what you do.

The disciplines are the why of what you do.

Disciplines are timeless.

And a business would be better off if they don't have good systems and processes, have really clear disciplines that you can teach everybody on the organization, because then

the business will be better off because of it.

I'll give you an example.

One of our disciplines, look, early on, the lead is sacred, okay?

That's a discipline that stayed with the business.

The lead is sacred.

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

We always run a full sales presentation every single time.

These are basic disciplines of the business, and I think a business owner can think about, maybe take a day or two or three, and think about, if I look at each department, what are

two or three timeless disciplines that we need in our organization in order to hit our aspirational goal?

After that, the systems and processes will come to you.

The disciplines,

Okay.

Our Almighty.

Yeah, that's good advice.

can, as you're speaking, I can see that playing out in my own business.

I don't know that I would have used that same language, but we've had some things that have carried through for 41 years of this is how we do it.

This is what we do.

And yeah, I think that's vital.

That's a good thought.

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

Yeah, and I think, as you mentioned, as a business starts to grow, you often see that dip in profitability.

And there's a reason for that.

And I think it's this.

Look, when we had this saying, we had this three-word saying when the business was early, and it was, just sell shit.

Okay, that's what you want to do, just sell shit.

It didn't matter if you made any money.

And we built some beautiful projects that we didn't make any money on.

We didn't make any money on it, but they were sure were beautiful for the customer.

yet we were able to sell stuff.

And that is because

When you're trying to scale without the right without the right structure and the right desired outcome You have a lot of chaos inside of your business.

It's very chaotic and chaos can produce revenue but discipline produces profits and It takes a while to realize that that yeah, we're generating revenue What disciplines do we

need to spin from revenue to profit and when you do that?

You know, it really does put a lot of things in order for the business leader

That's a good phrase there.

I'm gonna write that down and save that for later.

Chaos can produce revenue, but discipline produces profit.

That's gold.

I might put that on a sign and hang it up in my office.

That's good stuff right there.

Yeah, I'll also share with you that in a chaotic world, right, and you're trying to lead a team and you're almost like kind of trying to hold the wheels on the bus from falling off,

right?

Just trying to keep everything together.

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

And you've got maybe an employee issue or some kind of issue or process issue, and you try to fix it.

You try to get in there and fix it.

And look, there's a big difference between being right and being influential.

When you're trying to change people's behavior inside of the organization, if something's not going right, you could be right all day long that you need them to do something

different.

It doesn't mean they're gonna do it.

You have to be able to be influential and that takes leadership.

And I think the more we can recognize that, again, in my book I get into this in quite, in a lot of detail, that the culture of your business, what is the culture of a business,

right?

It's how people think, act.

how people think, feel, and behave inside of the organization.

How they think, feel, and behave, it doesn't matter what you want your culture to be, that is your culture.

But also along that lines, your culture is shaped by the lowest level of acceptable behavior.

So what ends up happening is when we tolerate certain behaviors, we're actually setting a new standard.

And that's never good.

So we have to be in front of that as difficult as it is, what we tolerate, we actually attract more of.

So we have to be very careful as business leaders, what do we deem acceptable?

Because that is who you're gonna become.

That's great.

You just went ahead and answered my next question.

was going to say with a small organization, I found it's really, really easy to have a great culture because the founder, the owner, the leader is right there.

You're working shoulder by shoulder with them.

And as the business scales and grows, you know, how do you maintain that culture throughout?

But I think you just nailed it.

It's what you tolerate.

Well, that's one piece of it.

You know, the other truth of it, Erick, is if you have today in your business, you can be a fantastic decision maker, right?

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

You're a business leader, you're a great decision maker, you can solve problems very quickly.

At scale, the challenge becomes that when you solve a problem in isolation, you're actually robbing somebody of a training opportunity.

So you have to be more patient even when solving problems.

The other piece of it is to recognize that

that as the business grows and grows and grows, you, me, we get further and further and further away from the customer.

And we might not necessarily be the best decision maker in that problem anymore.

So that is a real issue.

We can start to make decisions in an ivory tower because we're too far removed from the customer.

So we have to change as leaders.

We have to develop others.

We have to get them to be good decision makers.

We have to teach them to make decisions.

We have to teach them one very important thing, that it's okay to be wrong, just don't be wrong for long.

And we have to teach people it's okay to make a decision.

My son, by the way, who's one of the owners of the Renewal by Anderson business that I sold, and they'll do $120 million in revenue this year, it's a big business.

He's got three things that he tells every new hire that is unacceptable.

Negativity, disrespect,

Inaction and I love that.

I love that.

I love the idea that that he doesn't punish mistakes He frowns upon inaction because that's what really stops a business from moving forward And as you know, eric you have a

business I had a business if if there's a problem if the customer if we did if we screwed something up Okay, let's say we screw something up.

We yeah We're human if we can't solve that problem right away by the time it goes up the org chart and gets to my desk

The customer doesn't want that problem solved.

They want a brand new house, because I broke their house, now they want a new one.

So that becomes a really bad customer journey.

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

I like that.

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

Right, right, do something even if it's wrong and then learn from it, right?

Yeah, an indecision is a decision.

If you don't act, things are happening anyway.

And look, I get it.

When we're all in on our business trying to empower, think what happens is we unintentionally become the leader we never wanted to be.

Let me fill you in what that means.

I don't think anybody that runs a business says, I wanna be a micromanager.

That's the type of business I wanna have.

And yet,

And yet because the nature of the fact that we're all in on our business, right?

We're all in on it.

Our life depends upon it.

If our business fails, it's a disaster for ourselves, for our family, for the people that work for us.

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

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

And that is micromanagement.

I'm sorry, that is.

So we default to micromanagement unintentionally.

Look, it's not like...

It's not like we went to Harvard Business School and created this grand master plan to build some large home improvement or home services business.

What probably happened is you worked for somebody, that person was a jerk, so you decided you wanna do it on your own, you get a little bit of traction, next thing you know you

need to hire a couple people, and before you know it, oh my gosh, I got a business.

And like I said earlier, I have no idea how to run this thing, okay, but I've got a business.

look, empowering, letting go systematically,

Training and developing others and letting go by empowering, it's a process.

It takes patience.

It's not a light switch that is on and off.

But it's something that you have to move forward with if you really want your sanity and if you want to sleep at night.

Yeah.

So what did that process look like for you?

How did you train the next generation of leaders?

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

Yeah, well, what happened was I was sitting in my office at the time I probably had 100 plus employees, okay?

And we did all of our marketing in-house and we had a massive marketing budget, know, massive.

In fact, when I sold my businesses, our marketing budget was $21 million a year.

That was our marketing budget, okay?

So were spending a lot of money on leads.

Try letting go of that, okay?

Okay, you can empower somebody else to spend all that money a year, okay?

But I was sitting at my desk and there were like two or three marketing people and then a sales manager behind them waiting outside of my door because they needed to ask me a

question so they can go ahead and do their job.

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

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

I said, this can't be.

I actually then the very next day I went shopping, I decided to remodel my office and I got rid of my desk and file cabinets and I put in a giant flat slab desk with no drawers

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

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

And that set me on the path of saying I need to model my business like a training organization.

And that means that every single thing is a training opportunity.

And that also means, by the way, that I have to hire people that are trainable.

Hiring somebody that's not trainable, if you're a training organization, doesn't do you very good.

So it just put me on a giant journey of saying, okay, what are some of the core things that I need to teach?

And what is the best environment to teach them?

And how do I know that teaching stuck?

And that was my goal.

That was my role.

Yeah.

great.

When were you most afraid during the process of building your business?

um Three days before payroll every two weeks

Hahaha

Look.

You know, business, you know, we talk about purpose and purpose changes, right?

Sometimes your only purpose is to stay in business.

Other times your purpose is to, you know, maybe make a positive impact in this world.

Our role is leader changes and outside circumstances affect that.

Sometimes you have employee issues, competitor issues, vendor issues, financial issues.

And these are all the headwinds that face business leaders.

And the truth is that sometimes we have to be a peacetime CEO and other times we have to be a wartime CEO.

And it is a difference.

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

we started doing the vast majority of our business was one day bath business and replacement windows.

That was our business, right?

One day baths and replacement windows.

When we started getting traction in the one day bath space,

I remember we did an early home show, it was in January one year.

And normally at this, it wasn't a big home show, but we would typically set about 30 appointments at this home show for a one day bath.

This particular year, even though the attendance was strong and our marketers were very good, we only set like seven appointments.

And the reason being is because all of a sudden everybody in our community wanted to become their own one day bath company.

And we had a dozen companies selling one day showers out of nowhere.

So look, that is a problem, right?

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

I had to say, do we not let this take our business down?

Because if we don't react to it now, if these competitors gain a tremendous amount of momentum, we're gonna have them for life.

It's gonna be a problem.

How do we win?

And we decided, I got my team together and I asked them, I said, what percentage of our business

comes out of home shows and we came up with the number 5%.

5 % of our business comes out of home shows.

Mind you, our average shower was $10,000 at the time, okay?

So if 5 % of our business comes out of home shows, what percentage of the business of all these startups is gonna come out of the home show for them?

And we kind of agreed that was like 90 % of their business was gonna come from these home shows.

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

Can we take them all out at once?

We never talked about price at a home show.

That was one thing.

We don't talk about price at a home show.

We wanna sell the appointment and get the home and do a presentation, except now.

So what we decided to do is we got on the tops of all our displays, giant signs that said showers, $3,495.

$3,495, okay?

That was below our cost, okay?

It costs more than that to produce it.

So I thought, you know what?

I can lose money.

on 5 % of my business and it's not gonna affect the rest of my company very much.

But my competitors are gonna be given a very difficult choice.

They're either gonna have to do showers for 3,495 and probably not make any money and go out of business, or they're not gonna do showers for 3,495 and not set any appointments at

the home show and probably not stick around.

it was a wartime decision inside of the business.

Now you might say,

Gosh, Brian, you're real jerk.

Okay, but I'm trying to win for my team.

And the following year, we only had like two or three bath companies on our home show after that.

was just, but the point of this is whatever the situation that you as a business leader are facing, you have to decide, what are you gonna do about it?

Are you going to be a wartime?

Are you gonna be a peacetime CEO in this moment?

So what gets me nervous?

Look, it's always risky, right?

When you have to...

when you have to do things that are a big risk to the organization, when sometimes you have to go all in on an idea, and you don't have all the facts and you don't know the

outcome.

But ultimately, that's what builds the character of the people on the team and gives the business confidence that if you can overcome this, you can overcome anything.

That's brilliant.

I love that story.

Thank you for sharing it.

That's great.

That uh it's a very analytical decision to like you said, you know, the math works.

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

It really was an investment in marketing, not losing money.

uh I imagine there's a lot of emotions that go with that that threat.

that decision and how to address it.

How do you balance the conflicting emotions of people coming into your space, threatening your business, having to give stuff away cheaper and losing money and stay in that

analytical space to make those good decisions?

Yeah, and again, that changes too, right?

At scale, at scale, a new competitor coming in your business, it doesn't move the needle, right?

It doesn't move the needle.

It's always gonna be somebody popping up and popping down.

And ultimately I learned that I don't need to focus on my competitors, I need to focus on our own business, okay?

And how do we constantly challenge, how do we challenge the customer journey every single day?

How do we say to ourselves, how do we just,

Instead of making our product our point of differentiation, how do we make operational excellence our point of differentiation?

And I'll give you an example of that.

One of the things we looked at in our business is that

We're selling a shower today and the shower is not getting installed for six or eight weeks like a lot of you know, There's big but then we've said well, how long does it

actually take to get the materials?

it takes us three days to get the materials.

Okay Well, then what is all this other slop?

It's all operational in efficiency, right?

What if we could what if what if we could take what if every single shower that we sell?

What if we can install it next week?

What if we could do that?

What what would we have to be excellent at to sell something today and install it next week?

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

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

So now when we're working a home show, we can set 200 appointments, we can run them all in a couple of days, and we can probably install the shower before a competitor even has a

chance to call them.

So now it's no longer about the competition, it's about how do we just deliver a better experience to the customer and make that our winning advantage.

And by the

way, when you get that right, talk about fending off competition.

Operational excellence is a lot more difficult to replicate.

It is.

That's brilliant.

I'm starting to get an idea of how you built such a large business so quickly.

Is there a...

I know you spent a lot of years learning from a lot of different businesses.

um Is there a time that really influenced or maybe a specific job or position that kind of gave you this visionary thinking and starting to look at things differently and the ways

that you can differentiate yourself?

yeah the

early on when we first started selling showers in 2012 uh several of my friends were selling the same shower and we created this this group we were all friends there were 12

of us different businesses across the country I'll name some of them in a moment.

Okay, and We called ourselves the dirty dozen actually the manufacturer one of one of the vendors named us the dirty dozen We then started calling ourselves the big 12

but we were a mastermind group.

built our own mastermind group where it was we as owners would get together once a month, but we were friends.

But we also got our marketing managers to get together.

We got the sales managers together.

We got the production managers together.

We got the recruitment departments together.

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

One of the companies in our, in our big 12 was a company called West Shore Home.

At the time they were doing maybe $20 million a year in revenue.

Another one was,

Reborn cabinets, another one was New Pro Home Improvements, another one was Alenco, Max Home.

Together, our companies totaled under, together, under $100 million in revenue.

Two months ago, those companies in revenue totaled just under $3 billion in revenue.

We all grew together.

We all learned from each other.

We were vulnerable together.

We...

didn't show up to be the smartest person in the room.

We showed up to really help each other.

And, you know, it's interesting when you surround yourself with like-minded people that you're not competing with, all trying to accomplish the same thing, and you don't try to

have all the answers, but instead try to come up with the right questions, boy, you can really build something great together.

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

So yeah, yeah, thanks.

Well, you've talked a lot about kind of the growth in your business and growing as a leader.

Like you said, at every stage, you've never run a business.

You've never run a $3 million business, never a $10 million business.

Did you ever feel like the business was growing significantly faster than you were as a leader?

yeah, yeah, 100 % 100 %

Yeah, many times I felt like I was just trying to hold the wheels on like I mentioned earlier and and I think we quit we have to question ourselves that Just like the business

that the business can't outperform the team's capabilities The team can't outperform the leaders capabilities, right?

They're not good.

It's not so and and and sometimes we were holding the business back look, I think that I Think that

Business leader is never going to have all the answers right when they have to make a decision if you're waiting for all the facts to make a good decision You're gonna be

waiting a long time So so what but you can gain momentum by making decisions without all the facts and they turn out okay But then also trusting in your team to help you make some

of these decisions But yeah many times I felt the business was growing ahead of me which is again why I went to Harvard Business School I needed to I needed to Be a different type

of leader

But in all fairness, that's why podcasts like what you do, Erick, is so important.

People can, this stuff, this information is available.

Even the theme of what you do for the next generation of leaders, and I love mentoring younger people, and I mentor a lot of people today.

And they don't have to make the same mistakes that I made.

The other truth is that in 2009, maybe it was 2010,

I remember talking to my production manager and I said, man, you know what I really want to do?

I want to build a $10 million company at the time that was unheard of.

Today, there are so many examples of these big organizations that have scaled.

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

There are so many more examples to follow that you don't have to, you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

think, I think the most difficult thing to realize is that the biggest challenge with business, one of the biggest challenges

is that as an organization is growing and scaling rapidly, what tends to happen is we start to add a system, add a process, add a person, add somebody in the org chart, add

another system, add a process.

something went wrong, we need a process for that, and on and on on on on.

And then we start to take on more products and then we're doing it this way.

And we've taken what was a very simple business and we've made it highly complicated.

And it's a challenge because to grow a business you really have to remove the complexity.

because that's what makes a trainable business, a simple business that's repeatable, is highly trainable and highly scalable.

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

It's very difficult to keep it simple.

It's easy to overcomplicate things.

And complexity is the absolute enemy to execution.

The more complicated the business is, the more difficult it is to execute.

So I think that regardless of the size of your business, you have to ask yourself,

Is my company, are the different departments trainable?

Is it simple enough?

Can I teach a salesperson in a couple of weeks how to sell everything that we offer?

Can I teach an installer in three, four, five, six weeks how to install anything that we sell?

If not, you might wanna think about is that the type of business that's scalable?

And if not, what should we do about it?

That's great, that's great.

So how do you go about attacking those complexities and simplifying it?

If you're in a business that's already kinda gotten out of control and got more complex than it should, how do you correct that course?

Yeah.

It all starts, in my opinion, A, with viewing everything through the lens of the customer.

See, what does the customer journey look like?

The other thing that I highly recommend is you take your entire timeline of your business, from the time you generate a lead to the time you're done and paid.

And you put all the different interactions that have to happen in your company with your

one employee to the other employee or you're an employee to the customer or you name it and you just put little hash marks everywhere there's an interaction because first of all

everywhere there's an interaction is an opportunity for friction.

Okay, those are all opportunities for friction.

Whenever two people interact with each other there's an opportunity for friction and you say to yourself is this necessary still?

Is there a better way to do this?

Why are we still doing it that way?

Look.

it's gonna be a long line if you're a big business.

And it's gonna be a grueling process because we get so stuck.

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

But a lot of times what happens is we create these ridiculous systems off of anomalies.

Off of like one time we had this one issue with one random customer once in our lifetime.

So now we have this big cumbersome process so that never ever happens again.

I mean, is that really the right decision?

Those are some of the things.

But then also really it goes back to empowering.

Empowering the people inside of your organization that at the team leadership level, that they're always looking for how to optimize their business, how to make their business more

efficient, their business inside of the business.

That's great.

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

When you're going back and attacking some of these processes trying to simplify things, is there a simple way to distinguish the disciplines that we discussed earlier versus some of

these processes?

Because especially maybe a middle manager in one of these companies, there might be a discipline that's vitally important to the company.

This is how we do it.

And there's a reason.

yeah, yeah.

might easily get confused with one of these processes of this is why we do it this way that needs to go.

Yeah, so let's pretend for a second you're my production manager, okay?

And we've got, and we're trying to look at our business, we have an issue with a customer or whatever that thing is.

If I go up to you and I say, hey, Erick, what happened on Mrs.

Jones's job?

Your first response might be, well, the sales rep sold it wrong, right?

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

And you're gonna start with people.

And what we have to do to get to the truth is we have to separate people from process.

I would be much better off if I say to you, Erick, we've got an issue with Mr.

and Mrs.

Jones' project, okay?

Leaving the people aside, we have the right people.

Where in our business is either the process broken or do we lack of discipline that we need, in your opinion?

Where do you think our process broke to allow this to happen?

So when you make it, when you focus people on process and not people, and on discipline and not people, you're really gonna get to the truth.

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

lot of wisdom there.

know, uh yeah, when you start addressing problems, it usually starts with a lot of finger pointing.

And so if you eliminate the people and where did the process break, that's good.

That's good stuff.

another key discipline, in fact, if you ask me the single most important discipline in business, single most important one in my opinion, is being able to forecast your targets

and then hit those targets with a high level of certainty, okay?

I'll share with you why.

I do keynotes across the country of this industry all the time, and I'm on million podcasts.

And I can ask the audience, how many of you in the audience,

And I would challenge your listeners, your viewers on this right now, how many of you need to make a key hire in your business?

You wanna hire somebody in your organization, but you're afraid to take on the overhead.

You don't wanna take on the overhead of this additional hire.

I get that, I get that.

But the truth is this, that it's not that you don't wanna take on the overhead, it's that you're not confident in the targets you're going to hit for 2026, and therefore, because

of that, you don't wanna take on the overhead.

So not taking on the overhead is a symptom.

The problem at the root cause is lack of confidence in either having targets or hitting targets.

A business has to hit targets with a high level of certainty.

The business owner can't do it by themselves.

It has to be the people inside of the business that help you not only craft the targets, but also have to speak to them on a daily basis.

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

in my opinion, should have a daily target.

Should have a daily target, a daily KPI that they not only speak to, but also compensated around.

It's part of their variable compensation structure.

The more the business gets great at hitting targets, the more you empower people to have to speak to their targets every single day, the better they're gonna be at decision-making

to hit those targets with a high level of certainty, and the more the business is gonna grow with a high level of certainty.

To me, that is really the secret sauce to growing a business.

It empowers people to make great decisions and also gives you the ability to sleep at night.

And then, if for some reason, a department, let's say once again, Erick, you're my, now you're no longer my production manager, you're my sales manager now, okay?

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

The way I need to approach that then, if I'm trying to help you build a better business inside of your business is,

I have to essentially ask you three questions.

Number one, what were the reasons we're missing Target?

Number two, what steps are you taking to correct it?

And number three, by what date will we be back on Target?

What this allows you to do as a leader inside of that business is first of all identify the root cause of the problem, formulate a plan, and then create a timeline to solving it.

This is empowerment.

This is how we empower people.

We take these kind of opportunities and we use them all as training opportunities.

That's great.

It sounds like you were very successful at building a strong culture in your business and that's something you're pretty passionate about.

Do you have a story of maybe an incident that influenced that passion?

Is that something you've always done well or is that a lesson you had to learn the hard way?

We always knew we had a special culture.

Our mission statement was to do well and do good.

And what that meant was the purpose of business was to make a decent profit, but do so decently, okay?

To do so decently.

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

What really ignited our culture though, to bring it to life was there was, the bath business is a very interesting business.

When you go into people's homes, there's a portion of people that are just looking for a more beautiful bath.

But there are a lot of people that are doing it because their bathroom is dangerous.

And we would go into homes where we would see veterans that proudly served our country that were petrified to take a shower in their own home because their bathtub was

impossible to step over.

And they're trying to hang onto the shower curtain or they're trying to hang onto something that's not...

and they're afraid to slip and fall in their own bathtub and they don't have any money to do anything about it and there are no real government programs to help them.

So what we started doing is we said, know what, how do we do something about this in a meaningful way?

And we started surprising veterans with free shower systems when in crazy ways, the first guy that we surprised, his name was Mike Alstein.

He was an uh Iraqi war veteran who came home from Iraq.

was diagnosed with MS and like that, bam, he was in a wheelchair.

And we heard about his story and we had him, we worked with his mom, so we approached his mom, we had Mike enter a sweepstakes, but it was a fake sweepstakes, he was the only

entry, okay?

So he entered a sweepstakes and the giveaway was a day at Lambeau Field for a tour of Lambeau Field and a night at a hockey game.

So, surprise, he won and anyway, so he goes out of his house at like 11 a.m.

to Lambeau for a tour, and we meet him at the hockey game at night, and we wheel him out on the ice.

Mind you, has no idea who I am.

And we thank him for his service, and we point to the Jumbotron, and we show that when he left his home at 11 a.m., our guys snuck into his home, crashed his bath, and made it

handicap accessible for him.

And that just put us on a journey that says, this is who we are.

This is what it means to do well and also do good.

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

This is something that everybody in the organization had to participate in to get Mike a safe bathroom in a day.

So from that, we founded a program called Baths for the Brave, okay, where Baths for the Brave, it's still going on, where we surprise veterans with free shower projects across

the country.

So far to date, we've done over $5 million worth of free showers for veterans on Veterans Day.

across the country partnering with like-minded home improvement companies all at the same time on Veterans Day.

So we've helped 350 veterans have free safe shower systems in their home.

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

That's the kind of stuff that to me gives people more than just a paycheck, more than just a career path, more than just a job, it gives them a mission.

That's awesome.

That's great.

Those are some great stories.

And since your exit in the business, is that program still going on?

It is, it's still going on.

We did it just this past November.

We were in 21 states with Bats for the Brave, helping veterans with free shower systems.

Yeah, it's still going on.

if there's a contractor listening that would like to partner with you in that, what's going to be the best way for them to join you?

yeah, reach out on my website, bryangotlieb.com.

Shoot me a note, say you want to participate.

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

I want to be on all 50 states.

And I think we're going to do it.

So it's a really cool program.

It makes everybody in the business feel good.

And by the way, when we crash a veteran's bathroom that day, we're not just doing the shower.

We get the entire community involved.

We have the fire department coming out to the home.

and changing smoke detector batteries for the veterans.

We have the elementary schools writing thank you cards for the veterans.

So when they're opening them up on the day of their crash, you know, there's not a dry eye in the house.

We have neighbors bringing food over.

have the high school band coming out and doing songs for the veteran out in the street.

We had the police department presenting the colors to the veterans.

We make a big, of course the media comes out, they tell the story.

It's just a day to celebrate someone.

m

And it's transformational when the day before we crash that bath, they have a shower that they're afraid of.

The day after, they can clean themselves in the safety of their own home with the dignity that they deserve.

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

And their life from just that one little instance is changed forever because

We take taking a shower safely for granted.

We take it for granted every day when we think about it, right?

But when people really struggle with that, it's a big issue.

So anyway, it's a worthy cause.

Reach out to me.

I'd love to sign you up for the program.

That's awesome.

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

ah I'll shoot you an email when we're done here and make sure I get all the information right, because that's something that I could really get behind.

That'd be great.

We don't do baths, but I'll have to hook you up with some contractors here in Wyoming, see if we can make that happen and add another state to your list.

I appreciate it.

Look, you as a business leader, you have a choice, right?

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

You can give them a career path and you're happy to advance them.

But how do you instead, how do you make their time with you, however long or however short it is, become a pivot point in their life to say, you know what, I as a human being,

and fundamentally different because of the experience I had working for that organization.

How do you create an environment to give people a chance to do their life's work, that thing that they were born to do?

And when you do that, I'll tell you what, it's like if you want to build a mighty ship to sail across the ocean, sure, you can hire a whole bunch of people and teach them how to

swing a hammer, but if you first get those people to yearn for the open sea,

they will build a more magnificent ship than you have ever imagined.

When I share with you that it was the team that built a more magnificent company than I could have ever imagined.

It couldn't have been done without them.

And yet, and they know it, they were a part of it, and it's something that we'll always remember.

That's awesome.

You've got me fired up.

I wanna come work for you now.

So I know you mentioned from the very beginning, you threw 7 % of all revenue into marketing.

um You have this culture inspiring people.

You've done a lot diving into the community, providing for veterans.

What other pieces are there to your strategy for growth?

And how did that strategy evolve as your company grew?

Yeah, well, look, ultimately, business is all about execution, right?

Vision without execution is called a hallucination.

You can have the greatest vision in the world, but if you can't execute on it, you're gonna be in trouble.

So you have to be able to execute, right?

And not just execute, you have to execute at a high level and with consistency.

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

regardless of the competitive landscape, you can win.

But to execute, you have to be able to measure execution, which comes back down to daily targets.

Every single person on your team deserves to know whether or not they had a productive day at work.

They need to know that.

And if they don't have a daily target or KPI to look at, how do they really know if they had a productive day?

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

So look.

When we're trying to grow a business, cannot, cannot discount the importance of KPIs and target-driven and execution, because ultimately that's what's gonna define the success or

the failure of a business.

So if we dive into the weeds a little bit, this is something that I've struggled with a lot.

For maybe the lower end of your team, uh the laborer that's maybe just a helper for an installer or something like that, what kind of KPIs do you put in place for those people

that every day they have different tasks, they do them differently?

You know, they might have an install that goes really well and really smooth and then one that they're fighting against.

How do you shape a KPI that's specific enough to motivate them and measure what they're doing, but open enough to allow the variability in their job?

Yeah, I mean look, it's a, let's just start at the beginning of the organization.

If it's a marketer that's setting appointments at a show or at a, know, or knocking on doors, there can be a piece of compensation based on the result that you expect out of

that cost that's associated with it, right?

So there's a variable cost to it, right?

If it's an installer, you're trying to do a certain amount of revenue in a certain amount of time, okay?

There's too much emphasis put on margin and not enough emphasis placed on what's called dollars per crew day You see, the margin, oh, we run a 60 % gross margin, we run a 50%, we

run an 80 % gross margin.

Great, I need more information.

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

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

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

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

I can go to the bar with you and brag about, yeah, my business has a 90 % gross margin.

But if I'm only selling one pen a day, I don't have a very good business, all right?

When we think about what we need in business, yes, we need a certain margin, but we also need a certain amount of dollars per crew day.

Every time we send a truck out, how much revenue do they need to bring back?

That creates an opportunity for variable compensation.

Once you know that math, I need a certain amount of revenue brought back.

And there can be a compensation structure, a variable component driven to that around whether productivity, bonus, something like that.

Same thing with the production manager.

If you have somebody that's running those crews, well, they probably have a certain amount of revenue done in paid revenue if they need to collect every single day.

That means there should be, that's a number they can speak to every day.

This is my target, this is what we actually did and should affect their compensation from a variable standpoint.

We can find variable comp everywhere if we look for it hard enough.

Yeah, that's awesome.

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

That's something that I have not yet applied it to comp or I never did.

um But that was something I always looked at when I was bidding jobs.

ah know, everybody has their formula for bidding jobs and you get to the end, you figure out all your expenses and have a standard markup.

And I never did that ah because you need...

dollars per crew day.

know, time is my limiting factor.

Sales is not my limiting factor.

Time is my limiting factor.

So I want to make so many dollars per day.

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

Because like you said, if you're selling stuff that's worth nothing, but you have a huge margin, you're making less money than if you're selling something with a small margin with

a lot of dollars.

And so we need a way to

to level that and make sure you're not spinning your wheels, you need to make sure that you're earning the amount you need to be earning per unit of effort or per hour or crew

day.

I'll give you a great example, the one day bath business, versus the full remodel bath business.

If I'm selling a shower and when I sold the businesses, the average sale is now up to probably, we'll just call it plus or minus $15,000 for shower system that's done in a day.

That means every time we're sending a crew out, we're getting $15,000 in revenue.

Sounds like a great idea if we add a vanity to it.

We're already in the bathroom, why don't we sell toilets and vanities?

That sounds like a great idea.

The challenge with that.

is regardless of the margin, it's gonna add a day to the job.

And can I get another $15,000 for a toilet and a vanity?

Probably not.

But now I've just doubled, I've just cut my dollars per crew day in half.

So it allows you to make business decisions.

When you talk about removing complexity, that's a key piece in removing complexity.

Selling a shower and a vanity and a toilet and flooring adds such complexity to the project.

our average ticket goes up.

Yeah, but our dollars per crew day goes down and our complexity goes out the fricking window, it's off the charts.

So look, we even chose to exit certain products because we couldn't hit a certain dollars per crew day that we needed.

We do the exact same thing.

We measure everything in dollars per crew day, profit per crew day, and that shaped the way that I did business for a long time.

You're the first person I've ever talked to that didn't think that idea was just crazy.

Everybody else, yeah.

man, well you made me feel better about the decisions I made.

Was there anything that significantly delayed your growth?

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

There's a saying that scared money can't gamble.

And I think one of the challenges that I think not just myself, I think a lot of business leaders struggle with is when you have excess cash, those few times you have excess cash,

no, when you have excess cash, excess capital, what is the most strategic way to deploy it?

What is really the best way to deploy excess capital?

I think a lot of business leaders get frozen.

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

They're afraid to take risks on marketing, and maybe it's because they're not tracking marketing well, or because they don't have a good way to process appointments once they

get them.

They're just not a marketing machine.

So I think those are the things that stand in the way of business growth that slowed me down until we got better at

where the business was much more predictable, much more mechanical.

I see it all the time.

I see it all the time with companies that are complaining about a certain marketing, marketing doesn't work, business doesn't work, blah, But the truth is, they're not

tracking it, they're not the first one to call the customer, they don't have any kind of a speed to lead program plugged into their business, they have no great way, they don't run

a formal sales process.

So everybody's selling something a little differently.

And so it's just not a scalable business.

So all these other sort of things.

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

I'm okay taking a risk on a marketing source.

I also, by the way, follow the analogy that try things with excess capital, but think about bullets before cannonballs, right?

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

And if you can't stop firing bullets at it, it's okay to be wrong.

Don't be wrong for long.

But if you start hitting the target with bullets, start launching cannonballs at it, man.

That's a good thing to launch cannonballs at.

And don't be afraid to go all in on it.

But I also, which brings me to another discipline of the business, I also believe that no one lead source should be more than 20 % of your business.

No one lead source should be more than 20 % of your business because if that source for some reason stops working, you're in big trouble.

So.

Not only should not only one lead source be more than 20 % of your business You should always replace the bottom 20 % of your lead sources every single year Now you can't do

that unless if you're tracking everything Can I can I give you one more discipline that ties into business growth sure, okay?

You have to run a batting order in your business.

Have you ever heard that expression, a batting order?

All right.

You're in the business of making leads, turning leads into appointments, and appointments into sales.

You and I, could go on a tour.

can go buy a Volkswagen bus, one of those old, cool ones, right?

Those things that you live in, right?

And we can go on a cross, we'll take your podcasts on the road, all right?

We're gonna go on a cross-country journey.

And we're gonna look at companies across the country.

We're gonna look at their sales report on any given month, all right?

And then we're gonna look at it again by removing the bottom 25 or 30 % of performers.

And the business will look totally different, right?

It'll be a much better business, right?

So how does an organization do that intentionally?

How do you always remove the bottom 25 or 30 % of performers intentionally to give them a chance for retraining?

There's only one way to do it.

You always have to have more salespeople

than you have appointments.

So that you can intentionally run a batting order.

So that your top performers are getting fed first and your bottom performers are back in for retraining.

And you want about 25 to 30 % more sales reps than you have appointments.

Those are the kind of things that if you do systematically in your organization, you're gonna grow a beast of a business.

It's gonna grow very intentionally.

And that is running a batting

Okay, that's some good advice.

Is there a major mistake that you wish you could have avoided?

Um.

Yeah, well, like a long list of them, right?

A long list of them.

ultimately, think I used to think that not going to college was a mistake.

I used to think that was a big mistake.

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

gosh, if I only went to college.

I remember before I started my business, I was applying for a job because I still wanted to get off the road.

So I thought,

knocking on doors seeing if I could get a job at a few places and I had a lot of good interviews but because I didn't have the degree I wasn't hired for the role.

Thank goodness I didn't go to college.

Thank goodness I wasn't hired for that role.

My life today would be very very different if I would have taken that job.

Look, we had the exit of our dreams, right?

Beyond, it's multi-generational wealth from

building these businesses and selling them to private equity and to my team, that would have never happened if I took that job because I had that degree.

So I think sometimes the things we think are mistakes might not necessarily be mistakes if we just give it enough time to wait for it.

Some of the things, the opportunities I wish I would have had are, thank goodness that didn't happen because it ended up opening up a totally different door.

That's how I view mistakes, how about that?

That's great.

You keep jumping ahead and stealing some of my favorite questions.

That's one of the ones I like to ask is about uh beneficial mistakes.

Mistakes that might have been a mistake at the time but ended up turning things around.

So, how...

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

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

I've terminated people that I should have kept.

I've made a lot of mistakes inside of the business, but each time I made a mistake, we learned more and more about how to be a better business.

Yeah, there you go.

We did an interview a couple weeks ago and he said that he doesn't make mistakes, he just has learning opportunities.

that's right Yeah, and experience is that thing you get right after you need it so, you

Yeah.

Well, you dove right back into education there.

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

So you uh skipped college coming out of high school.

You said that was a great decision, but eventually you wound up back in school and not just any school, Harvard Business School.

So what are your thoughts about a formal education today?

What advice would you give for young people trying to make that decision?

Yeah,

and again, to be clear, Harvard Business School is a very, very, it was a very different type of environment to learn in.

First of all, it was an executive education program that was for business owners.

And it was, you had to have a minimum revenue of $10 million to even be accepted.

And it was really cool because, look, what I hated about school is I hated tests.

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

had ADD, I was all over the place.

The way you learn at Harvard Business School is they teach everything through a case study.

And a case study is like 20 or 30 pages of some business is going through some issue.

It could be the headlights at Toyota aren't fitting in the car, or it could be Netflix is trying to negotiate a purchase, and you're the head negotiator, how would you deal with

this?

So they put you.

The case study has limited information.

So you have to solve the case study on your own.

That's your first silo of learning.

There are three silos.

The second silo is you go to Harvard Business School.

You live in a dorm.

And your dorm is with seven other business leaders from seven other countries with seven other business areas of expertise.

And you then talk about the case again.

And you try to solve the problem as a team.

Then the third silos of learning is you're in a classroom with a Harvard professor that challenges you to break this case down with 149 other people from 49 different countries.

So you get a worldwide perspective on problem solving and it's a cool learning environment.

But the other thing about it is you're going there for a very different reason.

You're not going there for a degree.

You're going there for a very specific challenge you're trying to solve in your business.

And so is everybody else.

get to be really, have really deep conversations with people about how they approach leadership and all those sorts of things.

was transformational for me.

And I made friends all over the world, which is great.

But Wolfgang Puck was one of my classmates, by the way.

And when he, in fact, that's why his little blurb is on the cover of my book, this little Wolfgang Puck quote on the cover of my book.

So he...

He had a fourth grade education.

That's all he's got.

When he went into his dorm room, he opened up the dorm room and there's a computer sitting in the dorm room of his own little private bedroom.

He never turned a computer on before.

He didn't know how to turn it on.

He never had to use one.

So this is pretty interesting.

uh Tyra Banks was in my executive, in my alumni class.

Just all these crazy, this guy Ron Deshae, who's one of the founders of American Idol.

was in my class.

You just get this wide variety of really talented, smart business people.

Some of the companies are multi, multi-billion dollar companies, all there for the same reason, trying to solve a problem in their business.

So was really

cool.

Yeah, it was cool.

Yeah, it was amazing.

So to your kids, for instance, would you recommend that they go into college out of high school?

Would you recommend they don't?

Do you support them either way?

What would be your view on kind of formal education?

Yeah, look, I think that there's, can make a lot of money by getting out of school and jumping into the blue collar trade.

I did a keynote for the huge convention, that's what it's called, and it's window washers and power washers in Nashville.

And there were 2000 business owners in that room.

And they were all in there like 19 to 24 years old, out making it every day, knocking on doors and building businesses.

I don't think formal education is important as it used to be.

I think that there are plenty of paths to be successful without it.

I do think that mentorship is important, watching podcasts, that networking, that getting out of your bubble is important.

And look, I think there are certain things that you need to learn how to do.

You have to learn how to read a P &L and a balance sheet.

You have to understand KPIs.

There are certain things, there's certain things you need.

You need to understand what it means to be a great leader.

That's not necessarily taught.

A P &L and balance sheet, yeah, you can learn that at school.

But learning how to be a great leader, learning how to make a lead and sell a lead, you're not gonna learn that in school.

So I think it's different strokes for different folks.

We've got six kids, two of them went the university route, the other four didn't, and they're all very successful in their own ways.

Yeah.

to have uh six kids doing well.

That's quite an accomplishment as a father as well.

Well, ultimately, as a parent, do you have kids, Erick?

I do, have three.

And how old are they?

Um, they're soon to be 11, 8, and 4.

Right.

So, you know, as a parent, we want our kids to be successful.

Of course we do.

But our that wasn't that wasn't our benchmark.

Our benchmark was how do we just raise decent kids?

Let's focus on decency.

OK, let's raise and and let them define what success looks like for them.

OK, but ultimately, if we focus on decency, I think we'll always be better off.

And that's true in business, in life.

in raising kids.

Let's just be decent.

That's great.

I was chatting with my dad recently and he was talking about when he started his business and he said that ah his primary goal was to do it right and if there was money left over

at the end of the job that was just a bonus

so.

That's right.

Yep to do to to do the right thing the right way right and and I think that's also important from a leadership standpoint is that you know, it's a leader's responsibility

Making sure that their team is working on the right things the right way Right.

That's that's a leadership fundamental.

How do we make sure that our team is actually focusing on the right things and doing it the right way?

because often we can focus on the wrong things and it doesn't usually come out so good.

It's a lot of wasted

calories.

Yeah.

Is there a viewpoint or a belief that you held pretty strongly early on and as you've matured and experienced growing your business your view or your uh opinion changed?

That is a great question.

A.

We have to believe.

that abundance is available to us.

And when I think about the years I spent beating myself up for not going to school and thinking this is as good as I'm gonna get, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that, I got

this little thing, I keep it on my desk really handy, okay?

You like it?

Okay, here's what it is.

It's these little chattering teeth, okay?

And these chattering teeth, tell you all kinds of things in your ear.

They tell you all the reasons why you shouldn't do something, why you're gonna fail at it, why you're no good, why you don't deserve it.

And we gotta take these teeth and we gotta put them on the shelf, okay?

You deserve to have a wonderful life.

You deserve to be successful.

You deserve, you have it in you to be a great leader.

It doesn't matter what your education was, that doesn't matter.

What matters is how are you showing up every day?

What difference do you want to make in this world?

And that's available to anybody.

It's what is your attitude, your energy, and your willingness to learn.

That, to me, is the most important thing.

The rest of the stuff is just noise.

energy and attitude has nothing to do with talent at all.

It has nothing to do with talent.

It has to do with attitude.

And we get to control that every single day.

So the chattering teeth can go take a hike.

I am limitless.

And that's how I choose to think.

That's awesome.

uh I have a lot of Henry Ford quotes that I like, but that's probably one of my favorites is whether you uh think you can or think you can't, you're probably right.

right.

That's Yeah Yeah, and and you know what comes with that by the way in all fairness is when we think about as a leader and we're growing a business We're not sure what we're doing

and we we're in what's called FUD, right?

We have FUD fear uncertainty and doubt right?

We're not sure and What then starts to creep in is imposter syndrome?

Then we start to think am I really the right leader for this business?

I mean, I who am I to say that this is the way to do things

All of that stuff is nonsense.

It's all nonsense.

And again, it just holds us back and we all we deserve more than that.

you business owner, you took the risk.

You are exactly where you should be.

And there's a whole lot more to be done.

So get to it, man.

Amen.

Good stuff.

That probably ties into my next question here.

What is something you wish you would have learned earlier?

Not necessarily about business, but about yourself.

Well, obviously the idea that I can be an inspirational leader, okay?

And that when I was younger, I used to take music lessons and I played like the keyboards, but terribly.

I played the guitar horribly.

I played the trombone terribly.

I even tried the clarinet, couldn't play.

But I liked being creative, but I couldn't play a music instrument.

I tried singing, but I can't sing.

So I tried drawing, but I can't draw.

I tried all these things that are...

a classic being creative, I can't do, but I'm creative and I wanna be creative.

I learned that you can be creative with people.

I learned you can be creative with business.

I learned there's so many different outlets for the things that we are passionate over that I could be creative with business and people and words in a book and those kind of

things.

so had I learned that sooner, maybe my life would be different, but again, I have no complaints to where I'm at today.

So I think everything happened in the right time.

I think there's a saying, I hope I get this right.

When the student is ready, the teacher arrives.

And what that means is the teacher is always there.

It's just the student isn't always ready.

The teacher is always there, but are we as students always ready to learn?

Maybe not.

good stuff.

I can relate to that as well.

think I've always had kind of a desire to be creative and yeah, music, I loved music.

I have no tone.

I have no ear.

I have no rhythm.

I'm terrible.

But I've found creativity in business, in designing a roof system.

I can be creative and then uh cooking is my latest one.

I've been taking up cooking and I really enjoy that.

Yeah, I will share with you, we took my love for music with my poor execution of music.

What we did in our bath business, we applied that to our bath company.

So when we would set up our shower displays, it was all part of the whole do well, do good kind of thing.

We did a bunch of weird stuff like this.

When we had set up at a music festival, we would put our shower systems there to set appointments.

But instead of putting soaps and towels in the displays, we would put microphones, speakers, and music instruments in there.

and we would challenge people to come on by and sing in our shower.

And once we got a certain amount of people singing in our shower each year, we would send a kid to music school for a year.

And we did that year after year after year, and then we built the whole campaign, showers that make you want to sing inside of them.

And so I think you can apply music to a lot of things, creativity to a lot of things.

I love creativity and marketing.

Yeah, that's awesome.

It sounds like you're very gifted at it.

So what has been your biggest win as a leader?

The single biggest win as a leader is that there are no fewer than 40 previous employees that worked for me that now have their own business and are doing things the right way.

That to me...

When I think about the tree, the branches that have come off of the business, all of the, now they're hiring people and they're employing people and I speak to most of them on a

very, very regular basis, mentoring them and helping them.

I'm just so freaking proud of them.

I'm just so proud of the leaders that they become and running the business that they, that the right way, the righteous business, taking great care of their team, their customers,

their community.

It's just humbling, how about that?

It's just humbling.

So that's my big claim to fame.

So you've talked a lot about uh growing, talking about your business outgrowing you, fighting to keep up.

I know you said at one point in time you were reading a book a week.

ah You had your experience at Harvard Business School.

What have been the most useful resources to help you grow as a leader?

Well, I think the resources change at different times, right?

Whether it was our mastermind group, the Big 12, just, you know, it's so interesting that when a business gets big, the other thing that tends to happen is that you start adding

layers and layers and layers into your business, and a shepherd should smell like the sheep, right?

A shepherd should smell like the sheep if they want to be a good shepherd.

And what happens is as the business grows, you start to get further and further away from the customer, and you stop smelling like the sheep.

Okay, and some of the greatest learning experience is actually talking to our customer.

Just how about I just take time and talk to our customer.

See how they see the business, that's a big deal.

And it's a challenge for businesses because I see it all the time that the business has gotten so big that nobody has time to talk to our customers.

We only talk to the pissed off ones, not the happy ones.

business meetings talks about labor costs and material costs and all these other KPIs.

When do we talk about our happy customers?

Who brings those stories to the table?

And I think the business can get very transactional that way.

And if we want a relational business and relational people, you can learn a lot by listening to your customer and asking them things about your business and about how they

view you.

It'll certainly teach you a lot.

They're a great teacher.

That's great.

What motivates you to keep going when things get hard?

Yeah, it's like two driving forces, It's hating to lose and loving to win.

I think that inside of every problem is an opportunity.

I do believe that.

I believe that the flip side of every problem is an opportunity.

You want to wallow in sadness over the problem, good.

You got 15 minutes to do that.

You better quickly get to what's the opportunity very, very quickly or nothing's going to get solved.

I think the other thing is, and I write about this in my book, it's one of the pillars.

There five pillars in my book.

One of the pillars is that it's called, leaders are aware of the echo of their voice.

Okay, and what that means is that look as you as you lead a team and you you're and as your team grows So does your influence with that team grow and as you become more

influential?

People are gonna decide what type of day they're gonna have based on the kind of data that the leader is having if the leader seems stressed out and nervous the team is gonna feel

stressed out and nervous so Leaders have to be aware of whatever that echo is that they're sending

And I think part of leadership is always being aware of that.

And look, we send it, it's not just the echo in business, it's the echo at home, it's the echo of being present.

Look, I'm on a podcast with you right now.

Imagine for a minute, hold on a minute, my phone is ringing, I gotta take this call, give me one second.

Hello, this is Brian, how can I help?

You'd be like, Brian, you're on a fricking phone call.

I start texting somebody, you're like, Brian, we're on a podcast, what are you doing?

We never think of doing that, but we do it all the time when we're having a conversation with our wife.

or we're trying to do a one-on-one with a teammate, know, being present sends a much better echo than being distracted.

And I think when we think about the echoes that we want to send, I think that's as important a leadership principle as anything.

Yeah, that's good stuff.

I don't know that I answered your question, but.

Whether it answered the question or not, it's great content.

So I want to dive in a little bit.

You exited the three companies that you built.

uh I know that can be very emotionally complicated.

What did that season of life bring for you?

Yeah.

It is an emotional roller coaster, right?

It just, okay, there's the sausage making of due diligence when you're going through the documents and the rectal exam, we'll call it, of the business, you all that stuff.

they were well-run businesses, so that part was a little easier.

But it's also understanding the why to exit, right?

I was at the point where the business had gotten so big.

that I found myself becoming more more risk averse than entrepreneurial and driven.

I was also concerned that if I ever get hit by a bus, look, I got a great leadership team, but do I really want my wife stepping into my role and running this business?

I didn't think that was fair.

Plus, because we had a great team and I was very, very focused on building the bench strength of the business of the team, we really drove leadership deep.

deep into the roots of the organization.

we had layers and layers and layers of people that were being exposed to leadership.

It's one of the reasons why I took on a new product or opened up another market.

It wasn't necessarily strictly revenue based.

It was because I've got this great leader and they're looking for something to do.

And if I don't do something with them, I'm gonna lose them.

They're gonna go off and do it on their own.

So why not give them a chance to run their own store or run their own product line or run their own, you know, open up in another state.

So what...

When you have a business with people that have strong legs and a lot of heart and want to run fast, I felt it was time to pass the baton and transition the business to

organizations that could give them the next level up in their business.

that was one of the, those are the reasons I decided to do it was it, plus there were other things I wanted to do in life, right?

I wanted to write a book.

I'm working on my second book already.

But yeah, it was an emotional process.

It's the drama of you're going through the negotiations with the private equity groups and they're like, okay, pencils down until we solve this problem.

Da da da da, drama.

So there's a lot of that, but you get through it.

And I will share with you that when I sold one of my businesses, when I sold Tondraland, that business, and it was sold for a lot of money, right?

They all sold for a lot.

But for some reason that one hit me a little different maybe because I was so emotionally connected to it that I was sitting around my office and Though we got done with all the

paperwork after two months of due diligence the money gets wired Everybody agrees.

Yep money wired Done deal is closed BAM.

Just like that.

Okay, hold on.

I get my phone

It hit me like a wave.

I pick up my phone, I call my wife, I stand up, and she's, and I said, I couldn't talk.

I couldn't fricking talk.

I couldn't get a word out of my, now me, I could talk all day long.

You see us on our podcast.

Me not being able to talk is like, what are you doing here?

I had to get outside and I go, and I said to her, it's done, it's done.

I squeaked out the word it's done.

It was just this emotional wave that hit me that it was, I was walking away from a chapter in my life and a moment in time that not just was transformational for the people that

worked for me, but was transformational to me.

And now it was time to do the next thing.

it was, anyway, it was just really cool.

It was really cool.

That's great.

I have no regrets by the way, zero.

Zero!

Awesome.

Well, that's good to hear.

I actually just recently exited my company as well and not nearly on the scale that you were at, but I had run it for 12 years also and ah now we're moving on to the next thing.

And I learned a lot through that process.

It was a very daunting process.

ah Like I said, not nearly on the scale that you guys were at, but uh for the business leader that's maybe looking to the future, looking in that direction.

yeah, yeah.

to prepare both practically within the business and emotionally for that process?

yeah, I'm so glad you asked that question.

I but before I answer I want to ask you a question When you when you got the letter of intent for the first time and you opened it and you read it.

How did you feel?

I was relieved.

I can relate to a lot of the things you said.

You know, we got into the roofing business.

My dad had started the business and uh I was already working in it.

I was pretty good at it.

I saw the opportunity.

I saw the opportunity for growth, but it maybe was not.

It wasn't my life's passion.

The idea was always to kind of run it for a little while, um get some financial foundation underneath us and then probably move on to something else.

And uh this came a lot faster than I was expecting.

My plan was probably more a 20 year plan, not a 12 year plan.

And so ah there's a lot of relief and excitement of like, man, this is coming faster than I thought and where are we headed?

And I can relate it to a lot of what you said.

think, again, we grew a lot in the last few years of running our business and the impetus there was.

not my ego or my growth or my bank account, but I had a lot of these leaders that I'd raised up in the business that they needed some upward movement.

They needed somewhere to go and I had nowhere to promote them to.

So we just started trying to grow just to make some room for them.

kind of like you said, it got to a point where I just didn't have the gas in the tank to keep pushing it the direction it was going.

And so getting some new blood, some new energy to help it keep moving was the right decision for my employees.

It was the right decision for the organization.

And it allowed us to move on to this next phase of life

and see what's next.

uh

so look, the advice that I would give to somebody that's thinking about one day exiting is to understand a few things.

The first thing is we are not in the business, unless if you're in like HVAC or something like that, if you're in roofing or siding or replacement windows or one day baths or that

kind of there is no previous book of business that they're buying.

They're buying the future.

All right, that's what buyers are buying.

They're saying, what is the likelihood that this company can perform

at the targets that they're saying they're going to perform at.

What is the likelihood they're going to be able to generate the leads and the sales and the revenue that they're saying?

Buyers buy the future, okay?

They're buying the future.

And therefore, you have to first of all prove that you're good at hitting your targets for the future, but then also you have a team that's capable of delivering on it, okay?

And look, if you're not taking a salary out of your business, but...

business is making some money is probably not a real business that's sellable.

You've got to get it to an organization that is able to pay you and make a good percentage of net profit and that you have your systems and processes put together, that you have a

leadership team, they have some bench strength, that you're able to hit targets, and you have a clear vision that everybody understands.

And you're on a cruel accounting so that you can get through due diligence.

Because if you're not on that, it's really going to be problematic.

Due diligence was, man, I had no idea that you could go that deep into our financials.

That was a whole nother thing.

Yeah, the first business I sold, my Arizona business, there were 40 people on the due diligence team that were buying it, that I was dealing with.

It was a slog, but we got through it.

Get a good CFO, I would say that.

Get a good CFO to make sure they're looking at your books and understand the industry.

Don't work with your local attorney.

Work with an &A attorney.

Rob Macklin, somebody like that, that's really good, that understands the industry.

that knows how to get deals done because selling a business is very different than helping you with a customer that didn't pay you.

It's a totally different skill set.

So get yourself a good team around you.

It's gonna help you through due diligence.

Those are some of other things I'd say.

That's good advice.

Good advice.

So you talked about the emotional response to selling TundraLand.

Was there a similar response with the others?

And I guess what order did this all happen in?

Yeah, I first sold my Arizona Jacuzzi bath business.

And that was good.

I was able to still stick around and work with them just as a consultant in the business.

But again, I had a team move to Arizona that started the business.

So while I was attached to the business, wasn't that same depth of emotional attachment.

that business sold first.

Once I sold that business, I'm like,

One down, two to go.

I can't wait to sell the other two.

So look, I was excited to sell Tungiland.

I'm really happy with Leaf Home Enhancements is the company that acquired it.

They are owned by Gridiron Capital and I was the great buyer for the business.

And then when I sold my renewal by Anderson business, I was just excited to look, I could have sold it to a lot of people.

was a big business.

It was actually bigger than Tungiland from a revenue standpoint.

And I could have sold it to, I had a lot of choices, but I wanted to sell it to my leadership team.

I wanted to give them a chance to have generational wealth as well.

And I'm just, I'm so proud of what they've done with it.

They've taken it to a whole nother level than when I owned it.

They've really exploded it.

And I'm still involved in that business as the chairman of the board.

So I'm still on the board.

And yeah, I just love working with them.

So it's just been, again, it's all love.

It's all love.

Yeah, that's great.

How was that process different selling to an outside private equity firm versus your internal leadership team?

Yeah, well, look, I didn't have to sell my leadership team on what the business was.

They knew it, they were operating it anyway, so they understood.

For me, it was more rewarding to sell to them just to kind of see the...

I just got a text from one of them yesterday.

He sent me a picture of uh his house that he just paid off and that he's so grateful because he just bought this house a couple of years ago and now he paid it off, that he

couldn't have done that without...

These are, it's just that kind of stuff, you know, it's pretty cool.

It's pretty cool.

That's awesome.

I'm really looking forward to having some of those stories myself.

uh We started down the process with a private equity firm and it kind of fell apart and we ended up selling it to uh my operations manager and his family.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's fantastic.

Good for you.

Yeah.

So you know how it feels.

It's nice to see them do something with the business.

It did.

I was excited to sell it to Private Equity.

I was far more excited when we got to keep it in the family, so to speak.

Yeah, that's great.

Yeah.

And, you know, so once I sold the business, that's when I decided it's time to write a book, which, you know, I'm so happy we did.

Yeah.

Man, and it's a great book.

uh Beyond the Hammer, is that right?

Beyond the Hammer.

And what's so surprising is when I wrote it, I started writing it as like a leadership book.

And I'm like, this is like every other leadership book out there.

I want to make it very different.

So as you know, the book is split in two parts.

The first half is a business parable, which follows the life of this guy, George, who's a contractor.

And you see the troubles he's got with his business with burnt out employees and pissed off customers and inconsistent results.

And you follow George as he meets this mentor named Marty.

where the five pillars of leadership are revealed to him and you watch how as he plugs them into his business, his business really changes.

So that's the first half of the book.

And the second half of the book, I shift from storytelling to strategy where I go deep into how to plug the five pillars into your business.

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

I just got notified Forbes was my publisher.

I've sold now 40,000 copies of Beyond the Hammer in the blue collar industry.

That's like.

So many companies using it they're buying not one they're buying five and ten and twenty and a hundred of them It's been it's been great feedback.

So I just love it.

Yeah, it's been

great Thank you.

Yeah, so now I'm on my next book.

Yeah, so my next book is a sales book It's gonna be the same thing.

It's gonna be another business parable, but I'm about a third of the way done with it I hope to have it done halfway done.

Hope hopefully be done around April or May So, yeah

are you going to split this one as well with the parable followed by the strategy?

yeah, and do a great audio version.

The audio book, by the way, of Beyond the Hammer, I happen have a copyright here, the audio version of Beyond the Hammer is ridiculous because here's the deal.

I have no problem speaking in public or reading a book or being a narrator, but being a narrator of a parable, that's with different characters and character arcs and issues

going on and drama.

That's not my thing, right?

We already talked about that from my creative side.

I read the second half of the book, the strategy side, but I wanted somebody really cool to read the parable side.

And my favorite book narrator of all time is this guy named Eduardo Ballerini.

He used to be an actor on The Sopranos, and he does a lot of James Patterson books and these big books of drama and mystery.

And I I out, I cold called him.

I asked him if he'd read the parable and he did.

He read the parable for me.

So it's the legendary voice of Eduardo Ballerini bringing my characters to life in a way that I can only imagine.

It is so good.

And then of course I read the second half.

So the audio book has just been just really, really, really fun book to listen to.

That is awesome.

What was it like getting to work with kind of a hero might be a strong word, but somebody that you've listened to their work like that before, was that a little surreal?

it was surreal

when I got the first draft of his audio book back.

Kathy and I were in, we were in either Italy or France at the time, maybe Italy, sitting in our hotel room listening to this thing.

And it was like just overwhelmed with joy, gratitude and emotion.

Just hearing your story come to life.

I can only imagine if somebody ever creates a movie out of a book that somebody writes.

I can only imagine what that feels like.

Yeah, that'd be pretty cool hearing this voice that you listen to high level production all the time speaking your words.

Yeah.

Tell you my story.

Yeah, that's great.

That's great.

Was there an inspiration for how you chose to structure that book?

The character, the main character in the mentor, people ask all the time, which one are you?

Are you the mentor or are you the guy being, that's struggling in business?

And the answer is, I've been both at different times.

It just depends.

But again, I wanted something that was very much relatable to our industry, that was highly actionable, that was not speaking over people's heads.

that people could say, know what, when I plug this in, it's gonna make a difference in my business, but it's approachable and I can do that.

So there's, there are a lot, it's full of nuggets and a lot of simplicity as well.

So it's quite, again, I promise whoever gets, and it's available on Amazon, by the way.

You can get it on Amazon.

You can get it in Barnes & Noble, too.

You can also, in January,

Once again, it was there last January.

It'll be there this January at the airports, at those center tables, at Hudson bookstores.

It'll be there as well.

But get the audio book.

You'll really love it.

Yeah, well we'll make sure we put a link to all of that in the show notes.

We'll link the audio book and the book on Amazon there.

I've not finished it yet.

I'm excited to get the rest of the way through it.

Great.

Yep.

Onward and upward.

I'm just going to share with the listeners.

Look, there are, think there are a couple of, there are a couple of things to consider that when you're building your business, the first thing is that, that you only build a

business when you commit to building people.

And when it comes to building people, if you want to, one of the pillars of my book is that you have to model your business as a training organization.

And if you're a training organization, you have to follow the belief that if it's, if it's not written down, it doesn't exist.

You might think,

There's a way of doing things, because it lives in your head, but that doesn't mean anybody else is gonna do it.

It's gotta be written down, or it simply doesn't exist.

And along with that, the reward to it all is that when you go all in on really building people, and you see people doing things that they didn't even think possible before, you

will realize like I realized, that the two most important days of your life are the day that you're born,

and the day you finally realize why.

Wow, that's good.

That's good.

Well, that might dive into my next question here.

It's my favorite question.

ah Are you a person of a particular faith background?

And if so, how has that shaped your leadership journey?

I'm not what you would call a religious person.

I'm what you would consider be, I guess, a spiritual person.

I respect all people's belief systems.

I believe in myself and I believe in people too.

Again, the first pillar of the book is the idea that belief is transferable.

And if I wanna raise the lid of people, they have to first believe they're capable of doing it.

Just like,

We all have those chattering teeth in our ear that tell us we can't do stuff and we're asking people to do things they've never done before.

So if I want them to get to that next level of growth, I have to let them know why I believe in them.

I have to provide what's called evidence-based belief.

I believe in you because I've seen you do X, Y, and Z and that's why I know you can do this.

That's a necessary thing to help grow people.

Is that faith-based?

It's faith in people, right?

And I think that's kind of a cool faith to have.

Okay, I can appreciate that.

Is there anybody that you would like to see on the show?

Somebody that has a really interesting story or maybe somebody that works in a really intriguing industry that we could learn more about?

Yeah, I think there are a few people that I'd suggest.

Chris Hermes is the owner and operator of USA Showers.

He runs a great business, very highly disciplined business leader.

Does a lot of cool things the way he's running his business and in the community.

He'd be a great guest.

There's a gentleman that I think of, his name is Joe Downey, and he's one of the top sales leaders in the country.

the way he approaches...

training and developing people, he's got a story worth telling and somebody probably worth having a conversation.

Awesome, awesome.

Well, thank you.

I might reach out and see if you could put me in touch with them.

Yep.

All right, and our last question to either fuel or settle the debate, if you have the job to do with the cordless tool, which brand do you reach for?

Well, so that's a very easy, easy decision.

There are two things that are required if you're have a home in Wisconsin, which we do, that the first thing is you have to be a Packers fan, and the second thing is you have to

use Milwaukee tools.

So that's just an easy one.

So that's more of a religion than what we talked about earlier.

Big red it is.

So awesome.

Well, Brian, thank you so much for joining us.

Again, the book is Beyond the Hammer.

We'll have links in the show notes.

You also do some speaking, consulting, coaching engagements.

So we'll get your website linked in the show notes as well.

And I really appreciate you making the time.

This has been a lot of fun for me.

I think our listeners are going to really appreciate it as well.

Thank you, Erick.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, everybody.

Have a wonderful day.

Yeah,

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

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