Mike Wandler – From Shop Floor to the Future of Energy | AI, Microreactors & Building the Biggest Machines on Earth

The 1st 50 years of LNH, we had 30% turnover.

Started working on that and trying to change that when I

took over as president. So I took over as president

around 2000, 2012, it dropped to 3%.

So I want Wyoming to do this. It's not important if Wyoming

does this. It's incredibly important that

the somebody in the United States of America does this

because right now Russia is doing it and China is doing it.

In a world filled with Russian and Chinese micro reactors is

not good for us. Hey there and welcome to From

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

the next generation of free thinking leaders by telling the

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

getting it done, building a life that they love with their

hearts, their hands and their hustle.

I'm your host, Eric Loden. If you guys are enjoying the

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So today I am super excited. I have a guest that has been

recommended by a number of other guests and requested by a quite

a few of our listeners. So I am joined today by Mike

Wandler. Mike is the President of L&H

Industrial and also the CEO of Evercore Energy.

He is the founder of Wyoming's Innovative Entrepreneurs.

L and HS mission is to move industries forward by designing,

manufacturing, and maintaining the biggest machines on earth.

So I'm sure you guys are excited to hear more about that.

Mike has been innovative at L&H, combining a strong legacy and

heavy equipment with new opportunities in sensing, data,

AI, and energy innovation. Evercore Energy does that

through abundant, reliable energy solutions for heavy

industry, including micro reactors and digitally optimized

power systems. If that isn't enough, Mike is

also an accomplished author, having authored 2 books.

So, Mike, thank you so much for joining us.

Are you in the construction industry and super excited about

the services you get from your material supplier?

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If you answer no to any of those questions, make sure you catch.

Check out MacArthur, MacArthur co.com, give them a call and

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only the best service and ask them about their customer

incentive trips. All right, awesome.

Well, we like to start every show just getting a little bit

of background and and learning about you and where you came

from. So can you tell us a little bit

about what life was like growing up?

Thanks for having me, Eric. I appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm really excited. Just getting through that intro

is kind of a mouthful. I know you've had quite a career

and have your fingers in a lot of things, so we'll just dive

right in. I'm excited to learn more about

you. Awesome.

Yeah, so I was, I was born raised in Gillette, WY.

My dad had came there in the mid 6th, early 60s and he bought LNH

Industrial in 1964. He bought it from the guy that

was running the shop. It was called something else.

And so I was there. I was born in 68.

I grew up out on the, you know, born on Ross down in Gillette.

But we quickly moved out of town out to Raw Heights.

So I grew up as a, I was a ranch kid, but as a manufacturing

guy's kid and, and I liked tinkering with things at a young

age. And we moved out by Rosette and

I started working because I didn't, I didn't really like

being out there on the ranch and not doing anything.

I wanted to get to work early. So I started working when I was

14 and working in the shop, just, you know, cleaning chips,

going down there after, after middle school and, and doing

whatever they needed just be in the labor.

And that was 882. So it's, you know, the oil crash

happened right after that. And so I, I was involved in,

yeah, cleaning the shop and doing all these things.

And then everybody was leaving and everything was just up in

arms and I was getting minimum wage.

And so they're like, hey, come over here and start drilling

holes and making parts. So by the time I was 16, I was

out doing field machining out in the field.

And by the time I was 18, I was running the machine shop.

Not because I was qualified, just because I was.

So it was cheap and I was there and I was willing to show up and

do the work. So yeah, I worked with my dad

and my brothers, brother Lee, my brother Jeff.

And as a family company back then there was a lot of

shareholders. But yeah, I basically grew up in

the shop and I loved it. But born and raised in Gillette

and started going global. By the time the time I was 30,

we really had my eye towards global, even in the 80s, but by

the end of the 90s I was traveling and really starting to

starting to think about the big world out there and how we could

grow and diversify LNH. So yeah, that's hated, hated

school, like most entrepreneurs and I went to school and things

a lot and I hated, hated it. I just wanted to go down and

work and see much point in it. But so most of my education

happened after so after I became president.

So my my dad had a heart problem and he needed a heart

transplant. So I ended up buying him out

being my brothers and the other shareholders buy the bottom out

in 98. And then like, we bought my

oldest brother out in 2000 and I became president.

So once I became president, I was fine up till then.

I mean, I dropped out of high school about halfway through my

senior year and got my GED and no problem up up until then.

I mean, I had everything. But then as soon as I was

president and I'm sitting in these rooms, I'm like, I need to

know more than I know. So I went back and got a

bachelor's degree in business administration, and that was

great. That was great.

Then I felt like I was equipped to take on that part of my life.

And then in 2007, I went to Harvard for older president

management program. And that was my first experience

at a College in the dorms 3 weeks a year for three years in

a row. And it was absolutely fantastic.

And I continue going to things like that.

So I'm used to a bracious lifelong learner for things that

I want to learn. Typical entrepreneur, terrible

at school, love to work and I just worked my way through it

all. OK.

So sorry, I'm going to recap some of that.

Just make sure I got the timeline right.

So you you actually dropped out of high school early and got

your GED so that you could go into work.

And it was when you were around 30 years old is when you went

back to get a bachelor's degree. Let me think about that.

Yeah. What about 30?

Yeah, So about 2000 right in there.

So yeah, I was born in 68, so 32.

OK, OK. And where did you go to get that

degree? I did it all online because I

was, I had the president job and I was, you know, I was swimming

when it because I was not qualified to do it.

So I did it all online on nights and weekends and just worked my

neck off. Probably a part of why I got

divorced that second time. But yeah, I was, I was just in

the books for I think, I think it took Me 2 1/2 years to get

through that. And you, so you'd stop self

study, right? They'd send you the books, you'd

self study. And then he went down to a

library into the supervised test for each book, which was easy on

some of them, but not the law books.

The law books were really dense. But but I, I had a, you know

what? I was terrible at school and

high school. They were, they were going to

one of my teachers told me he was going to flunk me out of the

of high school and there's no way I was going to do another

year. That's why I just said screw up

and quit and got my GED. But it's different when you're

learning what you want to learn, right?

I can really get into it when it's something that applies and

I know I'm going to use. I just, I hate being told what

to do. Oh, man.

Yeah. And you were moving pretty fast.

If you're running a company developing into international

markets and then also doing a bachelor's degree in 2 1/2

years, you're chugging through that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I get on to something, I,

I, I have to because if I don't focus on it and just got it out,

I, I don't finish it. So yeah, I usually really put my

my heart and soul into it to get it done quickly and stay on it.

That's great. I think that's probably true of

a lot of entrepreneurs. We got a little bit of that

ADDADHD thing going on and if it's interesting, we can focus

and get a lot done. But if it's not interesting,

we're not going to finish it. Yeah, I'm a, I'm a big quick

start. I don't know if you follow any

Colby stuff, but my, my Colby's 4386.

So I'm a big quick start but my follow through is is not that

great. OK.

So I have a, I have a ton of people around me to do all the

follow through. I, I do the, the quick start

stuff on the new shiny things and get them, get them going.

And then I have a whole team of follow through people that will

take it and turn it into a real business.

That's great. That's awesome.

And I think you're the the 2nd guest we've had that went

through one of those programs at Harvard.

I don't know if it was the the same program or not, but can you

tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah, was that Cliff wrote that what went through?

No, Brian Gottlieb is who I was talking to.

He ran a home improvement and primarily bath and window

company out of Wisconsin I believe.

But. Oh yeah, out of Wisconsin,

Cliff, Cliff Root's the only back when I got done, there was

three people that had that had went through the OPM Harvard

program and Cliff Root was one of them.

And I can't remember who the other lady was, but she was no

longer with us. But it is a fantastic program

and I would recommend it to any entrepreneur.

They, they have a slot limit and this is, this is dated

information. This is back in 2007.

They have a slot limit of, of you need to be a major owner.

So they like you to have 50% of the company and they like it to

be a privately held company. There's another program for

publicly held companies, but OPM is for privately held.

You're a major owner and you're a president and then you apply.

And I, I didn't think I would get in because I'm a high school

dropout, right? And I got this chinky degree

from Kennedy Western University when I was 30, but it was all

online. But I went there and I met them

and, and we hit it off. So they, they let me in.

I had to take a few classes to, to get up to speed, but it was,

it was fantastic. And they, basically what they do

is they take their MBA program and they say, OK, if you're

running a company successfully, 5 million to $200 million

company, you can condense that because you, you obviously have

a lot of these basic things and you've got a lot of experience.

But what an entrepreneur is usually missing are these

things. So they, they bring you there,

they put you in a dorm and they work you like a dog.

I was, I was getting up at 6:00 AM and going to bed at midnight.

And you, you would get like one or two days off in that process.

But other than that, you were just flat out, if you wanted to

absorb it all right, If you wanted to get the most out of

it. It's a it's, it's a real

stretch, but changed my whole trajectory on my life.

So I would highly recommend it for anybody.

Funny story, when I, when I talked to my partners into

paying for it for me, you know, funding it and letting me take

three weeks paid to go do it, I thought it was a one year thing

and it was like 20 grand, which was a tremendous amount of money

back then. It was just like we did.

How dare you ask to, to use 20 grand and have three weeks off.

And when I got there, I, I realized that, oh, this is a

three-year thing and it's 20 grand per year, right?

So I had some explaining to do when I came back that, oh, by

the way, I'm going to be asking for that again next year.

But yeah, it was, it was amazing.

I, I was, I was ending it in 22,009 at the, the financial

crash, the, the housing market crash and they Harvard brought

in, we were right in the beginning of that and it was

just mayhem, nobody knowing what the future was going to look

like. And they brought in all of the

leading experts that were responsible for that in banks

and in the government. And it, it really underlined the

fact that these guys are not in control of anything.

They really, I mean, they could kind of tell you there's like

these 40 factors. And if these things happen, then

this will happen. And if these things happen, this

will happen. But they're not, they're not in

control and they're not in charge.

They're just in the position that they're supposed to be.

And it's impossible for them to do the job they've been tasked

with. So yeah, it's nature taking its

course, Right. Well, that was a good awesome.

It was a good thing to to learn and I've made a lot of money

because of the relationships I had with those people.

I got into a really ugly fight with my partner in South Africa.

We owned a machine shop in South Africa building gears.

We bought into about 2003 and my partner was a Dutch South

African and he was just a maniac got to where I couldn't work

with him. You know, he was, he was just

kept jacking his price up because he was mad that we were

making money above and beyond what he was making.

But he wasn't sharing any of his money.

So it just didn't make any sense.

But anyway, we broke up and then he was just like you're you're

going away and you're, you know, you have no rights here.

Good luck, right? You just I'm taking your shares.

And so I emailed my Harvard OPM 38 group and asked them, hey,

has anybody dealt with this? Do you know what you're doing?

I had five people say, Yep, he can't do that.

I know exactly what to do. I'll, I'll to get on your board,

I'll introduce you to my attorneys.

I'll hold your hand and walk you through it.

And it's. So instead of getting $0.00 out

of that deal, I got, I think we got $2,000,000 settlement.

So those kind of connections are incredibly valuable.

And I know Harvard gets gets picked on and they deserve it

for some of the stuff what they get picked on, like, you know,

taking taxpayer dollars when they had so many billions of

their own. But as far as going to a school

to to teach us some incredible things and be surrounded by

amazing students and amazing staff on the business side,

they're they're amazing. I love MIT too.

I spend a lot of time at MIT now MIT fits Wyoming a little more

more because that's it's minds and hands, I think they call it.

So they they like doing the work, but but they're both

excellent. If anybody can go to either one

of those and learn anything that you're interested in, pay the

money, go do it. It will pay.

It'll give you incredible dividends.

Yeah, that's great. Well, that that leads into one

of my next questions was with your experience diving into the

workforce straight or in high school and then postponing

college till later in life and and kind of going to get your

college education after you had realized a particular interest

and a particular need, How has that shaped your view of

education? What advice would you have for

the high school student trying to figure out what they want to

do with their life? Should should they pursue a

college education at all costs or should they get involved in

the workforce and figure out where they want to go what?

What are your thoughts there? Yeah, so the the best advice is

to do a a Colby Clifton and print figure out your unique

abilities and your passions. And and a parent should do the

this with their kid around 10 or 12 help figure out what that

what that that kids current unique abilities and passions

are. And I love tradesmen.

So I'll talk about tradesmen in a different way where you don't

have to test them to figure this out.

If you've got a kid that he's probably doesn't like school or

isn't good at it, but you see him working on his bicycle, you

know, motorcycles tearing, tearing things apart, put in the

back together, that's a tradesman.

So what we're looking for and the world is looking for in

tradesmen is people that like to fix things and make things

engineering type of people. Now that right now is the the

the highest paying job, but don't go after a job because of

because it pays. First stop and figure out your

unique abilities and passions and you can do Colby cliffs and

print stuff. And once you know your, your

unique abilities and passion, then go into AI and say, what

all jobs would this Colby Clifton and print well, all jobs

would I love and see which ones pop out for that kid, right?

And there's going to be a lot of them that you know that pop out

and then tell them, OK, you're going to have to choose, you

know, narrow it and choose. And it's not a permanent choice.

Tell them that, right? It's not a permanent choice.

It's just what are you going to do first?

What are you going to do for the next 10 years?

You know, you need to make a, a commitment and, but if you did

that with, with the kids, or if they do that for themselves,

they will, they will land on a job that doesn't feel like they

should even be getting paid for it because it's so easy and they

love doing it. And, and they just happen to

know that it's worth $100,000 a year.

So they they get that money to be able to do something they

love. And then the second piece of

that is make sure that that you go into a tribe of like minded

people. So make sure that you like the

mission. I would, I would say first of

all, create your own business. And this is this is going to

happen going forward because of AIA lot of people are going to

just create their own business and be their own entrepreneurs.

And that that entrepreneur is the freest person in the world.

So I would wish that on everybody.

Again, it's not for everybody, you know, check and make see if

that's for you. But if it is for you, man, just

do that. It's it's wonderful.

But if it's not yet very clear on on your unique abilities and

passions and go into that field. And I wrote a book on the know

thyself, Love thyself, which is, which kind of covers this whole

concept of starting out with, with mental fitness, mental

resilience. And then you go into this unique

ability and then you figure out how to drop into flow and the

flow state. You can call it what you want,

the zone, whatever you want to call it.

It's it's when time warps. That's how most people know that

they're in it is the day went by quickly or really slow.

And and if once you experience flow, you're you're not going to

want to do anything that's not in flow.

You keep looking for that. And then if you're working for a

company and you have a great leader, a great leader that's

been properly take trained can get the group into flow.

So whatever the group is and then then that's a whole nother

level. So personal flow is amazing and

you can get to that by yourself. Group Flow takes a great leader

and it's it's beautiful to watch.

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the ground up show. Well, I know you kind of ran

through it a little bit, but maybe just helping us understand

the the scope of your business. You said your your dad purchased

the business in the 60s. When did it originally start?

Yeah, I don't know when that building started, but it was it

was just a small machine shop and the guy that ran it wasn't

paying his bills. So I went into receivership and

I believe the bank came and said, hey, anybody working here

want to buy this? So Dad went and borrowed some

money from his relatives and bought the shop.

It was just a small little garage machine shop working on

drilling rigs. But Dad was running it.

So and then he renamed it LNH Industrial because it was Leon

was my dad's name. And then Hank Barney was his his

welding, the guy that was going to run the welding side and help

him run the business because that really didn't want to do

the welding stuff. He really liked the machining.

And he got started and they were, it was a boom.

It was that was a oil and gas boom.

And dad was working on drilling rigs.

And so they were as boom, just rolling in cash from the 70s,

sixties all the way through the 70s.

And they, so they were rolling in so much cash that they built

a brand new building out in the field north of Gillette, out in

the middle of nowhere, out by the fishing lake.

And now it's surrounded by town. But then it was the middle of

nowhere and they actually did develop, they developed land.

So they had this huge Bureau for building.

And I, I started there pushing promotion around the floor and

helping the contractors doing electrical work and things as

they built that building. So I was there to, to help build

the building and then to move all the equipment and move all

the stuff from the old side side of town to the new side of town.

And I didn't know what was going on.

I was 14. But then we no sooner got the

machines moved over there and the work dried up.

They had built this, this shop to handle like, I'll get the

number wrong, but it was like 12 derricks could move it.

You could be set into this shop and it was all designed for the

drilling and it was gone. I mean, literally the day they

opened it, all that work disappeared.

The oil crash. And there, I mean, the most we

ever saw in there after that was probably 2 derricks through the

80s a little bit, but we, we had to pivot to mining.

So all my dad's employees had gotten hired by the mines to

come out and start doing the coal mining and start the

maintenance shops at the coal mines and there was no services

in Gillette. I mean, we were we were one of

the few. There was no field machining.

I helped dad, he took a model A rear end and turn it into a

portable boring machine to go out and lime bore and that I cut

my teeth running that portable warring machine.

Remember being out at one of the mines and they realize how young

I was. And the safety guy, of course

was like, no, you, you can't be here.

You know, they so they took me in the office to dad's friend

and and dad, his friend called him and was chewing him out like

you can't have this 16 year old kid out here.

And dad said, OK, well, have him pack the stuff up and send him

in because I don't have anybody else to do it.

And so I got a pass. I got a pass to, to stay out

there. That's awesome.

So I, I cut my teeth in the mining.

My oldest brother, Lee, he cut his teeth in the oil field.

So he's, he stayed in the oil field.

One of the reasons we bought him out is he didn't want to do the

mining stuff. He he wanted to work on pumping

units. And so he, he took the old shop

and, and set up Marlin oil and he's still, he still owns oil

wells, fixes oil wells. He does that stuff, but that's,

that's why Lee left for the oil field stuff.

We, we still do oil field work. So we do, but it's oil mining

mostly. And then there's some oil field

work that comes in the shop that we do and we, we love it, love

those customers are great legacy customers.

But most of our work is now in surface mining.

So the mines and then the railroad came in in the 90s and

we started working on maintenance away equipment for

BNSF designing. We put real engineers in and we

were always, we always had shade tree engineers and my dad was a

great shade tree engineer. But then we formalized it and

had a whole engineering department then, then we just

kept going out further and further and different minds.

And then NASA, I don't know if you saw the Artemis rocket shoot

off, but we'd, we've worked on the NASA crawler transport.

We do a lot of work for NASA, a lot of work for Blue Origin, and

lots of mineral processing and aggregate work.

Wind, we work on wind shafts. Everything's in in big mining

equipment or big bit large largest equipment in the world,

but it's all machining, mechanic and welding field service.

It's been a great ride. So I, that was one of my

questions. I know part of your mission

statement is that you work on the largest machines on Earth.

Being here close by Gillette, I've gotten to see a glimpse

into some of those. But for our listeners that maybe

you're not exposed to mining and, and NASA, the space shuttle

you mentioned and some of the things you do.

Can you help us understand, I mean, how big are these

machines? What kind of machines do you

build? Yeah, So the the biggest

machine, Well, let's talk about the NASA crawler transporter

because a lot of people know what that is.

They've seen it. That's the machine that's

carried the Rockets out to the launchpad at Kennedy Space

Center since the original rockets.

And, and it just, it took all the space shuttles out.

Now the SLS rocket, that thing's an undercarriage off a walking

dragline from the 50s. That's what it was such what the

design was off of. It was built by Marion Power

Shovel. So it, it is the size of you

could put 4 houses on top of that machine and we upgraded it

for the SLS rocket needed to handle 6,000,000 more pounds

than it was equipped for. So I think, I think it's in the

23. That's tremendous.

It's a tremendous machine. That's not the biggest machines

we work on. We work on drag lines, walking

drag lines, which are like a skyscraper or walking around and

and digging dirt and, and then some of the fixed plant stuff

would be just enormous buildings with enormous equipment in them.

So the opinions that we manufacture can be 3 feet in

diameter and and eight feet long.

The track pads that we manufacture for the oil sands

like to keep those machines from sinking into the oil sands.

They're 15 feet long and two foot bread loaf and there's

hundreds of them on one of those machines.

So these are these are monster machines.

So the world has a lot of big equipment that needs maintained

and a lot of its custom, like the NASA crawler transporter.

There's two of them. They're both at NASA.

Whenever you're doing big mineral processing at a gold

mine or a copper mine, you have massive equipment.

Or if you're working on drag lines or shovels, those are all

equipment that's the size of a house.

So you build the parts that you can in a shop because the shop

conditions are more controlled and nicer.

And then you send them to the field with field crews and you

assemble them there and build them out so that the NASA crawl

transporter parts, there was 1300 of them built in Sheridan

and Gillette, all sent to Kennedy Space Center.

And then the, our field crew went down there for two years,

took all the old parts off, read machine and refit the bores and

installed all the new parts and, and ran test the machine.

It was, you know, it was, that's what we do for all of these

machines and wait. So the, you know, we compete

with people like Kat Komatsu, FL Schmidt, all the, all the big

guys. But those are $50 billion

companies that build the machines.

They, they get tired of them, right?

So if there's, if there's a we buy each other all the time and

then there's these machines that there's not enough of them for

them to take care of. But if you own crawler

Transporter and it's $100 million machine, you'd rather

spend 14,000,000 fixing it and upgrading it, then you would buy

a brand new one for 100 million and you run into that across the

entire globe. But you do have to sell globally

to feed, and we got 250 people in the US and 250 people

internationally. So we have to sell globally to

keep that many people busy. And you guys are, how many

countries or continents are you on?

Aren't you on like 6 continents or something now?

Yeah. So we as far as shops, we've got

shops in Gilot and Sheridan and in Phoenix there's LMH Mexico,

there's two shops down there for the do rebuilds and retrofits

and upgrades. And then there's one shop in

Anavakasa, Chile. And then we've got we've got

offices in Canada. We had the place in South

Africa. We don't have any work thing

there anymore. And we had places two different

times in in Australia. We don't have anything there

anymore, but we sell to all of those places, we sell to Brazil.

So it's, you know, you go where the customers are, wherever they

need you. And usually when you can set up

service and support, you'll sell more parts.

Service and support is the hard part.

It's really tough to staff it and to maintain it.

Yeah. Oh man, those are.

That's a broad reach from some pretty humble beginnings in

Gillette, WY. It is, it is.

We didn't think we would be able to do it, but we tried and it

wasn't as hard as as it should have been because a lot of that

is people trust companies from the United States and then they

especially trust people from Wyoming.

You know, there's some states in the United States that people

aren't known to be that trustworthy.

But Wyoming, you're a cowboy. You're a man of your word.

You'll do what you say you're going to do.

And that's, that's actually very unusual in the world.

So the fact that the USA has that is, is incredible and has

that reputation worldwide is incredible.

And then the fact that Wyoming has even a little higher

reputation of that is, is incredible.

So it's it's actually great to be from Wyoming and sell

globally. I would hope that any

entrepreneur in Wyoming, and I tell my Wyoming innovative

entrepreneurs, this is, yes, be a Wyoming majority owned company

and headquartered in Wyoming and be at least national.

But I would prefer to be global because you're, you know, the

markets ebb and flow. And maybe this is because of my

scars from being so young and seeing the market pulled out

from India so many times. The diversity, we're arguably

over diversified, but I'd rather be over diversified than under

diversified. When it's slow, when it's busy,

that's no sense in all the diversification we have, you'd,

you'd be way better off financially to focus.

But when it gets slow, there's always a customer somewhere

that's busy that it's like, yeah, come over here.

If you got resources, bring them over here.

We'll we'll do all of the stuff we've been wanting to do and

that that works, that works. Now where's the fine line on

that? I don't know.

It changes all the time, but you, you shouldn't have you, you

shouldn't have any customer that's over 15% of your sales

and less than that's better. Yeah, there's some huge wisdom

there. I know We discussed with the

previous guest that there's nobody more arrogant than an

entrepreneur that stumbled onto a booming market and hasn't hit

a downturn yet. They think that they can do no

wrong and they're going to make money forever and then the

market crashes. I've I've seen many of them and

I've been that guy once or twice so.

Yeah. Once you've been through that a

few times, you're like, yeah, this, this money printing

machine will end. Yeah.

About the time that everybody's saying it won't end, that's

right towards the end of it. Anybody can make money in in

demand industry when the market's booming, it's it's the

people that know how to keep it when the market turns that

really show success. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. Go through a few cycles and then

then you're a real business entrepreneur, right?

Yep, you got you got to go through a few cycles.

Yeah, good stuff. Well, I know we mentioned it in

your intro. You've recently launched

Evercore as well. How do L&H and Evercore fit

together? Is 1A subsidiary of the other?

Are they independent businesses? How does that work?

So Evercore is a subsidiary of L&H Industrial and it's my

latest crazy idea. Actually, it's a few years old

now. I decided that my life's purpose

was to innovate energy. It just came to me that, you

know, we've got a serious energy problem going on.

And I saw it coming. And that's what my latest book

is on is Innovate Energy. So my, my life's purpose is to

innovate energy. So I went to work trying to

figure out, well, what's the best way for me to do that?

And of course, I manufacture and I work on a lot of parts for

energy. So we, we do that already.

And so that's the LNH side is the parts for energy.

You know, we're, we're in coal, oil, gas, we, we work on wind

things. We, we would rebuild power

plants. We, we do all of these things to

help them keep their machines running and advance the, the

energy hydro dams is big for us. We do a lot of hydro dam work to

refresh all the hydro dams and improve the efficiency then.

So that was covered under L and HI was at a, at a meeting with

BWXT and one of the Trona mines and I was there as the

manufacturer, right. That was the local guy that was

there to support and try to get micro reactors into the Trona

mines. And I saw them talking back and

forth and they wanted to react. These guys wanted to sell the

reactor the the Toronto mine wanted to buy the reactor, but

nobody wanted to own it. And you know, I'm an

entrepreneur. So I'm like, wait a minute, what

why don't you want to own it? And they told me and like, well,

sounds like a good business opportunity.

How about I own it? And they're like, yeah, that

would be great. So you figure out how to do

that. We would love you to own that.

So I headed down that road and working with Governor Gordon,

working with Wyoming Energy Authority and, and thinking

about this, it came to me that owning the micro reactors, if,

if Wyoming, if we could have a Wyoming based company that owned

micro reactors. And I'm talking about 10 MW,

maybe 20 MW micro reactors and you had fleets of them.

So you'd buy a billion dollars a year worth of them and you would

lease them to my customers, these, these mining customers,

any mineral processing customers, anybody that's remote

that's at the end of the power line and they're the first ones

that are going to get cut off as this energy boom is happening.

So that that's already happening now.

So you would prefer to be able to put a mine or a mineral

processing anywhere in the world so that you could pick the best

ore deposit, right. And and then if you're, if

you're constrained by power, because there's no more power to

sell, you need power. So you're going to you're going

to put in a power plant. Well, do you have coal near you

or gas near you or, or something else?

You need power that's on. Well, a nuclear micro reactor is

a very elegant solution. And I knew that because my

father-in-law that that lived in Sundance, Jerry Schloret, he ran

micro reactors for the Navy in Antarctica and in Panama.

And he was just him and his friends were just beside

themselves that we had stopped doing that in the 70s after they

had proven that it worked. So I knew that this could be

done. And I'd talked to the guys that

that did it. So I started focusing on that.

And I didn't want to build them because I could already see

there was lots of people. BWXTI mean they're the best at

building micro reactors, have been doing it for the Navy

forever. I can see Radiant came in, lots

of people dogpile on building him.

So I'm like, I will build parts for you.

So I want to build parts for BWXT, for Radiant, for all of

these other micro reactor companies from L&H.

And then I want to own those micro reactors.

I want to have that company stock in Wyoming for the long

run and adding a billion dollars a year with the reactors that

are sold to great customers globally.

So you have this Evergreen paycheck coming back to Wyoming

because you're you're constantly leasing these and these reactors

the last 20 years, 60 years, 100 years maybe.

And you can actually be the energy capital of the world,

Wyoming and the United States. It's it's not I, I love Wyoming,

so I want Wyoming to do this. It's not important if Wyoming

does this. It's incredibly important that

the unite somebody in the United States of America does this

because right now Russia is doing it and China is doing it

in a world filled with Russian and Chinese micro reactors is

not good for us for two reasons. One is they don't care about

life, they don't care about whether they pollute the world.

They just don't care, right? They look at killing people way

different than we do or polluting the earth way

different than we do. The second one is you don't want

that revenue stream going to a non free country that you want

you want in your country, right? You want in your country for a

matter of national security. I want that done.

I'm not sure if I'm the right person to do it.

I actually even had a billion dollars a year worth of micro

reactors. You could have a hundred of

these companies doing the same thing and not be in each other's

way. So this is this is a total

abundance play. It's complete subsidiary of L&H.

I'd hired Marcio has brought up for a couple of years to help me

with it. And then I realized that it's

not ready. I don't have any micro reactors

to sell. So he, he went off to do

something else because he needs to get on with his stuff.

And I decided to, to just wait. It's still active.

I'm still promoting it. The book I wrote Know Thyself,

Love Thyself, or the book I wrote on innovative energy just

dropped. And it's, it's, it outlines

that. And he'd say, well, why are you

doing that? Because you're just letting your

playbook out because this needs to happen for the good of the

United States. And if I can do it and I can put

it together for Wyoming, awesome.

If somebody else does it, 100 other people do it in the USA,

that's awesome too. Just needs to happen.

There needs to be great leadership.

And this, this is a way to do it.

So if you were doing, if you did this, and I love coil and gas

and hydro and all of these other energies, there's a place for

all of them. This one could be owned by

Wyoming. Some people will say, well, the

micros aren't going to be competitive.

OK, that's that's true. They're going to cost more than

an SMR or a big light water reactor.

But they're going to be super competitive when you're in a

remote area and you don't have enough demand for an SMR or, or

you don't, you can't connect to the big light water.

So they're, they're not a competition for anywhere you're

going to have SMR's like Terra power.

It kind of made sense in the Trona mines because they don't

have a lot of other options. But anyway, it's, it's more for

remote stuff. So that that's what I'm doing.

And I think I'm going to have reactors ready.

I'm already on the list with quite a few companies that want

me to own them once they sell them, but they they aren't close

to sell. It's close enough to sell them

for me to engage and hire somebody else to run after it

yet. But as soon as they are, then

I'll explore and I'll hire somebody to follow through with

it and I'll round up the money and it'll, it'll round up people

to operate them, start buying them.

I'll start working with Wyoming to, to get this anchored in, in

Wyoming. So, so the, my thought of that

is there's always this worry that worries us in Wyoming

because we don't have to pay our own taxes.

The minerals pay our taxes, right?

So if you could do this for 10 or 15 years, then you would have

something to pivot to, to tax if you needed to.

If, if the minerals would wouldn't pay our taxes anymore,

you would at least have a highly profitable company that you

could pivot and tax to take care of that that be have that be a a

plan for the long term of Wyoming for for a lot of

different reasons. But yeah, main main reason is

that it's a matter of national security.

This needs to be done. Awesome.

Well, I want to dive into the nuclear and understand that a

little bit better. But I mean, we've already

covered you guys do large mining equipment, you're dabbling in

nuclear that you've built stuff for NASA, you have the the

crawler and I understand you guys built some parts for the,

the Artemis 2 that's up exploring the moon right now.

What is the, the type of equipment or the aspect of your

business that you find most exciting?

What What are you most interested in or what is the

most fun to work on? Anything new so I'm a quick

start. So I like the new things that

will significantly improve where we're at or, or, or look just to

learn something new. But it it needs to be something

where there's revenue, there's profit to be to be generated.

So it needs to be somewhere where we're not going into a

market that's full of people that are doing fine.

It's something that that needs to be done being ignored by

others or, or it's just underserved and we can move the

needle in a significant way for our customers.

So we have a compelling offer and we can be profitable at it,

right? We're past working for free on

purpose. We'll do that enough on

accident. We don't want to do it on

purpose, right? Yeah, Amen.

So the new stuff that I'm focused on right now, the NQA 1

you mentioned. So we, we got tangled in with

all of these nuclear guys for quite a few years now.

And we, the BWXT guys brought us an incredible opportunity to

make parts for this power plant. And we're in the middle of still

negotiating that contract with the lawyers.

The lawyers are trying to screw it up, but we'll, I think we'll

get that one landed. But in that process, we decided

to get our nuclear quality assurance.

That's what NQA stands for. It's decided to get our nuclear

quality assurance program in place.

So we hired a guy and he came in and did a beautiful job helping

my guys, Paul and, and Gary set up a nuclear quality quality

assurance plan. We, we hired one person, we got

Paul moving over there and we have two others that we moved

over there, Paul and Gary and and the Russ into a building was

actually LG apparatus shop that we had bought many years ago and

sits right on our campus in July.

So we allocated that building. We're refurbing at putting walls

in because it needs to be secure.

The people having these parts done don't want them mixed in

with the the ISO level parts, which is another quality

program. Your ISO level stuff and your

NQA level stuff will be in a separate building and the people

will be over there. I'll be over there with them for

the foreseeable future just to get this up and going.

And yeah, we'll be, we're we're right now ready to take business

for nuclear quality insurance, which means that it's radiated

components before when they're ISO, we could work on non

radiated components, which when you look at a nuclear power

plant, there's plenty of non radiated components, plenty of

stuff you don't need NQA for. But anything that's radiated now

you have to have nuclear quality assurance level.

And it's, it's a bugger, It's a, it's a big lift.

And I would love everybody in Wyoming to jump in and do this

too. I want Wyoming to be the place

you go to buy parts for nuclear energy that that's a especially

an SMRS and in in micro reactors.

That's a brand new industry. I've never been around when you

had an opportunity to be at the ground floor of creating a brand

new manufacturing industry. And then along with that, the

old light water reactors, which they're going to build more new

ones. You might as well enter that as

well because it's the same certifications.

That's my dream is to help. You know, I'm going to set L&H

up, but while I'm doing that, I'm going to share what I'm

doing with other entrepreneurs, innovative entrepreneurs in

Wyoming so that they too can come along.

And then my word of warning is it's very expensive.

You know, I talked about a building, I talked about four

people. I talked about a certification

program or a program put in place that cost, I think it was

250,000. I think now this work will be

higher margin work. So somebody that's the same part

in ISO and then you do it in NQA, you're going to be able to

target multiple times more for the NQA one because of the

pedigree and the tracking. But I, I think you would need,

you'll, you'll definitely need millions of dollars worth of

work lined up to bother paying for the, the registration and,

and the, you know, having that, that in your building and having

your people distracted by it. And then the other thing we

learned is you can't put it in with your ISO program.

It will eat the, eat the lunch of your ISO program and then

you'll only be doing and 2A1 work.

That's why it works. The higher the level program you

put in, it swallows all the lower level stuff.

And that's OK if you don't care about that old work, but we do,

we care dearly about that old work.

So we firewall between the two to where this doesn't swallow

that. And it's separate people and

it's separate planning and separate hats that you put on

when you're doing it. So it's important to keep a

separate not try to mix it in. It's important that you can you

can see millions of dollars worth of revenue that some some

customers telling you yes, if you would go get that, I will

give you this work. And the way they're telling you

that should be that they're bringing you other non nuclear

work and you've got a relationship with them, right.

Not a not a guess or a passing. Yeah, I'd, yeah, I'd give you

work because everybody says that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If they can get somebody else to

make their investment for them, why not?

But that that goes back to the diversification you were talking

about earlier, making sure you're in multiple markets and

and having your bases covered there.

Yeah, yeah. And then the go ahead.

Oh yeah. I was gonna say, you've

mentioned a couple different levels of kind of nuclear power

and different size systems for the the novice that maybe isn't

familiar with that. Can you help us understand what

size are we talking about what what counts as a micro reactor?

What kind of application would there be for that?

Yeah, so the the light water reactor and I'm probably getting

these terms wrong, but the what I hear normally call the light

rod reactor was your grandfather reactor.

It's it's the one that you see the big smoke stack, right?

It's not smoke, it's steam, but you see the big stack and it's a

huge, huge machine putting out what a GW of power.

Hers look a lot smaller and a lot more elegant.

They look more like a normal power plant, like Wyatt act

power plant. And they're, they're putting

out, you know, 250, you know, 500 megawatts of of energy.

So you need, you need three of those two or three of those.

You'll need three of those to to make up the big ones, right?

So you got the huge ones and then you got the medium sized

ones. They're still fixed plant, but

but you can build them modularly so that everybody's wanting to

build a modular, which means you build them in a factory the size

that you can haul when you haul them to site and you put them

together, do as much work as you can in the factory.

And then what you then you have a micro and a micro is some some

people still build them for fixed plant.

I would love if micro meant that it could be hauled on a semi.

That would be my definition. That's the one I'm looking for.

I want the micro reactor that I could haul it on a semi.

I don't care if it takes 4 semis, but haul them on a semi

quickly assemble them on site and not have fixed plant

equipment and and be able to just set it up, not have things

buried and be able to move that what I want.

I don't know if you've seen the Pele that BWXT delivered, but

it's a mobile micro reactor that the military can use to put it

forward positions when they're fighting conflicts and keep the

power on. And that's because the, the, the

compelling reason for that is half of the deaths in a military

conflict are people hauling fuel to the generators to power those

forward positions. So if you put a micro reactor

there, there's nobody hauling fuels.

You remove half the deaths in those conflicts.

So that's fascinating. But yeah, I want to be able to

move them. I want to be able to move them

in and I there's a problem with moving them while they're

fueled. So that's fine.

If I, if I could at least have an option to move them on a

refuel. So that would be what, every 5

or 10 years when it's ready to refuel, if they no longer need

that energy at that site, I would love the option to move it

to a different site to continue using that piece of equipment.

And that, that's what I'm dreaming of.

And then not have this big fixed plant thing.

But that's the one I'm, that's the ones I'm looking at

investing in because then I can move them in.

So a mine starts, you move in, let's say 10 megawatts or maybe

2 fives because you never want 1.

So maybe 2-5 MW. And then as the mine grows, you

just keep adding them and stacking them on as it needs

more and more megawatts. And then as the mine life starts

going down, or maybe they get better things, they don't need

all that energy start taking them away and moving them to

where they're needed. That that me is a micro reactor.

But I would qualify that with saying a lot of everybody starts

out with that design and it's really hard and it's really

expensive. And they end up with what looks

more like an SMRA fixed plant that you're never going to move

to another location, which means that you better, you better be

sure that you're going to need that power long enough to at

least pay for it, which would be 20 years, 30 years.

There's an interesting problem coming, and that is the cost of

the power. So we're running a bunch of

energy that was put in what, 30 to 60 years ago.

And that's in coal and, and nuclear and all of us, we put it

in 30 or 60 years ago. Well, imagine a house that you

bought 30 or 60 years ago. You know, you probably paid 15

or 30 grand for it and, and now you're living in it and you, you

paid off the fixed equipment long ago, right?

You still got your maintenance, but you, you paid off the thing

years ago. So that's, that's what we have

in all the power plants. We have stuff that the setup was

paid off years ago. Now we don't want to reset up.

Now the, the new house instead of costing 15 grand to build is

going to cost $500,000 to build. Power plants are the same way.

The new ones are going to cost tremendously more than the old

ones because of inflation. And nobody wants to pay that

bill. So everybody's doing this and

they're freaking out about, you know, this and that and the

other. But it's they just trying to

avoid having to pay the bill for the new House, and they're not.

There's no way you're going to be able to avoid it.

Could you Peanut butter across all the taxpayers?

Yeah, but the taxpayers are the same people that are ratepayers.

So, you know, that's the that's the problem that that the world

that the United States is facing right now is we got a lot, we

got to build a lot of power, and it's going to cost a lot more

than it used to. And nobody's going to like the

new price for that power. So they're looking for ways to

make that not true. But that's like saying let's

make inflation not true, yeah? Yeah.

So I've seen some stuff in the news lately about there's a few

startup companies out there that are trying to get the the micro

reactors. And what I was reading was they

were talking about, you know, putting a micro reactor, a

couple micro reactors for each kind of town and moving the

whole power grid towards nuclear on a a small state.

And you're saying you don't think that's feasible.

That's going to be far more expensive.

The primary value of these micro reactors is going to be more

remote locations or more industrial locations.

Yeah, absolutely. You're, you're not, you're not

going to compete with a large reactor with a small reactor.

If you've got a place that can absorb the energy from a GW, you

need a light water reactor. If you have a place that can

absorb 350 megawatts, you need a Terra power and atrium reactor.

You can take the smaller one, but you're going to pay a lot

more per kWh for that smaller 1. So it, there's a place for all

of them and the place for the smallest ones are where you

don't have the options of grid power.

Grid power is so affordable and so amazing that the people that

that dreamed up that, you know, all of those old power plants

and all of the grid and the Co-op systems were amazing and

they're still amazing. They're, they're cooperatives,

right? They're, they're, they're owned

by the users. It's, it's a, it's an amazing

system. There's a few problems with it,

but mostly it's amazing and we need to keep using that where it

makes sense. Now, is it vulnerable?

Yes, it's vulnerable. It's vulnerable because it's a

the grid goes down and the grid really needs to be refreshed and

updated. And I'm not an expert of that.

I just know enough to be dangerous.

But I know our US grid is the largest machine in the world and

we don't really know what what's going to happen when we throw a

few more gigawatts on it, right. It's we know it's not going to

be good. So there's a lot of smart people

working on it. And it's going to, again, it's

the largest machine in the world.

So guess what? It's going to take a ton of

money to fix it. And somebody's going to have to

pony up that money. It's probably going to be the

American taxpayer, which by the way, is the middle class.

That's that's who pays for all this stuff.

So how, how much can they afford?

Will they afford? Yeah, it's the you don't want.

What you're going to see I think in the next 5 and 10 years is

rolling brownouts and then some blackouts that we're not used

to. We're used to the power always

being there. Just flip the switch.

It's always there. You're going to see that is not

true in the future. And it's going to be because of,

you know, grid is going to be does a lack of power.

It's going to be for, for various different reasons that

there are people focusing on and and the good news is we will fix

it, but not without, not without pain and suffering of rolling

brownouts and blackouts that we're not used to in the USA and

not without the energy costing 2 to three times more than it is

today. OK, interesting.

Energy is important though. Energy is the most important

thing that that we have to focus on.

It is for the next 10 or 20 years, it's going to be the

thing. And China is kicking our ass on

energy. They have put on a massive

amount of energies and energy's. What makes the economy roar.

We got to get on with building it.

So what? What are they doing to increase

their energy output as quickly as they have?

How does their system compared to ours?

So they're doing everything and, and because they're Communists,

Chinese Communist Party, they, they don't, you know, they don't

have to find the money. They don't have to ask anybody.

They just decide at a high level that we're going to, you know,

we're going to add power plants and nuclear power plants and

then whoever's in the way, get out of the way.

You know, bulldozers are coming. We'll maybe we'll build you a

shack over here that they don't, they're not free.

All of this stuff. And I love, I would prefer free,

I would never change our USA system for theirs.

And but the truth is there's, they just, you know, the federal

government says we're doing it and it's bulldozers and get the

hell out of the way and, and they start putting them up.

And so it's, it's a, it's an efficient system where we have,

we know, we, we try to get it done by private industry, which

we should, that takes longer all the negotiations.

And how much are you paying private industry?

How much the government have to pay?

We don't want to pay anything, but how much do we have to pay

to get this going? And then, and then you just have

to start negotiating with the NIMBY.

You know, the, the, you can't put it here.

China doesn't deal with that. There's nobody, nobody would

dare say you can't put that here.

You can't say that over there. You don't have that choice.

It's just, no, it's, it's going there and don't care how long

you're how, how many generations this farm has been in your

family that we're putting a reactor there tomorrow, you

know, so that, that's why we can move faster.

And, and they did. So we, we really didn't need

power. You know, we had all the power

we needed in the 70s and then we've been pretty flat lined

since then and it hasn't been a problem.

So, so I was born in 68, right? We flat, we've been flat on

power since 1970s. We've got a lot of other

efficiencies that we put in. So we were just spoiled and fat,

dumb and happy. And now it's come home to roost

that that we have to, you know, we have to put reliable energy

and we have to increase the capacity.

And, and some of that's being driven by AI.

A lot of what's being driven by AI servers about chip plants

coming back home. Each one of those chip plants

takes the same energy as an entire state, you know, so

bringing, bringing that kind of stuff back to the USA, which I

think we're all in favor of, OK, you not only bring that, but now

you got to bring the power source to, to feed it with

power. And it needs to be clean and

reliable and and it needs not to cost the middle class anything,

if you can help that. Right.

Yeah. So what you see them doing now

is the people that are building chip plants, they're just buying

their own power. They're bringing their own

power. This is amazing.

You wouldn't have thought that two years ago.

But they're all like, yeah, we're buying our own power,

we're going to bring it, which is great.

That's a way that the price of that power ends up on the the

company that's selling that product.

So it ends up being in that product for those that choose to

buy it rather than ended up on the taxpayers, no matter if they

decided to use that stuff or not, right?

That's the beauty of the commercialism and or capitalism

rather is man, corporate America solves problems.

If they need power and they don't have it, they're going to

build it so. And it's happening right now

and, and I'm just proud to have a little small piece of it and

know enough about it to try to try to peel off some of it and,

and help up the fight, right. Yeah.

So do you foresee that being a, a potential market for some of

the, the micro reactors and things that you guys are getting

into somebody setting up a, a micro reactor to power just a, a

big industrial facility or to, to supplement power for one of

these chip plants or things like that?

Or is, is it still too expensive for that application?

No, they'll pay the they'll pay for it.

So they, you'll, you'll see it in remote areas or you'll see it

at you. You would see it at A at a plant

like the ones down in in the Toronto mines.

So the somebody that's at the end of the line and the the

person that's supplying them power really doesn't want to

They're they're generating their own power right now, but they

don't like generating their own power.

They want the simpler, easier solution.

I don't think you're going to see that very prominent until

the mid twenty 30s because what's going to have to happen

is somebody's going to have to pay for the first of a kind and

it's going to be very expensive and and then they're they're

going to have to be the the end of the kind, right.

So I believe when you start building and this is whether

it's SMR or microreactors, when you start building, let's say

even 25 a year and it's the same 25 S the same.

You got your design worked out, you proved it.

Now you're cooker cut cookie cutter in 25 of those a year,

the cost curves are going to go way down.

Now, what I don't know enough about, and I need to jump into

is, is the fuel cost and, and all of that, the fuel costs are

a big piece of these micro reactors and, and the big, big

reactors. So, and, and I know that there's

people working on creating competition with that to drive

those prices down too. So, but yeah, as far as the

machines, they're going to get cheaper and cheaper and, and

there needs to be 3 competitors in all of this and to get the

price to be what, where we want it to be.

And I think that I, I can see a path where if we do this right

and we keep doing it, you know, all nuclear energy will be very

competitive with all of the other energies.

Yeah. You need it.

You need it all. That's the, the beauty of our

capitalist system is China might be able to move fast because

they can just put it where they want.

But the the US economy, the capitalist system is going to

find a way to make it affordable because the the competition, the

the potential for profit, they're going to, they're going

to find the most efficient way to do it.

That's right. And we, and we might do some

dumb things along the way, but that's us sorting it out and

figuring it out and getting there quicker, right.

When they've got had a few people on the top that did the

design and then they're like, no, no, that's just it.

That's that's what we're going to do.

You know that that's not very smart.

You know, that's that that doesn't, doesn't self correct.

Whereas the capitalism and the freedom in the United States,

it's sort of self corrects. If there's huge demand and a lot

of money behind that demand, a bunch of people come in and and

supply that demand. And then as that sorts itself

out, then you end up with three really great players in that

business and then they keep each other honest.

And, and that's the great system.

It's worked for 250 years and I'm a huge fan of it.

I'd take that any day over the speed that that a economist

country can do things. Yeah, See you've mentioned the

the efficiency of some of the systems we have right now and

you're investing in, in nuclear. What do you foresee as the the

future of our power grid here in the United States?

Are we going to continue to be diversified or things going to

move more nuclear, whether it's large plants or smaller

reactors? What do you foresee as the

future over the next 10-15 years?

You're going to continue to be diversified for the next

hundreds of years and I have proof of that.

There's, there's only one energy when you look at all the energy

that we've ever used from the beginning of time till now,

there's only one energy that we stopped using and that was whale

oil. And interestingly enough, that

wasn't for an environmental reason.

That was because it was too expensive.

You know that as the whales, as we killed the ones that were

close and they were too expensive to go way out and

harvest them, they, they stopped doing that.

So it's a completely cost driven reason for stopping Nowadays.

You'd be like, Oh yeah, somebody saved the whales, which I'm glad

they did, but that was not that was not why they did it.

They did it because it wasn't competitive.

Every other energy we're still using, even feces from animals.

And if you go to India, they still pile them up in pyramids

and sell them so that they burn them like wood and then we still

burn wood. You talk about the the least.

I mean, it's it's crazy how bad of an energy source that is.

And so my well, the truth is you're going to use all energies

that you have available and they all have a spot.

Every one of them has a spot that there's people act like,

well, we need to just do this one or this one's going to win.

No, that's not true that these fits and, and once you put one

in, they last a long time, five years to 100 years.

You're not going to put a new one in.

You're going to keep running that one, optimizing it and get

all the good that you can out of it.

Now the you know which, which one will they be adding on to

whatever the government decides to support, I guess so.

So what you want when you're in an industry is you want growth,

right? So once, once the growth stops,

then the the margins start going away and it's kind of a race to

the bottom. So which one will be growing?

Definitely nuclear is, is a growing one right now.

And hydro can't grow because you don't have that many places to

put it. Although hydro is arguably, you

know, it's really elegant, beautiful way to create energy.

Solar. There's good places for solar in

Phoenix, AZ Solar really helps because when the air

conditioners are clicking on, the solar is kicking on, right.

And so there's places that it that it all fits.

But I think what we, what we need to stop doing is, is

fighting about it. And we just need to let the

smart people that spend their lives thinking about this say,

well, here, here's your three choices of energy.

That would be the best. And here's, you know, choose,

you choose which one, right? We have that knowledge with AI

now we can very easily optimize that and stop making it about

dumb things that that aren't the cost of energy and and you know,

environment, yes, we all want a clean environment.

Nobody's going to want to contaminate the environment.

So that's that's just true. And that can be true with all of

these energies, energy sources, except probably would probably

pretty hard to argue that wood won't, won't cause pollution.

But yeah, it's, it's all of the above forever.

And that's been true our entire existence.

And I think it'll continue being true.

And I think the other thing that will continue being true is that

any of them that are big polluters, like if if we decided

to go back to just wood and we were only burning wood to heat

Gillette, people would put a stop to that really quick as

soon as it started, you know, polluting the air that they

would stop it. And that's abundantly fair as

well. And the other thing that I think

is very, very important for people to know is the middle

class pays for all of this stuff.

So don't do dumb things that are just wasting money for dumb

reasons because the middle class can't afford it.

And, and if you outstrip their ability to, to pay for things,

it all falls apart anyway. And, and they, they need a

break. So we need to be thoughtful

about the whole thing and put all the energies in that we can

and, and, and keep up with the demand.

Yeah. And their lights on keep

people's life. Yeah, yeah.

Interesting, though, I don't, it's not going to be the

consumers that are the first cut off.

They think they will be, but they're not.

They'll they're the last ones that get cut off.

What happens is first they call the steel mill, they call the

mine, they call the industrial, they're big power users and

they're like shut your stuff off.

So they voters, the middle class that's not out working in one of

these Heavy Industries that uses a lot of power won't be the

first ones cut off. So that's another reason that

heavy industry knows that. And they're like, oof, if they

get cut off for a few weeks that it completely ruined their

profitability there and ruined the contracts.

And this I mean it, they're they're at that serious risk.

So they have to kind of take control and have Plan B's and

C's for energy to keep themselves going because when

the grid's having to curtail, they'll be curtailing the

businesses first. Yeah, yeah.

If you're in an A large industry, a controlled industry

that's only making a a couple percent per year of profit

margin, you get shut down for a week, you're done.

That's it. When I when I owned that shop in

South Africa, it was right when the black empowerment was coming

back in and they took all of the trains off of the railroad, all

the coal trains and they put them on the roads to, to create

jobs immediately beat the hell out of the roads.

Huge potholes destroyed the roads and couldn't get the coal

to the power plants anymore. And this was over about a year

period of time. So we started seeing rolling

brownouts and blackouts. That company became unprofitable

immediately. Within a month it was

unprofitable. So we we've seen it happen and

it's it's a problem. Yeah, I'm with you.

I think the best solution is when large industry, when

corporate America starts solving that problem themselves, they're

going to they're going to find the most efficient ways to do it

and it's going to come through in products cost rather than

taxes or. Which is abundantly fair.

It is, yeah. When you pay for whatever,

whenever you add it to the product costs and the person

that's benefiting from that get to pay the bill.

You can't do that all the time. I'm not against the government

priming the pump to get things going.

They they do sometimes, but but you shouldn't, it shouldn't be a

constant thing where you're taking something that somebody

should be paying for and charging it to everybody else.

That's when it's gone awry. Yeah, that's why capitalism

works, is that the consumer pays the cost of the product.

You're not paying for your neighbors stuff.

So awesome. What I want to shift a little

bit. We've talked a lot about your

businesses and and now especially the in energy

industry. Let's dive a little bit more

into your journey. You know, you started it at 14

years old, just running a machine and a machine shop and

are now president and CEO of multiple, multiple companies.

What has been the most difficult step in your career journey?

The difficult step was getting good at working with people and,

and running people and, and getting the right team that

wanted to work with me and that I wanted to work with.

So I think the people are the most difficult.

It's it's very difficult to find work and, and grow work as well.

But if you have the right people and you know how to, to lead

people and reward them and all of those things that go into

human resources, the people make it easy, right?

If you, if you can, if you can gather up a team.

And I, I was absolutely terrible at it.

I hadn't really had any training at it.

And my, my dad was kind of a maniac.

You know, he, he ran at old school oil, 1970s oilfield

calling me every name in the

book, screaming, yelling, veins popping out of his head.

And that was just how he spent his day, right?

So, you know, I didn't want to do that because that wasn't

working. By the time the 90s come around

work anymore, he just lost people.

But I was still, you know, I was kind of a young punk jerk.

And I remember I got a a 360. They did a 360, which is they

have all the people around you evaluate you.

And, and my dad delivered that to me.

And I was so pissed, so pissed because everybody hated me,

right? And but it was a wake up call

for me. And I'm like, OK, I needed that.

So I started working on being a better leader and I'm still

working on being a better leader.

It's you're never done. It's just always constant.

So I think that's, that's the hardest part for me and the

biggest learning. And I'm still learning and now

I'm into the mental fitness, mental resilience and, and

unique abilities and flow. So it's a, it's a higher level.

But to find finding great people, I am convinced that I

can grow as much as I can find great talent to service the

customers and find and retain right.

So for, for the 1st 50 years of LMH, we had 30% turnover.

So 30% of the people would leave every year.

Started working on that and trying to change that when I

took over as president and in 2000, so I took over as

president around 2000, 2012 it dropped to 3%.

And I remember calling Denise, my HR manager, and I'm like, did

we do something or is this just what's going on here?

We've never seen anywhere close to 3%, never seen single digits

ever. This is, I don't know.

We'll see. It's been at 3% since then.

Now it's at 2%. So we only have 2% of our people

leave every year and that's astounding.

If you run the numbers on 30% turnover versus 2% turnover,

it's all of our net. We would have no net if we were

still at 30% turnover. So it's, it's, it's really,

yeah, it's, it's hard because people are slippery and it's

important. If you do it right, you end up

with awesome people that you end up like Navy SEAL.

So our, our mental fitness coach that we have was a, was a, it

was a Green Beret. But all of these special forces,

right? You end up knowing that person

beside you and you got their back and you know what they're

going to do. But you know what they're going

to say before they say, you know what they're going to do before

they do it. You know, each other has each

other's back. You know, when they're having a

tough time, you pick them up when, when they have a tough

time, you do the same. And so that's the culture we're

going for. And that's, that's, that's next

level. And it's, it's awesome.

That's incredible, man, 2%, that's kind of unheard of in any

industry. So especially a a blue collar

industry that that's pretty impressive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I'm very proud of it.

It's, it's probably my biggest, biggest accomplishment.

And it took a lifetime to to get there and, and, and as you know,

it would take a few minutes to screw it up.

Yeah, you can't. You constantly have to work on

that and, and create it and make it happen.

And if you end up being an idiot for, you know, a few weeks, you

could ruin all of that. Yeah, absolutely.

It takes a lot of attention in your time growing within the

business, leading the business, growing the business, at what

point were you most afraid and what what were the consequences

kind of driving that fear? Yeah, I was probably when I took

over as president, that was probably the biggest fear that I

had, because I was, I had no business doing that.

We'd bought out Dad for half at the company and then two years

later we buy out my oldest brother for another half.

So I bought 100% of the company in two years.

I didn't know you weren't supposed to do that, although my

banker told me you can't do that thing to change banks in order

to get it done. But I had no idea how far I had

my juggler stuck out. And we got it done.

And thank goodness it was in one of those growth spurts, right?

So just got lucky and we were in a growth spurt, so we were able

to work our way out of it. But you know, when you take over

from any a previous leader and they were, they were both great

leaders, the people that are there, you know, they, they were

following that person, not you. So then there has to be this

transition and some of them go away right away and some you

have to weed out and, and there's this whole transition of

you either winning over the people that are there, which is

very hard, or getting rid of them and getting your own team.

So there, there was probably a 10 year transition there that

you didn't really know who was, who was working for you and who

was trying to, to get rid of you.

And so that was a big bold change.

Plus, like I said, I was, I was ill equipped from a capability

standpoint for that job. It took me quite a few years to

grow into it. And so there was a lot of risk

there. And you know, it's and I, I've

stuck, I've stuck my neck out quite a few times.

I kind of do that every once in a while, but that was definitely

a bit the biggest and scariest one.

And thank goodness it worked. Because if it wouldn't have

worked, I would have not only let down my family, you know, I

had notes to my dad and my mom and my brothers, my brother for

for years. So I would have, I would have

really let a lot of people down and thank goodness it worked

out. Yeah, yeah.

So for the the young entrepreneur, the the young

leader out there that's maybe stepping into a position they

don't feel qualified for or aren't quite yet qualified for,

what advice would you have for them to do what you've done and

and really step into that role and become successful?

Yeah, you, you follow your heart and your gut.

So your your, your head, heart and gut.

I spent way too much time in my head up until about 7-8 years

ago and you know, basically ignoring my heart and gut and

let my head veto them. You know, don't do that.

You know, follow your head, heart and gut and know yourself.

You know, I, I knew that I could as a workaholic and I still am a

workaholic. I'm a little recovered now, but

you know, I knew I could work my way through it.

I could, I could work harder and more than anybody else.

So I would win, right? But you have to know yourself.

Not everybody's built the same way, but you take those risks

and you learn from them. And I try, you know, the, I have

it. I, I hesitate giving people

advice to be too aggressive or not aggressive enough because I

was very aggressive. Like you said at 32.

I was, I was a president of L&H Industrial, which, you know, it

was probably A7 million, $8 million company back then, but

that's still a serious number for a, you know, 32 year old

that, that hadn't been trained to do that job.

You know, the, they have to do their thing.

But I, I did it by working a lot and being a workaholic and, and

I did it my way and they need to do it their way.

But now, now with AI, it is so much simpler with, with AI, they

have access to all knowledge ever, ever, all of it.

So they just need to know how to ask good questions.

And then they could set up their AI.

So if I had it to do over again and I had AI in 2000, I would

have focused on learning AI. I would have set up my executive

CEOCFO dash dashboards on that. And it would have hand fed me

what I needed to look at and pay attention to.

But word of warning, it would have told me no way, don't buy

out my oldest brother. So this is where the heart and

the gut comes along, right? Yeah.

So sometimes not having that information served me well.

Got lucky. Luck is part of it, right.

So, yeah, it's, it's a hard one, but, you know, I like being

bold. I like taking hard problems and,

and solving them. And I think it's incredibly

great now that everybody has access to AI, has access to all

knowledge ever, and it puts it in context that they can

understand. And so it's going to be easier

for people to do it now. But it's not always great to

have all the knowledge either. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

And you, you, you do things because you don't know any

better. And so that one worries me a

little bit that now we all have all this knowledge and you're

doing things perfectly that that's going to make you not do

things that if you would have otherwise done them, you would

have, you know, he would have been more successful.

It's it's an interesting problem.

I didn't, I didn't answer your question, but I don't think

there's an answer. I think they, they have to do

their own thing. I coach all the people Wyoming,

and not all of them, but some people, Wyoming innovative

entrepreneurs. And I try to get them to figure

out they usually know what they want to do.

My mental fitness coach, Travis, he, he coaches me and all my

people and he coaches all kinds of top executives around the

world. He's been doing it forever.

Since he got out of being a Green Beret, he's been doing

that. And he says the hardest thing

for people is to choose what they want.

So his saying is you can have anything you want, you just

can't have everything. And when he's working with

people, they, you know, they can give him a litany of things they

don't want that are happening to them in their life is So he gets

the list and he's like, OK, I got all that.

I got all the stuff you don't want, but now what do you want?

And that is such a hard question for us human beings because we

don't want to choose. Choosing and focusing is very

important. If you if you look at my skill

set, I mean, it sounds pretty broad when you read, read it

off. It is brought.

But I've been at it for 43 years.

Right. Yeah, but it's really focused on

fixing things and making things and and people.

So they're really my my depth out of that gets shallow.

That I I've been focused on this this thing for 40 some years.

That that's why I'm, you know, that's why I'm where I'm at and

that's why I bought everybody out along the way because they

they're like done. What would you buy it from me?

And I just kept buying and, and you end up, you end up with this

thing to and This is why it's important to make sure it's your

unique ability and passion, because I love this thing that

I've created and Co created with all of these amazing people over

the past 40 years. I love it and I do it because I

love it. And that's that's the most

important thing. If you love what you do, you're

keep focused on it and doing it. So you mentioned you're running

about 6 or 7 million when you took over.

Do you mind sharing what you've grown that to?

How have you guys grown over the last 25 years?

It's 115,000,000 right now and we, we grow around 5% a year and

it's choppy. It's not 5% it's, it's choppy,

right. You'll have your ups and downs,

but 115,000,000 and it's it's 100% closely vibrately held a

matter of fact, it's 100% held by family for the first time

ever as of two years ago, we bought the last non blood

shareholder out. So it's now it's me.

I own about half of it and then I got my son Gage lives in

Sheridan and my nephews Dustin and Jason and they own the other

half, which is beautiful. So why why is that beautiful?

Because you're not having to buy out any more shareholders.

I've spent my entire life buying out shareholders.

I can't even imagine how many I bought out like 20, some of

them. That's incredible.

So you got all of this equity going out to buy out past

shareholders, right. And we're at the end of that

because I don't want to retire. And thank goodness my partners

don't want me to retire yet. So I get to stay and do the fun

things. They do all the follow through

stuff and run the company. It's, it's managed by them, but

I get to do the cool stuff that I decide to do in the micro

reactors or an AI or setting up this new NQA and the crazy new

stuff that may or may not work, but somebody needs to go spend

the time on it, right? And so that they, they do all of

that, But so that the reason that's important is too many of

these companies are for sale. And when you're for, if you're

for sale, then you know, that's fine for the person that owns

the shares. And then you get, you know, pump

it up for a big sale and they, they get a bunch of money and

everybody high fives. But it, the company's never the

same after the sale because it's got a different leader and they

got to pay that sale back. It was probably sold for too

much. And now the beatings will

continue until they can get their money back out of it.

And that company that bought it, a lot of times they're on it for

a very short time. So they're just going to flog

the heck out of it, try to get it worth five times more and

then they're going to dump it. The customers don't get great

service. The employees are just getting

whiplash and and put through all kinds of nonsense.

I like the own it and, and have the family own it to protect the

shares. And then the, the companies ran

for the good of the tribe and the tribe being employees, the

vendors, the customers, they all count on us continuing to do

what we do and continuing to grow and to be here when they

pick up the phone. And, and I think even with just

employees, there's probably, you know, 1500 people by the time

you have figure the 500 nationally and internationally

and then their family members, there's probably 1500 people

that count on L&H for, for their livelihood.

And yeah, yeah. So it's a, it's a big, it's a

big tribe and it's our tribe. That's awesome.

Well, that's an incredible story and man an an incredible success

to start where you did and take it to where you have.

So that's great. Yeah, we'll keep keep, keep

rolling and keep pushing it. What it gets easier the longer

you go? Yeah.

Oh, man. Yeah.

I had a conversation recently that man, you know, five years

ago, a, a problem that would have been just a, a debilitating

stop the presses take all my attention.

Problem today. I just call that Tuesday, you

know, as as the company grows and you grow and you gain

ability and gain skills and that and that's very evident with you

as well. So.

Yeah, you've been through it before, and you have better

people and better machines and better systems, and you just

sail through it where, like you said, it would stop you in your

tracks 5 or 10 years ago, and now it's no problem.

Just a Tuesday. Was there anything that delayed

your growth? And if so, how would you handle

that differently today? Yeah, so the big thing that

delayed my growth, I, I, I put in three different ERP systems,

which is a computer system for manufacturer inter size

enterprise resource planning systems.

And the first one was job boss and it was OK, right?

Collected our information. And then, then I, I learned that

I wanted to schedule. I wanted to use it to schedule

because we were scheduling the shops on the back of a, you

know, yellow notepad. I, I would schedule the machine

shop and, and Roy would schedule a welding shop and Lee would

schedule a mechanic shop. And, and then we would, we would

try to work together, but we were actually competing and we,

we would try to try to get things to flow through them.

And it was just an absolute nightmare.

Things would get lost. It was it was terrible.

And so I bought another software that didn't work out, was a

complete failure. Took me about it was 2 years of

trying to get it stood up and and at the end of that I

realized that it would not schedule.

It wasn't going to work it they'd sold me a bag of goods

that would not work. So I had a failure, right, that

two year failure and this was right when I was buying or

taking over as president. So then I take over as president

and I've got this failure of the ERP system and we're back to

using job boss and I come on with this new system called

visual that I'm like OK guys, I found the one.

I'm sure this one does what the concurrent finite scheduling

that we want to do. And of course people didn't, you

know, they weren't jumping up and down for that.

So they were throwing rocks at me.

But I started it and I, I drug them kicking and screaming for

eight years because for a few reasons, I didn't know for sure

that it would work. And concurrent finite

scheduling, strange. It's, it's 3 year old math, but

the problem is you have 80 people that are doing things

that affect the math. So dates on purchase orders,

dates on receivables, how much, how many hours are supposed to

be on the job did are you reporting your percentage

complete? Just everybody that is feeding

information and can screw up the schedule if they don't do their

information properly. So you're running around, it's

like pushing the waterbed down, right?

You're running around getting this person to do it right.

And then you run over here to get this other person to do

theirs right. And by the time they do, then

they quit doing theirs right. So I was chasing that and there

was a few guys that were just that I should have fired a lot

earlier or, or put the hammer down on, but I wasn't quite sure

that that it would work. So I, I drug them kicking and

screaming. It took me 8 years.

If I had to do it over again, it would probably take two or three

years because I wouldn't put up with it.

I would just be, I would be a better leader and I would, I

would be willing to, to get rid of people sooner that were

standing in the way and not cooperating.

Yeah, that was, that was an expensive long one, but I, I got

it. And there's only 4% of

manufacturers in the world that do concurrent finite scheduling

because of that issue. And once, once it worked.

So eight years after we started in it and it worked and they all

saw it work because everybody all of a sudden, you know, I got

everybody doing what they were supposed to do.

Then it was self correcting and everybody would kill each other

if they weren't putting the data in right and they could easily

see who wasn't. So then then they were all

making sure that everybody was on the bus.

So it worked out. Yeah.

OK. Well, that this next question

might tie into that, but is there a lesson that you wish you

would have learned earlier? Learned earlier it's a no, I

don't, you know that one that would be better to learn earlier

and then anything to do with, with how to run people and the,

the, I guess the biggest one that would have been the biggest

benefit if I learned it earlier was mental fitness and mental

resilience. If I would have got onto that

earlier. That's been a gold mine in the

past. We've been working on it 7-8

years now and it's, it's an absolute gold mine to focus on

your mental fitness and your mental resilience and unpack

that bag of stones that we all carry around and get to get

that, that part of it for, for you and your people.

And when you put it out for your people, you know, don't expect

people to run, run for it because they've been jaded by

all of the normal ways of doing it.

But if you get a really good guy like Travis and you pay, you pay

for it and you you allow them and their kids, their family to

do it, you can change a lot of lives and you can save a lot of

employees, you can save a lot of marriages.

It's a complete game changer for you and your people.

So that was gonna be my follow up question.

There is especially in the trades, I think a lot of people

are somewhat resistant to programs like that.

I mean, yeah, what does that look like and how did you gain

the engagement of your staff? How did you gain the buy in?

Yeah. So I was doing it to begin with

and it was working so well that I offered it to my family and it

was working so well there that I came to my partners and said,

Hey, I'd like to offer this. And we put it out there and, and

I had, I started by doing videos and recording podcasts like

this. They're on LNH, honestly, better

mentalfitness.com free to everybody.

And so I, Travis and I started sitting and talking like this

about these issues and about what, what I was working on,

what he sees in the world. So that what that made it

accessible. People could see that, you know,

see that I was in it and I was talking about it as the leader

and, and the. But what ended up happening was

the, when we first introduced it, the people that were really

in crisis, you know, usually divorce or their teenage

children are just, you know, into drugs and alcohol and, and

going off the rails. So something traumatic like

that. There was four people that

engaged him and then he's so amazing that they told their

friends and and then they told their friends.

So now we're up to 100 sessions a month, which is unbelievable.

We're maxed out and, and, and we've added some other

resources. Stacy Stook, you, my executive

assistant does the unique ability Colby Clifton and print

stuff so that he can. Hey, you need to go figure that

out. Go over to that person and we've

got another Sarah that works on works full time in Gillette and

she's, if you're working on your health and your, and your

fitness, she can also do some mental fitness and resilience

stuff too. She's she's into that, but her,

she was hired for the health and fitness side of it.

So we got three people that, that are focused on that and,

and incredible engagement and, and you can't, you can't pencil

it out on a spreadsheet. So when I, when I tell other

entrepreneurs about this and then I, I've even introduced

people Travis before, but he, he's too busy now.

I can't take anybody else. But when he could, nobody could

replicate it because they, they couldn't get past, you know,

they wanted him to only talk about work stuff and not include

the family and they wanted to see it pencil out on the

spreadsheet and it just doesn't work.

It kills the thing, right? Whereas we're just like, Hey, if

you're helping our employees, I don't care if it's their, you

know, their, their significant other or you know, their kid,

whatever, just do what you need to do and we'll, we'll cover it.

And that, that works and we're hands off.

You know, we, we give him a list of who our employees are so that

he can make sure that they're just not random people coming in

off the street. But we run it pretty loose and

that works. And, and then when you used to

talk about return on investment, you have to use your

imagination. You know, what is it?

What does it save you to not have people in a funk for years

after a divorce or the, you know, better yet, the ones that

you saved from being divorced or the ones that would have quit

because they were in such a, such a down area that they would

have, they would have flamed out and quit and you were able to

help them recover from that. That's that's worth.

That's worth, I think it's worth millions a year to us, and it's

costing us about a quarter million a year.

But you could argue that because you can't, you can't point to

the column on the spreadsheet that quantitizes it.

It's like health, right? If you prevent the heart attack

or the cancer, you don't have the measurement.

Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff. We've tried to get some programs

like that going a lot smaller scale than that in my business

and we just had a hard time getting employees to take

advantage of it or get the buy in.

But it sounds like you guys have kind of found the secret sauce

there. It's all about the quality of

the person that's that's doing the helping Travis.

I ran into Travis at this executive 40 years of Zen that

you go to and one week expensive intensive executive training and

I ran into him and it was incredible.

And I'm like, man, I'd really like to bring this back to my

family, but I can't afford to, you know, slap all them out here

and pay for each of them to come to this.

Nor would it fit what that program is for and asked him if

he would try to do it on Zoom. And he's like, now let's try it,

see if it works. But it's the quality of the

person. That's it, right?

That's, that's all I'm trying to if we lose Travis now, Stacy's

amazing and Sarah's amazing. So we have a couple that are

backfilling, but Travis is just next level and he's spent.

I think he was a Green Beret in 2000.

So he spent all that time since then training in this.

He'll be hard to replace. I, I did create a Yoda chatbot

though that's available for anybody that wants it.

That's on that honestly better mental fitness website and it

runs off a ChatGPT. It's trained off of, of all of

the ancient mental fitness people, like philosophers that

Travis believes in and and follows their, their teachings.

It's all, it's all ancient wisdom, right?

So it's trained off of all this ancient wisdom and then all the

stuff that's Travis and I do. And I know that self led by self

book and it's really good. It works amazingly well.

I get a lot of incredibly positive feedback.

So that's available to anybody in the world.

You can get it on ChatGPT or you can get it on my honestly better

mental fitness website. And it's check it out.

It's it's really good. That's nothing better than space

with Travis, but this is available 24/7 free.

Yeah, that's cool that you put that out there for the whole

world and and allow access to everybody.

That's great. So.

Yeah, right thing to do. Is there an opinion that you

once held strongly that you've changed your mind about

throughout your experience as a leader and throughout your

career? And then I held strongly that

change. Yeah, school was the first one,

right? So I thought school was done as

hell. And then I then I realized it

just doesn't didn't fit for me being told what to do.

So yeah, I changed my mind on a lot of a lot of the schooling

stuff. Although I think now schooling

is being is going to be completely disrupted by AI and,

and, and needs to be in a lot of ways.

But there's still a lot of you know, when when I say that I

mess around with Harvard and MITA lot of people are like,

that's snobby, which I was in that camp before I went there.

And once you're you go there, you realize that these are just,

you know, top of the top elite people that are getting shit

done and you should spend you should hang out with them more.

You know, they're not they're they're not a Snooty.

Most of them aren't as Snooty as you think they are, right.

So that that's the school side of it.

You know, I've spent a lot of time on thinking about

compensation because compensation and and incentives.

So when I was young and naive, actually, I wrote my thesis,

Kennedy Western on, on compensation and I had AI had a

strong feeling that that incentives would really drive

performance. And then I proved myself wrong

about in about about 2010, I finally woke up to the fact that

the compensation needs to be there, but it is not what keeps

people. They are good people.

As a matter of fact, I learned the opposite.

The more you pay people, the more they'll just flake out and

leave on your or resent you. As I was watching people with

other companies that were getting paid, you know, $300,000

for a job that they should have been paid 150 for.

And they completely resented their employer for it and left

and went into competition with that employer.

And that would happen time and time again.

So it was interesting. As far as the compensation,

people want fairness. Fairness is was way more

important than the amount. So, so as an employer, you

really have to get fair on, well, how do we decide who gets

paid what? And how do we do we do profit

sharing? So is, is the profit sharing

fair? And do we make sure we're paying

the people that should be paid and not paying people that

shouldn't be paid? And then you have to make all of

that simple enough to where, where people can generally agree

on it, right? So, and to make it simple

enough, number one, you have to have a written plan that's

shared. And then #2 you have to put

people in charge of making these decisions that people trust.

And they won't be right. You know, there's no, there's no

right. It's just we did our best and

we, we had a, we had a way of doing it.

And if they people trust you and you do it fairly, then they'll

stick around. And if they don't and they start

thinking somebody's shady, then they'll leave you.

And so I think that that compensation, I was, I was

pretty convinced when I was young and that incentives would,

would really drive performance. And now I'm convinced that you,

you hire somebody and they, they've got people have this,

you know, I work at a certain level.

It doesn't really matter what you pay me.

I'm going to, I'm going to perform, I'm going to do these

things and I'm going to do them over and over again.

And if you don't pay me enough, I'll leave, right?

That's true. And if you got unpaid fair

fairness on, you know, if your pay is not fair, then I'll

probably leave too because I don't like that.

But as far as you know, incentives don't don't drive

real performers. You just lock them into a good

pay. And the other thing that I

learned is and, and not to qualify, not everybody at LNH

agrees with this stuff. But the other thing that I think

is true is where was it going with that?

It'll come back to me. I forgot that one.

Yeah. The compensations, a big thing

around figuring that out. That takes forever to figure

out. And you got to have your system.

The I did So what I came back to me.

So I like to pay people well, well enough because what I, what

I saw happening after being there for a long time was when,

when people want to, they'll, they'll pick their head up once

in a while and look around and see if you're screwing them.

And they do not count any commissions nor any bonuses.

Anything that comes randomly and is not guaranteed, not built

into their pay. They don't count that money when

they're looking at different jobs.

So when they're when they pick their head up and they're

looking around, they're just looking at base pay.

So you can't really retain great people with a low base pay and a

High Commission because as soon as things get a little bit tough

and they know the commission's not there, they are going to

jump to another company with higher pay.

So I prefer a bigger higher pay and then a profit sharing.

If the company makes X amount, anything over that we'll share

and that that works. OK.

But you do still like having a a profit sharing component in

there to incentivize? Performance, yeah, the profit

sharing components important because if you're really making

it rain, people want a piece of that, right?

Yeah. And so, yeah, so the company

needs X amount. So for us it's 8%.

We need 8% to pay for our stuff and pay for new things going on,

right. So we need 8% net for the

company to be healthy and, and sustained.

So we split anything over that. We'll split with employees.

We got a graded system 8 to 10 and 10 up and, and that as soon

as we put that in, we became way more profitable that really the,

the, the community really responded to that.

Now we don't just split that evenly.

We, we have ways of splitting it that are fair.

So if somebody's didn't add any value, there's Jason and my

partners largely does a lot of this for the production.

If somebody's adding no value, they can get nothing.

If somebody's adding twice the value, they can get double.

And we try to keep it simple like that, right?

We don't try to. You can't turn it into a math

problem is what I've learned too.

I used to try to turn it all into a Microsoft Excel

spreadsheet math problem. And that that doesn't work

because you can't put all of those other things in there that

a human knows. So you have to put somebody in

charge that's trusted to make those decisions.

OK, interesting. And then they run it by other

people that agree with them, right, or or disagree with them

and adjust those decisions. Yeah, yeah.

That's an interesting system. And we, we also have, we still

have commissions, my other partner Dustin and he likes to

run commissions with his sales guys because he's convinced that

it does drive performance. OK.

And that's fine, as long as you, as long as you keep enough base

pay to keep them happy in the slow times, then I, I think

it's, it's fine. I'm not I'm not.

I argue that it drives performance on, on good people,

but it does drive performance for some people.

Some people really like that, that they like to have that

carrot out there. So if you could go back to when

you're 14 years old, starting out in the machine shop and do

it all over again, would you? Yeah, I would.

I love it. I love what I do, love where I'm

at, even all the the nasty parts in between.

I mean, that's the stuff you look back at fondly now.

So I'm one of the few lucky ones that still loves what I do.

And I can imagine doing this for another 40 years.

And it's largely because my great people and I get to do

what I want to do, right? I'm not, I'm not bogged down and

anything I don't want to do my, my personal values are love,

freedom and flow. So I don't do anything that

reduces the amount of love in my life or the amount of freedoms I

have or the amount of flow I have.

So I'm, that's what that's what I'm shooting for personally,

when I make all my decisions is love, freedom and flow.

Plus I'm not good at the follow through stuff anyway.

So that I drive my guys crazy if I get into it.

So they, they're just like, let me, let me take that.

I'll do that for you. I'm like great, please do.

Awesome, that sounds like a sweet place to be.

Yeah. What has been your biggest win

as a leader? Biggest win, the biggest win is

the team that I have now and how incredible they are on that,

that 2% turnover. I mean, it's it, it's very, very

hard to gather up, you know, 250 tradesmen and, and other people

supporting those tradesmen and have it be people you enjoy

being around and that stick or something crazy.

And we, we all like each other And you know, that's, that's,

that's my biggest win. It's the, it's the love of my

work and the love of the people that are in, in my work.

And then we're, you know, we're just, we're continuing to

ratchet that up a little bit all the time.

Our, our immune system is so strong.

If if somebody fakes their way in our our interview process is

pretty good. We usually weed out the people

that aren't going to fit the culture.

But if they if they fake their way in and they get in the

immune system kicks them out very quickly.

So it seems self healing now that they don't stick around

very long. And I used to worry about that

like what happened to that person, right?

We just had them for three weeks now I'm like, oh, must not have

benefit. That's awesome.

I think I'm going to quit asking that question because almost

everybody. Says their team.

Well, all great leaders are proud of their people.

So all of them mean it though, yeah.

That might. Be true, so I know.

It yeah, you've. Pursued a lot of education, a

lot of different areas. You've gone back to school

twice. I've heard you mentioned a

number of different coaches that you've engaged.

What has been your best resource to grow as a leader?

Yeah. Best resource to grow on the on

the. Technical piece is Peter

Diamandis abundance 360 and he has a podcast called Moon shots

right now. That's that's amazing if anybody

wants to deep dive into that. And so Peter, I get my download

of all of everything futuristic and tech from Peter.

And then Dan Sullivan is on the thinking about my thinking.

So Dan Sullivan, a strategic coach is the best.

He's got like 17,000 people that he coaches in the world.

And, and he, he, he does the thinking about the thinking and

the mindset and how to think about things.

So like, I really enjoy that. And I spend a lot more time on

that because the yearly download from Peter's enough gives me

enough of the tech stuff to work on.

All of my AI stuff, digital things came from him.

My moon shot of innovative energy came from him, but Ding

on, you know, keeps you focused and grabbed and centered.

And then Travis Ramsey, you know him, him coaching me at 40 years

is then and helping me with mental fitness and resilience

has been incredible. Harvard was incredible.

Harvard still. These other ones will pay in the

future. Harvard I did in 2007 and 2009.

So I've gotten arguably 2 million a year because of that.

That time and money I spent with those people, these other ones,

they, they, they could beat that, but they'll be less

measurable with a Harvard one. It was very measurable,

$2,000,000 event, $2,000,000 event, $2,000,000 event, Very,

very focused back to people that I met at, at Harvard OPM and,

and classmates. So those are the top 4, top

four. And what Dan Sullivan tells me

and I he's right is there's always another level.

So I've got lots of people that are in strategic coach and

Anabond 360 that are leveling me up.

Even even with Travis, I met a guy that works on brain scans

and reprogramming brain stuff. That's, you know, he's so

there's always another level, right?

It's like it's like climbing a mountain.

The higher you get, the more you can see and the more things you

can do. And there's there's no end to it

unless you retire or quit. And I don't ever plan on

retiring or quitting because it sounds boring, right?

This is so much fun, but I can't imagine not doing it.

That's awesome. That's awesome.

Yeah. That's a pretty good ROI.

It's. Been 20,000 a year for three

years and gained 2 million a year after that.

That's why I tell people and I've I've experienced living

proof of this. Just go to the best trainer that

that you can find and just pay the money.

They're, they're always expensive.

Go to the best and figure out where everybody's going.

Because not only is that trainer the, the professors at Harvard

were amazing, but the, the, there's 180 other entrepreneurs.

I've gotten more out of the other entrepreneurs than I got

out of the trainer. So there's this 2 million a year

is because of AI was sitting down with one of my classmates

13 years after we'd graduated. And this guy, him and I weren't

that tight, you know, we didn't really hang out, but he called

me up and he's like, hey, I'm down here, do you want to go

dinner? So I did and I was telling him

that I was headed towards debt free and he's like, why the hell

are you doing that? We, you know, we went to the

same school and the same classes like that's dumb.

Why are you doing that? And I said, well, I'm sick of

mortgaging everything I have every time I sign a stupid

little note on a machine or a, or something else.

And he was like, you don't have to do that.

Let me introduce you to my banker and he'll set it up a

different way. So he held my hand and

introduced me to UMB and I was with Wells or I think I was with

Wells at the time. And it cut my bank costs by 2

million a year by that one conversation with that one OPM

guy and his intro to the bank and then his holding my hand

through, you know, do it this way, don't do it that way.

It's, it's incredible what those and that those are the little

things that happen, little stupid things that happen,

right? That, that if you're with the

right people. So, so, you know, go, go to the

best trainer that you can go to. And, and I'm not saying this

damn the cost. I know cost matters, but man, I

can't imagine my life if I wouldn't have talked my partners

into letting me spend that 20 grand in that three weeks a year

for three years would be I wouldn't be where I am today.

Yeah, that's something in my own life I regret not seeing the

value in. Earlier, with my own education

and connections, I always kind of discounted the connection

aspect and I thought, well, I'm just going to, I'm going to work

hard. I'm going to prove myself and

stand on my own work. And you know, I think there's

value in that. But man, the connections you can

build along the way, there's a lot of opportunities I missed by

not leveraging that. So yeah, they they call it a

water. The Bill Alette from MIT calls

it a watering. Hole and what he means by that

is you know, you should hang out with people that you're aspiring

to be like. So if, if you're aspiring to be

a phenomenal business person of, of a privately held business and

you go to a Harvard OPM, then you're around 180 people that

have a very similar set up like you and your head in the same

direction and you feed off of each other and it's it's a

watering hole and, and you know, you are who you hang out with.

So if you don't like where you're at in life, just look

around and see who you're hanging out with and, and change

to hanging out with people that are where you want to be.

That the challenge you right that.

And and I think that one of the reasons we don't do that is we

don't want to look stupid. You know, I don't like losing, I

don't like looking stupid, But you know what, that's when I

learn. So when I put myself in a

situation where I'm with people that are wave, wave higher than

I am and I don't even understand what they're saying, but I want

to then I, I'm, I'm learning. And then and then I try to do

that for others to pass it down, right, Because if I'm going to

do that and they're, and these, these people are always

incredibly gracious to hand me everything that they have.

So that's one of the reasons I try to do the same thing because

I think we're all, we're all put here to help elevate each other

and we're all on a journey. It's a it's an individual

journey, but we can sure help each other get there if we're

clear on where we want to go. Amen.

Good stuff. So you you mentioned selecting

the. Best trainers I know.

I mean, we live in a world now where it seems like everybody is

a, a personal coach, a life coach, some sort of a, a coach

without any real backing your experience.

And I've had some experience with some that we're definitely

not worth the money. How do you go about vetting, you

know, finding the best trainer and vetting that to make sure

it's somebody that really can provide value?

Yeah, I, I get hit up by all kinds of them because these

these abundance. 360 and strategic coach I go to are full

of those people that are just looking for people to coach.

And so, you know, I, I, I get them from each other.

So I met Dan Sullivan through Peter de Mendes, So they were

vouching for them, right. So I, it's usually a referral.

I'm very suspicious when I get hit up by somebody who just cold

calling. Matter of fact, if they're

hitting me up on e-mail or LinkedIn, I just ignore it.

I just, I'm not, that's not how I find my people.

And frankly, right now I don't need any more people.

I got so many people that are helping me that I'm I'm

committed with. I don't have another time.

So there's, there's actually a couple people that I would love

to engage with that I know could teach me a lot about AI.

And I just, I don't, I can't do one more engagement.

I'm, I'm already doing about 360 strategic coach.

I'm already doing the Travis stuff.

That's enough, right? That's enough.

So I I will tend to do too much of it.

And and then you're not doing your day job, which is what the

point of doing all this stuff is enhance your day job, right?

But then you're spending all your time training.

And I'm guilty of that. So, yeah, but you don't have

people that that you trust tell you about these people.

You you can find them. You can find them easily now,

but also use AI is a incredible teacher now of anything that you

want to know. And it's on your terms at your

demand. So I, I use AIA lot for, for

teaching me and training me. And I I'll use it to sort people

out too. But you'll know it when when,

when this person has really has something to offer you and it

just feels right. And your head, heart and your

gut are like, yes, I have to do this.

That's when you do it. So if it's a hell yes, do it.

If it's anything but a hell yes, don't do it.

Yeah, I had a a personal role there for a few years with if

you. Call me trying to solve a

problem I didn't know I had. The answer is no.

That's a good. That's good.

I like that if I know I have a. Problem.

I will go find you to solve it for me if.

If you call me trying to solve one of my problems, that's not a

problem that I have. So yes.

And the world is so full of them now.

And. They're making these AI agents

to chase you around. It's going to get exhausting,

but it we'll just. We'll filter them, all right?

We'll put them all on block. Yeah, yeah.

All right, well, this is my favorite question that I.

Ask of every guest, are you a person of a particular faith

tradition and if so, how has that shaped your leadership

journey? So I was brought up Catholic and

my parents were pretty strict. Catholic, you know, I was

baptized and, and you know, we went to church probably till 17

or something when, when they gave up.

And I don't, I, I am very spiritual, but I'm not

religious. The religions bug me because of

the control issue. I already told you I have

control issues. I don't like being controlled

and, and church seems like it was set up by men to control

men. And so I don't like that.

But I'm because of that, I'm very glad that my parents put me

through the Catholic stuff and I believe in God.

I believe in Jesus. I know that that all happened

and I believe that there's, there's higher powers.

I know there is, I, I know now today, more than I knew three

years ago, that that there are, there are higher powers.

I mean, I, I believe there's, there's angels following me

around. There's no way I could have gone

where I'm at in my life without having a guardian Angel.

Now that's a very Catholic thing, right?

So, But yeah, I, I'm a believer. I, I have an incredible amount

of faith and, and not actively in, in any religion, but I like

them all. And what I do now is when I'm

searching for the truth is I go to my AI and I say, look at all

of the religious scriptures from everything and tell me what,

what common, what you see common through all of them.

That's where the truth lies. There you can find the real

truths. But then when a, when a person

grabs that and creates the religion and they, they put

things in and they put them in for good reason to get people to

behave in a certain way that's better for those people and to

get money out of those people too.

But there's, there's a lot of truth in all of the Bibles and

all of the religions, and they're very useful.

And I would encourage anybody to go through it.

And I think that the point is to become very spiritual and know

there's something beyond yourself and also know that

you're, we're all connected. You know, we can all read each

other's minds and we don't like to know that because it's very

uncomfortable. But we're we're a connected

people and you can. I don't know what what the

connection is, but I can tap into the the spirit of all of it

and get downloads that just came from somewhere that I just know,

but I don't know how I know them.

OK, how about you? I I'm a committed practicing.

Christian nice we we attend a Christian Church and pretty

devoted. There so.

That's awesome. Yeah.

I love it. And anytime that you're

meditating. Or or praying or in any of that

is it's very valuable time. Yeah.

So is there somebody that you would like to see on the show?

Somebody that has a a really unique story or an interesting

career, interesting industry that you'd like to learn more

about. That's interesting.

You know Elon? Musk's always interesting to

talk to. What if you can make that

connection? I would love to have him on.

Yeah, right now he's not responding.

To my emails, so he's not. Dang it, Dang it, any of the.

Politicians running this sort of this race we have coming up is

very important and want they want the politicians that are

that are for probusiness and growth and diversification and

to to win. This radical stuff is wearing on

me. But I was talking to Bo Biteman.

He's running for Congress. I think he would be a good one

to be on your show. He's he's really got it plugged

in. Anybody, that's anybody that's

going to help businesses grow and diversify and help Wyoming.

Well, that's an angle I've not looked at before, so I might.

Dig into that, especially as we get a little bit closer.

It's coming up faster than I would like.

Let's go on now, because they're the elections, the primaries.

The other thing that the people need to know is the primaries or

what sets it all. If you don't vote at the

primary, your votes really not that important, especially in

Wyoming, especially in. Wyoming the the primary.

Decides it the the general. Election.

It's all done by then and I'm very guilty of not going to the

primary but it from now on. I have not been very happy with

our politics last couple of years.

So from now on I'm going to make sure I make it to those

primaries and I'm going to be preaching to everybody to to

make it to the primaries. I think I think both said it was

in August 18th or something. So it's coming right up.

It's game on for for the election right now.

Yeah. All right.

I might have to look into. That well, my my last question

we ask of most of our guests to either fuel or settle the

debate. If you have a job to do and have

to use a cordless tool, which brands do you prefer?

I buy the DeWalt. I like DeWalt.

What about you? I'm a DeWalt.

Guy, I think Milwaukee has been edging us out those.

Are those are the two big contenders of all my guests is

Milwaukee and DeWalt, and I think Milwaukee might be pulling

ahead, but I'm a DeWalt guy. I've had DeWalt for a long time.

They've just served me well. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

I like them. Awesome.

Well, Mike, thank you so much. This really has been a pleasure.

You are just a, a fountain of knowledge on a number of

different fronts from, you know, manufacturing to energy to

business and leadership. I know you're a busy guy.

You're, you're running a a couple massive companies and I

have a lot going on. So I I really appreciate your

wisdom. I really appreciate you taking

the time to chat with us. You bet.

Eric, thanks for the time. It was a great conversation.

I appreciate it. Yeah, this has.

Been great and thank you guys for joining us here.

On from the ground up show again, if you like the content,

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