Ep 120 - "Making Alex Duta" Part Two

0:00 What up, amigo? What up? What up? Changing it up. Yeah. You know, dude, I watched this. Buddy, do you ever watch Parks and Rec? Yes. I can't remember what episode it was, but it's when... I'm going to brain fire everybody's name. What's the guy that she likes? I'm totally destroying this. Anyways, it's a bad story. And long story short, it's this key leader that... He finds out that all his interns, like he's responsible for this big pile of intern staff. Yeah. He finds out that every single one of the interns is actually connected directly like family-wise to like senators and congressmen and women. Like they're all like these people's kids basically.

0:41 And he's all really pissed off and he's about to like can them all. And then he finds out that he can't basically. Yeah. And so he has this moment where he begins acting like super cool and trying to be connected with everybody. And he's making like all these old school references to like shows and content that all the kids have no idea. He's like, he's like, Rendo, Rendo Minium, how you do it? Like doing the whole, it's like, they don't even have a clue who the fudge he's talking about. Anyways, let's get to business here, man. That's funny, dude. I don't know why you're taking time talking about bullcrap. I feel like I've had a hundred of those conversations with my children. So it's kind of what made me think about it is like how out of touch you end up being and you don't know it.

1:24 So you try to like connect in quotes with the younger crowd and you realize I'm way older than I want to admit. Anyways, here we go. I'm feeling more and more of that as time goes by. I was just hanging out actually last night with a couple of business buddies of mine that are in their mid thirties. Oh my gosh. You know? And it's just like, you know. Yeah. Exactly. It's different. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it just kind of reminds me of our guy, Wayne. You know, I think Wayne's 29. Yeah, it's crazy. I was like, dude, if I was half as smart as him at 29. I know, dude. I'm not even sure where I'd be. I know. I mean, he's brilliant. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah, it's true. There it goes. It's true. Okay, we got a great show today. This is number two with Mr. Alex Duda. Yeah. And so this is Making Alex Duda Part 2.

2:06 I guess there's our title. Alex, man, he is a fascinating dude. And I think one of the things I appreciate about him is... And I hate to say, especially at his age, but it is pretty remarkable what this guy's achieved. But I think the more impressive thing to me is not necessarily what he's done in terms of dollars and how many businesses or whatever he's built. I appreciate how thoughtful he is. I think he's keyed in on some things in his life. Yeah. certainly at an earlier age than I have, you know, I think just kind of puts him out in front a bit, especially in his age group. There's just so much to be learned from how he's kind of ordering his life and the way he thinks about the work and the way he's thinking about his family.

2:50 And so I just think it's a great listen for any business owner, certainly, but also any just aspiring leader. And for those of you out there that are quote, young, you know, whatever that means to you, I think you'll find it really inspiring. And if you missed the first part with Alex, she'd go back to making Alex Duda part one. Yeah, they kind of build on each other. They really do. Yeah, yeah. We talked about just some, a lot of lifestyle stuff comes up and I think we don't talk enough about this. I was having a similar conversation with my buddies last night around the fire. It's just, we don't talk about these inner things as much. We don't talk about how we're approaching our family life and just how important and integrated that is with how we do business, you know?

3:31 So we get into all that with him Yeah. He reminds me a lot of Zach over at Liftify, where you've got two men who are really proactive in kind of all the quadrants of their life, not just winning at work or professionally, but they're very intentional about how they carry some of those disciplines and those prioritizations over in their personal life. And I think, again, you never know for sure. Right. But I see a guy that's doing the best he absolutely can to be winning in all quadrants at the same time. Yeah. And I think that's worth taking note of and paying attention to because I think all of us can use some hacks to get better at doing those things in conjunction with one another. Yeah. So here we go.

4:11 Hope you enjoy the show. Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart & Boots podcast. I'm Chris. And I'm Brennan. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours. I'm noticing that and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose. No, I don't. I didn't. And I am not happy with it. Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for listening to the show. Hey, if you're not already following, please do so. And ultimately share, right? The coolest currency that we have in terms of supporting this is share it with a friend, share it with somebody, a colleague, a peer, one of your downline team members.

4:55 Let them be able to take advantage of the information you're already leveraging in your favor. And finally, guys, if you hear a show that really moves you, that really moves the needle, will you please leave us a review? Those five-star reviews help Right on. And listen, if you're trying to grow your business, you might consider checking out Floodlight's Business Opportunity Audit. It's free. We provide it at no charge. It's actually what we use to assess new clients as they come in. It's 110 point assessment for your business. And we've now decided to give access to the general public for it. So go and take our business opportunity audit at floodlightgrp.com. It's going to help you identify the biggest gaps and opportunities in your business right now.

5:37 And at the end, it'll assign you a health score to let you know exactly where your business stands right now. So go check it out, floodlightgrp.com forward slash audit and take the BOA. It's a great way to get a pulse on your business. All right, Alex, my man, we're back for part two. You know, this decidedly, we were going to keep this more focused on entrepreneurship, your leadership journey. So I titled it, and I don't know if it was kind of a goofy title, but Making Alex Duda, right? How have you sort of put this life together, right? That you've created for yourself. both in building and ultimately selling a successful restoration company to now you're in a venture-backed software startup and, and, and, and, and, and we're, maybe we'll touch on some of the other ands during our chat again today, but...

6:23 For people that listening to this and you haven't heard the first part with Alex, go back and pick up that first part. We talk about certain lifestyle practices and disciplines that you have, some philosophical stuff about how you approach your work. And we talked about booze, I think, at one point. And so we're just going to... We're going to hang with a Z just so we're... Booze. Yeah, I just want to make... Yeah, I'm a little bit stuffed up. So I want to make sure that my words come across very clearly. Keep it PG. Booze. Yep. So we're going to kind of hang in that pocket. Here's how I want to open it up, man. I've been following you on social media as have, I think, a lot of people in our industry. And you are regularly posting content.

7:03 And we just talked about this at the outset of our conversation. You have a similar approach to content production as we do. It's capturing all the real moments throughout the day, all the ways we document our work, and then sharing that stuff out, kind of pulling back the curtain. It's great. But in addition to the content, man, you have a lot of stuff going on. I mean, just to rattle off what I've seen via social media, which is, of course, the whole truth, I'm sure, about your life. You're building your dream home. You've got this venture-backed software startup, which is no small undertaking to begin with. You lead at least one private Google or excuse me, Facebook group. You're active on LinkedIn. You obviously are leading and developing your software startup team.

7:47 You're meeting with investors. You have existing investors that you have to steward those relationships. Yeah. You have a young child. Children? Child. Child. Just one, Sophia. Child. You're married. You're a private pilot. And you fly regularly. So here's my question. How do you choose what not to do? Oh, how? That's a tough question, but I think I boil it down into two things. If it doesn't bring me value and I don't enjoy doing it, I don't do it. Or if it doesn't bring value in general, I would say. So if it's not valuable and I don't enjoy it, it gets cut out. The other thing is, I think people, if you look at the different things that people can do, they kind of fall into different buckets.

8:33 There are things that people are really bad at, not meant to do. There are things that people are all right at. They can do sort of kind of okay. There's also things that people can do that they're great at, right? So, I mean, I'm great at a handful of things. But I think if you're an entrepreneur or if you really want to get to the next level, you need to focus on your superpowers and only do your superpowers and then find ways to delegate and or build systems around the things that maybe you're great at, maybe you're mediocre at, maybe you're bad at. It doesn't matter and take those off your plate. So I could sit and write a good Facebook post.

9:14 But that's not my superpower. So I go find other people and I build systems around a Facebook post. My superpower is the knowledge of the restoration industry and restoration entrepreneurship. So I need to find a system through which I can basically feed somebody whose superpower is writing to be able to write Facebook posts. And then make it like seamless and natural. And that's when calls like these get recorded and then they get watched and then they get created. So I think a lot of people like they're afraid to give up things that they're great at and good at and maybe mediocre at because they feel like, oh, what's my purpose if I don't, if I give up those things. But the reality is you need to find your superpower, focus on your superpower, and delegate and get rid of all those other things.

9:59 And your superpower is that one thing that everybody's like, you do very well, and everybody's like, how in the world did you do that? You know, some people, you know, like think of people who play instruments, for example. It's like, how in the world did you hit the piano and all that notes so well? Like it came, and then that person's answer would be like, I don't know, man, that just kind of came naturally to me. Like I learned it over time and I just kind of picked it up. So that's my answer to that. What would you say your superpower is then? My superpower came from a very young age. And I think my superpower is actually dreaming. So we kind of talked about my childhood, first generation American immigrant parents were working a lot. I probably had a, and still have a very interesting, maybe rather abrasive personality.

10:43 I would get in trouble at school a lot, do stupid stuff all the time. And I'd get in trouble a lot. And, you know, old Eastern European and troubled, it's like you get everything taken away from you for like a week to two weeks and you're stuck in your room because you can't do anything else. And like my coping mechanism became like daydreaming. So I remember like sitting on my bed and pretending like I was driving a truck down the road. And then, then I envisioned myself building skyscrapers. And like, I would dream like I drive up to the truck site with the big dump truck and get out of the truck and hop up on, you know, ladders and stuff. And like, I'd even pretend like I'm fixing up stuff. It was almost this weird thing that maybe most people would make fun of me for at the time. It's like you're enacting these things.

11:24 And eventually I did some acting and such. But I realized that not a lot of people, it doesn't come easy to a lot of people to think of the future, to dream or to visualize or to come up with that. And that's just something that comes very naturally to me. I close my eyes, imagine a scene, look at how something looks like, and then communicate it well. And that's my superpower. So the concept of Albie, I'm horrible at the meticulous, project management part of software where you have to write these really flushed out tickets with all the requirements of what things can do. But I can see a future of restoration tech. With everything I do, I guess, yeah, that's what comes naturally to me. It's like seeing the future or seeing a world where this is different and being able to dream it and then being able to articulate it to other people.

12:10 That's interesting. I just have a question, kind of a follow-up to that. First off, I can totally relate to your comment about the fact that there's almost like some fear around personal value that we build around all these kind of auxiliary tasks that we just really don't love and we know that are a weakness. So I think that's a piece that I've been personally wrestling with quite a bit recently. It's just being able to segregate yourself. And honestly, man, like in full transparency with you, you saying like, hey, I think dreaming is my superpower. I think that's hard sometimes for, I know for me, like for me to say that's valuable. Like that is special. That is the unique thing. And all these taskings are things that we can hire out and that we can develop personnel to help us execute on.

12:55 All right. But here's where I want to go with this. So you are living or have lived kind of like two different places where you guys, you were a part of building a restoration company where there was all these transitions and stuff that you went through. I'm going to assume a lot more bootstrapping, right? Like this is grassroots. We're feeding our own machine. Now you've got this kind of investor partnership type relationship with Albiware. Okay, go back to restoration days as you're settling in on some of your superpowers and What was some of the mindset or posture that you had to have as you're trying to get the business to these points where you can begin delegating some of these things? Because I know some people are listening and be like, yeah, I'd love to toss off 20 things, but it's hard for me to accomplish that or see that I can even get there.

13:43 Yeah. Yeah, what did that look like early days for you, man? While you were dreaming, the work had to get done. The projects had to get managed, right? Yeah, that's true. In the vein of dreaming, even in resto days, I think a remarkable moment was when Warner Cruz, the owner of JC Restoration, had invited us over to tour his facility. And I remember my father and I had gone there and we walk in and, you know, beautiful facility. There was this sign that said, welcome, Nick and Alex. And we walk into this reception area, shake his hand. He had an executive assistant, see the war room, see this world-class facility. And I remember, uh, Thinking to myself, and then even when my father and I left there, we were like, well, if Warner can do it, we can do it too.

14:26 Like, what does he have that nobody else does? And that's what pushed us through from like day one when literally dad's garage, air movers, DUs, we had to go rent our first base because the freeze was coming in and we couldn't keep the DUs in the garage and such. We were always motivated by, well, if other people can do it, we can do it ourselves as well. What does that other person have that we don't have? They have two hands, two feet, you know? Yeah, Warmer was a little intimidating because he had this awesome business school and went to Japan and such. But I always, I guess, related and always went with the mindset of somebody else can do it. We can do it as well. As far as delegating while in the field, I think there were a lot of challenges.

15:13 There was never a challenge of giving up the work. We found technicians. We saw the value of us stopping to do the work. Within three to six months of us starting the company, we had stopped physically doing or leading the work. We had technicians and we would be more of a crew chief role and such. But some of the biggest challenges that we ran into were things like we won't let somebody else answer the phone because we believe that the phone ringing is like super, super, super important. And we don't want to lose that job. And, oh, we can't find somebody who can write an estimate as good as we write it. So we were kind of holding on to those things. And it was like a huge struggle to let go of items. And eventually we were forced just because we had a lot of work and there was nobody else to do it.

15:56 So I can't say like there was a mindset shift. It was almost by the fact that we were overwhelmed. There really wasn't enough time a day. We were working these 16-hour days. We had to eventually let go of things. And then there was this whole battle of trying to accept that. Maybe nobody's going to do it as good as you think you do it. Or maybe the tasks like no one individual contributor is going to be able to fulfill all the roles that you filled. At the beginning, taking the call, doing the work, signing the job, doing the estimate. But then 12 to 16 months later, we now realize that we had individual contributors that started doing things better. They didn't do the whole together, but they were starting to do things way better than we would have done them.

16:37 Right. Way more organized project managers, way more meticulous, way more organized crew chiefs, way more hardworking that could lift heavier bags than we could and do work that way. People over the phone that were way more pleasant than we were at three o'clock in the morning. And then it kind of clicked afterwards to 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking perfect. And then the second thing clicked is you don't need to find the person that could do it all well You need to find the people that can do little bits and pieces of it. And there's going to be people that can really knock your socks off into something specifically. I mean, we had an estimator. I was decent at Xactimate. I'd say pretty good. I'm an Xactimate certified trainer. But we had an estimator. We had a photographic memory.

17:18 He can just pound out $10 million a year worth of estimating work. When he worked at CWF, he did actually $18 million a year of estimating work. I personally can't do that. Right. And yeah, it transitioned into, oh, we were kind of holding ourselves back by not looking for those people ahead of time and our self-limiting belief of we have to do everything. Nobody can do everything as good as we can. As entrepreneurs, no one can maybe do the whole thing as good as we can. But there's a ton of people that can do bits and pieces way better than we can. That's huge. I think that's super sound. And for those listening right now, maybe if you want a point of reference to maybe dive into that topic a little bit deeper, Who Not How is an excellent book for folks to take a look at to maybe help crack that code on how do I begin leveraging other people's specialties, right?

18:09 Bigger piece of the puzzle. So that's cool. I actually, I want to dig in to my first question again. I want to circle at it from another angle here because while I agree with you and I think that took us off in a good direction in terms of delegation and the importance of identifying our superpower and all that, I also know it still is a struggle that I think all entrepreneurs and leaders have. some degree of shiny object syndrome in the sense of, like you talked about doing things that you're great at and meant to do. I'm just curious about your decision-making process of how do you prioritize in a sea of lots of good, great things to do that may even tap into your superpower How do you discipline yourself and your team?

18:57 And I know this to be true, my very minimal dabbling in the software startup space, enough that it traumatized me from wanting to get back into it, is this whole idea of creating a product roadmap that can't create the next Google platform. in V1 of our products, right? We can't create... You can't create the next... Let's just in our industry call it Dash in version one, go out and cover all the scope of functionality and everything else day one. And so you're always managing a product roadmap of what are the most valuable features for us to develop first, next, etc., etc. From a cost standpoint, what people want, marketing, all that kind of thing, right? So similarly, dude, how do you choose what to do first?

19:39 Yeah. And how do you choose when to not do something that otherwise could be very good and could be a big opportunity? How do you choose between various lots of good things to do in order to focus on the most important thing? What's your decision making process? And how do you do that as a team? Because I imagine your team, you have a lot of creative thinkers on your team that are always coming up with new ideas and, oh, we could do this and maybe even other verticals you guys could serve. How do you stay disciplined doing the important stuff that's right in front of you? Yeah. So I guess an example that I can give, and maybe it's not restoration specific, but a recent example that comes to mind is I was sitting in on a sales team meeting and the sales team felt a little stuck and a little overwhelmed.

20:25 And there was a bunch of different ideas of things that we should have done with the sales team. data needs to be cleaned up better. We need to get better automation. We need to try to call these different people, try to go into these different verticals and so on and so forth. A bunch of different ideas were coming up and I could see everybody, I guess the analogy I would give is they're spinning their tires in mud and there's a lot of momentum moving on in that conversation, but people were frustrated and there were no solutions. And I kind of, I don't know, out of intuition, just asked, hey team, and this was a newer team also. We had grown very rapidly from like four employees to now the sales team, I think it's around 18 employees.

21:05 And I was like, hey, what's our North Star in sales? I just had the intuition to ask that. And we got like eight to 10 different responses from the different team members there. Oh, it's how many demos we book or how many calls we make. But nobody really mentioned the North Star. And like from our board approved plan, there was a North Star and the North Star was an ARR goal, which was a revenue goal. Right. And it was the end result. So nobody knew it. So I threw it up on the board and I was like, okay, this is our North Star, right? It's like $400,000 of ARR every month needs to be closed. And then we went through and we also made a list of the problems that they were trying to tackle.

21:47 It was like a list of 14. I'm like, which one of these things will really move the needle? to hit that North Star. And we rank them from, well, we cut out the ones that didn't, and we rank them. And then I'm like, which one's the 2x lever that we should focus on and put all of our time and energy? Which one is that lever that will yield 2x impact on our North Star and also have the least amount of effort? And that's kind of how we looked at it. And we all came to the conclusion that who cares if our house is not in order, right? Who cares if our data and our CRM isn't as clean or our company isn't as perfect, right? As long as we're hitting these metrics, especially since everybody's comp plan and everything's tied to it, everybody succeeds.

22:28 Another example, like customer success had brought up the fact that, you know, our billing system's kind of messed up. There's no direct tying on our user system to a billing system and it's a manual process. And then we went back to our mission. It's like our mission is to pull the restoration industry forward. We're like, okay, it's going to take us six months system with our engineers to be able to alleviate the pain that we have this person sitting here manually doing billing for restoration contractors. And it got a lot. I mean, we have thousands of users on the platform and it's literally a full-time job to do that. But I'm like, do we really want to take engineering resources away from our mission of propelling restoration forward? Like in those six months, we could build so much more and we've got a lot on our roadmap and kind of steer away from our North Star of that to fulfill our selfish needs of getting our house in order.

23:14 And that's kind of how I think of things. It's like, what are we trying to accomplish here? And okay, all of these different things we can do are great, but does this fit that North star? So that's another way you can frame it. And then which one of these ideas is the 2x idea with the least amount of input needed or the least amount of effort needed? And that's another matrix to look through it. I love that. Super sound. That's a great way to think, dude. And that's exactly what I was looking for. That's awesome, man. Because I think we all struggle with that, right? With deciding amongst various good options. I think that's a really great way to think about it and simplify the thinking.

23:54 how do you feel that you can introduce or and or adopt that kind of same mentality in the personal life? Because I mean, I'm assuming there's a lot of alignment in terms of the way that you behave and act and lead yourself. So what's the tie in there? How do I do that same kind of concept, you know, developing my North Star in my personal life? I think they are very synergetic. And I think personal life to me, if you're talking about personal finances and then personal being, from a personal finance standpoint, I think the most successful or people that build themselves up personally or their personal net worth the highest, I feel like a Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban, and so on and so forth, they don't get involved or don't invest in things that they don't think they have an unfair competitive advantage in.

24:38 So even there, they create these things called investment theses, theses, thesi? Anyway, theses. They create an investment thesis. Yeah. They create an investment thesis around something specifically. Then when you go on to like personal, like I think every family, there's this book called Family Boardroom 2. And we're starting, we've started to implement those principles in our family. But I think there's something magical that happens when you and a spouse or a partner co-creates together and you formulate North Stars or a mission for a family's existence. Yeah. And kind of work together as a family towards that. And it needs to fit the bucket of the reason for family existing and what we want to do. And if it doesn't fit that bucket, then it kind of drops lower to the list or maybe we don't do it.

25:23 At the end of the day, a family is an organization. A non-for-profit church or whatever is an organization. A company is an organization. A country is an organization. Right. And it's an organization of people that have one thesis or a mission or a North Star. And I think it's very important to look at it from that lens and to focus on that North Star without getting distracted by other things. Liftify.com forward slash bloodlight. You've heard Brandon and I talk a bunch of times about the importance of Google reviews. Maybe you even heard our episode with Zach Garrett, the CEO and founder. Recency, consistency, two of the most important things when it comes to maximizing the benefit from your Google reviews.

26:07 Why not use an outside partner? Liftify is targeting 20 to 25% conversion, right? So if you do a thousand jobs a year, you ought to be adding right now, 200 to 250 reviews a year, every single year. If you're not doing that, you owe it to yourself to get a free demo from liftify.com. See their system, see how it works, see how affordable it is. I promise you, you'll thank us. Liftify.com forward slash bloodlight. Thank you. You know, we spend a lot of money and a lot of attention trying to get that first call. And one of the things that we do once it happens is sometimes we leave it to chance, right? Who picks up the phone? How do they respond? How do they walk that client into a relationship with us? Well, one of the benefits of partnering with a team like AnswerForce.com is we can systemize that.

26:52 We can make it more consistent. We can also have backup for when our teams need that help, right? Somebody goes on vacation. Somebody's out sick. You know, we get a storm surge. We get Cat Event. All sorts of things can have an impact on how we receive that client. But the most important thing is they need to know that they've chosen the right team. And so AnswerForce.com can support you, be a bolt-on partner to help you consistently produce an awesome onboarding experience with that first call with your client. So AnswerForce.com forward slash... blood light. That's great. CNR Magazine, we're friends with all the folks at CNR. Michelle and her team, they do a great job of keeping their ear to the ground and reporting all the important information from our industry.

27:34 Right. You want to stay up on all the M&A activity and what the latest best practices are for selling your company successfully. Right. She's got that great articles about all the four quadrants of our business. Right. CNR is constantly pushing out great material and leveraging great writers and subject matter experts in our industry. It is the water cooler of our industry. So if you're not subscribed, go to cnrmagazine.com. Follow them on LinkedIn. Follow Michelle on LinkedIn. Trust us. If you're trying to stay on top of everything happening in the industry, your best destination is cnrmagazine.com. You guys, many of you have already heard about actionable insights and the training and the technical expertise that they bring to the industry.

28:17 But how many of you are already leveraging the actionable insights profile for Xactimate? That's the game changer. It's essentially an AI tool that's walking alongside of you as you write your estimate, bringing things to your attention that should be added, that could be considered. All of them items that increase our profitability, increase the effectiveness and the consistency of that scope. And it can do anything from helping a new team member assimilate some estimating best practices. And it also helps the grizzled bets add back that few percent that we've just forgot over time. So actionable insights, get insights.org forward slash floodlight and take a look at what the actionable insights exactimate profile could be doing for you and your team.

29:05 All right. I got another topic. Meetings. I would imagine you have a lot of different kinds of meetings. Can you give us, I mean, so you have the experience, obviously, of running a restoration company and there's a meeting cadence that's required at some level to run a successful restoration company. Yeah. Now you're in a venture-backed software startup of all kinds of new types of meetings and audiences. Can you give us some of your best practices or maybe some principles that you try to lead meetings by to make them productive? Yeah. Absolutely. So I think the biggest thing that you need to understand about a meeting is like the cost of a meeting. So you're going to host a company meeting and you've got, I don't know, let's say an average person's worth 40 bucks an hour, right?

29:50 And you could even do an opportunity cost. An average person could produce $1,000 an hour and you've got 50 people in that meeting. That's $50,000 in that hour. So you need to understand that you need to deliver out deliver that much value within that meeting or else you've, you've cost that meeting money. So I like, I don't take meetings lightly and I don't schedule meetings just for the sake of having meetings. I have ultimate intentionality behind every meeting. And like in the back of my head, I know, Hey, these people are taking time out of their day to meet with me or whatever. We're taking time out of our day to meet on this specific topic. Like the intentionality needs to be set. And it can't just be a meeting for the sake of meetings.

30:32 I also believe in rituals. And by rituals, I mean like different things that repeat themselves over and over. They build themselves on top of each other. And by rituals, I also mean, how can you incorporate the different people in the meeting to feel human and to all feel present in one place? So oftentimes, like people tend to jump into meetings and get straight to the chase. I always reserve, you know, four to five minutes to talk about, hey, here's a trip report or hey, what was the win? or, hey, what'd you do this weekend? To have the different people feel human and be there, and they're not just there for that specific meeting. As far as cadences, I think there's different types of meetings or different types of cadences for different types of meetings.

31:19 So typically, we operate off of EOS on both companies, both the restoration company and the... software company. So every single week, there's like a departmental meeting and we follow the US structure. I think the US structure is fabulous in the fact that you start off with five minutes of good news. Then afterwards, you go into scorecards and you're reviewing the metrics as a team. So you're reviewing your North Star that we just talked about. Then afterwards, you're going into holding each other accountable on to-do lists and checking those things off. And then afterwards, you're talking about your ROCs, which are your 90-day things that you're trying to move the needle on. So everybody is super laser focused. And then that all feeds into an IDS session, which is identify, discuss and solve. So basically, whatever's holding you back, like a great question to always ask in a meeting, if you're talking about numbers, it's like, okay, great, we didn't hit these numbers.

32:04 What's the number one thing holding us back from hitting these numbers or from doing this outcome or from moving the company forward, and then having a discussion there where you're solving things. As far as other types of meetings, I think leadership retreats are very important. We do them quarterly. And a leadership retreat in my book consists of the leadership team getting unplugged from the day-to-day business where they're just stuck in the weeds and into the regular monotony of the world and going to do something together. So we'll book a cabin in Gatlinburg or up in Wisconsin or whatever. And we have a couple of purposes. One is review the previous quarter. Two is set the new quarter plan.

32:45 Three is do something around our core values. So we're very adamant about how our core values are. And we have two activities that we do as a leadership team that pushes us out of our comfort zone. So it could be anything from, we haven't done firewalking yet, but that's like an activity. But like, we've done things like extreme hikes through really bad weather and stuff like that, too. If somebody's uncomfortable with presenting in front of a crowd or stuff like that, we'll do things like those to help push people outside of their comfort zone, kind of realign us with our values. Then there's board meetings. If you don't have a board, I would still put together a board meeting. The concept of every single quarter, synthesizing and looking over your business and how it's worked, I think is huge as well.

33:26 And then the last type of meeting that I use is a one-on-one, half an hour. feedback between you and your direct reports. If you have any direct reports, all focused on how can I serve the direct report so that way they can achieve their goals and their dreams bigger. And again, an awesome question to just start those things off with. Well, what are you winning at? Let's celebrate. And then two, what's the number one thing that's holding you back? And giving feedback 100% on what you think, speaking your mind, whether they like it or not in a polite way and giving them that feedback so that way they can better themselves. I love that. I think that's a challenge that a lot of teams are faced with in terms of how they're deploying a one-on-one and they just kind of lose the point of who it's for.

34:11 And they're still trying to use that meeting or leverage that meeting almost to get what they want or what they need. And I just love the fact that you're completely unapologetic about the fact that that is a meeting for them. It's their development. And that's your opportunity to be a steward and a guide to help them achieve that thing. I just think that's really mission critical that many of us are not connecting the dots to in terms of the success and engagement in our organization. Yeah. So you've been in this process of building a company where the strategy you've deployed requires outside investment. You've been working with venture capitalists. What is the biggest thing you've learned about working with investors and managing that relationship? Because there's a lot of people that they're seeing all the M&A activity in the industry and they're like, oh my gosh, I want to jump on that gravy train.

34:57 And they want to prepare their company to sell and potentially have a second bite at the apple, work with a PE company, all this stuff. What's the biggest thing that you've learned and maybe one of the surprises about working with investors as you've been doing that with Albie? Absolutely. I think one of the surprises was the fact that investors and capital markets are depicted in, I think, a negative way. People feel like they lose control. People feel like the investors come take you over and push you in a different way and so on and so forth. And Maybe part of that is true, but I personally haven't experienced that. Now, granted, all of our investments are minority stake investments.

35:38 My co-founder and I own the majority of the company and we still have full control. But I think the value that somebody can bring as an investor to the table is huge. And I think that it's a myth and an illusion that that take over your business, especially if you're the operator. Like at the end of the day, even if you own 0% of the company, if you're the operator of the company, you actually have the most control because that investor actually needs you. Because if you leave, what's that investor going to do? So I think that's something that like surprised me. The biggest thing I've learned, well, there's two things that I've learned. But one, my relationships with money and capital has changed a little bit. I realized that a lot of times as business owners, maybe imposter syndrome kicks up and we don't give ourselves enough credit.

36:24 And we're always told we're not enough. We try to go get those lines of credit. We get denied on those and we're getting beat up over capital, which ultimately what I learned is capital is just a freaking commodity. The banks, the investors, the capital markets need entrepreneurs like us who are building places for their stupid money to get placed into this. And oftentimes, the script is the exact opposite, where it's like us as founders, we're almost like begging for capital. We're going to those banks and going through all the loopholes and such. And obviously, there's strict terms for a reason, and it's hard to get capital for a reason.

37:07 But most people don't understand that, and they almost beat up the value of what they're creating as a business. And your business and your enterprise is the machine that uses up that capital to produce future values. And what you've built as an entrepreneur is very valuable. And they need you maybe just as much as you need them. And that's a great one. I would have not seen that one coming in a million years. And yet, I just think that's profoundly important for people to consider. I mean, we're, you know, much different circumstances likely than where you're at, but we're in similar circumstances currently where we're having these kinds of conversations about certain projects and opportunities.

37:48 And I feel myself sliding into that where you almost feel yourself shrinking a little bit because you aren't the one that can address the cash or the financial demand of the project. And so honestly, like hearing you say that, even for me, I'm like, you know what? He's freaking right. I need to own that as well, like in my own. Yeah, we were just talking about that yesterday, just how there's a lot of those mindset shifts, right? That need to happen. It starts to, when it comes to money and investors, they just have a different vantage point. We were sitting in the office with a guy who's a serial investor and entrepreneur and hearing the way he thinks about cash and thinks about debt. And debt, yeah. I think is, I mean, it's definitely more in line with what you're talking about.

38:31 Being that flipping the script. Oh, yeah. Money's everywhere. A ton. There's more money than there are places to put the money. There's a ton more capital. Like, talk about abundance mindset. We're all trained with scarcity mindset. Oh, there's only so much money. Let's hoard it. As entrepreneurs, too, we're stashing money away, you know, putting it away in savings accounts. And we need X amounts of, I don't know, how many expense, you know, income-free months that we need to have in the bank and such. But it's like, there's a ton of capital out there. There's a ton of restoration jobs out there. There's a ton of everything out there. Everything that you think is scarce, we'll have people say, oh, well, the restoration market isn't big enough for you to go build this kind of technology. It's like, yeah, it is.

39:12 There's a ton of restoration contractors. Did you see the IISRC forum with all the instructors? There was like 100 and some instructors in a room doing at the IISRC forum meeting of the instructors. I was like, there's 100 and some instructors training the industry. Imagine how big the industry is. And they're just scraping the surface. Like that hundred and something, right? Represents such a tiny, you know, on the radar. Is there any other like kind of financial or money mindset that's shifted for you as the kind of the vision of what you're chasing and building is growing? What else has accompanied that in terms of money thoughts? Yeah. Yeah, so as a venture-backed startup versus bootstrap restoration company, you learn how to efficiently burn money.

39:57 So what I mean by that is how you can run at negative cash flows for future value. And that kind of flipped the script and it really highlighted some self-limiting beliefs that I maybe had in restoration. Like, oh, it's not worth it to pay, I don't know, $5,000 to acquire a plumber that can refer you, I don't know, $40,000 a year over the next 10 years kind of thing. So moving over into Albi, typically software companies that are venture backed and just software companies in general, like somebody pays $300 a month for your subscription, well, it'll cost you way more than... It could even cost you $3,600, $4,000 to acquire that customer. So you're basically paying the money now to acquire that customer, and then a customer takes 12, 14, 16 months to pay back.

40:43 And therefore, you're operating at a negative versus being cash flow positive. And it really showed me like, wow, we're building future value. And the only way to build future value is to consume this capital. But it kind of clicked in that sense because... The value we've built, at least an enterprise value and such in the past four years here, was way more than we built in restoration in the past 10 years. So you got to spend money to make money. You've got to earn money to make money. Moving money is more... That's what moves the economy. So the more money you move around you, the more your economy flows versus the less money you move through the markets. And the more money you keep yourself, the more you might be holding yourself back.

41:26 And I'm not saying go spend all your money. Keep caution and stuff. Like I've got my own cautions and reserves, but also like don't hold on to like a ton of cash for the what ifs and as if it's scarce. Go move the money, go pump it back in because it'll come back 10x. Where do you, what's like your source for keeping yourself, I guess that competency, increasing that competency as the scope of your responsibilities continues to grow? What are the two, three places that you go to consistently to grow that? Yeah. So one thing that I do a lot, just because we have to talk to the capital markets all the time, is I always try to gather information about what the markets are doing and what other people are doing.

42:08 Because in my opinion, I'm always driven to be in the top X percent. Now with a venture-backed company, it's like no matter what happens in the world, capital is always going to flow to companies. It's just in a really good market, it'll flow to the top 50% of companies. In a really bad market, it'll only flow to the top 10% of companies. So I'm always trying to gather data points to understand in the people who always talk to companies, what's the top 10% look like and how can I make sure that our company is always in the top 10%? So to relate that back to restoration, it's always very important to understand, well, what, like to always networking with restoration companies, with other people that serve the restoration industry, maybe even brokers and understand, what's a really good restoration company trade for?

42:51 What's it worth? What are they paying their project managers, their crew chiefs and such, and always trying to be in the top X percent. So in all those areas. The second thing is I'm a part of a lot of mastermind groups and spend quite a bit in personal development and to be in rooms where I'm the smallest person in the room with a lot of other people of expertise. And what that's given me, it's almost made me unstoppable in the fact of like, From a mastermind group, one of my mentors wrote a book, and now I, all of a sudden, I'm able to network with the publicist and the graphic copywriter and the person who's going to publish it and all that stuff. So the who, not how is powerful. And then getting into the rooms where you could always find the who is very powerful.

43:31 And sometimes they cost, sometimes you have to network your way into them. But that's another thing that I do. And then the third thing is you will never know enough. Abundance mindset applies to knowledge. Right. Knowledge isn't scarce, it's abundant. You must always be seeking out more knowledge. And not just seeking out like consuming it, but learning it. So read the book, mark up the book, read the book again. Journal. Every single day and every single interaction that you do, it's a learning experience. So just like Chris is writing things down right now, when you write things down, you actually catch what you learn. So it's not about what's taught, it's what's caught.

44:13 and you reinforce it within your brain. And there's a difference between consuming content and studying stuff. So if you're always studying and you create a daily habit out of studying, you'll always be able to build yourself up. I love that. I'm going to dime myself out. Did you guys get into a morning routine at all? Last time? I can't remember. We didn't. We talked about fitness and we talked about some of that stuff. But this was also what our first, our last chat was over a month ago, a couple of months ago. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Month, month and a half ago. Yeah. We did talk briefly about morning routine. You mentioned that you were starting to plunge and you had some fear around plunging, but that you were going to do more plunging.

44:54 So how did that go so far? I've done more plunging. In fact, I recently, one of the things I started doing was on the weekends, I've been doing multiple hot, cold exposures, like for a couple hours with my boys. It's been so fun because my boys, they feel so manly, you know, sitting, sweating in the sauna. And then we take turns. The first person get out does the cold plunge and just doing it in succession. So yeah, that's awesome. Doing that. It's very fun. Congrats on that. That's awesome. Fuck it, man. We totally snoop on you all the time in terms of the socials, right? So it's like, I'm watching... You're taking shots in the gym. Not shots as in... You're not doing tequila shots, but shots from the gym.

45:39 Keyed in on some amazing things that are happening in your business and the different things that you're chasing. Talk to me a little bit about that, just the balancing, the time blocking. What are you doing in real physical terms to be in the right places to give yourself the time to do the things that you want and to prioritize? How do you balance that, man? Yeah, I mean, I think it's all connected. Health, wealth, love, and spirituality are the four pillars of life, in my opinion. If one's out of balance, it'll take a toll. So I even incorporate physical stuff into our stand-ups with the sales team, for example. We'll go do burpees, jumping jacks, something like that. But I think like... If you're not showing up 110% at work, you're probably not showing up 110% in other aspects and it kind of mirrors itself.

46:23 And yeah, I mean, almost every day working out, I think sweat every day, you tire the body to tame the mind. And I went on a health journey about a year, year and a half ago. And then ever since then, I didn't really, I haven't stopped in the sense of working out, eating very right, doing things like stressing the body yourself. I also believe in like you stress versus distress. If you stress your body out yourself and if you embrace discomfort yourself, basically other things in the world don't stress you the same way. Like an employee coming in and telling you X, Y, Z won't stress you as much because you're already used to you stressing your body to a higher degree on a daily basis. And I'd rather stress myself out than have something else from left field come stress myself.

47:06 As far as morning routines, I focus on the mind, body, the spirit, and then moving the business or my life forward. So those are kind of the four buckets that happened. And it could be something as quick as an hour. It could be, typically it takes about an hour and a half to two hours. And it involves a workout. It involves eating right. It involves journaling. It involves reviewing my goals and analyzing myself. I have 12 goals for every single year and analyzing myself against those goals and seeing, okay, where am I short? And what can I do to move this forward? And it's quick and it's simple, simple scales. You don't need to do a million cold plunges throughout the day. You don't need to, I don't know.

47:47 I'm not like a bodybuilder by any means. A workout could be as simple as, I don't know, go for a run or sometimes it's heck, go for a walk, right? Yeah. It's those simple, small little improvements every single day that really count. Do you ever struggle with, and I want to be cognizant of time, but do you ever struggle with discipline fatigue? You know what I mean by that? Let me give you context just in case. It's like... I'm a pretty driven person. So like Enneagram, I'm an eight. You know, like I'm definitely the challenger. Like I like to be disciplined. I like to be making forward progress, right? But I also have times where it's exhausting. Like there's just, it's hard to be disciplined, right?

48:28 And so I have phases where I feel like where I get discipline fatigue. And there's kind of exercise or this battle that takes place where... my system's kind of trying to sabotage me. Like, oh, you deserve it. You're tired, right? Like you're toeing the line, all these things. So anyways, in my mind, like I have these moments where I battle discipline. Do you ever run into something like that? And if you do, what do you do about it? A thousand percent, actually. And, you know, ever since I, like I think I've maybe... I've taken organization and systematization to an extreme, right? To where if you look at my calendar from 4 a.m. to 9 p.m., everything's on there. And even my time with my wife's on the calendar.

49:09 And the thing that woke me up a little bit was... I was at a mastermind group and I stood up and I asked somebody who was speaking, who knew me sort of well, hey, what's the number one thing holding me back? And they sat there and they looked at me and they were like, you know, in December, when you and your wife came to my house, Yeah, I don't know. Something felt weird there, right? You guys were sitting on the couch and stuff like that, but I don't know. And then he went and told a story about him and his wife. And then he said something along the lines of, I feel like sometimes you're just doing the motions or I feel like sometimes people feel like you're just doing the motions and I was like, hmm. And my co-founder was in the room. He stood up. He's like, dude, at lunch, hit me up.

49:50 I got to tell you something. And then he sat down. I'm like, okay. So I went to my co-founder and I'm like, okay, what's up? And he's like, yeah, your wife told my wife something along those lines too. Like sometimes use those same exact words. Sometimes I feel like he's just doing the motions. I'm like, hmm, interesting. And then on the run the next day, we do this founder's run and such. And I was running with people and I talked to one of my buddies and stuff. And he mentioned the same thing. Long story short, go confront my wife. I'm like, hey, we have a great relationship. We don't really fight much, stuff like that. We don't have friction. Everything's great. And she's like, yeah, but just because we don't always fight stuff like that, you can't say it's absolutely perfect and superlative and such. I was like, hmm, interesting. What do you mean by that, babe? And then she mentioned the same words.

50:31 Long story short, those times can be turned into, oh, you're just doing it because it's on your calendar or you're just doing it because of this. And it can add extra stress to your life. What I'm doing about it now is giving myself permission to be more spontaneous within the structure. So the structures don't go away. The discipline doesn't go away. But allow yourself a margin of error here and there. I'll move a meeting to go walk around the office if I need to. Like not like a very important meeting, but like time on my calendar to do X, Y, Z. But I think the fine balance is because you're an entrepreneur too. You want that freedom. That's what you want. The fine balance is don't throw it away or don't slip, right?

51:12 Like give yourself permission to move that one meeting. Give yourself permission, I don't know, one day a week or one day every two weeks to take it easier at the gym. Or maybe go for a walk instead of going for a gym. Add some flexibility, right? But make sure that the discipline and the consistency at which you're showing up is still consistent because you could easily slip up into the other realm where it completely eliminates that discipline. So I don't know if that answered your question, but I think that's how I relate to what you were bringing up. Yeah, I think it's just important for listeners to hear the human side of people because at the end of the day, I think we could oversimplify every single interview that we've ever had with somebody of substance and competency. And that is, if you look at the level of discipline they engage on a day-to-day basis, there's a strong chance it looks higher than the person to the left and right.

52:01 And that's part of where all this achievement and success comes from. But I think we also can lose track of the fact that that discipline is not easy. Like they don't just every day wake up, you know, and it's just like another day getting the box checked. It is hard to maintain that. 100%. Discipline. And we just get tired. Like it's appropriate for us to admit that we just get frigging tired. 100%. Thanks. But, you know. Well, dude, I think this is a good opportunity for us to land the plane on this part too. A question that I like to end with, with a lot of our guests is just, what are you most curious about right now? And it could be a book that's provoking you. It could be a mentor that has you in a particular spot, looking at a particular part of your life or a podcast you listen to, whatever else.

52:48 But what are you most curious about personally right now or oriented towards? Yeah, one of the things that's been on my mind, well, yeah, I guess the biggest thing that's been on my mind has been along the side of what I've been explaining on the co-creation front, on the family front. I'm really curious, without adding the boundaries and the systems of business, which my wife personally is super against, how to boost co-creation and unity and... mission within my family life, familiar life, family life, I'd call it. And I think there's a fine line, right? Because business maybe is my super strength and just throwing business principles at it won't work because marriages and relationships are a fine balance and a delicate balance.

53:38 But truly, how can I... what does that 110% co-creation between my wife and I look like and between my wife, my daughter and I and the future little dudas that are running around. So yeah, that's something I'm, one of the things I'm very interested in and working at currently. Mm-hmm. Love it, man. That's awesome, dude. All right. What about you? You know, for me, it's interesting, also personal, but I think the implications of these things, right? They extend, reach everything. I have lately been getting into internal family systems, IFS. It's a type of therapy. Are you familiar with IFS? Mm-hmm. No, I'm not. Tell me more.

54:19 So the basic premise of it is, you know, we as individuals, we have these individual parts inside of us. I actually, I wrote an article about this in CNR a while back. This sense of when we tend to get into a difficult or stressful situation, have some encounter negative emotions, we tend to completely and totally identify with those things. I am really stressed out right now about this thing. Yeah. And part of the sort of the principles behind IFS is adopting more of a nuanced view of yourself, right? That when we encounter those negative or stressful things or emotions that are coming at us, instead thinking of it as part of us, right?

55:02 There's a perspective taking. Yeah, that separates from myself and who I am. these emotions that I happen to be encountering or these stressors or these anxieties. And so it's just, it goes obviously a lot deeper than that. But the founder of Internal Family Systems is Richard Swartz, and he's written a book called No Bad Parts. And it's just this idea that in order for us to be engaged in self-leadership, This really is the concept of self-leadership is recognizing there's all of these disparate parts inside of me that have originated from experiences that I've had in the past.

55:42 Often they take the form of a protector, right? We've encountered certain hardship or suffering or abuse or whatever early on in life. And these parts of us take shape and they take on roles. And I just find it really interesting as a leader looking at, okay, how do these parts and what are these parts inside of me? And then how do I also recognize these parts in other people? You know what I mean? And think more holistically about others and my relationship to others. And it's like, okay, what might be happening inside them in their various parts that's causing this behavior or this way that they tend to show up? So anyway, it's very interesting. You can Google it.

56:23 This guy, Richard Swartz, has been on a lot of really great podcasts too. So I've just been digging into that lately. There's a huge spiritual parallel to what you're talking about. I did some spiritual work recently, but you're the feeler of the feeling blank. You are not blank. You're not stressed. You're the feeler of the feeling stressed. Yeah. And almost like identifying you as your soul versus your ego or your brain or like your physical body as something separate and understanding like the difference between the two. And there's like, we can go on a whole episode on that, but... It was very interesting to find the correlation there. Yeah, we may have to. That's an interesting place to hang.

57:05 I think for me, it's almost like you can almost see it a little bit in some of the questions I was asking you. It's like I'm in this place right now where I feel like I'm creating new boundaries maybe and new perceptions maybe of what's appropriate in response to... cash management, money management, like the role it plays in my life. Because I think, you know, like growing up and around kind of, I don't know, for lack of a better, maybe like Protestant kind of Christian environments, you just get a weird understanding of money. And it permeates into all sorts of stuff. So even as a business owner, a lot of those boundaries have been stretched and moved. But there's still this fundamental core process that's happening, probably more so at a subconscious level that I'm trying to get a grip on.

57:50 And then I think another place that I feel like stays in a similar vein is just my own personal priority. So I'm 47. We're going to be 48 in November. And man, dude, I am hitting a moment in my life where I'm really tired of giving a shit about stuff that people tell me I'm supposed to care about. Like I'm just burnt on fitting all these other person's priorities on top of the things that I know when I'm alone thinking about my own personal vision for my family and our friend, our sphere, and all those things. It's like those things have often been in contrast. or in contention with those. And I'm just like in this space of what's the right line of being bold and saying no and not agreeing to the things that you just straight up don't agree to versus becoming the pendulum swinging to the point where now it's a detriment and it actually is a dysfunction in relationship.

58:45 And it actually is taking away from me. I'm trying to find that line and I honestly don't know where it is yet. I find myself shifting back and forth on this what feels like a very... sharp line. So that's kind of where my head has been. And I'm finding some content of value, but I think a lot of it comes down to just having conversations with guys like you where I'm like, I just need to hear someone else's perspective that I respect by the way they carry themselves. Awesome. Very interesting. Good stuff. Well, we're going to record all the various ways that people can get in touch with you and the companies that you lead and the stuff that you participated in our show notes from the episode. But man, this has been fun, dude. And I think we identified what our next conversation is going to have to be around spiritual things and what's going on between our ears.

59:30 Dive hard into that next time. So for sure. Let's do it. Thanks for your time, dude. Thanks for hanging, man. Yeah. This was a pleasure. And thanks so much for what you're doing for the industry. You guys are clearly exposing a lot of different mindsets and beliefs to the restoration industry. And I think that's the number one thing holding this industry back. And you guys are nailing it right on the head. So. Yeah. Appreciate that. Thanks a lot, man. Okay. Well, until next time. Take care, guys. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots. And if you're enjoying the show, but you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend.

1:00:11 Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.