Episode #311 - The Trade Industry - Industry Coaches

And queen. She flagged me down and climbed up in the cab and said, "I never knew you were a pickup man. You can set my truck on fire and roll it down a hill and I still wouldn't trade it for a good deal. I got an 8ft bed that never has to be made. You know, if it weren't for trucks, you wouldn't have tailgates. I met all my wives. The traffic jams are just something women like about a pickup man. Most Friday nights I can be found in the bed of my truck on an old chase lounge. Backed into my spot at the driving show. You know a cargo light gives off a romantic glow. I never have to wait in line at the popcorn stand cuz there's something women like about a pickup man. You can set my truck on fire and roll it down a hill and I still wouldn't trade it for. All right. All right. It's time. I've been waiting all week for this, guys. How are you? I'm great, man. How about you, buddy? And we got uh we got Michael Whitaker from Purple Coaching. We got Tamara and I always get them the last name uh pronouncing right. Espelling. Esping. Esping. Yeah. Yeah. founder of Draw Offense and many other things which we're gonna find out tonight. So, how are you both doing? I'm good, man. Um, just wanting rain to stop in Texas. We need we need heat and sunny skies. It comes and goes though, doesn't it? Just kind of just little spurts and then it and then then it calms down on you. It what it does is it only comes in the morning to wreck our day, then gets sunny right about the time customers get home. So then customers are like, "Where you been?" Looks like you haven't done nothing all day, right? The guy's been sitting in the trucks. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Do they work through the rain? Do we work Do we work in the rain? Um, that's a good question. Depends on what our schedule's telling us we have to do, right? So, sometimes we don't have a choice. Tamara, you're up in uh Canada right now. So, uh, tell us about that. What's going on up there? Well, it's funny. Sky is all the way here. We're in the middle of a heat wave, so it's like 30°. And um I I I am originally from Africa, so I used to be used to heat and I'm not anymore. From Africa. So used to the heat, then you come up to Canada and then uh you're on which side? Alberta. Alberta. Okay. So over there. So you're getting all the weather. Yeah. Yeah, pretty much. I love Canada. 80 degrees Celsius difference between winter and summer. Canada's beautiful though. Have you Michael, have you been up to Canada? No. Like like I was saying uh backstage, uh Robert gets to work with the company out in Canada. So when his first uh quarterly up there, I'm going to tag along and just do the fun stuff. So yeah, it's nice. Yeah, it's I mean I had I don't know a lot of people don't know, but I I moved a couple trucks up to British Columbia once and this was like pre-COVID, like 2019. And uh I had did my first couple jobs and then COVID hit and it was just such a pain to get back and forth across even though I had temporary residency. I had the license and I could, you know, I could go back and forth across but they wanted me to sit in the house for two weeks every time and uh you know and I used to fly up like on a Wednesday and come back on Sunday, you know, just to work both companies up there and back and I couldn't go up there for two weeks and sit there and then and then go out for a couple days and then come back. It just it was a mess. So Tamara, you had a lot of that stuff going on up there. You remember what that was? It was a lockdown in Canada. And the problem is a lot of people who live in Vancouver work in like Washington. Yeah. If you if you live in uh what's that place? Um it's right right over the bridge from Detroit, but there's a lot of people who work in the US and live in Canada. Yeah. A lot. And then going back and forth, they didn't care if you had temporary residency or resident, whatever. you had to you had to selfisolate inside your house and they were watching you too. Man, you couldn't even go to a restaurant without showing your uh card, your immunization card and stuff. It was crazy up there. So anyway, that was like uh 6 months afterwards I was all in love with Canada and I had a house up there. I mean, we're not used to this. I mean, they got so much water that there wasn't even a water meter on my house if you can believe that. It was literally just as much water as you

Wanted to run. They didn't even in this town I was in, they didn't even charge you for water. Can you imagine that? You wish no water. Here we are fighting just to water our lawns in Nevada. You know, I'm getting rode up because I watered on the wrong day. Yeah, you're you guys are gonna run out you guys are going to run out of water, Brian. That that is for sure. But so, um, uh, Michael, tell me a little bit about Purple Coaching. I mean, you weren't obviously all of a sudden you guys were just on the scene and everywhere, right? I mean, it's just But you didn't you didn't do the typical, you know, purple fence coaching or anything like that. So, I'm guessing that you had bigger dreams than just keeping in one industry. Yeah, Brian, I don't know if you really know my entire background. So, I kind of got a start um in the back. So, Robert and I started Magnolia uh fencing and patio. So, I was in the fencing world for sure. Um but prior to that, we had a commercial landscape company and we're twins, 10 minutes apart. from 10 minutes older, 10 minutes wiser. And after right after COVID, funny we're talking about it, Rob and I decided to split the two companies and I took the commercial landscape route. Got out of the fencing world and in two in 2023, I sold the company for a seven figure exit, thinking I'm I'm not going to be a contractor anymore. Uh being a contractor is the hardest thing in the world. And when you sell a company, people think you're brighter than everybody else. And so, um, I started doing some consulting inside the landscape industry. And I was following Robert and Purple and I went out to fence tech out there in Nashville. And I said, "Hey, I want to be part of this." Uh, the fence industry, I felt like, had an opening for anybody who wanted to pave the way. Um, create some rules and regulations that would benefit everybody. um lift up the the smaller guys to help out the new guys. So, Robert and I did some trading of clients. Um I learned underneath his platform and really fell in love with what he had built, but I I wanted to put my twist on it. And so, um we kind of identified that we didn't kind of we did identify that I really love working with and I'll work with any size company, but three million and under, I love really working on tactical stuff. uh Robert really focuses a lot on leadership uh team building whereas I'm trying to help people who who get into the business because they're a great technician and now that they're they're trying to get off the tool belt and so um I I also own several different other companies but Purple is where my what fills my cup and fills a good portion of my time. So, that's how I ended up the purple. And I think I might have even kind of knew Robert a little bit first. And going back to being twins, I mean, there there's no doubt because I don't know if you remember uh I don't know if you remember this post that uh Yeah, look at you, man. Look, you even know how to do that, Brian. That's good. Yeah, that's actually my So, Tam, that that is my twin brother and he got So, I did I did a post promoting him being on the show and I used a picture of his twin brother. Yeah. Now you're selling on yourself. Yeah. So, a couple people missed out about it. Yeah. That's how I ended up here and that's how I got back into the fence industry. Um, and we don't solely operate only in the fence industry, but it's a really good platform for us and we really understand it. Um, like we've been in it for a long enough time to where we can give actual tactical advice, not just 30,000 foot view advice. So, it's it's been good, man. It's been fun to come back. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. I mean, I I love to watch what you guys are doing and I notice it's two different personalities. There's no doubt. And some of you guys I mean, so it's it's probably compliments each other, but I'm sure on certain projects you guys have to almost split up and say, "I'm going to tackle this part of it and you tackle the other." Yeah, that is that's funny. I I definitely in the last year, I feel like I've really gained my identity. I've I've had the courage to say, "Hey, listen. I I believe in what I'm doing here. I've had the feedback from people uh that are thirsty for the way that I I work. Um and then there's people that just absolutely thrive in the way that Robert does. So before we take on any client, we we do an intake form and we both go through it and we see who would work better. Uh we both do an interview

With them and we essentially figure out who would be a better fit. Um whereas it was whoever they want, hey, Robert, we heard you here. Well, yeah, they might hear Robert and we find out Michael's better fit and vice versa. And so, um, I definitely have a a different a different approach, but we definitely coach on the same platform, which is what Robert developed with Purple. So, yeah, I like it. No, I like to watch it. I mean, it was just it was good. It's fun to watch you guys grow. But, Tamara, people call you the Netflix offense drawings, but there's got to be more to you than that. Tell me tell me quickly about that. Uh why why do why is there a joke going around that you're the Netflix offense drawings? Well, it's because it's a subscription service, right? So like Netflix, you pay one fee and you can watch movies all day, every day for the for the whole month, right? And that's the same thing with Draw Off Fence because normally if you're going to hire someone to do your drawings for you, you're going to pay per hour and per drawing and it's going to get real expensive. And with us, it's just one flat fee and you can do a 100 drawings a day if you want. So that's why we're the Netflix offense drawing. So are these uh semi-custom drawings? Are they just kind of standard drawings in a in a library that you have already? The what it is is we have um these onetoone scale CAD drawings that we've drawn. Um and then we've got some custom code in the back end of the site that works with a form based input. So you select all your specs and your heights and whatever and then it we the custom code uses that to pull the correct drawing from the library and then writes a written specification and populates the title block and everything. So it looks like you've got someone on your team doing CAD drawings all the time, but you don't have to have someone on your team doing CAD drawings. Nice. And and before you got into that, I know you you not used to you still do write a lot of writing. A lot of uh and it's just a lot of trade trade related writing. Yeah. So I've been an estimator since like 2000 and before that I studied construction and before that I went to a technical high school. So I've been in the business you know forever. Um and a few years ago I was I was doing general writing and I kind of thought well you know what the construction industry kind of struggles with writing and with you know marketing and that sort of thing. Um, and I have all this inside knowledge because as you guys know, if you don't speak fence or you don't speak construction, it's very hard to write credibly about it. So, I just put the two together and started writing um, specifically for construction. And I do sort of bid proposals, magazine articles, data sheets, all those kinds of things. Nice. Yeah. So, what made you want to do this though? I mean, it's uh, do you did you like this more than uh, doing the kind of consulting writing? Well, we were thinking last year because my co-founder is also a CAD operator who's got architectural training. Um, and we were thinking of starting a business doing custom CAD drawings for fence companies because we know fence companies typically don't have that in-house capability. And then I've also been a web developer for 15 years and I thought, well, maybe there's a way that I could put those two things together and use the web development experience to turn this into a product rather than a service. So we gave it a try last year and then we figured out that we could do it and then we started building it and then we got excited because we're like wow we can do all like three different views from the same form or we can do all these cool things and so we just started building more and more of it and within like a month actually a couple of weeks of launching we had our first customer you know and it's companies that have been in the business for like a hundred years. Yeah, it's not the new guys, but uh yeah, I mean it's it's just something I've always done. Every fence company I've ever worked for, um I was the only person who knew how to use CAD. I was the only person doing the CAD drawings. And it's always at a critical time, you know, big bid, you need to have the design drawings for the architect to like wow them for your presentation and stuff or with a change order or close out documentation. So, it's always a critical thing that you have to have to either get the job or get paid or whatever. and we thought, let's build something that makes it easy. Yeah, I've been fortunate enough where I mean, I've

Always done my own drawings in house. Michael, have you seen uh fence companies struggle with drawings or trying to get closeout documents? Um, yes and no. Uh, we struggle with fence companies creating good work orders or even being able to measure. Obviously, there's some tools out there. And so, I've operated in CAD uh through the landscape business for eight years. And so like when I bring in CAD or I show just CAD in general, people are like, "Man, you're you're a wizard. You've got some kind of magical sorcery over there." And I said, "Man, listen, I if you dumb this down just for what we do, um, and you don't try to just learn CAD as a whole, um, it's really not too terribly intimidating." But yeah, a lot of guys are really good technicians, like we said, and then they're really bad at getting paid at the end because they don't have the correct submitts. So when we specifically when we consult on, hey, I want to enter commercial, which do you really know what you're asking for? Sure, you want the 5,000 linear feet of fence, but there's a lot that goes into it on the other side. And so there are people popping up, you know, that that are assisting with this. And I'm I'm looking at your website right now. Um, and I'm I'm super eager to learn more about it. Um, but yeah, guys guys are they're coming off most of the time their businesses started because they're really good on a tool belt and and not they don't want to be parked behind a a computer for a long time. So, we really struggle just in general getting operators behind a computer. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough to get us. And then when we come home at the end of the day after you've been out, uh, you know, I mean, I've grown beyond having to go out every day and build fence myself, but man, I remember I remember going out, you know, you're out doing the sales calls and you're you're running out installing fence and doing a sales call at lunchtime and you're back trying to finish the fence that you started in that morning and last thing you want to do is go home and sit on the computer. You know, your your wife or your girlfriend's mad at you. You haven't been home. You're you're supposed to be home at 4:00 and it's now 7 and you're just rolling in the yard. Last thing she wants you to do is sit there till midnight doing drawings and stuff. So, I think that that really hurts us when we're uh when we're small. But, um, Michael, I I I have a question, man. I mean, this is uh you know, what's one of the biggest I mean, you you probably deal with a lot of people when you first walk in there or you first talking to somebody about doing any kind of consulting, coaching. What's uh what what do you think's one of the biggest myths uh business owners believe, you know, before they hire you? I I'll try to be brief. I'm not going to answer any of your questions directly. Um my wife, I was like, "Hey, what do you think about these?" and she's like, "You never answered any of his questions directly." I said, "I know. Isn't it great?" But I just want I want to be clear first of all because I think that there's also kind of a myth in currently our fence industry because there's a lot of consultants and and coaches and gurus popping up, right? And so coaching is a longer journey. It's it's really trying to pull the the best of somebody out of them. pull their inner vision, build confidence, uh build some some awareness, right? And so it's it's a longer selfjourney, right? And so that's where Robert loves operating. He loves developing the person inside of you that we know is inside of you. A lot of people don't know what's inside of themselves or they don't trust that, hey, I have that confidence, right? So that's coaching. Uh in our name, coaching and consulting. A consultant is somebody that comes in, analyzes, takes their expertise, maybe a new set of eyeballs, and they say, "Hey, this is an action plan." All right? And there's a lot of risk with that because if I say do it, and you don't do it, then you're just wasting money. We pivot between those two. Um, when we first started, we thought we were just going to be coaches. It's going to be great. Our work is going to stop at the door, at the end of the hour, whatever it is. And we love doing that. We've found that we've done a lot. and we pivot between the two. And then there's a third one which is a mentor which uh what I love about this industry um for instance Matt Warner just wants to be a mentor to people like he'll never want to be a coach, never want to be consultant. He wants to open his doors to anybody that

That will listen to him and and he gives great advice and um that's a friend, someone who's walked the path before you, right? So, okay, those are the those are the three. So, I think that there's two really big myths. Um, when you hire any coach or consultant, we don't have a magic wand. So, we can't just fix something by you calling us. There it's just impossible. And by calling us, you don't fix your cash or your marketing problem at all. By calling us, your cash does not we we can creatively fix that over a little bit of time, but there's no way by calling us it's going to get that much better tomorrow. You're not going to find missing money in the bank that uh we thought was there. And by calling us, we're not going to fix your marketing problem and your lead generation problem. Um we immediately we we can help build the strategy, but by calling us that's people ask us, will I get more leads? And that's that's not what we're here for. We're here to build out a strategy. Our strategy will create more leads. Your team will close more if we build a strategy. So that's your long answer, Brian. I like it. Well, you know, um it's an it's an interesting uh consulting or uh I know that consulting and coaching, it's interesting. I mean, I they're definitely two completely different things. And there's a million I mean, you could throw a rock and find a business consultant out there that uh you know, those agencies, in fact, most most of those agencies, if they're not from our our industry at all, like you come from, don't even understand what we're doing. A lot of it is is catered to like uh a lot of even construction consultants for general contractors and things like this. They're used to dealing with larger companies that are generals that are hiring subs and doing this, but they're not actually um dealing with crews and things like that on on, you know, on the same level that we're, you know, that we're dealing with where you have to get it more involved in the coaching and and probably some of the leadership stuff that that comes along with it. But consulting it for a while, man, it got a bad rap, too, a little bit because uh there was a lot of people that went out there until all you guys started stepping up, you know, from the industry and stuff. They would come in and say, "Hey, give me $15,000 and I'm going to come in and help you uh get your company in line." And then you hire the guy who comes in and he's got like just a cookie cutter thing where, you know, if he's not careful, he might not even change the name from the company he was at before on one of the documents, right? It was literally, you know what I'm talking about. that kind of well no I I know it's it's really simple you know who who they say consultants are right they're people who can't run a business consultant and I don't I don't mean that there are great consultants but when you're giving advice to industry specific you have to know really about the industry and so like I mean even just sort of building software for the industry right like if you don't know who you're working with you're just kind of guessing um that's why I think we strive we do really well in fence Now, I've got a really big challenge. I'm working with a doctor tomorrow and it's my very first, but once again, you're talking about a technician and their business is set up. And so, I said, "Listen, I cannot help you on being a doctor. There's there's no way. So, if you're not a good doctor, you're never going to be a good doctor. But what I can do is we can figure out how to go back in time and set up your business to have your business operate safely, predictable." And so I am purely going in as a as a consultant to set up their business correctly and then we'll possibly see if there's a coaching relationship after that. Um but you know I think too many guys are like oh I got a client I'm going to be an expert today in this. Um, and so we we do operate quite a bit in the fence in the fence because we have proven ourselves with with a few sales, just a few sales. And I think that's what I like how you guys mix the coaching in with it instead of just coming in and then after, like I said, a week or so, you're like, "Okay, well, I need another $5,000 if you want me to keep going." And then you're like going, "Okay, another 5,000." And all another week, you're like, "I need another 5,000 to keep going." And all a sudden the company's like, "Well, I can't afford to pay any more money." Well, that's the reason your company's not organized, you

Know, after they spend $20,000, right? The reason you're not organized is because you couldn't afford to keep us going. I'll I I'll tell you what, consultants make a lot more than coaches, but we at the end of of our race, I think it's a lot more rewarding um to to be a coach and see the journey and follow it and and you know, I wake up thinking about these these guys and gals. Um so, it really fills the cup. Now, once again, consulting does sometimes require more resources from us. Um we have team members that fractionally sit in. We've got right now we're we're managing admin positions at a couple different companies while they fulfill these. And so that is a consulting role that we're doing. Um and so we love that we can pivot back and forth. It wasn't Robert's original dream. He just put coaching consulting. Didn't know that we were going to be doing both. So yeah, it's uh it's fun to watch though. Like I said, I just I don't know what it is. It's just and you maybe it's your branding. You can't help but miss it. you know, now when I see anything and now when I see anything purple, I want to take a picture of it and send it. I'm like, "Look, a purple backpack. Look, some purple shoes." You're just like, you're like instantly think of you guys. So, it was a it was a brilliant marketing plan, you know, there's no doubt for sure. Mr. Purple for you. So, hey, uh, this one's for Tamara. Hey, um, who's using, uh, draw fence today that surprised you? I know you've been around a little bit now, so that you know, and they're still using it that you didn't expect, you know, that is complete surprise to you. Why are they using draw offense? The interesting thing that we found recently is that the people who do subscribe and who do pay to subscribe, not one of them has unsubscribed. You know, like free trial users will will give it a try and then, oh no, okay, I need that or whatever. But the people who've actually committed to it, every single one of them is still using it. And we see they're logged in all the time. You know, a lot of them are in there daily. That's why the Netflix of fence drawings, it it it saves them so much money because we do custom drawings and stuff as well and like a drawing set's going to cost you hundreds of dollars, you know, but for these guys, they're paying less than that for a full month. Um, but it's it's interesting the spectrum of people that are using it. You know, we've got like the really established companies with multiple different branches and they've been around for decades and stuff and then we've got the new guy who's still using a Gmail account, you know, so it's everybody. And then we started thinking we can actually expand it more because there's a lot of architects and specifiers and those kinds of people who struggle to get drawings of things out of paint companies. So, we're going to start marketing to those guys and the municipalities or putting together the smaller bid packages for construction projects. Um, and they can they can use a tool too to generate those drawings to get quotes from Pence company, right? So, it's actually quite broad. You you'd think it's very specific to one type of person, but we're finding that it's actually not. So, does every drawing that come out say draw a fence on it or can you white label it and make it look like it's something you drew up yourself? It's completely, it doesn't say our name on it anywhere. Um, you put your company information. We upload, we changing our, um, coding a little bit now to be able to upload a logo and save it in the site. So, you can select a logo to put on your drawing. Um, and then it's also project specific. So, it'll have the title, but then it says your client's name, your project's name. So, it it looks like somebody has drawn the the drawing just for your job, you know. Wow. Yeah, that's neat. I'm actually going to go check it out. I think I was uh going to create a trial and and go in there and check. I'm always looking for drawings. I mean, I I use I still use I a while back I I I bought I don't know if you remember um Michael CFS when it was the desktop version for the fence cloud and all that, the old one where um it was like five grand. You bought the software and it was on your computer and stuff and you can make your own drawings and I thought that was kind of cool. And then um I started building them on Excel, believe it or not. We uh we we have a client that I think had that software, but being from the

Landscape world, coming into the fence world again and the commercial side, uh y'all's commercial drawings just like from the takeoffs are terrible. Like I'm keep waiting for because fence is becoming such a big thing security. I keep waiting for an F1.1 page, right? And so a lot of times when we were working with people, we challenged the architects, we challenged GCs and they're like, "Well, you provide your own submittals. you put provide what you think is best. And I'm I'm sitting here listening to you and I'm thinking like, man, this would be so great because I could just rob, you know, take your photos and say here instead of trying to describe it. And I hope that the industry architects and all that move to it. F1 D. I don't know. Maybe y'all are lucky in Las Vegas, but it doesn't happen here. It's hidden, dude. It's hidden almost like it's like a where's Waldo kind of thing, dude. It's like with fencing for some I mean you every once in a while you get a GC send you something. They're bugging you, bugging you. You don't have time to look at it. You don't have time to look at it. Finally, you sit down, you go through for like two hours, and it's a freaking dumpster gate is all you can find or something. You're just like because, you know what I mean? I'm like, you could have just said that. At least the dumpster gates have drawings, you know, but but or or you you'll bid it and all of a sudden there's like there's, you know, 300 foot of fence on the grading plan and then there's some over in, you know, some overs in civil, some's over here. It's like, yeah. I mean, I've been bugging architects and engineers on, this is on the FWA side, to uh to actually try to lobby to get this stuff where there's an actual fence and gate kind of like a door schedule. You know, you have the door and window schedules, a fence and gate. Perfect. F1.1. Perfect. There should be because I mean there's there's people with a lot smaller scopes in the in the um plans that that have their own section. we should have one because it's in every there's almost ne never a time when there's not some sort of fence uh railing you know something that's relating to the fence or gates so I agree we should have our own sections you know Tamara maybe you can work on that for us too yeah we I come from originally in South Africa we use the British system so we've got quantity surveyors for everything so they would put together these complex builds of quantities and you do a hundred different unit rates for your fence like post and a bolt and a this and that and so many cubic meters of concrete and it was just nuts. So like the North American system is the other extreme where they're just like one line at the bottom that says 100 feet of fence, you know, refer to this. It's almost like it's on purpose. It's like trying to trick us or something sometimes. And then and then the GCs are like, "Oh, you missed that." So, you know, you can just use your errors and omissions. And you're like, "Man, I don't want to use my errors and omissions insurance. I mean, just tell me how much fence is in there." Right. Yeah. I mean, I I when I was still doing estimating here, I used to itemize everything because that's what I learned, right? So, I would give them a rate for a corner post unit and a rate for a terminal unit and a rate for fence per foot or whatever. And so many times it saved the companies that I was working on because they have to do those extras and stuff and they've already got a rate for it. So, you can justify it so easily and say, "Oh, we're doing we did five extra posts, so you owe us that that extra amount of money." You know, it's much easier if it's already in there. Yeah. It's all broken down. I hate I think I I hate to break stuff down though, man. I feel like every time I'm going to like line item or break stuff down like that much, they're going to they're going to reverse engineer this thing in the end and I'm going to end up like making no money on it, you know? Yeah. Well, that's what we did in landscape, you know? It's really irritating. They they wouldn't just tell me the quantity assad, you know? It's like I know you could just click and tell us and I don't have to put it in my system, right? And I know, hey, at least I got my own pages, but I would line item them like you would say. I would line item them so that in the event that they're like, oh, you missed it. I'm like, "No, I didn't. I just told you exactly what I was going to do. You accepted my build without seeing that

There was two extra trees I didn't see or something." So, yeah, I make a mad mine. So, in in uh in Africa, South Africa, you said, then do they uh do you ever see much consultants and coaching and stuff up there? Well, I haven't I've been in Canada for 13 years now. Um but I think it's kind of universal, right? Um, but actually the construction industry in South Africa is quite welldeveloped surprisingly. You know, you hear Africa and you think of mud huts and stuff like that. I had somebody ask me once if they had to bring disposable razors when they visited Well, I mean, no. I mean, I'm assuming they're eating rocks, not just mud. I mean, you know, everything's actually brick and concrete, believe it or not. No wood. There's no wood construction. So, yeah, it's pretty different. But, yeah, I mean, it's fairly well developed there. and and and they are definitely consultants and coaches and stuff like that. Yeah. So, hey Michael, what um when you walk into a facility or a company or something, what's the first thing you look for when you walk into a struggling business? What do you go for? What do you say I want to see? I mean, besides what do you say? What's your saying? Let's get naked. Let's uh What's that? You have a saying that you do. What is it? Yeah. Yeah. Robert Cra that let's let's get naked. It was funny. I actually had a guy was like really and like he looked at me like we were about to get naked. We're like, "No, we're just getting vulnerable very quickly." Um, man, so if a b if a business is struggling, it to me it really can only be two things. Uh, first, your team, your dynamics of your team. Uh, if your team was built right, if people are in the right seats, uh, being an employer now, kind of being an employee, I I can see where a lot of frustrations from employees are from the, you know, up to ownership. US owners like, well, it can't be us. know it actually is you. Um, and then margin. I I've I've really noticed that a lot of people think they understand margin and they actually don't. And and I hate that. It's always a really embarrassing conversation. Um, but they're just they're, you know, they're 10 to 20% off when you actually do the math. And so those are the two first things when someone's struggling. Man, we're making a lot of money. I'm like, but no, you're not. Not the math that you're doing it correctly. And then also we're either too team heavy, not enough team. You've got no KPIs in place whatsoever. And so you've got a guy selling 750 and he he's really proud of himself, but industry says a residential fence salesman should be 1.5 to two million for instance or, you know, and then we get to see everybody across the nation. And so trust me, we can identify if someone's not pulling their weight pretty quickly because we've got so and so over here who's got a, you know, a killer and then, you know, average guy over here. here and so we really can gauge everybody across. So those are the two things. Um and then the last part of it is if they were built during COVID. So I call these COVID companies. Um so I'm sure it's it we've found that there was artificial um inflation and just everyone's business um across the board during COVID. If you answer your phone, you got the job. And so there's a lot of companies that are really confused. So they maybe didn't actually understand the grind, the grit, the, you know, the concessions they might have to make to get a job. And so, um, if they were developed during that time, sometimes we give them a little bit more grace. And I'm not saying it's all companies, but they didn't have to go through the building stage like a lot of other companies had to do. Um, and now they're a little bit more confused and they're saying, "Well, when's the market going to come back?" We're like, "Well, actually, the market's actually this is where it should have been. it just went up for you at the best normal now. Yeah. Welcome to the rest of the rest of us. Right. Right. And so, um, those I guess those are the three things, but really it's team and margin are like number one. Number one and number two that are super frequent across the board. You think most mo most you think when you go in somebody's really struggling, you think most of the time they just have either either like what you were saying, either have no idea what their margin is or don't even know how to calculate it. Yeah. A lot of people like know your numbers, know your numbers. But listen, if you're in a growth pattern, how do

You really know your overhead? You're constantly adding and adding and adding. And so the one thing I think you can control is that this is a great thing about fence is you get to bid every job. And landscape, we would go for three to five year contracts. And so if we bid it wrong, we owned it. It was a long time till we got a chance to to renegotiate. So if you miss something and you're running margin, you know where you're aiming at, and then you do a takeoff at the end and people are like, "Oh, that takes a lot of work." I'm like, takes a lot of work to be broke, too. Trust me, it's a lot easier just to stay on the other side of things. And then to find out, I I got a guy that said, I got a major company that come in and and we're losing jobs to them. And we finally figured out exactly where that number was. It was shocking. It was like 34%. That's a little bit lower than we'd like to be, but at 35, he wasn't winning any jobs, right? And so, you know, we you got to know what you're you got to know where you're aiming at. And so what we find is a lot of people are doing markup and they don't know that they're doing markup and they're really we need to be aiming for true margin because as you know as it goes down from the top to the bottom of that P&L statement man there's a lot of hands grabbing right and if if we're not making at minimum 10% at the very bottom then you have to really start asking yourself is it worth it? Yeah. You know, because you can park money for, and you've heard my brother talk about this, everyone talk about you can park money for five to six%. And then, and is this job really worth the risk for another couple? I I don't know. So, um it can get ate up pretty quick as you know. There was two uh two two bidding models basically when I grew up. It was uh it was Yeah, we we didn't even look at margins or any of that stuff. And I don't know I don't know if the markups were were higher or lower or less competition or what but it was pretty it was pretty across the board. I mean you had two different models. It was a third third and third right. You had a third labor third material third what was your your profit or markup right? Or you had uh take your material and labor and double it. So that's the way it used to be and now you know like for instance like aluminum that's always fun when guys do double aluminum and then they get it. But yeah, that's the way we we did it even at my my other company. And um which was interesting when I started coaching consulting, I was like, "Oh, we do have to protect margin everywhere." And we're even at my other company, we just let revenue protect margin. And uh we what I found out towards the end of my career there was that if we didn't sell 10 services combined, we weren't making what we were supposed to. And so if some customer is like, "We just want concrete." Yeah, we we would maybe lose money, but if they wanted trees and concrete and saw and fence, one of those maybe had a 70% margin, all this. And so, I just encourage people to really look at it. And if they don't know, just say, "Hey, do you mind running some numbers for me?" You know, I'll I'll do it for free. Yeah. just um because it gets expensive if you've got too many bids out and people start accepting it and uh you thought you were doing 40 and you're really at 30 and your overhead's at 20, you know, and then you're like, "Yeah, or you know, for for a while I went I've went up you name it. Every wrong way you could possibly calculate a job up or run numbers, I've done it over the years. There's no doubt about it. I've uh I've tried every, you know, a million different ways. You I went from using subs. I was going to sub everything out to do it all in house. And I mean, you've probably heard it a million times, too. And um then I even went to uh for a point where, hey, here's my daily truck rate. Here's what I'm going to charge for this truck per day. And that changed based off the number of trucks I had. So, say I had, you know, only down to two trucks and you had to have $2,500 a day, you know, plus you take your materials and double it or whatever it is, right? So, um I'd run that and then you'd be down to like you only needed $1,800 a day per truck or something like that. I'm just running throwing numbers out. But uh by no means I don't know if I got to put a disclaimer up there. I'm not telling anybody what to bid jobs at. All right. I don't want no one saying I used I don't want no one out there saying I used your numbers, Brian, and I lost my ass. But listen, you know, I'm just saying. So that was a way for a while we

Did it to try to simplify it when you're dealing with multiple salespeople and things like this, you know, when you you just and it was getting complicated to try to break everything down and come up with an exact, you know, margin of 10 15% or whatever you wanted to, you know, to make on it. So I would calculate in our overhead and figure out what a truck rate would be. You know I know maybe it's a different way to do it and I would say okay for every truck I needed this amount of money per day and then you know if it was a half a day job you charge a whole day or something right anyway because unless you had something lined up. So have you ever heard of like strategies like that? Oh 100%. I mean, we we wouldn't roll. We we said drop our gate and landscape and every threeman crew had a rate. And so maybe the projects themselves were individually not exactly where they were, but the day had to add up um to a certain amount. And so even when Robert looks at Magnolia, he's got a specific day rate that he's trying to get. And obviously we're trying to protect margin at all times, but some quick easy math is you look at the day rate per truck, right? So it's it's talked about weekly at Magnolia. So do you notice that a lot of a lot of companies are struggling not so much with the bidding and the pricing but with the systems and the project management and the execution and the staying on top of everything because I think that's sometimes where it falls apart. You know the jobs bid correctly and then nobody's paying attention to how it's getting done and it's taking too long and you know all those things. I my big one on that is that I think that people are either doing way too few of trips to manage the project and so there there's the team doesn't know there's a lot of waste you know what there's not enough crack in the whip but then there's also too many trips and so if you start thinking all right every trip cost me $100 or a sales rep $100 and you start factoring those in too then I really think that people like so like Let's say I do a job and I, you know, there's $1,000 worth of profit, you know, I have like one trip I can make there myself, you know, before. So, I factor those in. And a lot of people like, oh, that's part of overhead and all that. I'm like, yeah, man, but time, opportunity, and all that. And so, you know, I I start I started thinking back about my project managers that my number one project manager, and he did he handled a lot of business. I'm like, man, he was going to a lot of those job sites. I don't know. we weren't factoring that time in well enough. Yeah. So, yeah, I do believe it can fall apart at the ops level um pretty easily if if they're not managing their time and and thinking about how many visits can I make to complete this job? And and Tamar might have led me right into one of the things I wanted to ask you. What's an what's an outdated system you think needs to die in most businesses? I mean, so when you walk in, is there one that kind of just sticks out to you that I I'm stubborn by the way by So, by the way, everything that I mention I do wrong. If you walked into my place, you'd probably be going, "Brian, not only should you shut down, you should you should step down from the FWA, the show, everything, if you saw how disorganized I am half the time." So, I would do everything wrong, you know. No, listen, as long as it understands and it it works. I don't think that there's like a lot of people, you should quit using Excel. I know a very very profitable um I I can't say I don't I don't know if I'm allowed to say his name. is very profitable, very big guy in the industry and he requires all of his departments to send him an Excel because that's the way he wants to analyze his business. Okay. By the way, there's there's nothing you can't say on on the podcast. I I there's not I don't No, no. I out of respect to him. I don't know because uh Okay. I was making sure it wasn't because of me. I'm like, "No, I I don't No, no, no. Um and he's probably gonna text me like, "Dude, you could have told him." Um so, I think there's two things. All right. So, I think this is not abandoning something, but I think people are too too slow to introduce AI in our industry. Um, and and actually know how to use it and and there's so many like I'm looking at a book on my shelf, the AI driven leader. Like, just read that and and it'll help you integrate it at some capacity. At first, I was like, "Oh, great. I don't have to learn AI. I'm in construction." And it's it can save you a lot of time. And we've built

A training bot to where like the new guy can just ask the dang bot these really simple questions instead of the owner and burn the owner out on, you know, answering questions. And then I think the number two one that I've noticed, and this is this is seriously a plug for it. If you're not using company cam or something similar to company cam, I think you've lost your mind. Like the day of having 15,000 photos on your phone of fence or landscape or brick I mean is is archaic the fact that even I think using a Google drive doesn't organize all the information correctly. So, do you I mean you guys use Company Cam, Brian? You know about Company Cam? I I love Company Cam. I think it's really cool. But I use uh you know, I've used Jobber. I don't know if you've heard of Jobber. Yeah. So, we got a couple clients with Jobber. I like Jobber. Yeah. So, I've used Jobber for so long. It's really hard to switch. You got so much data in there. So, it's going to it's really not a matter of learning a new platform. It's what do you do with all this data you have in this other one that never really transfers over correctly, you know, to another platform. So, uh, I use Jobber and then in the field or even out as the sales guy goes out, he can load the photos directly under that. Uh, so he loads them in under that estimate when he's out there and then that follows it over to the job and you could still access you could say whether they can access them and who can see them. But that saved me a bunch of times. So, exactly what you're saying, man, having those photos is huge. I've I've I've had issues where I mean, we we deal a lot with regulations and stuff here, right? where I've had to stand and defend myself either to uh the city or the contractor's board or something on something we did and I had photos to back it up and those photos were easily you know they were

Avail if you didn't take a picture it never happened right and so yeah so abandoning the fact that you're only relying on your cell phone storage would be I guess my number one. But I think the fear, you know, I'm not a I graduated with an IT degree. I realized I was going to have to learn my my job over and over and over and over again. I got really frustrated. So, I was like, well, I'm just going to dig holes for the rest of my life. Um, but I think people in our industry are still fighting or in when I say industry, construction are still fighting introducing AI and um I'm I don't think it has to be part of your daily, but I think it needs to be part of your tool belt. Um, and so introducing AI and ma and then abandoning however archaic way people store photos on their cell phone. That'd be that'd be my answer. So yeah, final answer. So do you save any photos, Samra? I used to um I mean I I've back in the day I used to do non-conformance report responses that were like 35 pages long and had every email categorized by when it was received and from who and all those kind of things. So, yeah, I've dealt with all of that nonsense as well. That sounds horrible. 35. Can you imagine a Spencer sitting it down to a 35page uh anything? I know. I'm just sitting there thinking like because I believe in personalities. I'm thinking goodness gracious, I'm glad there's people who like details in this world. Um there's no doubt about it. Yeah. Gunk chart, spreadsheet, all those things. That's that's exactly where I live. Yeah. That's Brian. That's where that's where we identify, man. There's a lot of teams that have people that don't have, you know, like I love I love to move fast. I love to make decisions. I like being on stage. I I like taking risks, but I need that counterpart to that anchor to hold me back. And then when I'm like, "Hey, I got some some stuff that I don't like working on." And I know that person's going to love to accept it because that's where they live. And people really do, man. People love the opposite of what you love. It's It's crazy. And so I I we love watching it because it's super true. So we do a lot of Go ahead. Sorry, I was going to break it up. People write a lot of bid proposals for like general contractors and stuff. And that's also part of what I do. I'll analyze the bid document for them and say, "Oh, have you seen that they want that?" Or, "Did you see that contract clause?" Or, you know, like the real little details that annoy everyone else. That's that's what I you know and with the drawings as well. It's like line weight and font sizes and uniformity and that that's what I love. You guys are just segueing into everything. It's like it it's it's it's like you guys are reading my mind. I'm wondering how draw uh you know how it can change the estimating and bidding process, you know. And then I wanted I wanted to go back to Michael on this and ask uh how far you go into this. Do you actually get down to helping them make the estimates as well? understanding, you know, how important it is once you get to that one thing to come up with the numbers, but it's a whole another thing to to relay this information off to the customer to give your best shot at getting the work. So, how how can you guys help them at draw a fence? Well, the thing is, even though the fence industry is lagging a bit on the technology side, the rest of the industry isn't, and the customers aren't, and they're expecting you to do a certain level of, you know, presentation and stuff. You can't just kind of scribble into the bid document anymore and chuck it in an envelope and hope for the best. You got to give them a proposal that kind of wows them and, you know, shows them what you can do. And even if you operating out of your garage, you know, you can you can give people that impression of who you are and what you can do and stuff like that. And decent drawings is such a big part of that, you know. Um, I'm I'm weird in the fence industry that I like those things, but I can tell you now, architects, engineers, project managers, those kinds of people, if you have those things on hand and you can include it, if somebody else comes in with a bid that's close to yours in price, but you've wowed them with package and the document and all the answers that you've given them and stuff like that, nine times out of 10, you're going to get the job. So, a lot of it's marketing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Michael, when you when you're talking to people um and I ask

This a lot, I'm going to try to get some um some free consulting or coaching out of you here. So, when uh you're talking to uh you know, getting towards the end of it now, you're getting down now you're at the point where you're talking about, okay, we we've went through the numbers. We've we've helped you kind of organize a little bit and we've given you some coaching. We we've discussed, you know, gotten their you've got them feeling more confident. They're ready to go out and start making estimates uh with this new information you've given them. Do you do you think it's important to sometimes look at how they're actually presenting these quotes to the customers and and explain to them what's important or or have you found that a lot of them are just doing a paragraph saying 100 and that by the way this is a pet peeve of mine when they go out there and and I see 165 ft of 8 foot tall chain link fence with three walk gates and $18,000 at the bottom and I'm like going man you went through all this work and you just you didn't give them anything. Yeah. No, for sure. everything that that she said is absolutely perfect and I I was I I'm a high D so I wanted to speak last um because I I wanted to hear your response but yeah 100%. So what I've started doing with uh with working with guys is I want you to send me your presentation to customer. This is before you even paid me because I want to see the whole picture of like where we are, right? So it's a presentation to the customer. It's a customer's choice whether they want to, you know, take the detail, throw it out the window. A lot of people are bottom right. You know, they're just looking price, price, price. But I believe it's our job to to present a presentation that could easily be turned into a work order. And so, like you're talking about the 18, you know, $18,000, 8 foot, whatever. If if I'm an ops person and I don't know what we're doing, how's a customer know what we're doing? And then that's when things start getting real sticky. And so maybe you're having real good success, but no one knows what you're buying. And so I think drawings, a map, overhead. Um, you know, listen, you don't you don't have to get very technical on your bid, but you have to at least say it. Like for instance, I'll use stone work for example. A lot of people like retaining wall, right? I have line stone type, you know, mortar type, footer type, drainage type, backfield type, and it and it lists it out very easy for everyone to read. And then there's a property map and it tells exactly what's going on. And so I think where a lot of people get frustrated is on that customer journey. He spent all this money on marketing a website. The girl answering the phone and this, you know, the sales guy's out there and then there's the presentation and you're like, I don't want to do this work. I don't want to I don't want to spend the time to do this because I'm ready to go out and do the next thing. And so we we see I see seven out of 10 times their presentation is super weak, which means there's a super weak work order following that. Yeah. So yeah, I agree. Yeah, I mean it's a big deal for me. I mean it's one of my pet peeves even with my when I when I train new sales people and especially if you get new sales people that have been doing nothing but GC work and things like that because they refuse they just want to say per bids and plans and I'm per plans and specs and I'm like man what do you so I'm just going to you want me to sign this contract saying I'm going to do whatever is in these plans and specs and I don't even know how many addendums are. I don't know any of this stuff and I'm like no man you you got to you got to sell it the same as you'd be selling it to a homeowner that you're walking out there. I want to see a sketch, a drawing, and and I' I've sold jobs. I know like and people love to say this. Oh, I've sold jobs that no one else could sell for this amount of money, but I know it to be a fact that I've taken closing uh ratios of salespeople up, not just by one or two, but we're talking by 10 to 20% by making them do the proposals correctly and spend the time. It's funny. They, you know, you're going to go through all this work to drive out there to, like you said, generate the lead, to drive out there, spend the time with them and and all this, but you can't spend as much time as the guy spent at Verizon selling you a cell phone for for $400 on this, you know, $10,000 bid, right? It's uh it's bizarre. Yeah. So, Brian, funny you mentioned about the plan.

Oh, well, I was going to say it's funny you said about the plans. I've seen people do that and they don't even put per plans issued date. They don't even two years later when you go actually do that job and you're like, "Wait, these aren't the same set of plans." No. 16 addendums later and Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why so much because nobody can argue with it. You know, there's ambiguity when you write something down. They might not understand what you meant or whatever. But if there's a picture of something and the written specification, they can't say, "Oh, I didn't know it was going to look like that," you know? Oh, yeah. No, I'm horrible, dude. I mean, my my nickname around town back when I was doing more of my sales, my nickname was Redline. I mean, I redline. I mean, if you sent me a 50page contract, I got it down to three. And then the conversation would go back and forth for a while. They'd be like, "Wow, don't worry about that. That doesn't really pertain to you. Well, then you don't mind if I redline it. Then I don't know what you're talking about." Well, it doesn't pertain to me today until all of a sudden there's a problem. You're like, refer to page 17, paragraph three, the second line. And I'm like, well, it does pertain or you wouldn't want it in there. So, it was definitely definitely stuff to I would list, hey, this is quotes per uh plans and specs and sheet number five, sheet no I mean, whatever it happens to be, I would be very specific. So, yeah, that's funny. But, uh, hey, I want to bring up some stuff that's coming up. What do you uh have you dealt uh have either one of you dealt much with SBA? I'm in Canada. So, no. Yeah. So, um obviously SBA helped out during COVID a little bit. So, we got that first experience, right? And so, I know more about I know where you're going with this. And then I sold to a a group that use SBA funding. So, we even learned even more about SBA. Yeah. Um but tell me what you know about that, Brian. Well, I was uh last Thursday I was uh for through Las Vegas fence I was given an award from uh Nevada Small Business Council and SBA was there and and an award from U Lieutenant you know Nevada Lieutenant Governor for Nevada and uh I was started chitchatting as well with the Small Business Administration Saul that's going to be coming on the show next week and I've already always been in contact with them. So now they're going to be on the show next week and we're going to talk about SBA because I think a lot of times people and I I stay pretty active in this stuff as a small business myself in the community and they're a lot more. We just think of them as a loan, right? And even through COVID is where probably a lot of people's first experience with them, you know, with the even the employer retention credits that people may have just gotten or didn't get. I think it's still time to get that if somebody hasn't got it. But um and also the PPP loans. I don't know if anybody got those that kind of stuff that really helped out a lot of businesses and that was part of that boom that that you were talking about Michael earlier where there was a lot of companies that had this almost like an artificial boom right during co they got a lot of government money and things like that that now it's starting to level off and and uh they're realizing that it it wasn't always like that but there's a lot of tools and it does you know especially when it comes down to small businesses they've got everything from consulting to loans to uh helping you get buildings and I mean really there's a lot of stuff they have to offer. So, I'm excited to have them on next week and if anybody has any questions or you guys or anybody want to pop on or something, let me know. But I think that's going to be kind of cool for a lot of small businesses to to get a little bit more information on. So, next week, same time, same bat channel, we're going to be uh right back here uh talking to uh actually one of the directors from SB SBA. So, I'm kind of excited about that. And then uh on the first every month now on the 1 there's going to be a uh gig safety uh basically it's going to be just an hourlong training. All we're going to be doing is talking about things like fall protection, entrapment zones and all the stuff that's the key. You know when you hear about a lot of accidents and stuff that are happening um it's most of it's the same stuff happening. We've got we're either missing fall protection,

You know, or enttrapment areas and things like this. We're going to be basically drilling this into people's heads. And at the end of this thing, in a year or two, if we can say we've gotten hundreds of people to do fall protection that wasn't there before, then it was a success, right? Because that's bottom line, that's that's what we're all trying to do. We're trying to make the sure the gates are done a little bit safer um than they are now. And and we're never going to get it all the way if we just keep saying, "Hey, just I mean we we in our industry, we're real quick to just say, "Hey, make sure you build that per code." And then we walk away. That's just that's how that's how we've been. We're like, "Hey, that's not code." Well, what is it? Well, you just got to go look it up. And uh but all I know is that's not it, you know. Well, we're gonna not get we're not going to do that to you. We're gonna actually just have an hour long and this is going to be for every it's going to be the first of the month. I don't care if it lands on a Sunday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday. It's a 1 pm. Uh everything's Pacific time because I'm not good at uh translating it out for everybody. So, um nonetheless, and that's my time zone. So, on the first of the month and then we're going to just for an hour long and I'm hoping to get more and we're going to reach out to all of our project uh project managers, all the uh property managers and not just for contractors, but in general, anybody that's dealing with gates, we're going to try to get them um a little bit more involved in it and just share the information. Again, it's just about things that that we really need to talk about, which is the stuff that can prevent people from getting hurt. And that's kind of the goal to the whole thing whether uh and it's not about supporting one one person, one association, one standard, one anything. I just want somebody to uh start using fall protection that's not using it now. So that's going to be the first and that's coming up here pretty soon. So hopefully everybody tunes in on that. Um I got one last question for you guys. Um what is and this may may uh may apply more to Michael, but uh what's the best business book you've ever read? Oh man, we don't have a lot of time. So I will shorten down my answer for you. I I want to I want everyone to know that everyone learns different, right? So podcast is a really popular way. A lot of people that I know that that we work with learn and I think podcast is a great way. Some people do conferences. Um some people do hardback books, but I do a lot of Audible books because I like to, you know, take advantage of my time driving, right? So, I actually have five and I think these five books meet any season of life that you are in in business. And so, uh, Hunting in a Farmer's World number number one, The Pumpkin Plan, Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss, who we just heard at Ramsay was awesome. He's a hostage negotiator. Um, trust and inspire and it's your ship. So, I know that's five, but if you had to just read one today, be hunting in a farmer's world. So, nice. Well, Tamara, when I said it was mainly I more I didn't mean that you were I just because he's doing business consulting, but I'd love to hear what your uh favorite business book was. Well, yeah, I read a lot of books. actually wrote a book um and yeah anyway um being a writer but um yeah like I said Blitzcaling um is the guy who founded LinkedIn and it's all about um you know in in the tech world they talk about Facebook where they their motto was move fast and break things so basically fail fast try new things uh if you have an idea implement it see how it works iterate as you go and those sorts of things and that was quite um inspirational but honestly I read a lot of dummies guides as well. I like to learn new things. So like anything about marketing, SEO, sales, whatever. I'll read a dummies guide. Yeah. Yeah, I like those too. What? Gosh, you ask that. So, um I say Art of War. I don't know if it's considered a business book, but I I I consider it one is uh probably one that I I I would lean on, but uh I don't I don't read as much as I I wish I could at all. My uh my wife really kind of kind of I I I read with her I guess sometimes she's doing you know we do a lot while we're driving and stuff and she'll read it out. So she just actually started doing one on JD Vance and that's been if you haven't read his autobiography that is really cool to read. It's pretty interesting stuff you didn't know. Um but other than that I

Don't really I've just I've never been a big reader. It's the weirdest thing. But I watch the hell out of TV and movies you know. Yeah. Well, you've got to everyone decompresses differently and so I travel a lot. Texas is a really big state, right? So, we I I take advantage of that time. Um that or or when we're on planes. But you might listen, The Pumpkin Plan is an awesome book. You might want to give that Audible a try. Yeah. And you might at least get into his his books. He's an awesome He reads his own stuff. Um I can't say his last name, that's why I'm not saying his his name. Um his first name, Mike. Um, but yeah, I get it. But like I said, everyone learns different. And so if you're not doing something, well, your wife reading to you or podcast or you know, I mean, you're reading all kinds of stuff, Brian. You're in the mix, right? But it's when you're not doing anything, that's when it gets scary, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's a lot of online. I I read a lot online, a lot of chattp and a lot of uh looking stuff up and researching. And so you'd be amazed how much you end up in the end of the day, how much you end up absorbing from that. But I wish I I wish I had the attention span to sit down and read more. And that's one of my one of my goals in life is to be able to sit there and read without going that crazy, you know? Well, do you mean just listen to it, man, when you're driving, you know? I see a lot of courses on like Corsera, you know, online courses and and they have short videos. They're like four minutes each or whatever and you can learn something new in like a couple of days. So, Well, now you got me. They got videos. I I I'm reading what's cool. So, hey, uh before we close out here, uh how do we tell people how to get a hold of you guys that are listening to um through one of the streaming channels? What's a good way for uh them to get a hold of uh Draw Offense? On our website, drawoffense.com. It's super simple. And then all our social media is linked from there and you can email us from there. And we are very responsive. We're always in startup mode. Okay. So, drawoffense.com. So, everybody that's listening um in their cars or at home or through their headphones, uh go check it out. I know I saw Michael looking at it already. I think I'm going to be going back and doing some research, too. Uh Michael, what's a good way to get a hold of uh Purple Coaching? Uh obviously online, purplecoaching.com. Um if you you you can we have all the information about what our platform is. uh kind of some case studies of what we worked on or our credentials uh some stuff that we are working on and then there's also an intake if you're just like hey I'm really interested we have an intake form uh it's very interactive you talk about yourself your business where you are we get it uh Robert and I both and then we'll we'll analyze and then we book a call with you almost immediately um and so you it's a pretty it's a really great website Robert spent a lot of time on it. It's very interactive. So, it's good just to explore and see where you are. And we have some resources on there, too. Some free resources for people. I think it was Benji from CleverFox built your site, too, right? Yeah, that's Yeah, Benji Benji's on I should give him a plug. Yeah, Benji. Um Benji and Robert that they did a lot of work on that one. That was I I was during it. I wrote some of it and I wrote some ideas behind it, but they really nailed it. So, they did a good job. Nice. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on, especially uh this late. I'll let you guys get to your dinner or wherever you guys going to be going. But uh thank you for coming on and everybody that's listening, thanks for tuning in. We will see you guys next week when uh we got Saul from SBA coming on. Everybody have a safe night. Hey, appreciate you, Brian. Thanks, buddy. Appreciate it. Thank you. Bye. Bye now.