November 25, 2024 • 36 mins
In this episode of the Builder Upper show, we speak with Josh Smyser, owner of TNT Tuckpointing & Building Restoration, LLC. Stepping into his family's business at just 12 years old, Josh's path came full circle when his father’s passing led him to leave his accounting career and rebuild TNT Tuckpointing & Building Restoration from the ground up. Josh highlights his focus on creating a strong company culture, investing in technology, and developing key employees. He also talks about the importance of character over skills in hiring and shares insights on using drones, construction cameras, and CRM systems to improve business operations.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone, I'm Lou Perez, your host of The Builder
Upper Show, a podcast where we talk about everything in
construction and trades.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Now let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I would like to welcome our guest, Josh Smicer, owner
of TNT Tuck Pointing and Building Restoration LLC.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey, Josh, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
I'm doing great. Good to meet you.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Good to meet you too. I appreciate you jumping on here.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You were referred by a friend, so that means that
somebody really likes you, Josh.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
They wanted you to be on The Builder Upper Show.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I appreciate you joining us today, and I love to
just jump right into it and get the nitty gritty
details of your background, So go ahead and highlight as
much as you can.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
When did you get into construction?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, so I got a construction at a really young age.
Show is kind of forced into it as child labor, right,
I'm second generation. My dad started company when I was twelve.
So here I was twelve years old working on you know,
parapets of school, so up on the rooflines so the
people wouldn't see you up there, But yeah, I did,
(01:12):
you know. I say it like it's a really tough thing,
but it was a It was a fun thing growing
up in a family business. My dad had started it
and he always stayed really small, so I worked with
him all through high school and college. I was the
only child most of my life, and so then I
went off to college, I became TPA. I was an
accountant for about five years, and then my father got sick,
(01:34):
so then I came back into the business. So that
was helpful to have that background of knowing how to
do the trade. But then my business background was really
helpful in growing a company. But I had to start
out with basically nobody. So my father passed away two
months after I came back, and then our main Yeah,
(01:56):
then our main employee had passed away six months after that,
so then I was down to the one guy I
had trained the previous year. So it was really challenging.
The first seven years. I'm thinking what the heck? Right,
Basically it was almost like a startup, right, we had
been in business for now, we've been in business over
(02:17):
thirty years, so at that point it was like sixteen
years or so, but really I was at ground day
one again, so it was interesting. So fast forward, you know,
took maybe seven eight years to start, you know, developing
some more foreman under me, and then probably about four
years ago brought one of the foremen in as a
(02:39):
project manager and estimator, and then that's also helped me
to continue to grow it. So now we went from
about two people in about three hundred thousand revenue to
now we got about twenty employees and about six million
in revenue amazing in the last fifteen years. So it's
been pretty good and we're really blessed to have a
(03:02):
good culture here of a lot of longtime employees. So
I would say the average tenure of our employees is
probably around eight years or so.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
That's really good. Tell me a little bit about your
your business. You know, what do you guys do?
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah, so we do. It's a little odds, right. I
always have to explain what tuck pointing is. So companies
C and T touch pointy and building restoration. So tuck
pointing is actually the grinding out of the mortar joints
between the brick and you can kind of see there's
a brick wall behind me. So that is the maintenance
that you do to a masonry building. So we do
anything with restoring brick block stone buildings. So we do
(03:41):
mostly courthouses, churches, schools. That kind of work.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Awesome, And tell me a little bit. You know, you're
you grew up with your dad doing this, you know
was there. I'd love to hear a story of you know,
how your dad brought you into this.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, think it was it was, uh, you just had
to get up and go. And I don't really remember why,
you know it was. I think it started out he
needed help on some chimneys on the weekends. Right, and
I'm twelve, I have no choice. Some of the funny
things of when I was a kid. You know, I'm
a really young kid. So I remember calling my mom
(04:19):
complaining about, you know, I didn't get launched from my dad.
And I'm sitting there starving. So my mom drops off
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I eat it
really fast. I can run over and keep mixing mortar
for that. So yeah, I have a lot of memories
like that. Those are kind of funny. Or it'd be like,
all right, we're going through McDonald's. You gotta pick it.
You gotta eat your food before we get to the
(04:40):
job site because we got to go, go, go, So
I his uh his like pushiness, I guess, or you know,
driven mentality really rubbed off on me. I mean, is
you know, I grew up very entrepreneurial the same way
as as uh as he did.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So that's great. I love that. I love it.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Hey, my dad and your dad very similar. Just push
us no matter what. So that's okay, it makes us better.
I haven't met that many CPA construction owners.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
What was like the long term goal before?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, so I never really planned on going back in
the business, Okay, you know, I did it growing up,
and then I liked you know, I liked working in
public accounting. So I worked at chrisce Waterhouse Scoopers in Deloitte,
a couple of the big firms. So I had moved
back home. I was working John Deere was my main
client here locally. And then it just happened to be,
you know, my dad got sick and I'm I had
(05:37):
a younger brother who passed away when I was younger,
so I was the only child, and I needed a
way for to keep the business going. And then after
my father passed away, away from my mom to be
able to mind tie getting out of it, you know,
and and The next part of that was I really
wanted to grow. I wanted to raise my kids, you
(06:00):
family business, because I think there's so much they can
learn from in a work ethics standpoint. You know.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah, I'm totally with that. That makes it.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
So you mentioned so you got kids, So go ahead,
and how many kids do you have? You know, what
are their ages? Feel free to say their names if
you're okay with that.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, sure, yeah. So I've got four kids. I've got
a fourteen year old that's Madison, and then I've got
triplet boys that are ten. So That'soper, Carter, and Tucker.
So that's it's really a blast, and I try to
get them involved. My daughter when she was fourteen. This
last summer, she became like our marketing associate is what
(06:38):
her title is. Then set her up with an email,
got her some business cards, so she helps with some
of our social media posts. The boys they're ten, we
take them around, they kind of come look at some
jobs with me, and we're they're they're really just learning
(06:58):
really how to interact with people, and then also just
a little bit of the technical side, like I'm just
showing them what are some of the issues I'm seeing
and how we fix it and then take them over
and see some job sites in action. So they've got
a little bit of understanding of what we do, but
they haven't had to work really hard yet. So I'm
waiting till they're twelve years to twelve.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, man, they must be proud of dad, that's for sure.
I think what you're doing, you're setting the next generation
up for success.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
It's the best. That's so.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I was going to ask you, you know, what's your
secret to scaling your business? But I already know it's
your daughter doing all the social media, but you're.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Talking about I think. I think what's really helped me
of growing the business was, you know, I learned some
lessons along the way of you know, don't grow it
too fast. When I first came in, it was really, hey,
let's get as much work as I can and let's
just you know, bang it out right. I'll just hire
anybody off the street and I'll train them. And it
(08:05):
just didn't work out. And I think the biggest thing
was it just took a lot of patients. Those first
seven years were really frustrating. I think I was really
pulling from the wrong labor pool. Right, Like it's gonna
sound bad, but I was getting a lot of the
guys the same kind of guys my dad was getting before, right,
a lot of the drunks and you know, guys with
drug problems and all this stuff, like they're just not reliable.
(08:29):
But when we're great at doing the trade, but you
couldn't depend on if they showed up or not. So
we kind of made a culture shift and just made
sure I wanted I wanted people with character and that
were great to be part of it in your team.
So we were looking for fit more than skills at
that point, and really we still are, so fit is
(08:50):
so much more important to me than what what skills
you bring to the table. So getting away from the
guys that were awesome performers but were really kind of
cancers to your team, Yeah, that was it. And then
so those were like the field levels. And then I
found certain positions kind of stopped me from growing. When
I first got started, I was having to do everything,
(09:12):
be the foreman, the estimator, the delivery driver. I mean
I was at my CDL and I was delivering lifts.
I was the CFO doing the accounting role. I mean,
it's a it's just a lot, and then you know,
you'd find develop a few key formats that helps you grow.
Then I brought in a guy to manage our warehouse
(09:34):
and delivery operations that's kind of like a catch all,
kind of does all kinds of different things. And then
bringing in one of the foremen in as another project
manager that helped out huge, And then more recently the
latest person that helped uscroll a lot is my cousin, Jason.
He's a he's a third generation Mason, so like my
(09:55):
to bring it all back. My father learned from his
grandfather up in Minneapolis, Oh Wow, and he he ran
his own company successfully for quite a few years, probably
thirteen fourteen years, and just last year he kind of
got tired of run in his own business and just
came and joined us, so that that was just another
key person that we can build around. So my biggest
(10:16):
thing when people ask me, what you know, what are
the keys to growing? And it really is like baby steps
to me. It's like finding who are the key people,
what are the key positions you need, and then find
and fill those positions and then grow again. So I've
viewed as like plateaus like grow, reach a reach a plateau,
grow again, reach another plateau, like you got to you
(10:40):
got to build the infrastructure around the company instead of
just going to get the sales and figuring it out.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
You answered like you're like two steps ahead of me.
You totally answered a question I was going to ask
you of, like how how is that company culture? And
how do you recruit new people? But it sounds like
you're not afraid to go get the players. You're not
afraid to bring in some of the best to make
sure that your whole operation is sustainable and successful at
(11:08):
all times. Is that kind of like your your approach then,
is you yeah, mind going after those eight players to
bring them in right?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Right? Yeah, that's exactly where we're at. And we're also
like developing them right, So like willing to be a
little bit patient. You know, we've had a few people
in the beginning who're like, I don't know if this
guy's gonna work out. You know, some field guys maybe
want to get rid of all you think, Hey, let's
see how this plays out. Some people develop a little
bit slower, and that's paid out pretty well, paid off
(11:36):
really well for us. So we've had a few guys
that you just didn't think in the beginning they with
but they they really you know, stepped up. And I
think it's having that culture of everybody supporting them on. Uh,
there isn't that insecurity, Like guys don't have that. Oh man,
he's after my job. No, we we have plenty of work.
We are slow to fire. I know that's opposite of
(11:59):
what most people will tell you. They're you're supposed to
you know, higher slow and fire fast. But we've already
thought through who we wanted to hire, so we're gonna
give it a little bit of leash before you know,
we were to get rid of somebody. So I think, yeah,
I think the culture is more it's more like a family,
a family culture with a big emphasis on production. I mean,
(12:23):
we have fun while we're working, so we're not the
like super lighthearted, like screwing around all the time. But guys,
you know, get along really well.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I was gonna say, do you guys hang out after
work hours? Do you guys do anything fun out outside
of work?
Speaker 3 (12:38):
We tried it, so we do, like you know, the
company parties and all that kind of stuff. We've done
some events. We always say we should do more. There's
just never enough time. We you know, we've went paintballing,
We've done types of things. But the other thing is
the nature of our business is it seasonal. So we
start up typically like mid February and then the end
(13:02):
around Thanksgiving. So the guys always have those couple months off.
So I always say, hey, we're we're pretty hardcore. Monday
through Friday, so they'll work ten eleven hour days or so,
and then they get every weekend off and then they
have those the winner breaks. So a lot of times
during the winter, those guys will still hang out even
(13:23):
though they're not working together, they're getting together, you know,
going out hunting or doing whatever.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
That's the Yeah, that's when the fun begins, right, So, yeah,
that's cool. I like that you offer, you know, development opportunities.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
I think that's exciting for anybody to even come into
the industry. You know, do you have that approach when
you're trying to push the company towards newcomers or even
if you go out to get newcomers, that's kind of
like the approach to entice them to come.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
In give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
They work hard, they're worth the investment that you're going
to develop them to a position that they're looking to
be in.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's part of one of
the things that we owe people in the company is
we owe you a chance to grow as much as
you want to grow. So part of that, you know,
people in construction don't necessarily like a lot of the
guys coming in don't necessarily know, you know, what's their
end goal at the end of the day, right, they
(14:24):
just want to go there do a good job. And
then you do a good job, then you're promoted to
a foreman, and then you know, maybe you want to
become I have a lot of really good foreman that
maybe do or don't want to become project managers, you know,
all that kind of stuff that's like a different progression.
And then I have somebody like Jason though, guys mentioning
that ran his own company, like he would rather he
(14:46):
would prefer to be in the field, so like he
loves being like a foreman or superintendent, and he will
do the project management side in the winter, he comes
and helps estimates and everything, but as soon as those
projects get kicked off, he wants out of the office.
So trying to match each person's skill sets with the
positions we've got available, and then you know, trying to
(15:07):
think of how I can grow the company to still
provide those you know, new opportunities, because yeah, I do,
I do. See I have you know, some other people
coming up that, you know, if they want different opportunities.
I want to try to make it possible. But you know,
sometimes it's tough because we don't have turnover. So there's
(15:30):
you know, they're still they're happiest part of the team,
and you know we try to compensate well for that.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
So that's great.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Is there any other employees that you'd like to highlight
or you got some stories about that you'd like to share,
just so you can you can make sure that they
listen in and know that you called them out.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yeah, right, Yeah, We've got I mean, we have a
lot of people that have been with us for a
long time. We have some we have some key form
that have been with us for a while like Ryan Flatley,
Richard Copley, Chris Snyder, Ramon Guzman and uh, you know,
Jason Berg. And then Mike Lee is the other guy
(16:09):
that now he's a project manager, but he was he
was kind of our first success case, right and he
came in. He was one of the first guys, worked
right out in the field with me, and then became
the foreman. Actually, the fun the funny story about how
he became foreman, it wasn't funny for me at the time.
It was actually a foreman.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
We were supposed to start on like, say, next Monday,
we were supposed to start up this season, and I
called the guy and I'm like, yeah, Hey, next Monday,
We're gonna do a week of safety training. Here's what
I want you to train on. You're gonna you know,
you're gonna go power tools, You're gonna do over this
and that. And he's like, yeah, sounds great. Mall set
for that. And then Sunday night of that week he
(16:50):
calls and was like, Ah, you know, I think I'm
gonna go work for a different company, and oh, you
just had all winter off. We just talked one day
before and he decided to go somewhere else. So Mike
kind of got thrown into the foreman role because at
this point, you know, I needed a foreman. I'm trying
(17:11):
to grow the company and I can't be there on
site every day. So he got thrown into the role.
We had a bunch of newer guys. Some of these
same guys that are foreman were new under Mike that
first year, and you know, it all just worked out.
I'm not gonna say it wasn't challenging. It is quite challenging.
But then the other part to that story is about
(17:33):
four months later, that other guy who left wanted his
job back. And now you say, you know sorry, I mean,
you proved a lot to me about your character in
this time of willing to leave me hang in when
I needed you the most, and so you know, character
matters here. So like I continued on with the guy
(17:53):
that was the lead, the less experienced foreman at the time,
no one, We're going to develop them and it's going
to be way better. We did all also have kind
of a similar situation where around that same time, we
had one guy that was one of those problem guys
of showing up to work when he was at work.
He was fantastic, and he was actually my first employee
I had ever hired, so he had worked for me
(18:15):
for five six years. Great work when he's there, but
and every time there was an excuse for not showing up.
You started to see how much that affected the team,
and I think I really only could grow more when
I did cut ties with him. It had to be
(18:36):
his own thing, right, I mean it even came down
to you and missed so many days off. I'm like, hey,
if you do not show up tomorrow, you don't have
a job. They didn't show up. Well sorry. But once
once we moved away from that guy, you know, like,
these are kind of those cancers that you don't even
know are happened, that are really causing a big impact.
(18:56):
It really freed up other people to step into thet
those roles. And I would say too, I even had
like one of my employees about a year later, one
of those guys that was a newer guy. A year later,
he pulled me off to the side and said, you know,
after that guy left, I was kind of wondering how
(19:18):
this was gonna go because he was he was our
top producer. Like, he had serious concerns of how it
was going to go. And you know, looking back at
on a year later, then he had a lot of pride.
I think I think the whole team had pride that
you know, here we lost one of our best producers,
but the team was so much stronger for it. Because
(19:39):
we didn't have all this negativity of you know, so
and so not showing us showing up and they're making
my life harder. And they ended up stepping up to
the plate and learned the technical skills. So you can anybody,
you can learn these technical skills if you've got the
right attitude.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
I'm totally with that. Man.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
The leadership that you just showed through all of that
is huge, It's really huge. And then the impact and
result from the team is incredible. So it also congrats
to you on making that move. I know not everybody
likes to, as you call it, cut ties when the
time is right, but you have to do what you
(20:18):
have to do in order to push the business forward.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And you made that call, and now look at you.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
You're in a stronger position, your team is strong, you
have no regrets, You're just moving forward.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
So I love that, man.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
You guys are just just crushing it right now, and
I want to pivot. You mentioned something along training and
tools and stuff that sparked the next question, which was
I was going to ask you, are you using any
type of technology to help your business be efficient or
grow or how do you use technology in your business today?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah, technology is a big part of it. I think
it comes from my accounting side, Like I really like
thinking about processes and all that stuff. So those are
some of the things that I tried to do more
in my day to day life is think about how
I can integrate some technologies to improve our business and
scale us for the next level. We do use some
drone software out there, so myself and the other project
(21:13):
manager as part of every job when we go look
at it, we do fly a drone and it flies
in an automated path. You upload these images and you
create like a three D model. We use that for
all of our estimating because it helps us like refine
some estimates. We can get measurements right off of It
helps you understand the layout of the project. So not
(21:34):
only do we use something like that at during estimating,
we also do it the whole time we're on the project,
so then we can see project process or at me progress.
You can also use it for some videos for marketing
where I'm trying to bring my daughter involved. So that's cool.
That's drones that we use. That. Another thing we started
(21:59):
implement just this year was using construction cameras. Okay, we're
that those up on our job sites. We've only done
that for about six months now. But on the on
the second job site we set it up on, we
had some unintended uh, unintended benefits. I wasn't really planning on.
We were doing a school over in Rock Island. We're
(22:20):
redoing a stadium and it's a little bit rougher part
of town. So we actually bought a couple of cameras
that had uh SER monitoring. So while I was at
my kids baseball game on a Saturday, I get this
little text message, you know, showing you know, somebody's on
our site, you know, asking if we want to uh
(22:41):
dispatch the police. Well I didn't even I didn't even
pay attention to that. I was too into the game
or whatever. And then the next time I look at it,
they already dispatched the police. And then I go and
log onto the video and you see this this young
kid getting handcuffed. And then I could scroll back and
watch the video and yeah, he's trying to break into
the athletic directors office.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
I mean some of those, like I was planning on,
I wanted the construction cameras to be able to track progress. Yeah,
and it'll send daily photo or photos every fifteen minutes,
like into our construction management software. So I'm all about
technology and trying to find ways to incorporate it.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
You get so many benefits.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
I mean, you're you're not only tracking productivity, you're making
sure that your entire construction site's safe. And then on
top of that, you get to send it over for
marketing if it's good, video to be cut off and anyway, we.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Thought one of the good good things like the construction cameras,
there was a lot of parts to it that I
didn't really think through of, like how beneficial they really are.
Like one of the things like in the winter when
I mentioned, wow, we're I don't know if we really
talked about but then we are seasonal. We shut down
around Thanksgiving and we start up typically mid February, So
in that off season is really when I try to
refine and improve the business a lot. So one of
(23:59):
the things, like on that project at the Rock Island Stadium,
it was a large deck coding project, so on the
stairs of the stadium you use like a rubberized debt coding.
We hadn't done a lot of that, so we made sure,
you know, We made sure we did that right, had
the right reps in there and everything. But when I'm
bidding that kind of project, I end up calling one
(24:22):
of my buddies from Philly. Shout out to Michael at Culbertson. Uh.
He helped me. Uh, he helped me come up with
my basic estimate. Right, I'm like, tell me what your
slowest guy does. That's how I want to bid this thing, right,
I've never done one before, so so give me productivity
of your slowest guy. So anyways, we were able to
(24:43):
win the job, and we do it now when our
off season rolls around, I haven't done it yet. That's
why I'm saying gonna do it. I'm gonna go back
to that video and actually look at how many guys
I had doing that work, and the go back and
recalculate our productivity because I don't know about you or
(25:04):
what some of the other contractors you got. We do
cost codes and all that stuff for guys, uh, payroll tracking,
but I mean, honestly, they're just not good at swapping
out and you know, like if they did one task
they were, you know, erecting scaffold in the morning, and
then they started doing deck coding. They don't. They don't
switch that, and I don't really expect them to, you know,
(25:26):
I mean, I'm just trying to get close. But that's
another example where you could use these construction cameras and
just go back and say, Okay, we started this day,
we started that day. We had this many guys, it
took us this long. I know what the footage is.
Now I can go back and recreate actual productivities, even
if their time cards weren't great, you.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Know, so validate, validate all the data just by looking
at it on the camera.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
That's great.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Yeah. So those are just kind of some of the things,
you know, you know, that's that's really not why you're
buying it initially, right, But there's so many added benefits.
So I would say, of all the things that I
implemented this year, that's probably the biggest one. And then
also getting into I think another thing we did about
a year ago. So one of my one of my competitors,
(26:12):
I'm anticipating is going to have some problems. They've got
they've got some lawsuits going on and things like that.
So about a year ago I'm planning for like the
I'm looking at that thinking, Okay, I'm gonna have another
big step up and growth in the next two years.
And so then we started implementing like a CRM. Oh
on that way, we as like Salesforce, but there's so
(26:33):
many others h And we were talking about what are
some of the thing advice you'd give to other contractors
that that is definitely one that I didn't I didn't
understand the value of a CRM, and that CRM just
customer relationship model, I think, right, But we we would probably,
(26:55):
like a lot of contractors, somebody calls us, we get
their information, we go look at the bid, we send
out the bid. If we don't hear from them, we
don't hear from them, they must not be interested. Might
call them once. But then you know, after that we
just kind of moved on. But with implementing the CRM,
it actually allows me to go back to that list
and look at and like, I should probably touch up
(27:16):
a base with this person, you know, revalidate that conversation,
you know, see if we met their needs our bid,
See if they need us to update anything for next year.
So just that more follow up. Right in construction, we
are really bad at following up. I know that because
I don't know how many customers would I call them
(27:37):
and say, hey, I'm sorry, it's taking me three four
days to get a hold of you. They're like, oh,
at least you called me back. I've been trying to
call people for two months. So the bar is super
low in construction. So if you are responsive, and especially
if you're given foresight and one reaching out to them
before they even contact you, I think it goes a
long ways. Like right now we're prepping. We're looking back
(28:00):
at you know, bids we gave to churches or other
nonprofits things like that, where a lot of times it's
like a multi year cycle. You know, they don't realize
how expensive stuff is. Then they got a budget for
it and fundraise. So we we try to reach out
to them now and give them updated pricing so that
way you know they're ready for next year.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
That's smart. That's so smart.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
The in the CRMs, I mean they have, they're so
smart now these days with the tech because you can
set up like automated workflows where you can set up
like cadences for email follow ups and then the systems
doing the email follow ups for you automatically and just
makes life a lot easier.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, you led into what That's my
goal for this winter is to develop some of these
workflows where somebody calls in, they get the email of hey,
we got we we heard you called us, thank you,
We're going to sign an estimator in the next day
or two. They'll get a hold of you and then
start like the whole progression. Send out the bid, feed
(29:04):
them some marketing materials.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, automate the.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Whole process the way to do it. I can I
see the growth. I see where you guys are headed.
It's really exciting. Where can people find your business? How
do you know? Do you do business in a specific area?
And then do you have a website phone number if
you wouldn't mind.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Yeah, yeah, So we operate primarily in Iowa, but we
do go into some parts of Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
And depending on when this airs, we'll probably have a
new website. By Friday of this week, our new website
will roll out and so our service area is actually
part of that website. But our primary areas that we
(29:50):
we work it for is you know, commercial, educational, religious,
governmental type work. So we don't do any resis eventual
work unfortunately they're just yeah, and historic is a big
part of it. Again, I didn't really stay, but we
do a lot of historic frustrations.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Do you guys, did you pick out a website domain
yet for your new website that's coming.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
And so it's still the same thing. It's TNT tuck
pointing dot com.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
TNT Touchpointing dot com. Okay, awesome, yep, yep. And then
if someone wants to call you to yep.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
And if they want to call us, it's five sixty
three seventy eight five zero one two zero. And I
kind of want to give a shout out to the
guys we're working with on our website and kind of
our marketing plan in general. We're working with some guys
h Adam over at Manic Manic yep, m A D
A K m A d A K.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Are they local? Are they in your area?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
No? Actually no, Actually just connected with Adam over LinkedIn
and oh nice some of the work that he did
and we met, you know, on a zoom call and
it was just a great connection. I felt like this
is something that understands where I'm going because I really
wanted to partner. I don't have a marketing background, right,
(31:10):
I'm an accountant and a construction worker, so I'm just
like very detail oriented. I don't think creatively like that.
So I really needed somebody with that energy.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
That's smart.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I was going to ask you, you know, just like
a last question before we wrapped up, and I know
that you mentioned a little bit of.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Advice already, I was like noting it down you meant.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
I wanted to ask you, do you have any advice
for new construction owners that you'd like to share with
the listeners something that you shared earlier that was I
feel like a really big piece was invest in tech,
invest in your CRM automate processes. If you want to
elaborate on any other advice, feel free or even tell
us anything else that you would like to share.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
It's totally up to you.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah. Yeah, I think one of them that you know
probably talk about. One of the parts that maybe aren't
that fun is you're gonna have some bad years, right,
so in that you know this like, oh, it's always
tough to talk about, but you know, I'd say in
year seven eight somewhere around there, we were growing pretty well,
(32:18):
and man, we just had two jobs go bad and
when you're small and you have a couple jobs go bad.
You know, there was a year where we lost over
one hundred grand. I'm like, man, those are the times
where behind a desk working as an accountant looked really good, right,
I really questioned what I was doing. But it made you,
(32:38):
it made me double down on it, right, and you realize, Okay,
what are what are the things we did wrong? You
know what? What were the issues here? And and in
that year, it was we had an inexperienced crew and
we were doing some prevailing wage jobs, so we had
guys with like six months experience getting like full journeyman wages,
and honestly they were they were milking it. So yeah,
(32:59):
that was a tough lesson to learn that that year,
and we had another year kind of like that. But
you know what, I've never recreated any of those bad
learning experiences, right, you know, We've we've always improved on those.
So I guess you don't want to fail, but you
really had to fail to get better. Yeah, and those
(33:20):
happened earlier on when the sticks are a little bit lower,
so that those that's another piece of experience I guess
I tell people is because I have friends that you
know start up construction companies and they want to grow, grow, grow, grow,
And I think that's one of the biggest mistakes you
can do. Like if I was starting over, I would
invest heavily in tech right away up front that so
(33:41):
that is a big thing we do. I really don't
want much administrative cost, so invest in tech, have a
great plan, and find great people. Right is you The
people are still your cornerstone here. You need your tech there,
but you need people that you can and trust, the
people that you want to grow with. One of the
(34:04):
things we talked about with that company culture. One of
the things that's happening right now is we had an
opportunity to buy like four more buildings in our town,
a little co op. I live in a really small town,
so the agricultural co op sold their buildings, so they
had like four buildings twenty eight thousand square feet four
acres just two blocks from our shop. We had the
(34:26):
opportunity to buy that, and we did because it's just
great to get you know, more space and better organized.
But the pride by employees had in that right, the
guys that have been here for so long have been
able to see when we started out with just like
our main shop right then like six years ago we
built a five thousand square feet build building. Then three
(34:48):
years ago we built the other twelve thousand, and then
now we bought these buildings. So the employees to just
have been able to grow with us, and everybody has
that same pride in what we've been able to do together.
It's not me driving it. It's them just as much
as as me.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
You know, I love it. I love it, Josh.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
I have to ask you before we even wrap up.
You look like a sports guy. You know who who's
your teams? Who's your teams?
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah? Yeah, so I used I grew up in I
mean Iowa, so we don't have professional sports teams. But
I was from Minnesota when I was younger. So I'm
Minnesota guy. Vikings Twins.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Okay, yep.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
My brother in law will be proud. He's a huge
he's your Minnesota as well. He's a huge Vikings fan.
He rubs it in my face all the time. I
won't say who I'm a fan of, but yeah, that's
good to know.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Awesome.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yep. You can't see it in my camera, but I
actually have up there. I got like helmets and all
that stuff in my own.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Oh, I love it.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
I just I had a feeling. I had a feeling.
I had to ask you just feel it out. That's
that's good. That's awesome, man, what was really great getting
to know you. Thank you for being a guest on
the show. Please everyone like, subscribe, comment, and share the
Builder Upper Show with anyone in the construction industry.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
We will see you next time.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
If you're a construction contractor and would like to appear
as a guest on our podcast, write us an email.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
It's Lou at lumberfi dot com.
Hey everyone, I'm Lou Perez, your host of The Builder
Upper Show, a podcast where we talk about everything in
construction and trades.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Now let's get into it.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
I would like to welcome our guest, Josh Smicer, owner
of TNT Tuck Pointing and Building Restoration LLC.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey, Josh, how are you doing today?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
I'm doing great. Good to meet you.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Good to meet you too. I appreciate you jumping on here.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
You were referred by a friend, so that means that
somebody really likes you, Josh.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
They wanted you to be on The Builder Upper Show.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I appreciate you joining us today, and I love to
just jump right into it and get the nitty gritty
details of your background, So go ahead and highlight as
much as you can.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
When did you get into construction?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, so I got a construction at a really young age.
Show is kind of forced into it as child labor, right,
I'm second generation. My dad started company when I was twelve.
So here I was twelve years old working on you know,
parapets of school, so up on the rooflines so the
people wouldn't see you up there, But yeah, I did,
(01:12):
you know. I say it like it's a really tough thing,
but it was a It was a fun thing growing
up in a family business. My dad had started it
and he always stayed really small, so I worked with
him all through high school and college. I was the
only child most of my life, and so then I
went off to college, I became TPA. I was an
accountant for about five years, and then my father got sick,
(01:34):
so then I came back into the business. So that
was helpful to have that background of knowing how to
do the trade. But then my business background was really
helpful in growing a company. But I had to start
out with basically nobody. So my father passed away two
months after I came back, and then our main Yeah,
(01:56):
then our main employee had passed away six months after that,
so then I was down to the one guy I
had trained the previous year. So it was really challenging.
The first seven years. I'm thinking what the heck? Right,
Basically it was almost like a startup, right, we had
been in business for now, we've been in business over
(02:17):
thirty years, so at that point it was like sixteen
years or so, but really I was at ground day
one again, so it was interesting. So fast forward, you know,
took maybe seven eight years to start, you know, developing
some more foreman under me, and then probably about four
years ago brought one of the foremen in as a
(02:39):
project manager and estimator, and then that's also helped me
to continue to grow it. So now we went from
about two people in about three hundred thousand revenue to
now we got about twenty employees and about six million
in revenue amazing in the last fifteen years. So it's
been pretty good and we're really blessed to have a
(03:02):
good culture here of a lot of longtime employees. So
I would say the average tenure of our employees is
probably around eight years or so.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
That's really good. Tell me a little bit about your
your business. You know, what do you guys do?
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Yeah, so we do. It's a little odds, right. I
always have to explain what tuck pointing is. So companies
C and T touch pointy and building restoration. So tuck
pointing is actually the grinding out of the mortar joints
between the brick and you can kind of see there's
a brick wall behind me. So that is the maintenance
that you do to a masonry building. So we do
anything with restoring brick block stone buildings. So we do
(03:41):
mostly courthouses, churches, schools. That kind of work.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
Awesome, And tell me a little bit. You know, you're
you grew up with your dad doing this, you know
was there. I'd love to hear a story of you know,
how your dad brought you into this.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
Yeah, think it was it was, uh, you just had
to get up and go. And I don't really remember why,
you know it was. I think it started out he
needed help on some chimneys on the weekends. Right, and
I'm twelve, I have no choice. Some of the funny
things of when I was a kid. You know, I'm
a really young kid. So I remember calling my mom
(04:19):
complaining about, you know, I didn't get launched from my dad.
And I'm sitting there starving. So my mom drops off
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and I eat it
really fast. I can run over and keep mixing mortar
for that. So yeah, I have a lot of memories
like that. Those are kind of funny. Or it'd be like,
all right, we're going through McDonald's. You gotta pick it.
You gotta eat your food before we get to the
(04:40):
job site because we got to go, go, go, So
I his uh his like pushiness, I guess, or you know,
driven mentality really rubbed off on me. I mean, is
you know, I grew up very entrepreneurial the same way
as as uh as he did.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
So that's great. I love that. I love it.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Hey, my dad and your dad very similar. Just push
us no matter what. So that's okay, it makes us better.
I haven't met that many CPA construction owners.
Speaker 2 (05:11):
What was like the long term goal before?
Speaker 3 (05:15):
Yeah, so I never really planned on going back in
the business, Okay, you know, I did it growing up,
and then I liked you know, I liked working in
public accounting. So I worked at chrisce Waterhouse Scoopers in Deloitte,
a couple of the big firms. So I had moved
back home. I was working John Deere was my main
client here locally. And then it just happened to be,
you know, my dad got sick and I'm I had
(05:37):
a younger brother who passed away when I was younger,
so I was the only child, and I needed a
way for to keep the business going. And then after
my father passed away, away from my mom to be
able to mind tie getting out of it, you know,
and and The next part of that was I really
wanted to grow. I wanted to raise my kids, you
(06:00):
family business, because I think there's so much they can
learn from in a work ethics standpoint. You know.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah, I'm totally with that. That makes it.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
So you mentioned so you got kids, So go ahead,
and how many kids do you have? You know, what
are their ages? Feel free to say their names if
you're okay with that.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
Yeah, sure, yeah. So I've got four kids. I've got
a fourteen year old that's Madison, and then I've got
triplet boys that are ten. So That'soper, Carter, and Tucker.
So that's it's really a blast, and I try to
get them involved. My daughter when she was fourteen. This
last summer, she became like our marketing associate is what
(06:38):
her title is. Then set her up with an email,
got her some business cards, so she helps with some
of our social media posts. The boys they're ten, we
take them around, they kind of come look at some
jobs with me, and we're they're they're really just learning
(06:58):
really how to interact with people, and then also just
a little bit of the technical side, like I'm just
showing them what are some of the issues I'm seeing
and how we fix it and then take them over
and see some job sites in action. So they've got
a little bit of understanding of what we do, but
they haven't had to work really hard yet. So I'm
waiting till they're twelve years to twelve.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
I love that.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
Yeah, man, they must be proud of dad, that's for sure.
I think what you're doing, you're setting the next generation
up for success.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
It's the best. That's so.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I was going to ask you, you know, what's your
secret to scaling your business? But I already know it's
your daughter doing all the social media, but you're.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Talking about I think. I think what's really helped me
of growing the business was, you know, I learned some
lessons along the way of you know, don't grow it
too fast. When I first came in, it was really, hey,
let's get as much work as I can and let's
just you know, bang it out right. I'll just hire
anybody off the street and I'll train them. And it
(08:05):
just didn't work out. And I think the biggest thing
was it just took a lot of patients. Those first
seven years were really frustrating. I think I was really
pulling from the wrong labor pool. Right, Like it's gonna
sound bad, but I was getting a lot of the
guys the same kind of guys my dad was getting before, right,
a lot of the drunks and you know, guys with
drug problems and all this stuff, like they're just not reliable.
(08:29):
But when we're great at doing the trade, but you
couldn't depend on if they showed up or not. So
we kind of made a culture shift and just made
sure I wanted I wanted people with character and that
were great to be part of it in your team.
So we were looking for fit more than skills at
that point, and really we still are, so fit is
(08:50):
so much more important to me than what what skills
you bring to the table. So getting away from the
guys that were awesome performers but were really kind of
cancers to your team, Yeah, that was it. And then
so those were like the field levels. And then I
found certain positions kind of stopped me from growing. When
I first got started, I was having to do everything,
(09:12):
be the foreman, the estimator, the delivery driver. I mean
I was at my CDL and I was delivering lifts.
I was the CFO doing the accounting role. I mean,
it's a it's just a lot, and then you know,
you'd find develop a few key formats that helps you grow.
Then I brought in a guy to manage our warehouse
(09:34):
and delivery operations that's kind of like a catch all,
kind of does all kinds of different things. And then
bringing in one of the foremen in as another project
manager that helped out huge, And then more recently the
latest person that helped uscroll a lot is my cousin, Jason.
He's a he's a third generation Mason, so like my
(09:55):
to bring it all back. My father learned from his
grandfather up in Minneapolis, Oh Wow, and he he ran
his own company successfully for quite a few years, probably
thirteen fourteen years, and just last year he kind of
got tired of run in his own business and just
came and joined us, so that that was just another
key person that we can build around. So my biggest
(10:16):
thing when people ask me, what you know, what are
the keys to growing? And it really is like baby steps
to me. It's like finding who are the key people,
what are the key positions you need, and then find
and fill those positions and then grow again. So I've
viewed as like plateaus like grow, reach a reach a plateau,
grow again, reach another plateau, like you got to you
(10:40):
got to build the infrastructure around the company instead of
just going to get the sales and figuring it out.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
You answered like you're like two steps ahead of me.
You totally answered a question I was going to ask
you of, like how how is that company culture? And
how do you recruit new people? But it sounds like
you're not afraid to go get the players. You're not
afraid to bring in some of the best to make
sure that your whole operation is sustainable and successful at
(11:08):
all times. Is that kind of like your your approach then,
is you yeah, mind going after those eight players to
bring them in right?
Speaker 3 (11:15):
Right? Yeah, that's exactly where we're at. And we're also
like developing them right, So like willing to be a
little bit patient. You know, we've had a few people
in the beginning who're like, I don't know if this
guy's gonna work out. You know, some field guys maybe
want to get rid of all you think, Hey, let's
see how this plays out. Some people develop a little
bit slower, and that's paid out pretty well, paid off
(11:36):
really well for us. So we've had a few guys
that you just didn't think in the beginning they with
but they they really you know, stepped up. And I
think it's having that culture of everybody supporting them on. Uh,
there isn't that insecurity, Like guys don't have that. Oh man,
he's after my job. No, we we have plenty of work.
We are slow to fire. I know that's opposite of
(11:59):
what most people will tell you. They're you're supposed to
you know, higher slow and fire fast. But we've already
thought through who we wanted to hire, so we're gonna
give it a little bit of leash before you know,
we were to get rid of somebody. So I think, yeah,
I think the culture is more it's more like a family,
a family culture with a big emphasis on production. I mean,
(12:23):
we have fun while we're working, so we're not the
like super lighthearted, like screwing around all the time. But guys,
you know, get along really well.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I was gonna say, do you guys hang out after
work hours? Do you guys do anything fun out outside
of work?
Speaker 3 (12:38):
We tried it, so we do, like you know, the
company parties and all that kind of stuff. We've done
some events. We always say we should do more. There's
just never enough time. We you know, we've went paintballing,
We've done types of things. But the other thing is
the nature of our business is it seasonal. So we
start up typically like mid February and then the end
(13:02):
around Thanksgiving. So the guys always have those couple months off.
So I always say, hey, we're we're pretty hardcore. Monday
through Friday, so they'll work ten eleven hour days or so,
and then they get every weekend off and then they
have those the winner breaks. So a lot of times
during the winter, those guys will still hang out even
(13:23):
though they're not working together, they're getting together, you know,
going out hunting or doing whatever.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
That's the Yeah, that's when the fun begins, right, So, yeah,
that's cool. I like that you offer, you know, development opportunities.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
That's great.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
I think that's exciting for anybody to even come into
the industry. You know, do you have that approach when
you're trying to push the company towards newcomers or even
if you go out to get newcomers, that's kind of
like the approach to entice them to come.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
In give it a shot.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
They work hard, they're worth the investment that you're going
to develop them to a position that they're looking to
be in.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Yeah, yeah, And I think that's part of one of
the things that we owe people in the company is
we owe you a chance to grow as much as
you want to grow. So part of that, you know,
people in construction don't necessarily like a lot of the
guys coming in don't necessarily know, you know, what's their
end goal at the end of the day, right, they
(14:24):
just want to go there do a good job. And
then you do a good job, then you're promoted to
a foreman, and then you know, maybe you want to
become I have a lot of really good foreman that
maybe do or don't want to become project managers, you know,
all that kind of stuff that's like a different progression.
And then I have somebody like Jason though, guys mentioning
that ran his own company, like he would rather he
(14:46):
would prefer to be in the field, so like he
loves being like a foreman or superintendent, and he will
do the project management side in the winter, he comes
and helps estimates and everything, but as soon as those
projects get kicked off, he wants out of the office.
So trying to match each person's skill sets with the
positions we've got available, and then you know, trying to
(15:07):
think of how I can grow the company to still
provide those you know, new opportunities, because yeah, I do,
I do. See I have you know, some other people
coming up that, you know, if they want different opportunities.
I want to try to make it possible. But you know,
sometimes it's tough because we don't have turnover. So there's
(15:30):
you know, they're still they're happiest part of the team,
and you know we try to compensate well for that.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
So that's great.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Is there any other employees that you'd like to highlight
or you got some stories about that you'd like to share,
just so you can you can make sure that they
listen in and know that you called them out.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
Yeah, right, Yeah, We've got I mean, we have a
lot of people that have been with us for a
long time. We have some we have some key form
that have been with us for a while like Ryan Flatley,
Richard Copley, Chris Snyder, Ramon Guzman and uh, you know,
Jason Berg. And then Mike Lee is the other guy
(16:09):
that now he's a project manager, but he was he
was kind of our first success case, right and he
came in. He was one of the first guys, worked
right out in the field with me, and then became
the foreman. Actually, the fun the funny story about how
he became foreman, it wasn't funny for me at the time.
It was actually a foreman.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (16:28):
We were supposed to start on like, say, next Monday,
we were supposed to start up this season, and I
called the guy and I'm like, yeah, Hey, next Monday,
We're gonna do a week of safety training. Here's what
I want you to train on. You're gonna you know,
you're gonna go power tools, You're gonna do over this
and that. And he's like, yeah, sounds great. Mall set
for that. And then Sunday night of that week he
(16:50):
calls and was like, Ah, you know, I think I'm
gonna go work for a different company, and oh, you
just had all winter off. We just talked one day
before and he decided to go somewhere else. So Mike
kind of got thrown into the foreman role because at
this point, you know, I needed a foreman. I'm trying
(17:11):
to grow the company and I can't be there on
site every day. So he got thrown into the role.
We had a bunch of newer guys. Some of these
same guys that are foreman were new under Mike that
first year, and you know, it all just worked out.
I'm not gonna say it wasn't challenging. It is quite challenging.
But then the other part to that story is about
(17:33):
four months later, that other guy who left wanted his
job back. And now you say, you know sorry, I mean,
you proved a lot to me about your character in
this time of willing to leave me hang in when
I needed you the most, and so you know, character
matters here. So like I continued on with the guy
(17:53):
that was the lead, the less experienced foreman at the time,
no one, We're going to develop them and it's going
to be way better. We did all also have kind
of a similar situation where around that same time, we
had one guy that was one of those problem guys
of showing up to work when he was at work.
He was fantastic, and he was actually my first employee
I had ever hired, so he had worked for me
(18:15):
for five six years. Great work when he's there, but
and every time there was an excuse for not showing up.
You started to see how much that affected the team,
and I think I really only could grow more when
I did cut ties with him. It had to be
(18:36):
his own thing, right, I mean it even came down
to you and missed so many days off. I'm like, hey,
if you do not show up tomorrow, you don't have
a job. They didn't show up. Well sorry. But once
once we moved away from that guy, you know, like,
these are kind of those cancers that you don't even
know are happened, that are really causing a big impact.
(18:56):
It really freed up other people to step into thet
those roles. And I would say too, I even had
like one of my employees about a year later, one
of those guys that was a newer guy. A year later,
he pulled me off to the side and said, you know,
after that guy left, I was kind of wondering how
(19:18):
this was gonna go because he was he was our
top producer. Like, he had serious concerns of how it
was going to go. And you know, looking back at
on a year later, then he had a lot of pride.
I think I think the whole team had pride that
you know, here we lost one of our best producers,
but the team was so much stronger for it. Because
(19:39):
we didn't have all this negativity of you know, so
and so not showing us showing up and they're making
my life harder. And they ended up stepping up to
the plate and learned the technical skills. So you can anybody,
you can learn these technical skills if you've got the
right attitude.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
I'm totally with that. Man.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
The leadership that you just showed through all of that
is huge, It's really huge. And then the impact and
result from the team is incredible. So it also congrats
to you on making that move. I know not everybody
likes to, as you call it, cut ties when the
time is right, but you have to do what you
(20:18):
have to do in order to push the business forward.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
And you made that call, and now look at you.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
You're in a stronger position, your team is strong, you
have no regrets, You're just moving forward.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
So I love that, man.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
You guys are just just crushing it right now, and
I want to pivot. You mentioned something along training and
tools and stuff that sparked the next question, which was
I was going to ask you, are you using any
type of technology to help your business be efficient or
grow or how do you use technology in your business today?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Yeah, technology is a big part of it. I think
it comes from my accounting side, Like I really like
thinking about processes and all that stuff. So those are
some of the things that I tried to do more
in my day to day life is think about how
I can integrate some technologies to improve our business and
scale us for the next level. We do use some
drone software out there, so myself and the other project
(21:13):
manager as part of every job when we go look
at it, we do fly a drone and it flies
in an automated path. You upload these images and you
create like a three D model. We use that for
all of our estimating because it helps us like refine
some estimates. We can get measurements right off of It
helps you understand the layout of the project. So not
(21:34):
only do we use something like that at during estimating,
we also do it the whole time we're on the project,
so then we can see project process or at me progress.
You can also use it for some videos for marketing
where I'm trying to bring my daughter involved. So that's cool.
That's drones that we use. That. Another thing we started
(21:59):
implement just this year was using construction cameras. Okay, we're
that those up on our job sites. We've only done
that for about six months now. But on the on
the second job site we set it up on, we
had some unintended uh, unintended benefits. I wasn't really planning on.
We were doing a school over in Rock Island. We're
(22:20):
redoing a stadium and it's a little bit rougher part
of town. So we actually bought a couple of cameras
that had uh SER monitoring. So while I was at
my kids baseball game on a Saturday, I get this
little text message, you know, showing you know, somebody's on
our site, you know, asking if we want to uh
(22:41):
dispatch the police. Well I didn't even I didn't even
pay attention to that. I was too into the game
or whatever. And then the next time I look at it,
they already dispatched the police. And then I go and
log onto the video and you see this this young
kid getting handcuffed. And then I could scroll back and
watch the video and yeah, he's trying to break into
the athletic directors office.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (23:02):
I mean some of those, like I was planning on,
I wanted the construction cameras to be able to track progress. Yeah,
and it'll send daily photo or photos every fifteen minutes,
like into our construction management software. So I'm all about
technology and trying to find ways to incorporate it.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
You get so many benefits.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
I mean, you're you're not only tracking productivity, you're making
sure that your entire construction site's safe. And then on
top of that, you get to send it over for
marketing if it's good, video to be cut off and anyway, we.
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Thought one of the good good things like the construction cameras,
there was a lot of parts to it that I
didn't really think through of, like how beneficial they really are.
Like one of the things like in the winter when
I mentioned, wow, we're I don't know if we really
talked about but then we are seasonal. We shut down
around Thanksgiving and we start up typically mid February, So
in that off season is really when I try to
refine and improve the business a lot. So one of
(23:59):
the things, like on that project at the Rock Island Stadium,
it was a large deck coding project, so on the
stairs of the stadium you use like a rubberized debt coding.
We hadn't done a lot of that, so we made sure,
you know, We made sure we did that right, had
the right reps in there and everything. But when I'm
bidding that kind of project, I end up calling one
(24:22):
of my buddies from Philly. Shout out to Michael at Culbertson. Uh.
He helped me. Uh, he helped me come up with
my basic estimate. Right, I'm like, tell me what your
slowest guy does. That's how I want to bid this thing, right,
I've never done one before, so so give me productivity
of your slowest guy. So anyways, we were able to
(24:43):
win the job, and we do it now when our
off season rolls around, I haven't done it yet. That's
why I'm saying gonna do it. I'm gonna go back
to that video and actually look at how many guys
I had doing that work, and the go back and
recalculate our productivity because I don't know about you or
(25:04):
what some of the other contractors you got. We do
cost codes and all that stuff for guys, uh, payroll tracking,
but I mean, honestly, they're just not good at swapping
out and you know, like if they did one task
they were, you know, erecting scaffold in the morning, and
then they started doing deck coding. They don't. They don't
switch that, and I don't really expect them to, you know,
(25:26):
I mean, I'm just trying to get close. But that's
another example where you could use these construction cameras and
just go back and say, Okay, we started this day,
we started that day. We had this many guys, it
took us this long. I know what the footage is.
Now I can go back and recreate actual productivities, even
if their time cards weren't great, you.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Know, so validate, validate all the data just by looking
at it on the camera.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
That's great.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Yeah. So those are just kind of some of the things,
you know, you know, that's that's really not why you're
buying it initially, right, But there's so many added benefits.
So I would say, of all the things that I
implemented this year, that's probably the biggest one. And then
also getting into I think another thing we did about
a year ago. So one of my one of my competitors,
(26:12):
I'm anticipating is going to have some problems. They've got
they've got some lawsuits going on and things like that.
So about a year ago I'm planning for like the
I'm looking at that thinking, Okay, I'm gonna have another
big step up and growth in the next two years.
And so then we started implementing like a CRM. Oh
on that way, we as like Salesforce, but there's so
(26:33):
many others h And we were talking about what are
some of the thing advice you'd give to other contractors
that that is definitely one that I didn't I didn't
understand the value of a CRM, and that CRM just
customer relationship model, I think, right, But we we would probably,
(26:55):
like a lot of contractors, somebody calls us, we get
their information, we go look at the bid, we send
out the bid. If we don't hear from them, we
don't hear from them, they must not be interested. Might
call them once. But then you know, after that we
just kind of moved on. But with implementing the CRM,
it actually allows me to go back to that list
and look at and like, I should probably touch up
(27:16):
a base with this person, you know, revalidate that conversation,
you know, see if we met their needs our bid,
See if they need us to update anything for next year.
So just that more follow up. Right in construction, we
are really bad at following up. I know that because
I don't know how many customers would I call them
(27:37):
and say, hey, I'm sorry, it's taking me three four
days to get a hold of you. They're like, oh,
at least you called me back. I've been trying to
call people for two months. So the bar is super
low in construction. So if you are responsive, and especially
if you're given foresight and one reaching out to them
before they even contact you, I think it goes a
long ways. Like right now we're prepping. We're looking back
(28:00):
at you know, bids we gave to churches or other
nonprofits things like that, where a lot of times it's
like a multi year cycle. You know, they don't realize
how expensive stuff is. Then they got a budget for
it and fundraise. So we we try to reach out
to them now and give them updated pricing so that
way you know they're ready for next year.
Speaker 2 (28:22):
That's smart. That's so smart.
Speaker 1 (28:24):
The in the CRMs, I mean they have, they're so
smart now these days with the tech because you can
set up like automated workflows where you can set up
like cadences for email follow ups and then the systems
doing the email follow ups for you automatically and just
makes life a lot easier.
Speaker 3 (28:42):
Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, you led into what That's my
goal for this winter is to develop some of these
workflows where somebody calls in, they get the email of hey,
we got we we heard you called us, thank you,
We're going to sign an estimator in the next day
or two. They'll get a hold of you and then
start like the whole progression. Send out the bid, feed
(29:04):
them some marketing materials.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Yeah, automate the.
Speaker 1 (29:08):
Whole process the way to do it. I can I
see the growth. I see where you guys are headed.
It's really exciting. Where can people find your business? How
do you know? Do you do business in a specific area?
And then do you have a website phone number if
you wouldn't mind.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
Yeah, yeah, So we operate primarily in Iowa, but we
do go into some parts of Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
And depending on when this airs, we'll probably have a
new website. By Friday of this week, our new website
will roll out and so our service area is actually
part of that website. But our primary areas that we
(29:50):
we work it for is you know, commercial, educational, religious,
governmental type work. So we don't do any resis eventual
work unfortunately they're just yeah, and historic is a big
part of it. Again, I didn't really stay, but we
do a lot of historic frustrations.
Speaker 2 (30:09):
That's really cool.
Speaker 1 (30:11):
Do you guys, did you pick out a website domain
yet for your new website that's coming.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
And so it's still the same thing. It's TNT tuck
pointing dot com.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
TNT Touchpointing dot com. Okay, awesome, yep, yep. And then
if someone wants to call you to yep.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
And if they want to call us, it's five sixty
three seventy eight five zero one two zero. And I
kind of want to give a shout out to the
guys we're working with on our website and kind of
our marketing plan in general. We're working with some guys
h Adam over at Manic Manic yep, m A D
A K m A d A K.
Speaker 2 (30:47):
Are they local? Are they in your area?
Speaker 3 (30:49):
No? Actually no, Actually just connected with Adam over LinkedIn
and oh nice some of the work that he did
and we met, you know, on a zoom call and
it was just a great connection. I felt like this
is something that understands where I'm going because I really
wanted to partner. I don't have a marketing background, right,
(31:10):
I'm an accountant and a construction worker, so I'm just
like very detail oriented. I don't think creatively like that.
So I really needed somebody with that energy.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
That's smart.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I was going to ask you, you know, just like
a last question before we wrapped up, and I know
that you mentioned a little bit of.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
Advice already, I was like noting it down you meant.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
I wanted to ask you, do you have any advice
for new construction owners that you'd like to share with
the listeners something that you shared earlier that was I
feel like a really big piece was invest in tech,
invest in your CRM automate processes. If you want to
elaborate on any other advice, feel free or even tell
us anything else that you would like to share.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
It's totally up to you.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah. Yeah, I think one of them that you know
probably talk about. One of the parts that maybe aren't
that fun is you're gonna have some bad years, right,
so in that you know this like, oh, it's always
tough to talk about, but you know, I'd say in
year seven eight somewhere around there, we were growing pretty well,
(32:18):
and man, we just had two jobs go bad and
when you're small and you have a couple jobs go bad.
You know, there was a year where we lost over
one hundred grand. I'm like, man, those are the times
where behind a desk working as an accountant looked really good, right,
I really questioned what I was doing. But it made you,
(32:38):
it made me double down on it, right, and you realize, Okay,
what are what are the things we did wrong? You
know what? What were the issues here? And and in
that year, it was we had an inexperienced crew and
we were doing some prevailing wage jobs, so we had
guys with like six months experience getting like full journeyman wages,
and honestly they were they were milking it. So yeah,
(32:59):
that was a tough lesson to learn that that year,
and we had another year kind of like that. But
you know what, I've never recreated any of those bad
learning experiences, right, you know, We've we've always improved on those.
So I guess you don't want to fail, but you
really had to fail to get better. Yeah, and those
(33:20):
happened earlier on when the sticks are a little bit lower,
so that those that's another piece of experience I guess
I tell people is because I have friends that you
know start up construction companies and they want to grow, grow, grow, grow,
And I think that's one of the biggest mistakes you
can do. Like if I was starting over, I would
invest heavily in tech right away up front that so
(33:41):
that is a big thing we do. I really don't
want much administrative cost, so invest in tech, have a
great plan, and find great people. Right is you The
people are still your cornerstone here. You need your tech there,
but you need people that you can and trust, the
people that you want to grow with. One of the
(34:04):
things we talked about with that company culture. One of
the things that's happening right now is we had an
opportunity to buy like four more buildings in our town,
a little co op. I live in a really small town,
so the agricultural co op sold their buildings, so they
had like four buildings twenty eight thousand square feet four
acres just two blocks from our shop. We had the
(34:26):
opportunity to buy that, and we did because it's just
great to get you know, more space and better organized.
But the pride by employees had in that right, the
guys that have been here for so long have been
able to see when we started out with just like
our main shop right then like six years ago we
built a five thousand square feet build building. Then three
(34:48):
years ago we built the other twelve thousand, and then
now we bought these buildings. So the employees to just
have been able to grow with us, and everybody has
that same pride in what we've been able to do together.
It's not me driving it. It's them just as much
as as me.
Speaker 2 (35:06):
You know, I love it. I love it, Josh.
Speaker 1 (35:10):
I have to ask you before we even wrap up.
You look like a sports guy. You know who who's
your teams? Who's your teams?
Speaker 3 (35:18):
Yeah? Yeah, so I used I grew up in I
mean Iowa, so we don't have professional sports teams. But
I was from Minnesota when I was younger. So I'm
Minnesota guy. Vikings Twins.
Speaker 2 (35:29):
Okay, yep.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
My brother in law will be proud. He's a huge
he's your Minnesota as well. He's a huge Vikings fan.
He rubs it in my face all the time. I
won't say who I'm a fan of, but yeah, that's
good to know.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
Awesome.
Speaker 3 (35:43):
Yep. You can't see it in my camera, but I
actually have up there. I got like helmets and all
that stuff in my own.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Oh, I love it.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
I just I had a feeling. I had a feeling.
I had to ask you just feel it out. That's
that's good. That's awesome, man, what was really great getting
to know you. Thank you for being a guest on
the show. Please everyone like, subscribe, comment, and share the
Builder Upper Show with anyone in the construction industry.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
We will see you next time.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
If you're a construction contractor and would like to appear
as a guest on our podcast, write us an email.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
It's Lou at lumberfi dot com.
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