#131 CCP

Hello, and welcome to another episode of instruction on our podcast. I'm Dillon, I'm your host. And guys, the reason that we're here, the reason this podcast exists is because we want to help the industry, whether you're in construction, whether you want to be in construction, whether somebody in construction, it's our job to really help break down, deconstruct the industry and help you to become better, a better professional, a better contractor.

Better in general, we talk mindset. We talk tactics, we talk strategies. We're going to talk to hiring and firing and training today. But through this podcast, we're again serving the construction industry from being the design side to contractor side, to the trades, to basically anybody that's involved with the construction industry.

So that's what this show is about. And if you like. The show that can track important podcasts. Go ahead and share it with a friend, share with a colleague again, we're here to help make you better. And if you have any questions, any topics you want over, something that you've been working to, maybe tell your boss or a colleague, and you don't want to do it, but you want us to cover it.

We're more than happy. You can find all of our contact info below. And with that guys just share the pill. It's that simple. They'll further do what is going on my blue collar. Bad-ass it's another beautiful day. Or we're just in the thick of it here. I say that every time we record now, but this spring man, spring of 2020 is going to go down in the history books for being quite possibly the busiest on record in the construction industry.

It is non-stop. I pulled up construction or housing starts yesterday. Again. And it's as of April seasonally adjusted. So that 1.7 million starts craziness a year ago. It was 900,000. So it's basically double, almost double in, in years of record, high pricing and record low product and material available.

So something's working. So let's just hope it keeps working. And it's crazy. I was talking to a friend in St. Louis and what he was saying is he's putting his house on the market and. That it's slightly cooled off, but only because of time of year, people are, it's Memorial day that kids are doing all this stuff.

So they're not really looking cause like you they've got baseball and everything else going on that ultimately I think people look at houses, so it's a like weird little time of year, but he's prices are still great. They're just not as much competition because again, people are dealing with end of year school.

And, to be honest with you as a seller antibiotic, it's probably a little less stressful right now. If you're gonna, if you're gonna jump on that ship and try and get it done. So maybe instead of 20 offers in a day, they'll only be 15. Okay. Do you still grate on at least, yeah. If you're selling it's great on the selling side it's gotta be stressful if you're trying to find someone.

As long as you're able to move quickly and make decisions quickly and you should be fine, which in life. Yeah. Making quick decisions is a great skill. Absolutely. Absolutely. You touched on it though. And that with my three boys and this crazy sports schedule we have there, there's nothing left in the tank to move quickly on a real estate deal right now, maybe in a month.

And I'm just going to make a hard right out of this. Cause I don't see any way else today. We're going to be talking about right. People, seats, hiring training, essentially firing, but in getting the right people in the right seats on the books. Out there that you can read, but we'll give you a cliff notes version here, which is what we do is distill it down into its essence, into the top tips, best secrets that you need to be successful in this industry.

We love to call construction. So Matt, how do we put the right people in the right. This is a very topical conversation for me personally. As of the day we're recording this, I have an interview scheduled late this afternoon. We're looking to hire a new project manager to bring on board. It was a good time to reflect on everything.

I try and tell people then about best practices for hiring and finding people and remind myself what kind of our own feedback channels and what we're looking for. So what we really base a lot of our business operations. Now on what's called the EOS model stands for the entrepreneurial operating system.

It's a phrase coined by a guy named Gino Wickman originally in the book traction, if you haven't read it it's worth a read. It's a, it's an easy read. I think there's there's probably four or five joining books now but traction is the main. And they talked about a a lot of things, really from core values to vision and planning for your business to hiring the firing to the whole gambit.

So it's a, a couple hundred page roadmap for how to run a business as the way we look at it. One of the main points in this is this right person, right seat phrase. And basically what it means is. Do y'all know who the right people are. That's pretty easy to gauge, right? Once you have a team in place or whether you have a team or not, when you meet someone, you can tell if they're the right person for your team, for your business, for your project, whatever it may be.

And that's really based on it's based on intrinsic knowledge that you have it's based on, do they mesh with your core values, all that sort of stuff. The other thing that. The other component of that is right seat. And this is the one where I think a lot of especially construction firms have a real hard time with, because we rely a lot on job descriptions and most job descriptions are a page, two pages, three pages of utter bullshit it's task-based and it's not results-based so it's a listing of.

This person will write subcontracts. They will manage a schedule. They will manage a budget, blah, blah. And it's fine. It's a part of what it is that we do or what this position does, but it's not what we're looking for. You could probably make a robot to do a lot of those tasks and there are probably people out there making them right now.

That'll be a different episode but what we really need are our results. Goal oriented people. And so we try to push the results of the position versus the task. So it gets a little woo at times, it's a little tricky to define it, but it's supposed to be. And when you focus on results, At the end of the day, I don't care what you do to get there.

Within reason if your tasks change fine, but if you can be a results producing member of our team, then you're going to be a good fit. So many good things in there. And one of the things that I want to pull out is one results driven. And even going back a little bit is the here job disruption.

And much love that we put in there. And one of the things I was thinking about as you said, that, in finding the right people, finding the right seats is how often our job descriptions really deter probably some really good people from applying to your position. Think of all the job descriptions that are out there.

And the one that really strikes me is how long you've been doing something right. Frankly, it doesn't necessarily qualify you for the job. So there's been many times in my career where I just, I went for it and it worked out and, or, applied or got headhunted or whatever, but it was, you needed five years of experience.

I'm like I don't have this, but I match a bunch of the stuff they want me to do. Is the year thing and it disqualify you. And I think a lot of firms put that in there for, I have no idea why, where somebody can actually execute all the pass the results that they want this year thing, whether it's five years, 10 years, 20 years veteran, which you're never going to find, like you got to pay a lot of money for somebody that's been in this industry for 20 years.

That's one thing that I want to like re hammer on is in that job description, because you're probably gonna deter a lot of people that could be working in your organization. If you become results oriented, not some arbitrary year. Okay. A hundred percent agree with you with a caveat though. For your main point there, I'm in complete agreement, right?

You don't necessarily judge the quality of a person by the number of years, the number of months or days or hours they've done something. There's countless examples. I think of newbies to the industry, to any industry who can come in and make a really positive difference right off from Davis.

We just recently hired a 20 year vet to the industry. So I can also concur about the other point you made, but it was also well worth it, and there's strategic reasons for that, because there, there are things that come with years of experience that are desirable to say the very least, but my caveat to what you just said is.

And this is something I've personally experienced quite a few times in the last couple of years, we have tried the online job posting thing because it's easy and it's relatively inexpensive indeed in particular. They have some pretty decent metrics and, data driven reporting that I didn't know existed until our last round.

And through this, I actually got a call out of the blue from one of their tech guys. And he said, your job posting is getting. I'm making up numbers like a million hits, but you're not talking to anyone why? And I said I'm going to keep this politically correct for our show, but we would get, 200 resumes in a day easily.

And out of those 200 resumes, maybe one was worth even thinking about. And we would. We would just get flooded with resumes typically completely unrelated to the position. And so there, there's lots of reasons that go into that and that's a cultural and values based discussion for another venue.

But what the guy told me was here's what you can do in the actual title of the posting. So we just had, construction project manager done. He suggested put construction project manager, period. And then we said, three to five years, minimum verifiable experience. And he says, what happens is if you put that there these trolls, for lack of better word who do nothing, but just scan for a job, they'll go right past it because, cause you're throwing it out there.

And we did that and instantly the number of resumes we got. By 90%, but the ones we were getting were actually quality, potential candidates. Now the three to five years. And in that case, it didn't mean shit to me. We, we could say that all we want, but like we already talked about, if someone comes in and really, whiles my socks off, I don't care if they have two days of experience.

But to that in any ways, simply as a weeding. Criteria. It was actually pretty useful, but it meant nothing to our business operations. That's super interesting, like tactically, that, that dropped the number of applicants and I can totally see that. And I think it's also, for you, you're carrying that mentality through, this was just a pure weeding piece versus oh, you don't have three years. I'm not going to look at your resume. Type of weeding. Cool. And I think that's one of the, that's a great caveat cause that's not something that like I've experienced in doing that. So fantastic. It's super tactical and practical.

I was thrilled. I didn't, I thought the guy was full of garbage and I said, I was getting ornery with them on the phone. We're paying. Whatever it is. It's not much, but it's not zero. I said, I'm paying this every click I get, I'm paying you. And the clicks are garbage.

And when he showed me that, and literally within a day, within 24 hours, it worked, it changed things around. I was amazed and I gladly paid for more of our clicks. And this is the other thing too, is when you get advice from the platforms and I'm not going to say that every piece of advice is good, but in like their trainings, So again, to get pretty tactical is so if you run ads, which I know, like this is not typical, but if you need to for anything, for a project, for a bond referendums, for other things to, to run ads on traffic across those platforms, like whatever Google says, they have all the data, same with Facebook.

Like they have all the data and they want you to be successful. So you spend money on their platform. Same with indeed. If this guy give you complete garbage information and it didn't work at all, you'd never use them again. And it's in their best interest to give you actionable correct information to do things.

And the same with we can go down the list, pro for. Companies like that. They're, they want you to succeed. They want you to use their platform. They want its work and to move forward. And in companies that don't have a full monopoly on how to do things. And that was just it.

And like I said, I got kinda pissy with the guy originally. Cause I, I just had this inherent distrust of him because I thought he doesn't really care. He just wants me to keep paying per click fee and. I'm not going to go out on a limb and say he really cares about me, but no he cared enough about the situation that he took a couple of minutes out of his time and he gave me a pretty good, actionable tip that created the results right away.

And while I'm still not convinced, and I never will be that online job postings are a great place to find candidates for any role. If, and when we do a posting again, I'll probably go back to them because. Yeah, it's just another avenue. And again, you're the whole point of all of this, is to find people that fit your core values.

And one of the things that you can do is lift your core values within your job descriptions. You can, if you are using indeed, you could have answered questions, so they actually have to type some stuff out, which then it's pretty easy to limit candidates. They don't answer questions. You're not in, like how much do you want.

And I love that you brought that up because we started doing that also at the same time. And that was one of the easiest ways to weed people out. We would post our core values right there in our job description. And frankly, I pulled up an old job description that I keep looking at and it's making me cringe because it's written like it was probably written in 1980 or whenever it was that the first person I copied this from did it.

And it's hot. Our new one, it basically says, we're looking for a candidate. We're going to call them whatever said position is you better fit these five core values because this is really what we care about. But then on indeed, I went further and I, I have a list of make you really uncomfortable type interview questions that I ask everybody I interview ever, whether it's online, zoom in person.

So I started just typing those out and made them. Questions on the indeed application. And it's amazing. Two things were amazing to me, one, the number of people that just wouldn't answer them, period, they'd send a resume and that was it. And it was just real fine. Click done, gone, never. And I won't spend a second looking at you, but the other thing that was amazing and th their core value driven questions, I don't, we don't need to get into all of them, but there's some that people have heard, the, what do you do when you're walking out?

You're late to your friend's wedding. You're walking out to your car from the store to get a card or whatever. And there's a shopping cart in the way, we, you and I have heard that one a million times, but some of the people that would answer it, most of them that did answer it.

They at least psychologically I think, fit what I was looking for or they knew what I was getting at. And they'd have, answers like, ah, my friend wanted to understand if I was a little bit later, I'd put the carts away, blah, blah, blah. Good answer. But you'd get some who.

Man F those guys, there's people getting paid to pick up that shit and they can come and pick them up themselves and put them away. It's not my job. And I was blown away at the first one. By the time I got to like the 15th one that said things like that, I thought, this is it's stunning to me, that people think that way, first of all, that people are willing to project that, but it was also reaffirming in the sense of how important our core values are to us.

If I brought someone like that onto my team that had that mentality about some stupid question about shopping cart, what are they going to do? When one of my clients comes and starts asking them questions about why the building looks the way it does or whatever the question is, it was mind blowing to even see someone respond like that.

And for years, and still. Vast majority of companies never asked even the remotest question like this, it's what do you know about the thing that you're required to do? Not? Are you a good person? Not do you get pissed off at the stupidest of things? Like those are never the questions or anything to elicit and really put a shopping cart bag.

Shouldn't elicit a remote emotional response, but if it does. Yeah. In our, in construction, you're going to get somebody yelling at you. At some point, you're going to get, your feelings hurt at some point. And if you react to a shopping, an inanimate object that way, man, I can't even imagine what, how you'd react to a real life situation to somebody in your face.

Screaming. That's, those are the kind of people that you're worried about pulling a gun on you. Really that's, it's not right necessarily, but it is the reality of, especially in the industry like construction, we have, we get emotional, we're out in the field or that people are working very hard, physically, mentally, all the above tempers get heated, right?

Because time is money. And any time anyone questions, anything you have to stop producing costs. You time, it costs you money. And, we've talked about stress levels and all that. And other episodes, it shouldn't probably happen but it does not necessarily frequently, but there will be a time in any career in the construction industry, I would strive to say that you're going to get yelled at.

You're going to get somebody pissed off at you for whatever and tempers are going to get pretty heated pretty quickly. And if you can't control yourself, Don't get me wrong. I've done my share of screaming and yelling. It happens once in a while. I typically sound like a drunken pirate. It's not my best moments that it typically doesn't produce anything great.

But if you can't contain it to at least that level and you try, you have to escalate to the next level or getting physical or anything, you don't fit anywhere, but certainly not on my team. No. That's just it, it becomes an ego problem, right? Like ultimately that somebody insulted your work or what you were doing, anything like that.

And it's, again, the biggest point here is ask some tough questions, whether that's in person, whether that's an honestly, I would do it through an online form. So you can weed out the people that don't matter. And it just saved you a whole bunch of time too. And again, think of questions around your core values and put them in, hypothetical situations and see how people respond.

And you can, and again, the whole thing is that if they don't match one core value, if there's an answer that's out of line within your set, if you've got seven core values, you've got seven questions, maybe. If there's one question that just doesn't fit, they're not going to fit on your team. So it's an easy kick for, Hey, you just don't match core values.

Yeah. That was a very hard thing for me to learn because by nature, contrary to popular belief, I guess I'm a pretty emotionally based emotionally driven guys. So I have this tendency to want to force a candidate to work. I want to force them to. Answer the damn question correctly, to fit with our core values, to convince myself that they are, they are the right fit.

And so I've made that mistake. I've brought people on board that didn't match one of our values. I brought people on board that probably didn't match any of them. And it always ends the same way. And it's not a good situation. It never lasts, it's just not, it's not worth it to me. It's not worth it.

Cause that's the other part of this equation. And then we've talked about it before, too. So I won't belabor it too bad, but it's not necessarily that if somebody doesn't fit these five core values on my wall here, that they're a bad person, but they just don't fit with our culture. So they need to go and find somewhere where they fit with.

And those it's not, good versus evil. It's just, it's good. But it's a quantitative approach now and that I can very confidently through my goofy questions and what I talk to people about in an interview, I can say, okay. Check. Yes. Check. No, if they get it. I'll shake their hand or I'll fist bump them and they go on their way and they don't talk to us again.

It's not a righteous thing. It's just, I know what works for our company. I know what makes us up. And this is what we have to have. It's not negotiable

becomes really simple right at that point. And that's no way. So right people, right seats, that's a whole topic here. So this is the whole finding the right people. The other side of it is actually looking at your business at what you need and determining what the right seats are and who you actually need in your organization.

And you might have some people currently, because if you've done this exercise is, does this person truly fit? Is this person supposed to be a site superintendent or would they be a better estimator or project manager or project engineer? What is their actual seat, is this person meant to be a designer or an architect or should they just be out, shaking hands and kissing babies, right?

Like what is there? They fit everything in the core values. They're just not perfect for that one. Whatever that might be, you need very detailed oriented people for some roles and you need dreamers and charismatic people and others. So it's a look at your organization and you might have to shake up quite a bit.

It might be that you've figured it out. And by maybe have the accident, you have a lot of people in the right, right seats, but, and some of this might affect all the way up to your C-suite. And who's running what, and. Are they the right person for that? Or should they be doing something else?

And in those cases, you're going to have, it's going to be a big ego problem to get those people to potentially move aside or take different roles if that's really the case, but it's sit down, think as leaders in your organization as executives to figure out where people actually fit.

And this is the. By no means easy. It will take some pot, take some time to figure out your org chart and who you actually need from top to bottom. And you're going to suffer some bumps and bruises going through this process. And I can't stress enough this whole EOS concept. And I'm not I'm not getting paid to say this.

We are still small enough that it doesn't make sense for us to hire what they call an integrator. They have their coaches like everybody does financially and just based on our numbers, it doesn't make sense yet if we were bigger or when we get to that point, I will absolutely bring one of these people in, because even just the book alone, it's got so much tactical value that you can put into place.

So there's the right people, right? Seat concept. Another one and you were just touching it is called GWC or get it, want it capacity to do it. And it's another quick and easy kind of informal quantitative way to, to survey someone, whether they're a candidate for a new position or whether they're an existing spot on your.

So get it is pretty easy. Do they get it? Do they understand what the purpose of their role in your company is or what it will be want it, do they truly want it, and this one plays really heavily. When you have people asking or looking into promotions or the moving up or more, like you mentioned moving into a different role, maybe you have a superintendent who decides, I think I want to try out the project management side.

Do they really want it though? Do they really know what that means? And that takes some time to really get deep into the psyche of that person, but you have to do it. And then the final one is his capacity to, can they physically do whatever this is either with their current workload.

Mindset with their current knowledge base, do they have the tools in their toolbox to produce what you're asking them to produce? And if you can't answer yes. To all three of those, again, it's just, it's it takes this frilly kind of vibration based psychological mindset and it shrinks it down to something purely quantitative.

It's a yes. And it helps you make quick, but informed decisions on people which are quite possibly the most difficult thing in any business, the most difficult thing to understand and manage and you need them. Yeah. I This is the hardest thing, and this is what we deal with the most in our industry, and I don't care what side of the table you're on. And any of this right design contractor, sub owner, you're dealing with a lot of people you're dealing with a lot of egos and opinions on best practices and these to do things, let alone, the rest of it is. So when it comes to being able to make decisions for who you have on your internal team but this could also go for external team as well.

And one of the guests that we had on Kevin tomorrow, he talks about having where you just said no to work from, as an electrical subcontractor said no to some general contractors one, they probably couldn't take it on at the time. They were so busy, but again, that was his, one of his core values was to always deliver.

And if you can't deliver well, don't take the work. Actually, I ended up getting him more work because he was honest with people on what he could actually handle. And then just other contractors, they didn't jive. And as a sub, one of the things I've heard him preach fairly regularly is, Hey we're in their house.

The general owns the site. It's, we're in their house. So keep it clean, keep it organized, we're on there. If you can't get along with basically the person you're working for in that type of relationship as a subcontractor, then it's not going to ultimately work. So when you find and pick partners, teammates, other companies to work with and team together on projects, this is just as important as your internal stuff, do these people align with our core values?

Does leadership match. And, we work together. So it's not just internal when we talk about people and then again, like you can even apply, get it on. It asked you to do it to some of your great partners, are they at least at the leadership level? Do they understand how to do things?

Have they done this? Do they actually can you tell that they're hungry enough and they're working, they're putting in effort that nobody's paying them for. It's usually the best indicator is they're doing things above and beyond what typically expected. And then can they, do they have the actual capacity, do they have the people, the manpower, the technology, whatever, to execute on the project, you're looking to partner with them on.

Absolutely. And that's the beauty. Of what it is we do sometimes. And that from project to project, typically speaking, it's not always the same team, right? So you're in my role anyways you're almost constantly building teams, a different team for a different project, different team for different task, for a different client.

And they truly are partners. If you don't, if you don't think of your subs as partners, You and I won't get along very well. There's two different there's different mindsets out there still, but this is why Shaffer construction purely candidly here, we don't have a very high win rate on publicly bid work because I have a very hard time just picking the lowest number and saying, all right, you're the guy.

I, frankly, I can't do it. I try and bring in my design build let's partner with our subs, build the team mentality into low bid work. And, usually we don't win it just being open here. And usually we probably don't want it either. And it's my own ego or my own unwillingness to let work slip by.

That puts me there in the first place. It's, there's so much of what we do that is based on people. And we value that immensely. It's the team, and we build it, we build the teams. We want to keep the teams together as, as much as we can. And that's not to say we don't want.

New and different subs because we do that all the time too, but we have a pretty strict vetting process and it's very similar to the process we use to hiring employees. Now, I won't tell you that every single one of our trusted subs fits every single one of our core values, but they don't have. They aren't working in my office on a daily basis, but they damn well better match our overall mindset and our overall approach to the market and approach to, to serving clients.

And if you take all of our core values and boil them down in a pot and pour them back out into a mold that's really what you're getting at the end of the day. Are you a good person? Are you seeking to do this for good reasons? And if you get that out of it, if you. Cake out of your mold.

You're going to be a good fit. We work with new guys all the time, but there is still a process that we go after. And that goes to setting expectations at the beginning of each project, especially if you're, building teams all over again. And for. Any given project, if you're external facing in any way, shape or form, you're going to have different, from a design side, is a MEP. You probably have different architects that you work with. You're going to eventually get to where you work with similar ones or the same guys over and over again. But the people rotate, right? People leave jobs every few years typically. So you're always going to have somebody new.

You're definitely going to work with different. Contractors from, the general contractors to all of the subs and the trade partners that you need to work with to different owners and owners roles. Even if you have the same client, again, people rotate jobs, they move up, they do different things.

And it's important to, to understand that Hey, at some point, hopefully at the beginning is the outline expectations. Find a way to do that, and most of the meetings I've been in for those expectations meetings, there's no talk of like core values or even traditionally what's actually expected.

What are, how long do we have to get back to you? Is it 24, 48 hours a week? What is an expected, like expediency for, communication. A lot of the basic stuff never gets talked about, frankly, in a lot of those expectations meetings and a lot of things would get out hopefully upfront.

You're going to have to repeat yourself, so don't feel afraid or scared to ever repeat yourself and what you're looking to do. Cause that's just part of it. People don't remember, it takes awhile to engrain. A lot of this stuff, even core values. It just does. You gotta repeat it often until people truly get it.

Yeah. And we talk about core values so much on this show that we haven't had anyone tell us not to yet. So that's a good thing, but it truly is so important. So valuable in, in doing what we do. If you don't have, stepping stones and a roadmap to get where you're trying to go, then you're just going to end up wandering around lost.

And that's what our core values provide for us. It's a step, it's a roadmap. It's a system of analyzing it's analyzing people, projects, clients, ourselves, we, we use them in everything and. We use them in our quarterly employee reviews, which again is another thing out of the book. As we affectionately call it the book traction we do this on a, we say quarterly and then we get busy and they ended up being, twice a year sometimes.

But regardless, that's a big chunk of our employee review process. Are you still fitting these values? And if not and again, just like when we are doing the hiring initial hiring process, if we get to a point where in a review, you've got a no next to one of our boxes, we're going to figure out why, what happened, what changed, how here's, how you Dillon are not meeting this value anymore.

What's going on? Did something happen at home? It's something happened at work. You talk through it like humans. And we give people another shot. Now, if we come up on that next review and that same value now is questionable. It's a real easy decision and what it has to happen, it's not fun or comfortable, but that's it.

And it's really hard. Like I said, in the very beginning, it's really hard to get to that point where you can use your core values as the blanket, the stretched out blanket beneath the window of the burning building. But once you recognize that once you jumped, you're going to land on the blanket and not splatter all over the ground.

It makes it a lot easier or a lot simpler. It still isn't easy, but it is a little bit simpler at least to use that as a guiding light to how you operate. It makes everything not personal. It is really like a simple way to look at it that you're not. You're not mad at that person.

You're not like upset at who they are or what they hate. You don't match these things that we say that we stand for. We correct behavior all towards core values. Hey, you've matched these at one point, you were aligned with us at one point, and now that alignment's just not there, what's going on, but it's now it's, you've got to be personal to them and pay what's going on with you. Why aren't, what happened to make me not align with these values? Not like now what's wrong with you or like in a bad way, right? You're not yelling. What's wrong with you. It's a, Hey man, what's going on like compassionate type of empathy, conversation with that person to say, Hey, at one point you aligned with this, that's why you've been here for hours. Something happened. Yeah. What can we do to help? And they may or may not want to talk about it and that's totally fine, but ultimately it comes back to, we need players, teammates that are aligned with this, and if you're not that's okay. It just won't work out.

Yeah. And I feel like we talked about this point too, at one point sometime in the past, but sometimes it's a failure on our end on as a, as an owner, as a leader, because you're sure it doesn't matter how many interviews you do with someone, until you are in the trenches with that person you can ask them all my goofy questions and ask them, how many basketballs fit in the room, which I ask every single person I've ever had.

And if you tell me you have no idea, you don't get hired there's a little hint. But no matter how many questions you ask them, you never really know that person until you've spent some time with them. And so it could be as simple as well. I checked the box that they fit this. We have a value.

We call it have a hundred, a 100 to zero mindset, and it's basically the, an aggressive mindset towards everything that we do. And. Business, anything we get involved in, we want to absolutely dominate. We want to win a hundred to zero, no holds barred. If we're going to commit that we're going after this.

We're all going after it a hundred percent. And within the last few years, we had a situation where we brought a guy on board as a superintendent. I interviewed him, my business partner interviewed him. We thought at the time that he fit all of our values. Nice guy, there was nothing wrong with him, but after over the course of a few projects, we realized there's just something missing and it was in this hundred to zero mentality.

You don't, you can't really grow that. It's either in you or it's not. And long story short, we ended up letting the guy go, but it was a very amicable thing. We brought him in, we, we explained what was going on and he was Yeah. I, once I've actually seen that in motion it really isn't me.

And we left on great. He left on great terms. We've given him recommendations, then references for new positions at other companies. And I still talk to this guy a couple times a month and it's been a year and a half, two years since he's been gone. And you know that's when the system. It's worth to me it, and it shows how valuable it really is.

We've had the other, the opposite experience too, where you guessed wrong in the initial interviews and, they show their true colors and don't want anything to do with you. Once you say, all right you're not meeting this and this. And it turns into a screaming match and, we're all flawed.

That's for sure. That's why we're humbly confident, but it's just, I can't stress it enough. You have to have something to be quantitative. You have to have a roadmap. You have to be strong in your convictions and your belief as to what you actually stand for. If you stand for nothing you fall for anything is the old saying and this concept of the EOS system, this book.

Everything you and I have talked about today. It's all wrapped up in that and being strong and confident in what you believe in and believing that once you reach that point, you will make the right decisions and you will be moving in the right direction just by virtue of the work you did to get there.

I can't summarize the show any better. So honestly, guys, this is hugely important. It becomes almost impersonal, but in a way that you can make corrections in a personal manner, right? It's a, this is what we stand for. These are the standards that we're looking to achieve. We might fall short, but this is what we're aiming for.

These are the standards that we hold ourselves to. You can't fall short too often, but you need to go this line, right? This is where we start from and go from there. So ultimately go and pick up the book, check traction by Gino. Wickman is a fantastic book. He's written some others that are also just incredible books.

I know many business owners that have read it, implemented it and had tremendous success in their organizations. They've turned everything around. Yeah. It's like their business Bible, if you will. It is the book to live by and we can't ultimately stress it enough to again, implement four values and implement the EOS, have your rocks, all those things to push you down the line.

I know we didn't get into rocks and goal setting or any of that stuff, but instill to implement, everything. Step-by-step keep coming back to it. Keep rereading it, keep going through, have your check-ins with your people, make sure that everyone's still upholding your values there.

They're still the right person for the right seat. We all grow. We might not grow our seats. We might, have things that happen in our lives. Like kids are on the other side of divorce, right? Just make us not the right people anymore, or we need a different seat in the organization, our time values shift, and that's okay.

But it's understand that with your people continually evaluate your people again, we're in the people game, as much as, you need somebody to move steel or operate a crane, yeah. They need to have those specific skillsets, but there's also a mentality that goes along with it within your organization.

Okay. Any other pieces you want to add before we close it out here, Matt, I would just re-ask everybody again, give us a rating, give us a share. Spread the show around. And while the construction junky website is not currently working, it doesn't seem, keep checking it because there is a little contest that he produces every year for construction-related podcasts.

If you get any value from what we're talking. I'll let you know again, once it's live and once the voting starts, but hop on over there and take two minutes out of your day and give us a vote. We'd appreciate it. Absolutely. Guys, we appreciate you listening. We appreciate you being a part of the show.

And again, anything that we can do to help or any topics to address, we'd love to help you out. So until next time.