EP196: Building a Strong Team Culture in Construction with Dylan Milroy

Yes.

Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Yeah,

Oh, yes, I was. Cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

6300, so I worked on 53 Echoes. Oh, the helicopters. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

They're very cool. They're pretty amazing.

Oh, they do, for sure. Yeah, primary.

Oh, yeah, the Frogs are long gone. 53s are the aircraft of the Marine Corps now.

the Ospreys. Yeah, don't get on one of those. You might not.

Yeah, that means that it's working. Yeah, Ospreys are scary. 53s are awesome. Yeah, I think they are going more essentially primary. I mean, they've dumped billions of dollars into the Kilo program. I got a lot of friends. who went down to Florida for those and they're, it's what's being used.

They can lift themselves.

Oh, yeah. When we'd be turfing, you know, you'd be, you could stand on the walls and they'd be going through, like you get a real like cowboy sort of pilot and you'd be, they'd be turfing through like the grand Canyon and there'd be people like on their boats and stuff like freaking out. It's fun.

So we do. basement waterproofing on existing structures. So retrofits, no new construction waterproofing. We do basements and crawl spaces. So it's a big thing here because the water table is so high and the soil is so saturated. I've essentially moved into a CMO role. I would say I'm probably above average home services marketer expert. It's kind of where I've worked my way into. And I also just kind of manage the culture and the direction of the business. I have a productions director who runs the job, the crews. And then I have a purchaser who does all our purchasing. You know, depending on your industry, you know, our niche, we don't have, relatively speaking, very many materials. You know, we kind of use the same two, three dozen materials. That was... Probably the best hire I ever did because if you got someone who masters bulk buying and those relationships, you'll change your bottom line overnight. I have a marketing coordinator. We kind of run our small, medium business like a big business. It's pretty nice.

Well, we're about to ramp up into our busy season here. January, we have... you know, two trucks about to be delivered. So it will be, you know, we'll, we'll run three through this three crews for the slow season. And then we'll probably, hopefully by the end of this, by the end of Q1 and next year, we'll be, you know, seven is, is what we have penciled out. Okay. So, and then each of those crews has anywhere from two to five guys, but mainly three, three is kind of the sweet spot for production. Okay.

crews, is that right?

Yeah, three, three and a half. Yeah.

Yeah, three man, three man crews. And then one, I say three and a half because we got like one, there's always like one straggler who's like doing a sump pump here. small thing there.

Yeah. Uh, we were actually, I literally this last week, I just launched our service program because we've been so focused on mastering the installation. Now I'm thinking of like reoccurring revenue and that kind of stuff. So yeah, we will, um, And really, it's good, but it's also mainly just to kind of what we call spiking a job. Someone will call and they think they have an issue and someone will show up, just install a pump really quick. And now they've canceled all their other bids and now you sell them a service program. So, yeah, we will have one once I have them, once I have the jobs lined up for it.

Yeah. I've been like pretty resistant to it because in my head, I think I would never do it. And I think a lot of, a lot of us, especially we have to re we, we have to remember that not everyone has the ability to do this. Not everyone has the desire to do it. And then you also, you know, not everyone has a nephew or a grand, a grandson to take care of them. I kind of had like a coming to Jesus moment where I was like, all right, it's a good business decision and people want it. So, you know, whatever. And we make it cheap. It's a, it's a hundred dollars a year and we give it away the first year for free if you buy a waterproofing system. So it's just trying to keep trucks out. Trucks are the best advertisement ever. Staying in front of customers, opportunity. to get ahead of things for them.

Well, it's funny is, is that we've had a lot of calls. There's been atmospheric rivers coming in on and off throughout this week. So we've had a lot of calls lately and we, I have our office every time they quoted over the phone. I tell them to click it up $25 until they get it now and then click it down 25. So we've been boosting it up slightly.

No, just shooting from, Oh, Oh yeah. You know, we use not in regards to that. We use a go high level build 12, uh, Les O 'Harris. Yeah. CRM and use a jobber with bill 12.

yeah. And the quote sending, you know, I, I hope they're not a sponsor. I used to hate them. I was like this big anti jobber guy, but you like get in this ecosystem and you can't escape. But I would say, you know, the last month they really got their stuff together and I actually like it. So

It's only not been horrible for about two months.

I've been on Zapier all day yesterday because Jobber had updates and crashed our system.

It doesn't work.

Yeah. And there's, I think there's five now and they don't, I, we had so many problems with it that I have like a Zapier. from les's team helping us yesterday and he's going through and he goes where are the rest of the triggers i was like this is all of them he's like what yeah so whatever they've gotten a lot better i guess i don't know they all what i've realized is they all suck can't convince me otherwise well the

Yeah, I'll look into it. It's hard to leave them. You know, you have all these contacts. It's tough. I mean, you have to retrain your whole business.

Yeah. You know, Mike, I have a co-owner. He's a silent partner-ish. Kind of, he isn't in the day to day. Essentially, he called me one day. I was, I was at work. He called me one day and he's like, Hey, you're in construction. You know, the trades really well. Will you look at this bid? And he like tells me it over the phone. He, he's a big realtor and it was actually for his personal house. And I was like, yeah, man, it sounds like you're getting ripped off. And he goes, he's like, yeah, I get like three of these bids a day. And I said, well, you know, sucks to suck. And he was like, and he goes, well. why don't we start a drainage company, like a waterproofing company? He's like, there's no competition. He's like, they'll be out six months. Even if I did sign this, I won't be able to get it done for six months. And two weeks later, we had our licenses and we had started. I sold him equity for some startup money. We benefited from the fact that we started with the goal of making it big. We didn't want... to like, it wasn't just like, I wasn't just going from like being an electrician and like, oh, I want to work for myself. It was, I want to make a lot of money. I want to provide good employment. I can work with my hands. So let's just do this. So we had our first employee, I think three weeks after we started a month and we probably had four employees, you know, two months after. And the first hires per usual is labor. And then it got to the point where I was, you know, running the business and also running the job sites and delivering material, doing all of this. And I brought in a business coach and he, you know, told me, I'm sure you've told people this, Hey, you need to, this is silly. You need to get an assistant. And they're like, assistant, like, I don't need no help. And yeah. So, um, told me to write everything down that I do in a week. from wiping my ass to, you know, dropping off material. And then we went through and he was like, what did you make last year? He's like, you're going to pay someone to go check the mail. And he's like, check that, check that, check that hired assistant. And after that, it was like life changing. It was like within, you know, once we figured it out, once her and I worked together for a little bit and, you know, we had a rhythm, I was like, your creative freedom just blows up. And it was like the best hire I ever had was my assistant slash office manager. Now she's more of an office manager now. And that's, I would say is what kind of kicked off a lot of our growth was, was her for sure.

It is so hard to paint that picture. Like you, it is so hard to tell construction guys or anyone really. I have a friend who runs a boutique marketing firm and he's like a, he's a CMO for a couple, like very, very high end brands. And it's just him and his brother. And I'm like, dude, why are you scheduling these appointments? And I'm like, I, you have. It's so hard to communicate how much clutter is in your brain and how much little things you're doing and how much it slows you down. And then you get addicted to it. Then you're like, I can just buy time.

Yeah. Hands down. Absolutely. And then like our core. Yeah. That's how I feel about my core group. It's one of those things you just have to trust. People aren't hiring him because it's fun. I was on a flight back from San Diego two months ago and I sat next to this executive of this large. brewery uh he was it doesn't matter he was a big ceo right he was a really cool guy and he flattered me and he was like give me one piece of business advice i always ask for one piece of business advice on a plane i'm not telling you business advice you tell me business advice and he said he's like all right he's like i he goes i have a coach first off it's a 50 year old man who's probably you know worth tens of millions of dollars he's like i have a business coach still what you and i both know is common and then he goes And he goes, my business coach tells me every six months, I write down every single thing I do. And then he says he cuts that list in half and he hires a position for it. So he does that every six months. And he said, it's been the key to his fast success. I mean, his company is publicly traded. So, and that's what he was, what he shared.

Yeah, I've read pieces of it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's funny is that what he told me was, is what my business coach told me two years prior. And I realized I hadn't done it. And I think I hired my marketing coordinator that week. I was like, dude, I need to do this. And I wrote it down. I was like, I am the most overpaid copywriter in the world. Like, this is silly. And I hired, I hired her as a, as a VA and we're bringing her on full staff because she's been great. And you got to be hunting for those sorts of things.

have three or four now. I got mine from less, you know, same thing. QB VA. So he does the same thing for contractors. I have a video editor who's a VA, a bunch of, I have my bookkeepers. pretty involved and she's, you know, more or less a VA, my marketing coordinator. So,

Yeah, we just post online, nothing special, but what I would say that. has been something I'm realizing that I'm pretty good at is painting vision and giving. It's very, very important to some construction guys that hear this. Just don't be a douchebag to these people. You know, it's like, hey, man, like paint some vision, have a dream so big that their dreams can fit in it and, you know, be communicative. So if you go to our job postings, they're very well written. They paint a vision. They talk about the future of where the business is going. They talk about where the business has been. And then they talk about how you can fit into it. In my trade, we're not building cabinets where you can do cabinets until you're 65. We're doing backbreaking work where people, most of our guys are, I have people who have their 20th birthday this year. So we have anywhere from, our old guys are. 32. So you have to really paint a vision of like, hey, you don't need to be running a jackhammer forever. And this is how I can execute it. So we do a lot of, you become a motivational speaker pretty quickly, but you know, it's, it's very effective if you have that like relational stewardship with them. And if you spend time with them and you're hiring people that you want to spend time with more importantly, if, if you're hiring for culture, it kind of fixes itself.

Yeah, number one. I tell my production guy that, you know, there's three, there's like three key things to the perfect laborer or the perfect waterproofer. We try our best to call them waterproofers. You don't have like an electrician saying like, I'm a laborer, you know, I'm an electrician. You know, you have someone who's reliable, someone who has a positive attitude, and someone who's teachable. If you have all three of those, you know, it's a home run. And, you know, you might like roll your eyes at it, but it's like, that's really hard to find someone who has all three of those, who's also willing to work for $28 an hour digging holes. So, yeah, I posted a job the other day and I had 115 applicants in 12 hours for waterproofing crawl spaces. And then once I sift through it pretty tightly and I really, I sift through it to, we want them to live within, you know, essentially in our town that we live in. Because, you know, I'll get guys who live 20,30 minutes away, and then I'll think about it. I'm like, dude, you're going to wake up at 5 a. m. You're going to drive half an hour to the yard, and then you're going to work for 10 hours, and you're going to drive a half an hour home. It's going to burn you out. Like, you can't be in the trades and have these super long commutes. It's just going to make you bitter. It's going to make you angry. So we've gotten to the point where, like, we want you to live in this town. Because... That's you get longevity that way. That's interesting. And then we even talk about we'll even allow once we have someone that we like, we'll even allow the job lead that he works with before we hire him to meet him. And hey, just real quick, ask a couple questions. You know, you're going to be training him. You're going to be spending time with him. So you have the last say. Like, can you see yourself with this guy forever? I'm not going to build your team. I'll help you build your team. So now you're giving responsibility to that guy too.

I think it's a combination. I do think it's a copywriting thing too, because I have people, I have a couple of competitors, you know, that I'm friends with the owners and stuff like that. They, they can't find people. I'm just like, what? You know, and you look at their job postings and it's like crawlspace waterproof for $20 an hour, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're just like, bro.

Yeah, for sure. It's just like, dude, do you even want to work here? And then you realize they don't. Being an entrepreneur is a little bit of a, it's kind of a cheat code because, you know, we get to create our own world. I spend more time with these people than I do with my wife and I'm going to be with her for eternity. Right. So it's like, I'm going to pick guys. I'm not going to hire my friends first off, but I'm going to hire guys who could be my friends. That is very, very, very important to me.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, it's, you just don't hire losers goes really far like you know well in these mastermind talks they'll be like how do you get guys to you know take company cam picks and follow these directions i'm like who are you hiring i don't have problems with this like silly stuff Yeah.

100%. And we go even further to tell people that, and granted, just like only hiring people who live nearby, we have the ability to do this. I don't hire people who are trying to get their college degree. I don't hire, like, hey, you're going to be in the trades. Do you want to be in construction? This isn't like a dead-end job to these guys. This is what we love. I love being in the trades. I wish I was still in the trades. Now I'm a... an owner and it's not as fun it's like i'm jealous of this guy yeah it's more work but yeah and then we make it clear that hey if you if you say yes but but you feel like you're not going to be here i usually tell people hey the moment you feel like you're not going to be here long term just let me know it's not that big a deal i have plenty of guys who are here for the long ride especially guys from the beginning who i'm going to take care of first and like this is they're here forever And if you have people who see it as temporary, that does muddy the vision. And now you're investing in someone who doesn't want to be invested in.

Oh, for sure. And most of these guys, even at the construction companies that I worked at, you know, that have, we're doing, you know,50, a hundred million dollars. They're not asking the laborers these questions. So like you ask some of these guys, these questions and they've never been asked about what they want and like where they see themselves. Right. Cause they just look like a burrow to them, you know, just like someone to lift, lift concrete all day. Hey man. Yeah. You do look like that, but you also look like you have a family. And. You realize that your back's not going to last through your 40s. So you're curious what's going on here. You know, if that's how you're going to set the tone, it goes far because, you know, we don't I don't have guys milking the clock. I don't have if I do, I can talk to them because I have that. Hey, what's like, why are you stealing from me? What did I do to make you not trust me? You know, it goes really far and it sets the tone of the business. The tone of the business in our business is growth. And you can't grow if you have just like a crap culture and crap teams.

Yeah. It's number one. Yeah. Cause like, you know, wait. You can teach, I don't care what your trade is. It insults people all the time. You can learn how to be an expert. And if you have the drive, you have, you know, basic motor skills. You can be taught how to be an expert in most all construction trades in a fairly quick amount of time. But you're not going to teach someone to like, to be able to communicate well or to be able to-To have morals. Yeah, and have morals and like not have baby mama drama every day. And, you know, and those are things that we talk about too, you know? And back to the military, it's just like, People will say, hey, talk about how great my management is. And it's like, dude, I just ripped everything off from people who I admire. And I would just think about like all the great management, all the great sergeants, all the great sergeant majors, all the great supervisors I've had. And they all, anytime they picked up the phone, it wasn't always just production, production, production. You know, it's so you call them and they'd be like, they would ask you before you know, you're on the phone with them for 45 minutes. and they're asking about your mother. It goes really, really far, and it makes the day less miserable for everyone. I think a lot of people hate hearing that because they're like, well, I can roof, but it's like, why do I need to ask about this? I just talked to one of my guys. His mom's going. He's one of my closest guys. I felt awful. I talked to him, and his mom's going through cancer treatment, and I had no idea, and he's telling me about it. He's getting all emotional, and then I thought, dude, I'm so sorry. I had no idea, and he was like, And it just, he just broke down. It's like, dude, that guy's, he's not going anywhere. He's not going anywhere. Like he's here forever.

Oh, that's a great question. Some people are going to have to change themselves a little bit. And some people are probably gonna have to fire some people they need. They know they need to fire. If you don't have a vision for your business, you don't have like an outlook for your business though, that's going to be step one. In ours, if you get on our website and you look at our vision and values of our business, they're all employee focused. I was on a podcast recently and it was, I think the guy, he was great, but you know, he's in private equity and stuff like that. So he's asking about like exit plans and all this kind of, I'm like, I don't know, man. Like, dude, like. At the end of the day, it is just a job, but it's going to, it's what people are doing. It's what a lot of us are doing, myself included, you know, forever.

Yeah. You got to start with your vision and values. You have to. If you don't know what's going on, you don't know what you're hiring by, you don't know how you make decisions, you have to get it down on paper. And I would say also, you have to have a coach. I have two business coaches, really only one. But you have to have one that not only has something that you want, but has brought people along with it too. You know, and I picked my business coach, you know, I'm a Christian. I take my family to church every Sunday. And that was something that was key when I was looking for one, you know, and, you know, Les, you know, his all his kids work for him. He's been married to the same woman forever. They work together. I was like, OK, I want that life. And he's got a fat bank account. You know, it's like he's doing something right. Tell me how to do it, man. I just try to surround myself by people that like make me feel stupid. I want to be the stupidest person in the room. That way I can just absorb everything, absorb everything. And then hopefully that provides great employment. And hopefully that works long-term. And so far, you know, I've never had anyone quit. Not one person.

fire people. I have my second hire still working for me. And he was digging trenches, you know, and he's still working for me. And he's, you know, for some reason. They trust me. And for some reason, they believe me when I tell them, you're not going to be doing this forever. And hey, I believe in you enough to like, eventually, hey, not yet. I can't do this yet. But eventually, give you some life-changing salaries that people would be like, this is crazy. You're making this out of construction company. So

We're working on our fourth year. Okay. So we're in our third year.

We will be, I think we're just over 20, but we'll be about 30 by the, by the end of the year.

Production is definitely most of it. Meaning like leadership as in job leads.

Yeah, so I have a marketing coordinator. I have an office manager. Then I have a production. I have a productions manager. And then I have a guy who will run the crawlspace crews. And now the productions manager is running the basement crews too. But he's going, but we're going to promote someone within to run the basement crews. So there will be three productions managers that will manage. those respective crews, a warehouse manager. He probably needs an assistant and then various VAs that I work closely with. Gotcha. So some of my VAs, like my bookkeeper, for instance, she loves, but hates, hates. I mean, she might as well be an employee because, because I'm in my book so often. I'm such a KPI. like terrorists. I'm in there all the time asking for reports and pulling stuff too.

Yeah.

Well, that's all I know about it. Know them and then hire someone who's smart enough to tell you what's good and bad.

And like, yeah, Hermose has this thing. Hermose has this thing. What does he say? You're one higher away from your, from your next financial goal.

Yeah. Something along those lines. And it's true, man. I mean, it's the way I run my way around my marketing is that I have a guy who is like a freak with Facebook ads, like in retargeting. and pixel track like is a free i manage him and then i have a guy who's a wizard with click campaigns ppc and then i have an seo person like for instance to talk about that most guys they want and they all hate it every single one of them they want the whole shebang that's how all of these marketing agencies are and and guess what what i found is is that they made their money in one thing and that's what i asked them what it is all right cool you can have that account And then now I just manage all of that. So now I have all these experts that are just like the whiz in these one things. I've gone about that way with marketing and now I'm trying to figure out how to do that with other sides of the business too.

Well, and then. talking bringing back to the trades is that if you're doing one thing the reason we're so good at the reason why i think i'm really good at marketing and you know the facts speak for it is that i'm only buying like one keyword i'm an expert in this one keyword so i hope my friends i'm happy to help them out but you know they they'll do all this sort of stuff i'll be like hey so like what keyword are we buying are we doing roofing are we doing yeah yeah yeah let's do this okay well you know it's like okay well yeah dex too you're like dude like if you focus on one thing we make a website on one thing i will dominate that market but like you're all over the place good luck and then and then also now you have to market all those services and now i'm paying you know i i might be i might spend four hundred thousand dollars next year on buying keywords and expert of this but if your budget is four hundred thousand dollars and you're spending ten thousand on mark on waterproofing and i was this i know like Dude, just get out of town. Like I'm going to walk all over you. And then it is the same. Well, you can say for purchasing, I buy pallets, four or five pallets of sump pumps at a time. I buy everything. My five materials, you know, they come in in truckloads because we bulk buy it and we only have to manage one product. My invoicing's faster. Everything is faster. Everything's easier. It takes me 10 minutes to train someone at a call center to learn the script because we only offer one service. I mean, it's just like, But everything's easier if you niche down and you focus on one thing.

It's never ending. Yeah, it's never. I have this joke where I say like, if I could only waterproof blue houses with garages on the left, I would. If there was, or it's like, oh, they have a maple. We don't do maples. Like, it's like, if you could focus on just the smaller, and we do this, we do this a little influx where we'll get rid of services, grow constantly. Like our services, they flex just a little bit, but it's only the upsells. It's only, you know, that the mean potatoes is the same. I'm very careful with even our upsells, you know, pipe insulation, little things like that, you know. it'll be like, are we getting pipe? I'll look at the keywords and talk to the salesman. Yeah, we're getting this way. Okay, yeah, let's see how much we can buy out of that in bulk and we'll sell it. And then just track it. If you're tracking your KPIs really, really close, then you know, you know when it's time to kill it. And you know, we, we do that kind of stuff all the time.

And I say, and what, and I would say that, you know, you go into a new market. because now you can just it's easier just to go in a new market because now you're oh i agree now you're showing up with three four or five years of experience and two of those years are perfected and you're just like wait this city this town's only an hour and a half away yeah i'm gonna buy these keywords really quick i mean that's what we did with eugene i didn't do a single house in eugene for three years and this month we're doing like six or seven basements in eugene i literally overnight i started a new business in eugene it took me two days of work with my development with my web dev and my marketing coordinator to get the keywords going. And now we are just selling jobs there. It's like there, how's that for revenue? I just unlocked, you know, maybe five, yeah, probably $700,000 of revenue, but I, but it took, it was, it was very calculated. I realized that I had this market saturated. Now we're in organic growth mode here. So let's find something else.

My personal LinkedIn is what I manage. All my other presence is managed by someone else. So my personal LinkedIn is going to be the best. You know, our website, better BWP. com. Don't click on one of my ads, please. Just type it in. Actually, just stay off my website because I don't want to be paying for the retargeting. I don't want to be paying for none of it.

Yeah, do something like that. They're off right now. They're about to be relaunched. But yeah, LinkedIn is the best or email.

Thanks for having me, man.