EP210: How to Build a Profitable Contracting Business – Lessons from Anthony Amunategi

Brad, so happy to be on your show. I get to be on your show now. Excited about this.

For me, it started really kind of different. I mean, I'm not as different than others. I worked my way through college painting houses, right? this little painting company down in Florida. We pressure clean and paint. That grew into some commercial projects. I got myself into a company called Discovery Zone. They're a playground for kids. I got to do my first commercial projects. I figured out how to paint those things faster than anybody ever painted them. A project manager saw me and invited me to this deal in Chicago where I got to come up there and talk about how I did it so fast. They were trying to help figure out how to make their projects go faster. And the guy offered me a job. I went to work for them. And my career cut to off from there I went from you know Discovery Zone as a project manager to Boston Market to Einstein Bagels to Panera Bread and worked my way internally for a bunch of these different brands doing hundreds of projects all around the country I traveled every single day and then working myself out of a job it was kind of tough so i once started a third-party outsourcing company called cdo group where it kind of stood for chief development officer and corporate development outsourcing it's kind of everything that fell under the chief development officer's role i could do for companies back then nobody did that there was no such thing as a third party uh support person uh either you were an internal or you were gc they they wouldn't there wasn't so we kind of started this kind of new idea that you could hire company to come do your construction management work and it took off the floodgates open for outsourcing maybe 15 maybe 18 years back and we happened to stand in front of them and it grew dramatically 2017 we were doing a lot of McDonald's projects McDonald's asked us to become a general contractor We were always a construction management firm, but not at risk. But we flipped over to the GC side and started growing that. And, you know, since then we do, you know, roughly, you know, something from $50 million to $85 million worth of construction a year, building all chain work. We don't do any residential. We do really. chain work, McDonald's, Raising Canes, Pan Express, those kind of brands are typical projects, somewhere between $1.5 and $5 million ground dump type buildings. We build a lot of those every year.

The truth was I got tired of working myself out of a job. I'm one of those guys who can't, being unemployed was not my thing. My fear of being broke, I was, we were broke. My mother worked at Denny's and to go back to being broke was not something I ever wanted to do. I mean, I guess when we were kids, we didn't know we were broke, but I know what it felt like to have nothing. And I generated some success in working for these companies. I got, you know, I remember my first job, I made $35,000. I thought, oh my God, I make $35,000. I thought it was great. Then I made like $65,000. I'm like, oh my god, I make $65,000. Oh my god, this is great. And then I made $85,000. I'm like, oh my god, this is great. And I broke the $100,000. I'm like, right? So the idea was that I was making a great living, and my lifestyle was getting better. And I loved it, right? I traveled. I worked really, really hard for these companies. I would give my blood sweat. I literally, I would travel seven days a week. And I was young. I just got married. I would, I would oftentimes I would fly home, have dinner with my wife, sleep there and leave in the morning. I would, you know, I would travel from. you know from puerto rico to hawaii in one week i would travel you know multiple cities two or three cities a day sometimes just going around and doing uh you know we were building uh somewhere between two to four hundred projects a year for these companies and i would go and land do punch walks pre-bid meetings uh you know job site walkthroughs you know that's what you did as a project manager I loved doing it. To me, I thought that that was the rock star of the industry, right? To be a project manager on these kind of projects felt like everything I've always wanted to do. Being able to get paid to travel. I was like, I remember the first day I went to Discovery Zone. I walked in and the guy goes, go to that lady's office, she's going to give you a credit card. I'm like, she's going to give me a credit card? I was 20 years old. She goes, go to that guy's office, she's going to give you some tickets. You have to be in Puerto Rico tomorrow. I'm like, My first day I'm going to Puerto Rico, she goes, yeah, you got your passport, right? I'm like, yeah, I brought my passport. And then he hands me 30 files and goes, come back when these are built. Like, that was my first couple of hours. First of all, I thought, they're all going to find out that I'm a fraud. I was this kid from Mochito, Florida, who was painting houses a couple of years, just a few months ago. I just got a couple of these commercial projects. I'm like, they're all going to find out I'm a fraud. But I worked my ass off for them, and I did, you know, I learned from some, they gave me some great guys to work for. I mean, that boss was a great guy. He really did put me together with some great people. And maybe there's some higher power that looks over us and gave me the gift of being able to work for this company. So it was fun.

Yeah, so I was actually an employee for them, right? I was a junior project manager. Okay. They didn't get any project management role until a couple years into it, right? And I worked for, and the project manager, so you're watching maybe 300?

Project managers to me were like those guys. They were like, they were literally, in my brain, they were these rock stars. They walked like those guys did Army. They were like these badass human beings that were smart. This guy, Fred Gores, who ran the construction, he hired really great human beings. And I was like a junior to those guys. And I just loved being on their team. And I got to learn from them. I'd watch how they talk. I was really great at paying attention and I'd watch how they talked, how they carried their bags and what they did on a job site, the questions they would ask. And truth was, I was like a parrot. I would just... really copy what they did. Yeah. And, you know, you kind of fake it till you make it a little bit. Maybe that's the truth. You know, a lot of that, you know, but I guess ultimately I had grown up in construction. My father and I, we would rehab houses and we would learn from that. So I guess I had a good fundamental, but I didn't have it at that level for sure.

You know, I want to hit on something before we got off that. I think that's something where you said. It's something that if you're a young person, you're listening to this, no one ever gives us the next role. You got to kind of take it. Right. I don't think that that's something that's not, you know, people are like, well, when are you going to give me a promotion? I'm like, take it. Yeah. Right. Take, take, take on the role and all of a sudden make it where I can't not pay you. Right. I tell people that all the time now, take the role, right. This whole nonsense that I got to wait to be groomed to be a, no, no, go take the role. And that's kind of what you did. Look, I just, I just went and, you know, it started moving. But, but to your point, you know, the question you ask, When I said on my own, I'd been through Discovery Zone, and then they knocked on the door and said, you know, I'm on vacation, and I got a call from my boss saying, hey, you've got to come in. And they said, hey, we're letting everybody off, right? It was like we're done building, we were bought by Blockbuster Video, and we're done there. And they didn't let me go. They actually kept me on. I did some work for Blockbuster. It was great, right? And then I got the call from Blockbuster people saying, oh, we're going to let you off. And that feeling of that jerking of the chain of not my own control, I was going to just the room with somebody else, Then I went to work for Boston Market. Same thing, right? I got this kind of, hey, we're going to let you go. It wasn't anything I did. I worked really hard, but I hated that feeling of not being in control. Somebody else would jink my chain. And all of a sudden, I had this young wife and just moved to Chicago. I didn't want to be broke again. So then I went to work for them, and then I went to work for Panera Bread, and that was good. They were a lot of fun, but some guys that worked for the grocery market said, hey, you want to go start our own company? I'm like, sure. So they were really more real estate guys. They were more from the real estate end of the business, where they wanted to help companies do site selection and demographic modeling, and I was like the construction... you know junkie or monkey junkie at the at the end of the line right they just kind of brought me on because they didn't want to do that work and they were these fancy real estate guys but i loved the construction part of it and i realized i'd worked for these companies Internally, and then just in my office, my needs would change every day. Some days it'd be like, okay, we're going to do 100 new stores this year. But then the next day, hey, we just bought another company. We're going to do 100 new stores and 30 remodels. And then that would change and go, hey, we want to change, you know, bagels in the front to bagels in the back line. So then I'd have 60 new remodels. The needs in a construction department kept changing. Yeah. So I realized that that was one of those resources that I was going to be at the whim of. whatever the initiative was. It wasn't anything I could control, but owning my own company, I could then go out and work for all these brands, and one would grow, one would stop, one would grow, and I could leverage myself over multiple clients. And that was really the gig. That's really how CEO started. And, you know, it's been, you know, last February, it was just 28 years. And 2025, February 1st, was 28 years. And, you know, and all that's kind of been a gift of, well, we can get into that a little bit more, but what it means to grow for 28 years, what does all that mean?

for sure. It was Einstein Bagels. Our first client was, well, Einstein Bagels, and we had a rent-to-own company. This group, Skyrim of Ekman, had hired these Stanford grads. They went out and searched and paid these MBA graduates. for a year to go search all the different businesses that they could figure out that would be the best return on investment, fastest growing, easiest to operate. And they come up with, what would you guess, rent to own, right? So they were these guys, these MBA graduates who created this company called RentWise. And so they were one of the first, very first, first customers. And I worked for these young, really smart guys. They didn't know. anything about construction and they were really they didn't know anything about running a business but they wanted to grow fast and they had all this money from Irvin and they so that was one of the first and then nine cent bagels I had worked for them some guys were internal said hey I'll give you 35 stores to do I did about 35 stores for them and they were just so there was kind of like first couple stores and then I remember one day we were we got a big room on a program for Red Lobster. And there was four of us in the basement of my house. We had an old living room table, right? Like an old brown living room table that my wife didn't want upstairs. She puts it down in the basement, right? So I sat on one end. The girl that had this, she sat in the middle, and my buddy sat on the other end, right? And three of us sat at this brown, and we had another employee, he sat on the garbage can like Lionel from the, he was like this big tall guy. And he sat on, he, put a board on the garbage can and he sat on that. So four of us were in the base of my house and we got, um, we're on a call from, uh, uh, Darden restaurants and, uh, it was Red Lobster. And this guy gave us this remodel program. He goes, look, we're going to do this thing called a dining room enhancement. It was back when, I don't know if you guys remember when Red Lobster had the wharf look, right? The kind of the seaweed and the ropes around the posts on the front. Yeah. All that stuff. And they were going from that to what was called a coastal home look. kind of getting rid of the nets and the starfish and the buoys and going to more of like a coastal home look, which is a little bit more fresh and kind of... And they were taking the bars out of the corners. They used to hide their bars and they put their bars out in the kind of main room. So we got to do these remodels. I remember when the guy gave it to us, he had no idea how small we were. None. Maybe not embellished, but maybe we didn't tell anybody how small we were, right? You know, I always tell people, when you go to a bar and you meet a girl, you know, walk in and tell her all your defects, you tell her good things, right? The same thing you do when you do customers, right? Make sure when you communicate with the customer, you're talking about the good things you do. So they gave us this program and we set off to do these and because we were so small, all four of us dove in. We had, I mean, when I say 100%, it was 150% of all of us. We traveled every day. I went to LA. We got California and we had the East Coast where they had a bunch of stores. I went to California 27 weeks in a row. So just imagine, like, I would leave every Sunday and come home every Tuesday, and I would just visit job site after job site after job site all the way up and down the West Coast. And then I would come home. I'd be home Tuesday night, Wednesday, and I'd leave Thursday morning to go to New York. And I'd go from New York from like, I'd go in the, I would drive into, I would take the train, I'd go to some projects in Newark and I'd go over to New York and then I'd go down to DC. And that was my second half of my week. I did that for every single week. Right. So you gotta be willing to go. If you're doing business, you gotta be willing to go and chew glass and travel. And that's a lot, right? You gotta, you gotta be willing to do that.

We did, all together, we did 160 projects for them. Now, this is where we learned a big lesson. And the big Enron thing happened. I remember when Enron had this big thing. And Darden had to stop all their projects, right? They had this big accounting thing they had to go through. And they stopped. Now, one of the things we learned was we had all of our eggs in one basket. All four of us worked on those projects every day. And when they stopped, we were like, we got a call that was like, stop. And we had to shuffle really fast. So one of the things we learned was be careful not to put too many eggs in one basket. And that was a big change. It was a gift. At the time, it wasn't a gift. It does not feel like a gift at the time. But, you know, if somehow the world's always happening for us and rather to us, now I look back and go, man, we learned a lot because of that. It was great.

It literally was that way. We got lucky. Then after that, we had a Boston Market remodel program where we worked with a firm that did the work, but we did all the punch lists. So that was like a 640-store program. And we would do 10 of those a day, some days, right, all around the country. So the four of us, you know, we'd divide them up, and we still had some of our lobster stuff cleaning up. So, you know, you start to learn how to. grow a little bit. We grew a couple more people there. And so all of those, you know, you're also, you're bailing and rowing, right? And then someone would say, you got to work in the business a little bit, right? You got to make this thing happen a little bit more streamlined. You can't be on every job site and run the company, right? You have to like go through the payments and checks and, you know, you're going to spend a couple of days in the office a week. And it was not something I knew how to do. In fact, I will tell you, I hated it. In fact, I still don't know that I love it. I love being on the field and being with people on job sites. It's kind of my favorite part. So, you know, as an owner, as you grow, you kind of had to learn to do the things that weren't necessarily the best. But, you know, that's what it needs to do to grow a successful business. You got to make sure you pay people properly. You got to get checks out and invoices in and the paperwork side of it.

You know, our business, construction, notoriously has been built on chaos. My real logic is that, you know, let's say that my finger, right, and if you're listening, I'm pointing at my hand, and I've got my finger. I'd say that the lifespan of a project is, you know, of a building is 50 years, right? Construction's a part that touches my finger, right? That piece here. And people have put up with a lot of chaos in construction. for a long time. And maybe in the old days when you could do one project at a time, you know, if it was just you and I, Brad, we had one project at a time and we had no other partners or no other people, maybe you can get away with chaos. But if you want to grow an organization in order for it to be profitable and systematic, Chaos is the biggest eater of all of your resources and your money, right? And I really start to realize that I'm not willing to play in a construction game where it's chaos, right? And most of what I saw up until that point was really people trying to solve the mistakes they caused. Right? Not being on top of budgets, not being on top of schedules, not being on top of ordering, not being on top of deliveries. And you started realizing that our actions were causing the chaos in the business. And then you started realizing, okay, like for those remodels, we had down to literally hour by hour what happened on a job site. From the second you showed up, even before that, for a couple of weeks before the remodel, right, who the people were going to be on the remodel, the meetings we had, the pre-construction meetings where we had. every sub on there where we talked about what you wear, how you show up, how you talk on a job site, right? We started to mitigate all the problems we knew we were going to have later on, which were, you know, look, you're in a live store, right? If a construction worker shows up and he's got a big FU shirt on, right? That's going to offend somebody, right? Or if you walk on a job site and you think you can smoke in the restaurant, you can't. Or if you say something inappropriate to one of the staff members. Right. So we started with way back when, right in the beginning, before the project started, a couple weeks before each project. And we started with the crews and we talked about what you look like, how you act. We all started with the crews and talked about how you bill. Right. Because one of the biggest problems were these are very fast remodels. if they didn't bill us properly right if they missed the billing they were going to get paid and what would happen is they would not want to show up and and you know that's the that's the big problem is that you know we had so we would literally start training them on how to bill us and help them write their first invoice to us two weeks before the project started and people are like well why'd you do that like because you understand when you pay people they show up and you can blame yourself well they didn't bill me or they didn't do this great now how could That'd be, as a company, I started looking at it going, how could that be our fault? Well, they, you know, maybe the low cost providers, the people that we needed to win the remodels, to get them, they were often low cost providers and people that weren't great at the paperwork side, right? So we started to train them and go, hey, look, let's take a few minutes and show you how to fill out a pay application, right? So here's the G703, here's a continuation sheet, here's a lien release, I need you to do a progress release for your invoice, and we'd fill it out with them. And so that's how we realized it started two weeks before so that if you run day one. right day one success wasn't on day one it started that two weeks before how many people did you need on day one and we would talk about right what are you gonna do when you walk in the store or in the restaurant so a big part of that remodel was um moving the bar so the first thing we do is we'd cordon off the area where are you gonna put the dumpster which way does the dumpster face which one is the opening of the dumpster we would get very technical about where it goes and how it opens and we want to hide it so that some people would drive onto the site and not even know there was a remodel going on because we put a fence up right and we didn't want you know a drywall dust tracked in and out of the store so the way we put it the where we put it how we operated really created, mitigated a lot of the problems we would have later on. So that logic about, you know, there's a great book to read, Extreme Ownership by Jack O 'Rourke. It's a great book about if every single detail is thought out before you go on mission, right? Every gun is loaded, every thing is oiled, every sheet's folded, everything you need to make sure that no matter what happens on that job site, it's been thought through. You get on the job site and you find out that... 95% of what's out there, maybe call it 85% of what's out there, you've already solved. Now you're just managing that 20% that breaks out. I can manage that, right? I'm not on a job site managing 85% of the stuff that I didn't put together, right, which becomes this cluster. Everybody's frustrated. People are mad at you. You know, we've all seen it in our business where people show up and they're mad because... They expect to do drywall today, and they get there, and the firmware wasn't done, right? They already had to bid the project. We've already created inefficiency in the way that we bid a project. Now we're asking people to be more inefficient because we didn't do the work we're supposed to do on it.

Well, just how many of us, it's one of the beliefs I have about the business that, I have to admit it, I don't know, we'll go off on a tangent for a second here, but look, I think a lot of what's happened in the construction world is, you know, look, people work hard. We don't get credit for that because there's so much dysfunction in the business. One of the bigger beliefs I have about it is that we start with really poor plans, right? We have, all of us are being asked to go bid on projects that have terrible, terrible plans. Right. I mean, every single architect, and I'm not mad at the architects because you don't get paid enough to do great plans. Right. You get, you get a small budget to do your napkin delivery. Right. What happens is now our subcontractors are forced to try to figure out the set of plans and do takeoffs and all of the things they need to figure out at a field level, which really should have been done at the design level, right? At design, we should have linear feet and takeoff and material takeoffs at design and Revit. about to come into our industry, the difference between Revit and AutoCAD, that's about to make a big change in the industry where that's going to happen. Now, that's going to take a minute to get there. We can get into that a little bit. But at design, imagine at design having a 100% takeoff. Every square foot, every unit pricing. Imagine being able to give that to a subcontractor and saying, hey, look, Mr. Electrician, you have 35,1900 boxes. You have seven reels of a number seven wire. You have six reels of, and you can look at the conduit and the holds. and all of the materials it's going to take to bid his project. And by the way, here's a schedule I'm going to want you to do so you can show them material and takeoff. Imagine what you could do for someone to bid that way, right? If I could give that to you. And we're working on that today where we give subcontractors extreme takeoffs like no one's ever done before. Now, why do we do that before we go to bid? It's because... We spend probably a couple thousand bucks a project for a panda or a raisin canes or in time for our estimators to do extreme, extreme takeoffs. Now, why we do that there is because when we go to bid, by the time we get those bids back, we can literally show them, hey, you're not missing an item. Now, once we get a word of that project, that takeoff turns into a schedule now. People go to me, you give, we're dealing with drywall. Imagine, we do a drywall takeoff. There's 500 sheets of drywall and a panda. Right now, I can go back and go, look, on day one, I want you to do 150 sheets. Now I can schedule and know how much manpower I need. The guy might say, all right, I can do 150 sheets with seven men. Great, bring us 11. By the way, if you get... 250 sheets done, you'll be done early. But I need to know that at least 150 sheets are going to get done that day. At least then, you know, today, what do we get on job sites? I worked real hard. I'm doing my best. But there's no way to quantify what that means and how does that mean to our schedule or what they should be doing next. It doesn't mitigate that if those people show up and the guy before them or the men before them didn't do the work they're supposed to do. I wasn't called off. Now I've got a group of men that show up on a job site that aren't prepared. And remember, they already had to bid the project, right? Remember, we had to bid this project in the beginning. So, you know, let's say, Panda this is using Panda Express I'm not bad I don't mean I'm using examples of your listening don't get mad at me but let's say there's a hundred fifty line items on a Panda Express right you got electrical plumbing HVAC underground sewer curbs gutters asphalt line striping signage right it's called a hundred line items right and maybe see me where maybe she's as a number We get three subs for every line item. So that's three subcontractors for every line item to bid that for us because we want to win the project. Let's say that it costs every sub that works for us $1,000 in time to bid for us. So before we even win the project, we have $300,000 worth of work that came out of the construction industry. No one's paying for it. We're not paying for it. The client's not paying for it. The industry had $300,000 worth of effort. and no one's won. Now imagine if we are bidding against five contractors, right? That's $1.5 million worth of work that gets sucked out of the construction industry and no one's won the project yet. And now we're asking us, what do we do in a, you know, we try to pick the right contractor, not the low contractor, because that's not who we are. But let's say we've got a variety of those people. that have all been going through that behavior. That's why I really do believe that the way that we bid projects today is changing fast. It's just not a sustainable model for the industry. It forces bad decision logic later on because we've already spent this $1.5 million project on a $2 million project. Look, and Panda didn't pay for that. And they're not to pay, I'm sorry, I'm not trying to, the client didn't pay for that. Right? Our industry did. Right. Right. And we're all working our ass off to do this. And one of the reasons why is because we're not getting that thousand bucks should be a couple hundred bucks. Because if I got a takeoff and a schedule that I could use and I could take the takeoff and send it to the supply house and they can give me the number for materials I need. And I can go look at a schedule and see how many man with the manpowers I need. That estimate I put together should. dramatically be less. But yet our industry says, nope, let's give them half the information. Every set of plans we get. I mean, have you ever got a set of plans that's perfect?

Yeah, I'm excited that what we're coming into is going to rattle our brain a little bit. The new technology is going to rattle the construction industry. A lot of people will get scared. Anytime we go through change, it's going to scare us. I've got plenty of my friends that say, I'm not thinking about AI yet. I'm going to retire before. I'm like, you're not going to make it. Look, AI is here the next couple of years of our industry. And those who embrace it. will, you know, will take off and they'll separate from those who don't embrace it so quickly they won't be able to catch up because, look, drawings will be done in AI, right? Our schedules will be done in AI. Our ordering will be done in AI. Those companies that start to embrace and play with that stuff today... will separate from those who don't so quickly. The model that we're talking about, this inefficient model of thousands and thousands of dollars of people working really hard to get to a point where you find out you're six inches off or eight inches off, it's just... It's not workable. Now, maybe we've gotten away with it, but the amount of frustration and cost of that is plaguing our industry. And we can certainly, great smart people have gotten through those problems. Great. But what's happening now, the cost of money, the cost of construction has gone up. All our materials are up there. Our margins are smaller. We need to eke out more dollars on everything that we do across the board. Right. So this is going to be more and more to find these tools to help us solve those problems quicker. You know, imagine what it would take to go back and rip that all open if the inspector didn't catch it. I mean, it could sink somebody. Yeah. I mean, how many framers, how many people, how many subs get sunk on a mistake like that? It takes them out.

That malevolent behavior is stuff that we as a group have got to say, that's not acceptable. Mr. Owner, you cannot behave that way, right? My wife's an attorney, a construction attorney. And at least once a day, I heard her say to another attorney, do you want to solve this? Or do you want to just keep charging your clients fees? Now, the problem is once it gets into a legal scenario. We're never going to win. We as GCs and in the construction world, the only people that win when it goes to court is the lawyers, right? It's just such an expensive thing to go through. And, you know, being able to handle that paperwork and that decision. And what happens? The change or keeping up with change orders on a job site while you're, you know, you're a small company, you're running 100 miles an hour. You stop doing that paperwork stuff that protects you from that owner that gets the amnesia the week after the project. Yeah. Right. And all of a sudden, you know, great team of people that worked really hard got taken out because of a bad, you know, a bad agreement.

Yeah. He lost his business. 20 years of doing this, I've learned one thing. Anytime it goes to legal field, nobody wins. It's always the only people that win are the attorneys. And, you know, the whole goal is to mitigate that happening. How do we prevent ourselves from ever getting to that lawsuit? And that's the behaviors and the practices we are. So, you know, we're on a job site and you start digging, you find, you know, Jimmy Hoffa underground. Right? Everybody wants to do it. First thing we want to do, we want to solve it. Right? Our people, oh, let's go solve it. No, no, no. Hold on. Stop. communicate right so let's communicate to the owners what exactly we're finding here we're going to do to try to solve this we need to get a proctor out there we need to get some soil samples done you know now we need to quantify how big of an issue is it before we move forward let's have an agreement on how we're going to cover these expenses I know you guys want to move forward but what's going to happen is that subcontractor will go and do the soil work the client will not agree to it they'll stop paying and the whole job will stop down and stop later Right. And that's going to be the worst case scenario. And now we've got lawyers involved. So, you know, I think that's all. And, you know, by the way, sometimes I can even say I've caused some of that problem because I want to go fast and I want to be the GC that's not a problem. But the truth is, if you don't follow those proper procedures, you end up causing your own problems for them later on. They may be grumpy with you now because you had to stop, get an answer, but they fire you later. And, you know, following those procedures, you know, does help solve a lot of that.

Yeah. And the question, if we go back and look at ourselves and go, how did I cause that? Right. I mean, it's really easy to blame the customer. Those guys, that person, I point out and everybody else, the problem with that is that victim mentality of the business. There is no agency, right? I have no, from there. I have no agency in doing it. But if I look and go, all right, how did my behavior cause that? When I look back at Anthony and my company and the work that we did, and how did we cause this to happen? I can always look back and say, Oh, look at that. I wanted to be a nice guy. I shook the guy's hand, and I thought they were going to be all ethical about it, but I didn't realize that he's got partners and people, and the people I shook hands with aren't even there when I quit the job, right? When I'm over the job, right? All of a sudden, that guy leaves, or that person leaves. You know, all of the things that could have been stopped had we done the proper paperwork, which ultimately makes us go faster. It's just hard to see that in the moment when you have to stop. reassess, put a change order together, get it approved, make sure everybody agrees on it. Now I can order the equipment, I can order the materials, I can move forward with clarity and vision and everybody's like, yeah, great. I'm not mad or resentful because I did the proper paperwork.

You know, right now, I love religious studies. I'm not a very religious guy, but I love reading religious books. So I'm in a deep dive right now in the Bible. I'm reading the Bhagavad Gita, which is... It's more of a Krishna book. And most of my stuff is business-related stuff. But right now I happen to be reading a deep dive in the Bible. I'm having a lot of fun reading the Bible with this great guy who's got a really deep knowledge of it. So we really hit the history of the Bible. I'm having a real fun time doing that, kind of a real study of that. And then I'm reading this Bhagavad Gita. I'm doing a project in Florence with a group of Krishna guys. And it started from this whole thing I'm working on for a school in India. It's kind of this weird whole thing. It's a long story. So I happen to be reading their religious texts, which is kind of interesting in itself. So those are the two books I'm reading right now, the Christian Bible and the Krishna Bible, which is the Bhagavad Gavita.

I love your show. I love being on it. I'm grateful having you on my show. Brother, it's been great. I just love watching your success. Your shorts are awesome. Keep them up. You have the best shorts in the industry, so keep those up. Thanks.