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From Teacher to Tech CEO: How Stephen Spence Built a Software Company With No Startup Background · Do Small Business Like a Big Boss Podcast

• Aisha Massengill: So one of the things that you just mentioned was overcoming the rejection and pushing through. How did you develop that muscle or how did you come to peace with that repeated direct rejection and then continuing to go forward? You know, I'm okay with it. To be honest with you, I don't think a lot of people are built for it. You have to be understanding that, you you might reach out to 10 people and one day and out of those 10 people, one might say yes, all 10 might say. Nope, sorry, you suck. I don't want to talk to you. You get hung up on, right? You get, you get emails back that are cussing you out saying, stop bothering me. it's, it's not easy and it's not for the faint of heart, but you know, I, I'm okay with it. I, I knew that that was kind of the business I was getting myself into when I became more of a sales guy at that point. ⁓ at the end of the day, you just have to move on and realize you're not going to make everybody happy. Welcome to Do Small Business Like a Big Boss, where we explore the real stories, hard-earned lessons, and game-changing strategies of entrepreneurs who've moved beyond the side hustle and built businesses that scale with confidence. This show is proudly sponsored by Project Icon. I'm your host, Ayesha Jorge Massengill, your Small Business Legal Guide. Let's dive in. Welcome to the latest episode of Do Small Business Like a Big Boss. I am your host, Ayesha Jorge-Massenguil, your Small Business Legal Guide. And today I'm really excited about this conversation with Steve Spence. Steve is the managing director and co-owner of Project MAPIT. Project MAPIT is an all-in-one marketing and sales tool that is designed to give contractors their time back while turning prospects into projects. Welcome, Steve. Thank you for having me, Ayesha. I appreciate it. I'm really glad to have you here. ⁓ In your own words, tell me a little bit more about Project MAP-IT. Yeah, we're a real simple tool, but powerful. We help build confidence in the homeowner when they're trying to choose a contractor that's best for them. So we're a mapping platform. So imagine just a roofing contractor, landscape or whatever, putting a bunch of pins on the map and all those pins represent jobs that they have done, whether it's a repair or a full project. And then within each of those pins, you can have your actual project photos uploaded. You can add all of your Google and Facebook reviews to those pins. So there's lots of other things that we are, but we're just a reputation tool that contractors and sales teams use to just show a homeowner why that homeowner should choose them over their competition. Cause contractors are always trying to compete against each other. know, every homeowner has taken two over three estimates every time they need a new job. So that's what we do. We help build confidence. So before we go too deep into project MAPIT, I want to rewind a little bit and talk about, you know, really interesting part of your, your story, because I don't know that based on what I understand you woke up one day and you were like, I'm going to run this tech company for contractors. so, and tell me, tell us about how that happened. And this is why I loved when you reached out to me. loved the idea of this podcast because I feel like I'm in a position now where I can speak. as a small business owner that has a weird journey that took me to this place that has learned a lot and continues to learn a lot. But yeah, my, my journey was, was a special education teacher here in Maryland for 20 years. I coached lacrosse here. So for those that are understanding of the sport of lacrosse, which you are, since you don't live too far from me, I coached at the high school level. And one of my players who graduated in 2004, started this tech company called Project Mappet. And so we ran into each other twice in the matter of a week after not seeing each other for about 12 years. And he's like, Hey coach, need you to talk. I want to talk to you about this new software program I've, I've developed. So I met him in over three months. We talked back and forth and sure enough, I was the first ever employee of Project Mappet. He ran his own contracting business. as well, which is why he created this product to begin with. It's a great product that he envisioned and built. But to be totally blunt and honest with you, Aisha, like about 30 days of two months in, I think he realized Project MAPIT wasn't making, like, wasn't going to make a dent in the revenue that he needed to sustain. So his focus went back on his contracting company that he owned. And now I was kind of left on an island alone to learn the contracting industry. and software industry as a 42 year old, guess, second career, if you will. And, you know, yeah, I was a teacher for 20 years. I wasn't an entrepreneur. So over the last eight years, I just had my eight year mark on LinkedIn. saw. So over the last eight years, I've talked to a lot of people, a lot of mentors who have helped me along the way. And I'm happy to say that we're, thriving and doing well. first of all, congratulations on your eight years. But what was it your 30, 60 days in it's going south? What was it that made you say, I'm going to stick with it even though he's bailing. know, it's, that's a good question. I had a couple BYU students ask me this the other day. Their professor had them do a thing and they reached out to me. And the blunt answer is that I had no other place to go. I was a teacher of 20 years. I wasn't going to back into that industry. You know, I was making just around six figures and there was nothing else I wanted to do or could do. And at that point, you know, project map, was just a thing. wasn't something that I was super passionate about. But I was at a point where that sucked, right? He left. He didn't leave. He mentored me for a good eight months or whatever, but it was me. I I was running the company and I didn't know what I was doing, but I had no other choice, in other words. I'd saved about $125,000 in my 401k over the 20 years of a teacher and that money went bye-bye because Project MAP, it wasn't making a lot of money. So I know some of your, that's my resilience story, right? Like at the end of the day, I... I think my first year I made $37,000. I was making maybe $3,000 a month. mean, was tough on my family. We had two young kids and stuff like that. They're older now, but it was not an easy transition. But I had no other place to go to answer your question. was either that or nothing. And so I chose that. Yeah, that's, I tend to think in music and lines from movies. And when you said that, it immediately made me think of Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere. I'm probably dating myself now, but Richard Gere is at his breaking point. And, you know, Lou Gossett is trying to get him to quit and he finally just cries out like, I've got nowhere else to go. So he had to make himself a success. And for all you watchers and listeners need to go pull that movie because there's a lot of wonderful lessons in there about resilience and when you feel like your back is against the wall and a theme that I always talk about the family that you make rather than the family that you're sometimes born into and how they help you get through the tough times. That little segue aside, have a couple little kids at home and your wife is like, what are you doing? You've got this teacher salary where you're making pretty good money for teacher. So what was the thing that did, what else kind of propelled you forward to say, I'm going to make a go of this? Yeah. mean, there were some personal things going on in my life as well. Our kids were young, they were nine and eight. So it's much easier to work from home, which is what I am, right? Like a lot of software companies, small ones at least. our remote workers. So it was really convenient for us where I could stay at home and be with the kids when they're sick, instead of having to call my mother at five o'clock in the morning and asking her to take care of the kids when they got sick and all the other stuff. I mean, I love the flexible hours, but yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, we both agreed it was a good step. I wasn't really happy where I was in my career as a teacher at the time. My next kind of, the thing I was going to do next as a teacher was I was going to be an administrator. So. a vice principal or assistant principal or something like that. I even got my certificate for that, but I just wasn't happy. The last five years, you I'd made some bad mistakes as a leader at the school I was at. was a special education department chair. I think I learned a lot from those mistakes that I made. So yeah, my wife and I both agreed that it was a good time for me to change it up a little bit. We didn't realize that it was going to be a $37,000 a year job the first year, by no means, but... She's been a rock. mean, my wife's been a rock. It has been nice for me to be home, but she and I both made the decision together and I think it was the right decision because I am very, very happy where I am right now. So, you know, in life, I do believe that there's, you know, you can either like lose the lesson or learn from the lesson. Are there any things that you brought from your teaching, either operationally in terms of having to navigate people who are differently abled or just... you know, how to run a business. Were there any kind of nuggets that you were able to carry over from teaching into running the business? Yeah. I mean, as a teacher, so in my, in our company now is a bigger company before, you know, the first three or four years it was me and every once in I would hire a person and it worked for me for a few months knowing that they would be gone after a few months. So they were really just kind of trying to help me out to be honest with you. But now that we have a team, ⁓ I will say that we all, the way we bring it, the way we say it in our company is everybody has a superpower, right? know, Perla is a 27 year old woman that is amazing. She's my number two in command here, Project MAPIT. And she is like the mama bear, the one that organizes the company and keeps us all on schedule and stuff like that. I'm the 52 year old, you know, father figure, boss guy that is not as organized. My brain is going a million miles a minute. So Perla helps kind of rein that in. You know, we got Pat who's a utilities guy. So like, My superpowers, I'm a people person. Like I love people. connect well with people. I'm a very good presenter. So I do a lot of presentations in front of contractors, educationally about things like your online presence and sales. And, I feel like I do a really good job at that. And contractors learn a lot when I present for different companies and organizations. So, you know, because I was. ⁓ a classroom teacher for so many years. feel like that is my superpower. Just I'm a, I'm a people connector. I connect well with people. And because of that, I feel like it's, it's helped grow the company because people trust me. Bigger companies trust me when they meet me. Contractors trust me when they meet me. And honestly, they trust our team too. So yeah, you got to build out that no like and trust is so important. So in the first two years, you just said like, it was just you. And then you might have someone sporadically and they drop off. What did a typical week look like for you? How were you spending your time? Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not easy when you're, you know, there's, are moments the first two, three years where it's like, man, I need to sell, I need to sell two more project map and subscriptions in the next five days, ⁓ in order for me to pay a salary of $3,000 for that month. mean, it was, it was tough at times. Typical day for me, I did everything right. And it's a little easier because we were a small company at the time, but you know, I was the salesperson. was the marketing person posting on socials. was the, ⁓ I was the onboarding. the customer success person, did all of the phases in the company. So I had to wear many hats and it was, it was not easy, but the biggest, the biggest problem was me trying to just get leads. Like just, just. You know, I had to find that first big company that was willing to kind of take us on as a vendor partner, which is the way we work. You know, a lot of, a lot of our business comes from just really good partnerships with bigger companies in specifically the exterior remodeling space, even though we work with all sorts of contractors. So that was, you know, I can remember that call December 15th of 2000, 2019, I'm Gryzinski, I bless you buddy. He called me, he's like, Hey man. I remember you from this show of a few months ago and I'd love for you to come and be a vendor partner of USLBM, which is a big supply company and you know, we can partner together and we'll promote you and they did. And that's what kind of got us to the point where we didn't have to close down. So let's go a little bit deeper on that because you talk about a challenge that most new business owners have to struggle with and that's developing leads when you're kind of starting from scratch. So can you tell me some of the early strategies that you use then? what worked and what didn't. mean, clearly the unlock was, you know, the partnership that you got, but leading up to that, what were the things you tried? Yeah, I mean, it was, I didn't know, to be totally honest with you. We didn't have Google ads. We're a niche product, so we don't really work well on Google ads anyway. And I didn't know how to run Google ads. So I, there was not really a lot of organic outreach, even though there probably should have been. Again, teacher of 20 years, not knowing what the heck I'm doing. I don't know how to get leads. You're talking about roofing contractors. How do I get that? How do I get a- How do I reach out to landscapers that don't know me? So one of the things my, my boss, the original owner had me do on day one, I kid you not, Aisha day one, he's like, go down to Annapolis. There's a strip of just tons of, ⁓ just in downtown, not downtown Annapolis, but there's just a strip of all these contracting buildings. And I just want you to walk into every single one and try to sell it. I didn't really even know much. mean, I knew, I knew about project MAPA, but I didn't know how to sell it. ⁓ I mean, I got to be honest with you talking about just, what do you call that? Like just throw it like, just, went in not knowing what the heck I was doing. So I hit up like 20 different contractors. They all denied me. They all said no, but at the end of the day, it was really a good experience because it got me over my like awkwardness. I was able to figure, you know, the first five, 10 times I was horrible at even talking about the, the, product. And then after that, I got a little smoother, a little better, but yeah, we had lists. I mean, this was again, eight years ago, this wasn't in the world of AI where we could go get lists of like 5,000 roofing contractors in Maryland today. Like that, that becomes a lot easier now. So it was, you know, I these old clunky lists that I think the owner bought somehow illegally. don't remember. don't know. And I would just, I would just, I would just email them and I'd have to email them, you know, like 50 at a time, 50 a day, just so like the, the email cops wouldn't arrest me for sending, 5,000 emails. to look spammy. So yeah, it was just this slow grind. It was a slow, slow grind. And it wasn't until this guy, John Groszinski gave us the opportunity and they're just out of New Jersey for the most part and Pennsylvania. So I was able to drive up and meet them. And there was like a personal connection, which was good. And then from there, ⁓ once I started getting some leads, not a ton, but enough, you know, he was able to. introduced me to CertainTeed, which is a manufacturing company that I've been with for six years. And then CertainTeed was able to introduce me to these other big, huge conglomerates. you know, once you land a couple of big ones, big companies that back you, you can use that to hopefully get other big companies to back you. And that's what we've done. And we've been very successful with it over the last, I'd say three years. So one of the things that you just mentioned was overcoming the rejection and pushing through. How did you develop that muscle or how did you come to peace with that repeated direct rejection and then continuing to go forward? You know, I'm okay with it. To be honest with you, I don't think a lot of people are built for it. You have to be understanding that, you might reach out to 10 people one day and out of those 10 people, one might say yes, all 10 might say, nope, sorry. You suck. don't want to talk to you. You get hung up on, right? You get, you get emails back that are cussing you out saying, stop bothering me. it's, it's not easy and it's not for the faint of heart, but you know, I I'm okay with it. I, I knew that that was kind of the business I was getting myself into when I became more of a sales guy at that point, at the end of the day. You just have to move on and realize you're not going to make everybody happy. But I will say it's like a roller coaster, right? Like I might've gotten rejected 20 times, but that first sale I ever made, Sunaway Shades, Arizona. built custom shades and they're about to close down, I think not too long from now, but they were my first ever customer and I will never forget them. To this day, I love just checking in on them and stuff like that. So, but rejection is part of the business. If you're going to be in sales as an owner, now that I'm an owner, I don't... I don't focus on sales as much. have salespeople that do the sales calls, but they all, they all understand that it's part of the business. part of that journey though, what I'm hearing and what I experience is we all have to take our turn in sales at some point and have to learn that muscle of rejection and continuing forward. So you bring up something good and I think it's probably pertinent for a podcast like yours is I try to do a lot of things first. just to kind of experience it because I know my company better than anybody in my company, even though I'm really smart people. ⁓ Cause I've just, I've been doing it the longest and I'm also very invested in it because I'm an owner, right? Like ultimately I have an exit and my exit is to possibly sell one day. like I have added passion for it based off those, those things, but I try like for customer success, I want to, I want to make sure that we are providing really good customer success attention. detail, all that kind of stuff. So I lived that customer success life for a while. I experienced it first. So everything we try to do, we hired a new call center person, a new retention, like a brand ambassador in our company just recently. And it really was me working very closely with the new person or me doing it myself and figuring out the best way in my mind to do it. And then once I figured it out, then work with the people in our company and they obviously can. even take what I've learned and make it a little better, but at least I have a really good idea of the best way to work that part of our company, if that makes sense. It absolutely does. My best friend at one point had a stint as a massage therapist and they teach a theory of see, feel, do. That you have to see the thing, experience the thing and do the thing. And I find you have to strike a balance between delegation, but also understanding what you're delegating. And as a natural born New Yorker, we have trust issues naturally. So it's like, I need to be able to check your work. I can't check your work if I don't know how it is supposed to work. So I do find as an owner that on some level, I need to have a baseline understanding of each facet of my business. It doesn't mean I live there forever, but I got to know how it's supposed to work. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. They say in sports, I've big into coaching, they say in sports, know, you could be a great player, but you're not like the best of the best until you can teach the other players on how to do things the right way as well. Like the fundamentals. You can be a great player yourself, but until you can actually teach it to other younger players under you, then you become, you know, the prime player that you deserve to be. As my coach told me once time, Aisha is not a good pass if they can't catch it. So. Would you play basketball? I played everything. I played basketball. I played softball. and I played volleyball and I grew up on the courts of the Bronx in New York. And so I would be very, I would get very frustrated when my teammates couldn't keep pace with me. And I was very fast and very gifted as a passer. But again, if you can't bring people along with you, then it doesn't matter how good you think you are. You have to be able to coach the folks up around you and help them be successful. So I'm in my fifth decade as well and that's still. sticks with me that lesson that coach Kennedy, shout out coach Kennedy gave me back in the day. I always say I'm very coachable. am very coachable. So right before the world shut down for COVID, you and your four partners bought out the founder. And I think it's, you you mentioned something about exit strategy. Like one day you hope to position it, to sell it. I feel the same way about my business. And one thing just tactically people may not understand is What is that process like of what are the steps you do to actually buy someone out? To get bought out? I mean, we would need, you know, for us, it's subscribers, to be honest with you. We want to have a lot of subscribers. I would love to have. We're probably 650, 680 subscribers. I haven't looked in a minute. You know, once you get to 1500 subscribers, then people start to notice because Honestly, in the software world, people are not just 100 % buying the software. They're also buying the people that you subscribe to. So that's an important thing. I never knew the word EBITDA. So you need to have a good EBITDA, which is, yeah, you laughed at as well. I sort of know what it is. We've been through the process once, you know, where somebody was looking at potentially acquire us when we were really young and it didn't. reached the third stage, but we had the NDA, we had like the discovery part, and then it kind of stopped there, which in hindsight was a really good thing because I think we're worth a lot more than what we would have been, you know, three years ago for sure. Yeah, I mean, subscribers, good, a good reputation for sure. Like people want to see like, you know, investors or whoever. For us, it could be a CRM, it could be a manufacturing company, it could be a supply company that buys us. There are lots of different potential suitors for a product like ours. But yeah, I mean, I feel like we have a strong work ethic in our company. think people that want to potentially acquire us would look at that part as well. Our brand is pretty strong. People know that we're a company with good integrity as a software company. need to have strong software, meaning the infrastructure of your code needs to be good. If someone wants to buy you, they want to make sure they're buying a strong infrastructure where the code's not going to break and the system is going to work. So we're lucky enough to have a guy, one of the owners actually, we're, you know, five of us, five of us total. The coder is one of the owners and he's really smart. So he's been over last two years really making sure that the software is strong and we'll be able to scale appropriately. So those are some of the things. So just for the folks who are following the show, earnings before interest taxes and amortization, unless you add the D in there for depreciation as EBITDA. But let's also talk about you bought your, your player out in the first instance, you and your partner. So what was that process like when you actually had to buy someone out versus being bought out? was super easy. We offered it he said, give us a number. gave a number and he offered, he accepted it. It wasn't a big, huge offer. It wasn't like, was, it was a lot of money for us at the time because we, you know, we weren't, you know, our revenue that year probably wasn't as much as what we bought them out for. But we have two of our investors, each pitched in half and they were able to get the funds necessary to buy him out. And because of those investors, again, not a ton of money, but because of them, we were able to survive and move forward. was either him or me. And at that point I was the face of the company, right? Like people knew who Steve Spence was. People didn't really know who he was. And so there was a point where we were kind of butt in heads a little bit and it just got to... the point where one of us needed a break. So luckily, luckily, the five of us bought them out and we've been doing well ever since. Excellent. Shifting to kind of the systems and processes and cetera, because I think you're listed as a co-owner, but also like the managing director of making sure all the trains run on time. What kind of systems or habits help you all grow? And what do you recommend for the folks listening? Well, I mean, by the time I say what I'm going to say, It'll probably change in six weeks once, once you put this lie because of AI. mean, AI is ridiculous with the way companies, I was talking to a friend of mine on Slack today, ⁓ who's like, yeah, I'm using Claude, the new Claude work thing. And basically everything is being done for me. So with that said, lot of new startup companies probably could use something like Claude to run a lot of their processes without having to get a lot of manpower. I will say that our company is small enough right now that it doesn't really, AI hasn't really affected us where I have two sales reps. They need to be sales reps, right? They have to present to people. I have two customer success managers. Our product requires some onboarding and some, you know, massaging and making sure they understand how to best leverage our system. And I have two people that help make the maps. And so there's really only two of us in each department and then me who runs the company. So, so AI... We're not using it yet as we grow exponentially, which is very possible. Even within the next quarter, we might have to use AI to help run some systems, but the software's that we're using to answer your question, we use HubSpot CRM. It's great for software companies. So if I started using it as a fledgling back eight years ago, and I've only grown since, I mean, we'd spend a lot of money on it, but we run our, website through HubSpot. It allows us to keep all our analytics. run our marketing. run our, we run at the sales side. We run the customer success that we run our company through HubSpot. That is hands down. So, I mean, we pay a good penny. We paid like 3,500 bucks a month. And on top of that, I basically, I have a young lady in India. She's actually moving to Uruguay, but Kajol is amazing. She's a, she's say she's a friend of ours, right? But we pay her, we pay her, you know, a little over eight. like 1800 bucks a month just to help us with HubSpot. She's my HubSpot guru. I'm pumping in like $5,000 or something like that a month just to run our CRM. But the ROI is there. You can start small with HubSpot and grow. And that's what we've done. So we run pretty much our entire company out of that. We use Google Drive to keep all of our work and everything like that. And then we use Slack to communicate. Slack is really cool, I think, for small companies. mean, you can video conference like you and I are doing now. You can create screen share videos of stuff for software companies. sometimes, you know, something's going wrong with our software. We can make a video of it. a developer, Pete, you know, look what's going wrong with project mapping. Can you help us fix this? So Slack is awesome for us. We use it religiously. have like shout outs, you know, we have a channel. So if somebody does well, we shout them out on Slack. So we use it as an inspirational tool as well. Those are the three like HubSpot Slack and Google Drive are the three main ones. that we use. We use BigMarker for our webinars, which we'll probably start using more of actually. I haven't heard of that one. That's just a webinar. Yeah, somebody told me about it years ago and I've used it and it's been good for us and it's not super expensive. So we use it. My team use Chatgy Media to help kind of refine emails and stuff like that or create email campaigns. Although I've heard that Claude is definitely better for stuff like that now Claude is becoming like the main go-to. I get in trouble and it is true. mean, people should know this that, and I'm sure you know this Aisha, but like just AI in general is really bad for the environment. feel, yeah, it's just the amount of energy. Yeah, the center's in the water and there's been a lot of, actually you can appreciate this as a Marylander, there's this, I served with the chamber of commerce and there's a lot of discussion because Maryland's in the legislative season and there's this tug of war about wanting to draw businesses to Maryland, but those data centers, the energy that they require and the land that they require to be successful can really be detrimental. not trying to make a political statement at all. It's just a fact. In fact, I was talking to my niece the other day and like she was fired up about this precise issue. So that's a big thing. And I would say I'm a huge fan of Claude and just always say, Claude is like a better copywriter and it might be a tick slower just in terms of spitting out the output, but the quality of the output is fantastic. And then, know, ChatGPT has stubbed its toe as of late because of their affiliation with the government and the information of yours that they may or may not be sharing. So just something for folks to think about. But more importantly, as a small business owner, I think, you know, you really highlighted one issue and that is where can you still... find the spaces in your business where the people still matter and the people still have to touch things. And even from a regulatory and compliance perspective, all the governments are telling us like you have to keep a person, a human involved in the process. You cannot just take your hands off of everything. I love the efficiency it brings me, but you can't just abdicate all your duties and you have to find where the people still fit in your business. That's well said. That's very well said. ⁓ you've done this a few times, huh? Yeah. I, you know, I love AI, but I'm also again, movies and music. am of the Skynet, you know, Terminator two, watching the world get taken over by the bots. And I don't know if you watch the show paradise, but I don't want to give any spoilers, but AI is huge on the impact of that show. And it's all the, it's all the best things of creating a new environment versus like what happens if it all goes horribly wrong. So everyone go check out Paradise. It's amazing. Did you see the finale? Yes, I did. did. My son and I watched it. Yep. Absolutely. And my girlfriend chat group was, we were just blowing up like, ⁓ my God. And I'm always yelling at my friends catch up because you know, sometimes they delay watching and I'm always like, I have all these thoughts I need to unload and I need you to catch up and watch the episode. So yeah, so I love it for the tool that it is, but I am mindful. that it has to have its guardrails. And in my field in particular, excuse me, people can over trust it and it spits out hallucinations and things that just give you wrong stuff. And so you've got to have the human remain involved. Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Well said. If you, so, we're gonna just start to wind down your very important time. If you're thinking about the folks who may be coming up behind, remember that, you know, for my listeners, it's... these aspiring folks who are trying to build it, you know, in all kinds of crazy ways, strapping things together with the band-aids and whatever. What kind of advice would you have for them as they enter into this journey? Yeah, think you're, I think two things pop into my head when you ask that question. The first is you have to be willing to work hard and work many hours beyond what you really want to, which is very, it's very contradictory to like work life balance, right? Like you want to have a work life balance because In order for you to be the most efficient person, you need to be able to have a work life balance. in the same breath, starting a new business, you have to be willing to get up on a Saturday morning at five and work until nine before your family wakes up. know, I mean, it takes grind and hustle. I definitely believe that you have to understand that sometimes you think it's going to be easy and it's not at all. I've had a lot of friends that actually started a company and didn't. didn't and weren't successful because they realized it was a lot harder than they thought it was going to be. I also think a big one is that this is what I feel like. And maybe people would say I'm wrong. I think you should be transparent with everyone. That's your new customers. So, you know, when I started, you know, when I started with Project MAPIT, the idea was, Hey Steve, you got to make everybody believe that you have 5,000 Project MAPIT customers. And we had like two, right? And I just, That never sat well with me. For me, it's always been just be transparent. Just be honest with the people that you're talking to. Cause at the end of the day, that's what they want. And so a new roofing company, just had like, they only, they've only done 10 jobs and on our product, that means only 10 pins are in a map. But like I tell them it's okay. Just be transparent. Hey, we're a brand new company. We want you to trust us. We're going to give you everything we have. We're going to take care of you. So I think being transparent is very important. I think it builds integrity and trust within the people. I feel like that's one of the reasons why we've been able to solidify very big relationships with multi-billion dollar supply and manufacturing companies. think they like that. I think they like that. That they can, that they can trust that what I'm saying is true, if that makes sense. So hard work and just, be yourself and have the integrity to be transparent with anybody you're talking to, whether it's your new customers, whether it's vendor partners that you're trying to form relationships with. Those are the two biggest takeaways I've learned in my short careers as an entrepreneur. Yeah. Going back to my time in corporate America, I had this epiphany. I was at a seminar and this one was talking and I realized like, you can have it all, but you can't have it all at the same time. there are always puts and takes that you're going to have to make. And when you're on this journey as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, it requires a lot. ⁓ you know, it's kind of like Sean Connery and the Untouchables. Like, what are you prepared to do? Like, what are you prepared to do as this business owner to really make this thing hum? And so sometimes things get out of balance. That's normal. You don't want to live there, but it's going to happen and you have to be fit for the fight. Let me ask you this, because I asked this of all of my guests. When you hear the phrase, do small business like a big boss, what does that mean to you? I did like that phrase. I did see that. We are, we always tell people we're small and mighty. Like we're lean and mean. So I feel like we truly are in a reflective of a small business. We have a competitor that has, you know, 200 employees and we have seven, you know, eight, if you count my developers. So eight. So for us. We are competing against the big boys and we're big girls and we are, we are winning. Like we're, doing really well. Our brand recognition is incredible in the exterior remodeling space. And we're seven people strong, you know, we're a small business, but we are doing it like a boss, like a big boss. I really do feel like that. And that's, that's definitely reflective of the people that work here at Project MAPIT. Those other seven people, they work their butts off. and they treat their customers fairly. And they're competitive with each other and with themselves to be even better than what they are. That's what I think when I hear that phrase. I love that phrase, by the way. That's a phrase. Thank you. Thank you. It was come up at a bar with my friend Arthur and I. were... kind of talking about how we wanted to construct it. And he came up with one phrase and I was like, I had to tweak it a little bit. And I love it because I am small and mighty. So I wanted to convey that for folks as they are trying to build something amazing. Steve, where can the people find you and, you know, Project MAPIT? What's the best way for them to contact you if they want to do so? Just projectmapit.com. You can go there. You can find me on LinkedIn, Steven, S-T-E-P-H-E-N, Spence. I love LinkedIn. I love learning from people on LinkedIn, but yeah, our website's probably the best. There's a calendar there. If you wanted to talk to us, there's a phone number there. Our Google business profile has a phone number. Any of those avenues. thank you so much for your time and your talents. Really enjoyed this conversation as much as I thought I would based on the things that I learned about you. All right, bosses, that is it for today's episode. If you found anything in here that resonated with you, please let us know. It helps the show grow. ⁓ You can download it. You could like, or you subscribe to the pod. You can also grab some neat free guides to help you and your small business grow at smallbizlegalguide.com. And that's Biz with two Z's. Biz with two Z's. I had to fight to get that domain name. So check that out. And last but not least, always remember, build a dream messy, build a dream scared, but just don't build it small. See you next week.