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Adventures in Estimation: How Jake Jones Transformed His Career · Learnings and Missteps by Depth Builder

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: You got to learn fast because it's go, go, go go go.
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: That's it, the old axiom drinking from a fire hose man, Because it's going to come at you and it's going to come at you fast.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: What is going on?
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: L&m family Back again with another super awesome human being.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: He is a nomadic estimator, helps contractors go after more pursuits and not only helps them go get more work, helps them refine and optimize their estimating processes.
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: Y'all already know it's kind of crazy.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Like man I get to talk to so many smart people, and it's not because I'm smart, it's just because I have a podcast, so I'm leveraging that thing for as much as I can.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: He has been living life on the run.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: He is the co-founder of Archer Estimation and Consulting.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: His name is Mr Jake Jones.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: He's been at it for a while.
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: We will find out what part of the world he is in today, because he gets around quite a bit.
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: Find out what part of the world he is in today because he gets around quite a bit.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: But before that, if this is your first time here, this is the Learnings and Missteps podcast, where you get to see real super awesome human beings just like you sharing their gifts and talents to leave this world better than they found it.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: I'm Jesse, your selfish servant, and we're about to get to know Mr Jake.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Jake, how are you?
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: my friend.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: Oh man, I am fantastic, jesse.
• 1:33
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me on today.
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I'm excited.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: I was looking at my schedule.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: I was like, oh, I get to hang out with Jake.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: This is going to be good.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: So where are you in the world today?
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: So, right now we are in Santiago, chile, and so we started a digital nomad kind of trip trek with our business, and so we are working our way through South America right now.
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: We've been to Buenos Aires, argentina, been to Montevideo, uruguay.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: Now here we are in Santiago de Chile.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Been to Montevideo, uruguay Now here we are in Santiago de Chile.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: Next week we pack everything up and we're headed off to Peru for about eight weeks Dang, so already next week you're heading on to the next stop.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: We spent about 60 days in each place.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay, so I got like a real softball question for you, are you ready?
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: All right, pay it on me.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: What have you learned about yourself while on this nomadic journey?
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: I have learned.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: One of the coolest things that I have learned about myself is that all of the stuff that I used to carry around with me, that I used to fill the space and the places we lived, and all of that that I really need almost none of it.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: That's been.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: The biggest thing is being able to simplify myself down to the absolute, almost bare bones, and when we're still carrying too much, I mean right now we're.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: We've got two 30 inch rolling duffels, two international sized rollerboard suitcases and two the day packs and we're going, man, we really still need to shed some stuff, and so we're shedding stuff.
• 3:08
  Speaker 2: Every stop we make Something doesn't make it back in a bag.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Okay, man.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: So I'm down with the minimalist idea.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: But paring it down that much, what was that like?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Was it simple, we're just going to take this stuff, or was it?
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Was there some kind of emotional turmoil in deciding what's going to stay, what's?
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: got to go.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: Honestly, it's a journey that has been going on for years.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: We started off we moved in 2017 from middle Georgia up to Nashville, tennessee, and when we moved, it was me, heather and her mom.
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: Her mom lived with us.
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: We were taking care of her and our two small dogs, and it took us a 53 foot van trailer and a 26 foot U-Haul to move all of our stuff to Tennessee.
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: And we had that much stuff, man, and we paid for storage units and all this other stuff, just like everybody else does.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: And so we kind of went all right, we got to start paring down and when we moved in 2022 from Tennessee to Pennsylvania for another job move, we moved in an 18 foot box truck and it was just.
• 4:27
  Speaker 2: It was Heather and I at that point, but we went from all that much stuff down to that, and so ever since then, we've been kind of.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: We've been you slip and slide a little bit, and the longer you stay somewhere, the more stuff.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: You kind of.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: You get one thing, two things, three things, and so you wind up accumulating again.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: But when we decided we were going to do this nomadic trek, we said we're just going to lay everything out and go through it and I it's.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: I probably shouldn't say this, but we did.
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: You're, you're familiar with the marie kondo thing, that you hold something and does this spark oh yeah, I love about this one on Reddit a few years ago and it's the exact opposite of that.
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: It's the poop test.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, if you hold it in your hand and you go if this had poop on it, would I clean it off or throw it away.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, or throw it away, okay.
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so that was it, that's it, and so now we have very small wardrobes.
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: You can wear all the same stuff several days a week.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: It's fine.
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: It all washes, and as things wear out, you buy a thing to replace it.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: So when this shirt wears out, I'll buy a shirt, and so it was definitely not easy, though there was a lot of stuff that we were hanging on to because it felt sentimental, and this was owned by my grandfather, this was owned by her grandfather, and on and on.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: And then we realized one day we were sitting there going the thing, the thing isn't the memory.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: The thing, the thing isn't the memory.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: The memory is the memory.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: So sit and look at the thing, think of the memory.
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: You don't need the thing.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Fair fair, okay, so it sounds like it was a buildup and with some momentum then it's like, okay, it makes sense, let's trim this out, let's trim this out, let's trim that out.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: And then you built some like filters or models to look at things, to change your perspective on the material thing versus the memory, because all of my exes will attest to this I can't stand stopping to take pictures.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: I like taking pictures of stuff, like when I'm on a job site because I'm going to use them for marketing or something.
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: I do not understand the purpose.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Let's take a picture all the time and then do nothing with the pictures.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: Of course, now they're digital and you can just store them on your phone or whatever, but for me it kind of ruins the memory.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: Right, right it's, I just want to take this thing in, but now I gotta pose and I gotta hold my chin up and I got like all of this nonsense if you're doing it and the the thought is, well, we want to get the memory.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna remember getting pissed off because we had to stop and take a stupid picture and before we had to do that my memory was great.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: It was awesome you see these people that go to concerts now and they spend almost the whole time holding their patented phrase, their distraction rectangle, with a camera on in front of their face.
• 7:32
  Speaker 2: You're going to watch.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: Dave.
• 7:34
  Speaker 2: Matthews play a concert, you're not going to take a glitchy, grainy video of it with the sound quality is going to be like crap.
• 7:42
  Speaker 2: Go and enjoy the thing.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: Hike up to the and enjoy the thing.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Hike the mat, hike up to the top of the mountain.
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want to take a picture when you get to the top of the mountain, of the view, yes, I get that, but don't spend the whole time you're up there taking pictures.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Put the, put your phone away, put your camera away.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Enjoy the moment.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: That time mastery workshop and they said there were so many amazing takeaways that I'm looking to incorporate into my daily habits.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: But one thing stood out to me the most, which was blending my personal and business schedule together, which is something I totally, totally recommend.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: Some people freak out and if you're curious and saying, well, you got to do is sign up for the next workshop and you'll see what the fuss is about.
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: And also all the L&M family members out there.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: You know, if you leave me a comment, send me a message, dm text, it doesn't matter, I love getting them and it gives me a good excuse to shout you out in the future future.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: So paring down do you feel like that's helped you?
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: The less stuff you have, the more present you can be in appreciating the moment a little bit.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you could also say to like go through and digitally detox your phone, go through and all the apps and stuff that you have that you're not really using, ditch them.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: They're there to suck your time away too, and so not having stuff, not having granted.
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: I do miss spending some time playing video games, but I don't have that to suck me in anymore, and there's a lot of technology now that's gotten small enough that it does travel with you, and with the glory of the cloud, there's that too.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: We still have all of our movies.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: They live on a plex server in tennessee that I can access remotely from wherever in the world we are, so if I want to watch a movie, I can you know, and we just digitized all our dvds before we got rid of them yeah, the binder with all that's awesome.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, so did you and miss heather back.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: Let's see, we'll say middle school.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Did you say, okay, look, I want to.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: I'm going to be an estimator because I can do that work digitally, which means I can do it from anywhere in the world.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Because, eventually, I want to be a nomadic entrepreneur, was that?
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: always not at all, not at all, not at all.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: The plan no, gosh, I wanted to.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: Honestly, I really wanted to join the military from a very young age.
• 10:35
  Speaker 2: About the time I was turning 18 was the time after Desert Storm, when the military was really trying to draw it down.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: Rifs were a big thing.
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: Lots of people were being Lego.
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: They weren't really being picky about who they could take and I had a medical history that precluded me.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: I did ROTC in high school.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: I applied to Virginia Institute.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah.
• 11:01
  Speaker 2: I did ROTC all four years in high school, applied to VMI, got a four-year Army scholarship, oh wow, and they were like well sorry, you can still go to VMI and maybe try and get in on a waiver.
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: I couldn't afford it.
• 11:27
  Speaker 2: Vmi was outrageously expensive, and so I wound up, and it was fortuitous as hell, because if I'd gone that route.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: I never would have met Heather, and so I picked the only school that I had applied to, and the only reason I applied to this school was, I'm sad to say now was because they were giving away cool t-shirts.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: But it was the only non-military school that I'd applied to.
• 11:52
  Speaker 2: So I went to Georgia Southern and I had a backup plan I was going to get a criminal justice degree and a psychology minor and I was going to go work for federal law enforcement.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: Well, I got into my first couple of classes and, man, I was so bored.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: It was misery.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: I hated it, I just and my grades the first semester were terrible because of it.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: I couldn't even so was it the course material?
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Was it the teachers?
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: It was a little bit of both.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: It just wasn't interesting.
• 12:21
  Speaker 2: I was not interested at all.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: And so the very next semester semester I was on academic probation.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: I was about to get kicked out of Georgia Southern and yeah, and so I had to.
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: I had to do something.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: And my roommate, bless his heart, says, hey, here's my books and notes and exams and everything for this, the intro to geology course.
• 12:43
  Speaker 2: That's part of the core curriculum.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: You just take that and it should be an easy.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: You won't have to focus as much time on it.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: And I said, okay, I can do that.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: I never touched any of his coursework.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: Day one I went man, I am home, I love this stuff.
• 13:00
  Speaker 2: Earth science is where I want to be, and so right then I thought, well, I don't want to move too fast, but this is what I want to do, took a couple other classes throughout my core curriculum, went back, had to take an environmental science, took environmental geology.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: Halfway through that course I was ready.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: I changed my major.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: I got a Bachelor of Science degree and loved it.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: But I got a Bachelor of Science degree in geology and I was going to be a hard rock quarry geologist.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: That was what I really wanted to do and the universe once again had other plans.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: Okay, so hard rock quarry is that like granite?
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, things like Stone Mountain Granite, Piedmont, granite rock in the southeastern United States, North Georgia, granites, diabases, diorites, that kind of stuff.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: Got it, got it, got it, okay, and so the universe had other plans.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: Yet again, I love that there's this new website that had just come out, and some people may not even remember it now, but it was called monstercom.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Okay, you remember monster I do remember monster, monster have been all over the campus radio for weeks and one of the things that I did during I tutored intro level geology courses as I as a way to make some money as I got higher up in my thing.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: So one night I was sitting there during my tutoring hours.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: No one had showed up.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: I had a whole room to myself and there was a computer listening to campus radio.
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: The monster commercial comes on again a month or two away from graduation.
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: So I say, well, why not, I'll throw my resume on monster, We'll see what happens.
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: I'll throw my resume on monster, We'll see what happens.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Lo and behold, Tuesday morning I get a phone call from a company that and it was weird because the guy was like hey, here's our website, this is what we do.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: If you're interested, call me back.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: And that was basically it.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: That was a phone call, not like a message.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: That was his phone call to me.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: I went and looked at it and it was a company that specialized in high-hazard compressed gas cylinder and piping remediation.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: These guys, if you have one of the big oxygen acetylene bottles or various other things ethyl, methyl, chicken death.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: And these guys were the guys that would come in.
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: They'd put on chemical suits, respirators and they would treat the stuff in those cylinders and make it safe and I thought I looked at this for all about five minutes and it tickled my scientist brain and I said I think I'm going to apply for this job.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: A little bit of adventure, yeah.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: Applied for that job, got it, worked it for a year and a half and it was one of the coolest things I ever did.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: It was pure cutting edge chemistry and physics every day.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: That was what the job was was practical chemistry and physics.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: I ate it up and wound up getting a job after that with an environmental consulting firm.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: It's its own long story.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: I won't go into it.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: But I wound up going to work for a consulting firm and it's its own long story.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: I won't go into it.
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: But I wound up going to work for a consulting firm.
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: And so that was when I learned about billable hours and lived and died by them.
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: And I had a mentor who was a chemical engineer brilliant guy still my mentor today he and I still talk and totally changed my life.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: Because there was one Wednesday, I think it was and I wandered down the hall to Andy's office and I said hey, man, do you have anything else I can work on?
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: He said I thought I'd given you enough to keep you busy through the middle of next week and I said, yeah, but I've done.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: And he went, go check it again.
• 16:40
  Speaker 2: I was like I've already done, that I can't polish that turd, no more no-transcript for this project.
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: I want it by next Friday, I don't want to see it sooner.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: I don't want to see you sooner, unless you have questions.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: And I want it complete.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: And I said okay and I went back to my desk and I sat down trying to figure out how to put a big budget together for this huge environmental site in Pennsylvania and having no clue what I was doing, I just took it stepwise.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: What's the first thing?
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: Who do I need, what kind of people?
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: And I started making phone calls and finding vendors.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: And the next Friday I took it in, I hand it to him.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: And finding vendors.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: And the next Friday I took it in, I hand it to him.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: And it was about this thick and he looks at it and he opens it.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: He flips through a couple of pages and he stops and he closes the folder and he kind of closes his eyes for a second.
• 17:59
  Speaker 2: He opens it up and he flips through it much more slowly and he's just kind of shaking his head a little bit and he flips to it much more slowly.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: He's just kind of shaking his head a little bit and I'm thinking, oh my God, I screwed this up, I've missed this, I've wasted all this billable time Now I'm going to have to fix this on my own nickel.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: And he closes it and he closes his eyes, he takes a deep breath and just sits there for about 15 seconds and if you've ever been on the receiving end of something like that, that's the longest 15 seconds.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you're like, you hit me, you just hit me already.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: And he opens his eyes and looks at me and he says Jake, I'm afraid I have to tell you something, you're in the wrong job.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, oh my God, how bad did I mess this up.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: And he said this is phenomenal work.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: You are an estimator, you have a skill.
• 18:48
  Speaker 2: You should be doing this with your life.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: And I said oh, okay.
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: Well, what does that mean?
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: And he said yeah, and he just kind of shooed me away and told me to go find something else to do, no-transcript, to generate some revenue while we waited on spills to come in between.
• 19:34
  Speaker 2: And so I hooked up with the local safety clean branch and the local PSC branch and several other folks and ran around looking at industrial cleaning projects tank cleans, pressure washing and parking lots that were had oil and stuff on there and started just churning out little estimates for this kind of work and from from there realized okay, I really do have a bent for this after ER.
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: But you enjoy it.
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: Oh, I love it.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: I love it.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: There's nothing for me getting a set of plans and taking it apart, figuring out how to put everything together, figuring out what all it's going to take, finding all the parts and pieces I need, and then taking all of that and putting it into a, into a box and making something of it and then turning it into to find out whether I won the job, to find out whether and not only did I win the job, did I win the job with a good margin.
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: Am I close to second?
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: There's a weird thing about estimators.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: We have this thing.
• 20:35
  Speaker 2: We don't ever want a gap.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: We're the low bidder.
• 20:38
  Speaker 2: The ultimate thing to do is to be the low bidder and be pennies away from second place.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: You're always kind of trying to refine that and figure out a way to make sure that your pricing compares to the good, to the market pricing, to the point where you're not leaving money on the table.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: You're not winning jobs by a vast margin, because if you're closer to second, that tells you that, a your bid is tight and, b you've maximized your profit opportunities.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: So the time with the consultant, it sounded like he wanted to make sure that you were being thorough.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: He gave you an assignment that triggered all the thoroughness within you because I'm sure that level of getting that detailed or enthralled, that doesn't happen to everything you do.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: It's specifically in this estimating environment, yeah.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: And so the science, the thread of the the scientist, still kind of plays all the way.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, you're at this point in the story.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: You were doing this for a hazmat company that does cleanups and stuff.
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: So you're still connected to the thing.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: But even just estimating in and of itself, like there's a theory, you've got to prove the theory, submit the theory for peer review, which would be submitting the proposal, and then, if they accept it or they'll let you know where you are.
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: Yes, I proved it.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: Scientific method yeah, that's it.
• 22:05
  Speaker 2: And then after that, I got into public work and into utilities and that was where I really that's where the drug comes in, because there's a drug called a public bid opening, and anyone out there that's ever been to one knows.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: You go into a room, your bid is in a sealed envelope, and they open the envelope and they read all the bids out to for everybody to hear, and it's instant feedback and that's addicting, because then you really get to a chance to you, you build up to it and you're sitting there and your, your hands are shaking and you're sweating and you're thinking about all this parts and pieces that you've put together in this bid.
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: And that was where I really discovered I love, love what I do, and I've worked for a company that did everything the old fashioned way I mean these guys, literally.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: When I started with them in 2013, they hand wrote their takeoffs, faxed them to their material suppliers and did the math longhand.
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: So I came in with my experience and having to turn these things out very quickly and I said, hey, let me optimize this.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Hey, let me make this better, let me take your handwritten thing and let me turn it into an excel spreadsheet.
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: So now, yeah, you that like were they like yeah, please do no.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: No, they were like this is witchcraft, stop.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: And and they were like we don't trust it if we, if we can't put it into the calculator ourselves, and so let's try it, let's just try it right.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: And so, right, that's the way I did it.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: And so I started doing all of my bids that way in Excel, and it came down to if I kludged a formula, then yeah, then that was the end, and I was writing my proposal while they were still figuring the job, and so that was what birthed my.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: I got to make things better.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: I got to I can, I can, I can tweak stuff.
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: And so it went from there to, as they started bidding more municipal work well, they bid a lot of.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: We started bidding bigger municipal work and huge DOT projects, and then it was we had 30, 40 pay items at the end of the day that we had to split our costs down into, and their old fashioned way of doing it was adding up the material, adding up what they thought the labor would be and then dividing it by.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: And so you were flipping pages and trying to find some of this stuff, and it was.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: It was a bear.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: So I made, I created a spreadsheet, that spreadsheet that you could copy and paste, it would go out and actually find stuff, and so it really sped that process up.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: And I went I'm on to something here.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: By the time I left they had gone from handwriting stuff and doing takeoff with colored pencils and scale rules to doing electronic takeoff on a screen using something like PlanSwift or Bluebeam, and they were doing Excel bids and it was fantastic and I realized that I could change things.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: And then I went and started an estimating department for a startup company in Nashville and I was like employee number?
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: I want to say 18.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: So did they get you?
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: Did they say, hey, jake, we need an estimating department.
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: We don't know what that is, come do it for us.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: Or like, how did that materialize?
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: It was.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: I got headhunted into it.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: There was a recruiter that called and they were looking like we had decided it was time for us to move out of the middle Georgia area that we were.
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: I could stay there and we've always been a bit nomadic and you kind of get that picture as we go.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: I've never lived anywhere longer than five years, and so it was time for us to move on.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: I realized I could stay in middle Georgia.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: I could stay there for 20 years through retirement.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: I would still never quite fit in.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: I and I would be doing the same thing I was doing and I was like it's rewarding, I like it, but there's more out there.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: And so I put my resume out, got headhunted for this position, looked around to see if there were any others and found another position up there.
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: So we went up to Nashville, did a couple of job interviews.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: I picked the one that was the startup, and it was.
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: They'd gotten to the point where the president and owner couldn't handle all of it himself.
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: He knew he needed an estimator, he needed help, yep.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: So he wanted someone that knew what was going on and knew how to set things up.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: And I, I kind of knew how to set things up.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: I'd seen how things could be done.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: I'd never set anything up my own, on my own.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, so this was like your own petri dish, to go do experimentation and see what sticks.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: Oh, I love it.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: We moved to Nashville.
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: I wound up in a job in an office about the size of a broom closet at a startup and built something.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: They went from $3 million in revenue to $30 million in two years.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: In two years, baby in two years that's painful.
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: That must have been just get it, baby.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: Get it, let's go for the first year and a half, almost two years that I was the estimator and it was I mean, you talk about wild and woolly man, it.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: There were times when my day started at 4am and went till six or seven o'clock at night, five days a week, and then I'd usually go six, seven hours in on Saturday.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: It was, but it was a great.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: I still felt rewarded.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: I was killing myself but I still felt rewarded in what I was doing.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: And so the with any company that grows that fast, you wind up seeing that there are problems that come up with it.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: And we went from Excel spreadsheets to massive multi-page, multi-tab tiered spreadsheets, to estimating software, to heavy bid sheets, to estimating software, to heavy bid, and I just I had help.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: They'd hired a couple other estimators.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: I was still just kind of at that point, I was burned out and I just wanted out and so it was time to go and so off.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: I went to another company in middle Tennessee and these guys somebody once referred to them as the top five or in the top 5% of heavy bid users.
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: I mean they, they literally this company had a team of five or six estimators and three juniors, three seniors and an admin, and they estimated on the order of a billion dollars worth of work a year with that team and heavy bid, and so it wasn't uncommon for us to do two multimillion dollar site work bids a week.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: And in order to be able to churn that amount of work they had to have really good processes in place, and they did.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: They used electronic takeoff and they had a database for their electronic takeoff software that was the same as their pay items for heavy bid.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: So you took off the job with the same heavy bid Heavy bid is an estimating software.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: It's put out by a company called heavy construction services software, I think HCSS.
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: Okay, and so it's a software.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: Got it, and it's widely renowned as the Cadillac of heavy civil estimate software.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: It's really what it's here for, and there's several others out there there's Bid2Win, there's OmenSystemsProEstimatenet.
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: There's probably a dozen of them.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: And they're geared for like civil work, some of them are.
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: Bid2win is more of just a pure estimating software.
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: You can do anything with bid to win.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: I've got one of my clients that uses it for environmental.
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's all about how you do your setup and so right.
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: But the way these guys worked was everything was regimented, everything was the same.
• 31:09
  Speaker 2: So when you finish your takeoff you've had a.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: We had a spreadsheet that I was like 1600 rows long and you that was all literally extensively, almost all of the pay items, all of the individual line items in an estimate.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: So dirt cut to fill 18 inch RCP, eight inch PVC sewer, it was all in that spreadsheet and so you went through and you put your takeoff in that spreadsheet and then you would delete all the lines that were empty, that you didn't need, and then you'd import that into heavy bid.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: You'd press a button.
• 31:35
  Speaker 2: Well, they had the whole library of tasks, of all the material and the labor and the equipment, all that pre-built.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: So when you hit that button, all that pre-populated, yeah, and so that's 90% of your estimate done right there.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: The rest is material entry and adjusting things.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: So they invested a whole lot of time in getting that set up but it paid off in the amount of time that they spent on an estimate with one of their estimators.
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: But there's always still room for improvement.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: And one of the things was when I got there you went through and using control minus, was how you deleted all the empty rows.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: So you would select a batch of them and then delete, and so on and so forth.
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: Well, it still takes a long time.
• 32:25
  Speaker 2: Your average civil estimate's 50 pay items, so you're calling 50 out of 1600.
• 32:31
  Speaker 2: It still takes you a good 10 minutes to delete all those rows.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: Don't miss one, because then you leave it out of your estimate.
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: So optimization Jake comes in and he goes.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: Man, there's got to be a better way to do this.
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: There's got to be a better way to do this.
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: And this was the days before chat GPT.
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: So I pulled out the Google and found a couple of old visual basic textbooks and put together a little short five line macro in visual basic that I bound to a button on that spreadsheet and when you click that button, column D was all of the quantities, so that that kind of look.
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: And if there was not a value in column D it deleted that row.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: So you had a one click roll up button that deletes all the empty rows for you and is error-proof.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: They do it manually yeah yeah.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: Okay, so I did that and we tested it a few times and finally I rolled it out, showed the whole company and everybody was just ecstatic because we wound up saving.
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: We timed it about eight to ten minutes per estimate.
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: These guys do Per yeah, eight minutes per estimate, and it was.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: You add that up up, you do 300 estimates a year.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: you're suddenly saving 40 man, hours worth of time deleting.
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: Yes, and so that's deleting rows mindless deleting rows, and so that was the sort of thing that I live for.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: Are those little tweaks, those ways to make things better?
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: And yeah, and I did a couple of other things while I was there and wrote a couple of other scripts, came up with a couple of other spreadsheets, that yeah, and so how long were you there before you're like OK, time for the next move, so.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: I started there right before the pandemic lockdown, and the pandemic was yet another one of those.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: Universe had other plans moments, because I had always had this belief that I had to be in an office.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: I had to be regionally located where I was working, because I needed to be able to get my hands on stuff, I needed to be able to talk to stuff.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: Well, the pandemic I started.
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: On a Wednesday, Friday morning, management calls us all into one little room in the middle of pandemic and says hey, it's, it's 11 o'clock on Friday when we leave here, go to your office, get all your stuff, take your monitors down, take your computer, take your keyboard, go home, spend the rest of the afternoon, set yourself up in office at your house a place to work.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: Don't like set up on the kitchen table, Find yourself somewhere, move furniture, whatever you got to do.
• 35:16
  Speaker 2: So you've got a workspace and plan to be there for six weeks, maybe longer.
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: That was my introduction to this company.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: I learned how to do all the stuff that they did and I wasn't even there.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: We met through teams and phone calls.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: I did pre-cons job kickoff meetings via Zoom and it was okay.
• 35:39
  Speaker 2: All right, I can do this from wherever.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: And I said, guys, I don't really want to come back to the office.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: There's no reason.
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: I'm more productive at home.
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: I don't lose, you get your travel time back.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: I work my travel time, guys, like, instead of leaving my house at 7 o'clock and sitting in traffic for 45 minutes, I'm in front of my computer at 7 and I'm working until 530.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: You're getting more out of me and I'm not sitting there doom scrolling on my feet.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: When I need a break, I go empty the dishwasher, I go cook lunch, I go do something.
• 36:14
  Speaker 2: I empty the clothes dryer, something.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: I do something that gives me a feeling of accomplishment in my personal life and it means that I'm saving some time on the stuff I have to do in my not work hours.
• 36:26
  Speaker 2: And this is fantastic for me, for my personality, which is somewhat introverted anyway.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: And they went.
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: No, you need to come back to the office.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: We don't trust that you're working.
• 36:41
  Speaker 2: I said you don't trust that I'm working.
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: How do you not trust that I'm working?
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: I've yet to miss a deadline.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: Most of the time I'm early.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: I haven't had any big misses on projects.
• 36:50
  Speaker 2: I'm working remotely with everybody in the team.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: I've done all this, but why do I need to come back to the office?
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: Well, we need to be able to watch you work.
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: So oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: That's a common thing with a lot of people.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: They gotta see, okay, I could be present and not do a damn, because I'm present where you feel better.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: I I think on two ends, right like when the whole thing happened, I was conflicted because all my brethren, all the trade workers they didn't have a choice, right Like they had to keep going.
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: We were deemed, finally, essential and they can't do their work remote.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: There were some jobs that you can't do them remotely, which I understand that, but there's a lot of.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: I remember thinking, man, if I was a, if I had this, the skill set to do things remotely, because I didn't until the lockdown, because I didn't until the lockdown, but when I was a superintendent, there was absolutely at least a day, if not half, that I could like the tasks and duties that I had to do.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: I didn't have to do them on site and it took me 10 times longer to do it at the office or on site than it would for me to do at home.
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: And I think nowadays, barring the job, like the jobs that require you to physically be present, there is a lot of work that can be done anywhere and trying to do it specifically in construction, on the job site.
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: It's just a bad idea and and I think leaders out there in construction, it's not that people need to show up to the job site, it's that managers, leaders, need to learn how to lead and support remote workers.
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: I think, I think a mix is absolutely the right answer.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: What that looks like for people is and some people really need to have.
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: Some people need there.
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: There are personality types that need to go to an office, that need to interact, but at the same time there are plenty of personalities that don't need that.
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: That don't want to be watched that don't want all the distractions of the water cooler talk or people.
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: My coworkers I like my coworkers.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: My coworkers were fantastic that I worked with over the years, but one of them would hit a point where they needed a break so they would come talk to me.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: I'm not a break point.
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: I'm up to my eyeballs in trying to get this estimate out by the end of the day.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: Now is not a good time.
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: I don't want to play, I'm working.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: Go away, I'm with you, man.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: I feel that 100%.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: When those guys said, hey, jake, we're putting our foot down.
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: You can either come back to the office or you can go find another job.
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: And I said, okay, I'll see y'all in the office on Monday.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: And I hung up the phone and I pulled up LinkedIn, and I pulled up Indeed and I started job hunting in a hurry.
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: And the nice thing about being a skilled estimator is that there's always opportunities, always no-transcript, yeah.
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: So I turned in my notice.
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: I got the surprise Pikachu face.
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: What do you mean?
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: What do you mean?
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: You're resigning.
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: They're going to let me do whatever.
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I said well, you told me to come back to the office or find another job.
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: I wasn't going to quit right then, but I did find another job.
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: And so that kind of catapulted me into now I'm estimating remotely and doing really well at it and hitting margins and not missing things.
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: And I had people that if there was a site visit necessary, there were people that could go do that site walk for me.
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: And we wound up moving to Pennsylvania, not necessarily to be where their office was, because I wasn't I was two hours away but just to be more in the area where they did work, so that if I needed to go do something I could.
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: And it worked out beautifully.
• 42:01
  Speaker 2: And then Heather had been bugging me for years that I was working too hard, I was letting companies take advantage of me, that I was working too many hours and that I was shortening my lifespan.
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: And so she said we really need to think about us starting our own business.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: And I said yeah, yeah, no one's going to freelance out an estimator.
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: And and I thought well, and I kept thinking about well, maybe, maybe.
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: And so finally I had a couple of just two really really bad days in a row and I took some PTO.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: We went off and then ticked off a bucket list item that was a couple of states away, that a couple of days, that next week, and on the way back we were driving and talking and Heather said you really should think about setting up our own business again.
• 42:55
  Speaker 2: And I said you know, I'm ready to talk about it.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: And we hashed it out and laid out the business plan and the details on the way back home and when we got home I called a friend of mine that I had been trying to hire me as his estimator for a number of years and I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this thing where I work as a fractional estimator and a fractional chief estimator estimator and a fractional chief estimator.
• 43:19
  Speaker 2: And so you know the whole goal would be I want to.
• 43:23
  Speaker 2: I've got a lot of experience, I've got almost 20 years in this.
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: Now I want to be able to give back to some of the smaller contractors, not if people that need an estimator but don't necessarily have the budget to hire one full time, they're not bidding enough work or they don't have the budget to pay someone that has the level of experience they're stuck on like entry level and they don't have time to train.
• 43:51
  Speaker 2: And I said do you think that's anything you might be willing to try?
• 43:57
  Speaker 2: Anything you might be willing to try?
• 44:00
  Speaker 2: And his response, after about half a heartbeat was.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: I have four jobs that you could estimate starting tomorrow and I said I'll send them to you right now.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay, I said well let me sleep on it, let me talk it over one more time with Heather, let me make sure this really is what we want and we'll give it a shot.
• 44:22
  Speaker 2: And so I called him the next morning.
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: I said, hey, guess what it's tomorrow, I'm ready.
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: And he sent me the first four jobs, sent me a login into his estimating software and we started the paperwork to create Archer Estimation.
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: Right then I mean that was on Monday we were off and running to the creating the LLC and everything else.
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: So I worked for this guy nights and weekends.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: For I said we didn't start paperwork quite that quick because we gave it about six weeks of me working nights and weekends In addition to my other job to to make sure that it was yeah, To make.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: Is it going to stick?
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: Is it going to stick?
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, is it going to stick.
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: Is it going to work?
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: A lot of people.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: I think I've confused people, because I'm a huge advocate for like self-care and thinking time and like all of that, because it's new to me and I know when I'm starting something new.
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: It's nights, weekends, all day.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: There's a season.
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: There are seasons and will be more in my future where I'm just straight.
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, the past two weeks for me have been I've been inconsistent and less available than usual, but it's that time, right, it's time to go, and once I get past it, I'm about a week or two away.
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: On the other end, it'll be nice and smooth and I'll be more available and do my pampering of myself and all that.
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: But there are times you got to test it out.
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: You don't know for sure you got to do double duty.
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: That's part of building something.
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: We were really I don't lucky is not the word, fortunate, I guess.
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: So we started Archer with one client in the bucket, ready to go within two days after starting.
• 46:09
  Speaker 2: When I turned in my resignation with my then employer, I said guys, I'm going to go do this thing, but I want y'all to be a client too.
• 46:17
  Speaker 2: I want y'all to be my first fractional chief estimating client.
• 46:20
  Speaker 2: And so they knew me, they knew what they got out of me, they knew my skills, and so that was a no brainer for them.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: They were in a bit of a cash crunch anyway, and so it was perfect.
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: I gave them more runway by getting off of their books as a salaried employee and on as a subcontractor, and they've been fantastic.
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: We're still working together now.
• 46:41
  Speaker 2: They've made it through their crash crunch.
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: They're growing.
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: They're going to hit their revenue targets for this year.
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: They're one of my best clients.
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: The other one is a guy in Middle Tennessee.
• 46:53
  Speaker 2: He's going gangbusters.
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: He's winning work left and right.
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: We're upgrading him.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: His old way of doing things was kind of go find an estimate that he'd done before and copy that and try and go through and change everything Close enough Now.
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: I've got him on the spreadsheet model and we've got all his pay items lined out.
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: We are we're about to upgrade him to version 2.0 of that and I have this opportunity now to work for several people and our goal is really to kind of like we know we're probably not going to be there forever for all of our clients, because the goal is to get their processes tuned up, get them straightened out, get them winning work, get them cashflow and get them to hire an estimator and then, once they're ready to go, then I can step back, their estimator takes over.
• 47:48
  Speaker 2: I'm still there.
• 47:49
  Speaker 2: I still remember all the stuff that I did, how their system works.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: As long as they kind of keep me in the loop, I'm there in case they get a busy period and they need to turn me back on.
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: Of course.
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: Now these services are specifically in the civil world.
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: Not necessarily no.
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: So I work in both the civil and the environmental remediation world in the day-to-day.
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: That said, estimating kind of boils down to four main things, and those four main things are what do I have to buy?
• 48:22
  Speaker 2: What materials do I need to accomplish the task?
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: What people do I need to send?
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: And how long are they going to be there?
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: What equipment do they need?
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: And then the fourth is what subcontractors do?
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: I need to round out my bid package and so that can be done.
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: I can do that for anybody.
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: There'll be a learning curve, obviously, and some folks the learning curve is just too steep.
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: We had one contractor that called us that did mostly residential renovation work.
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: That was done really without plans or very rudimentary plans, and we finally said I know I'm capable of doing it, but I don't.
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: Necessarily.
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: It's not the best fit for right now.
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: With the workload that I've got, with the workload that you've got, I don't have time to learn, you don't have time to teach.
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: It's not a good fit.
• 49:13
  Speaker 2: But at the same time, if you've got a process or you're out there trying to figure out how can I make this a process, come to me with.
• 49:22
  Speaker 2: These are the four things and this is what we do.
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: These are our most common pay items.
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: That's the bones of it.
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: We take and build from there.
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: So you went from the pressures long hours, high volume of workload of one company and said you know what?
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: I want to do it for multiple companies at the same time.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, how has that played out in terms of the amount of time and energy that you commit to the work?
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: Is it the same?
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: commit to the work.
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: Is it the same?
• 50:04
  Speaker 2: It is a lot the same, and that's because I'm and this is one of my growth edges.
• 50:06
  Speaker 2: We've talked about this before I could work myself to death easily, and so now I constantly bump up against my ceiling of the amount of work I can take on.
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: But I work really hard to only bump up against my ceiling and not exceed it like I used to At least not, for there are times when the bids do the bid Right.
• 50:31
  Speaker 2: But at the same time we're working to manage our time effectively, to not take on more work than we can get to.
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: So for somebody out there that has the inkling of being a fractional whatever right, because there's estimating, there's marketing, there's all kinds of different support roles for a business what would you recommend?
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: What do they need to look out for and be aware of that kind of bit you in the ankle because you didn't see it coming when you started?
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: I think the big thing is make sure that you understand the ins and outs of running a business, doing something.
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: If you have been working in a business for years but haven't run your own, you need to make sure that you've got your own support network in place for you.
• 51:29
  Speaker 2: You need to make sure that you have a good attorney.
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: You need to make sure that you have a good tax person that you can trust that can give you good information.
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: I think those were the two things I think that chewed on us a little bit in this process.
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: You know your work.
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: You know what you do, what your deliverables are.
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: You know that all day long.
• 51:51
  Speaker 2: Think about all of the stuff that goes into running a business and make sure, before you launch, think about that and think about how you're going to handle the back end of your business.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: How are you going to do your?
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: How are you going to get paid?
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: How are you going to follow up?
• 52:10
  Speaker 2: That's the and I got really lucky in Heather because because she founded the business and so she runs.
• 52:22
  Speaker 2: She's active in it as she can be, and so she runs the business side of Archer.
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: We make all our decisions together, but she does all the invoicing, she follows up and gets paid, she handles the taxes for the most part and so all of the dirty icky stuff that you have to do to make a business run.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: I got really lucky because she does almost all of that and I just get to do what I love.
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: I just get to estimate and so make sure, too, that you're leaving yourself time for that.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: don't book yourself up with 50 hours of billable work, of work, of client work, and and get yeah, you still have 30, 30, 40 percent of multiply that hour booked time times 1.4, that's how many hours you're going to be spending doing follow-up, check-in, all the other stuff.
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: It's a lot, yes, and it is a lot.
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: And it's a drain on you too, because if you overbook yourself when you're getting started, or even once you're starting, once you've been in business for a couple of years, even that tendency is to I can go a little better.
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: Oh, I can raise my revenue a little bit more, but if you're not really paying attention to all the back end stuff, you'll wind up crashing.
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: That'll get you 100%.
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, I mean, I started my business three years ago.
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: It's amazing, right?
• 53:58
  Speaker 1: Like the first time I had a gig offered to me, they said hey man, send me an invoice and we'll have a check for you the day of the thing.
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: And I said, oh shit, how do you do an invoice?
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: So I went home and YouTube did okay.
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: And there's just, there's a multitude, multitude of things that I had no idea, no concept of what it was going to take to operate the business Like delivering the service.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: You said it very well Delivering the service, that's the fun part, that's the easy thing.
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: You got reps, you've been doing that for years.
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: It's all the other little things.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: And also I want to be clear it's not impossible things.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: And also I want to be clear it's not impossible.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: You just better best be ready to learn.
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: Neil was learning on the matrix when we plugged them in.
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: you got to learn fast because it's it's go, go, go go that's it, the the old axiom drinking from a fire hose man, because it's gonna come at you and it's gonna come at you fast yes, yes, and you and here's the thing you don't want it to come at you slow, because that means you don't have business.
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: I want to get business.
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: Oh crap, I got to learn all these things all of a sudden because now I have business.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: But it's amazing, it's exhilarating.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: I know, for me it's.
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: I was a gamer for a long time and I swear it's.
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: It's like playing a video game for you.
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: You get different levels, you fight the boss, you get new skills, you get new power-ups, you're ready for the next level now.
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: It's a really expensive video game, but it's fun absolutely yeah, and you have your, your one thing, your one person.
• 55:35
  Speaker 2: That is fine for when you're a startup, yeah, but then, all of a sudden, you're going to start doing business in another state.
• 55:42
  Speaker 2: Well, suddenly my one state accountant isn't in.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: What we need anymore.
• 55:48
  Speaker 2: Now we need someone that knows how to handle two states, multiple states.
• 55:52
  Speaker 2: It's licensed in different places.
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: Oh wait, can my lawyer defend me in another state?
• 55:58
  Speaker 2: And it's unfortunate that you have to think about that sometimes too, because gone are the days of the spit on your hand handshake deals, and they're still out there, but they're very, very few and far between.
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: And now there's contracts and everything else that fly back and forth.
• 56:14
  Speaker 2: You need to make sure and that's the other thing I would say is, if you are contracting with somebody and you're not really doing your due diligence on reading and understanding that contract and the clauses that are in it, then you're setting yourself up for some kind of advice here.
• 56:40
  Speaker 2: I hear so many times about small civil contractors that are so excited to get that one big job.
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: It's the biggest job they ever got.
• 56:47
  Speaker 2: They just sign the contract and go and then come to realize that, oh wait, we're not going to get paid for 120 days.
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: It's in the contract language.
• 56:56
  Speaker 2: I didn't really read the scope, but they slipped the asphalt paving in on me.
• 57:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Wow.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: That's what they do, man.
• 57:04
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: So if somebody out there says, man, I want to connect with Mr Jake, where should we send?
• 57:10
  Speaker 2: So probably the best place to start is our website, wwwarcherestimationcom.
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: You can also hit me up.
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: Heather and I are both on LinkedIn.
• 57:20
  Speaker 2: We post things out there.
• 57:22
  Speaker 2: I'm sure you've.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: If you don't mind, pop up the our LinkedIn profiles then you can also send us an email.
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: We've got an email address.
• 57:30
  Speaker 2: Info at archer estimationcom.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: Nice, nice.
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll make sure we have all that in the show notes so people can access if they need some estimating help, or if they want some like pointers on on launching their own fractional thing, or if they want some pointers on where to go, where to stay when they're traveling the gallivanting all over south america, which is awesome yeah, yeah, reach out to us, talk to us.
• 58:02
  Speaker 2: We can.
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: We're glad to help it.
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: Also, one of the best places that we found when we were trying to figure out the nuts and bolts of starting our business was the and they're all over the country is a small business development center, an SBDC, and usually these are run through one of the state colleges near you.
• 58:29
  Speaker 2: So I know I've got a friend that works for the SBDC for University of Georgia.
• 58:34
  Speaker 2: Ours was the closest branch to us in Pennsylvania was the Shippensburg University branch, and so these are like small business incubators that have advisors.
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: It's totally free, costs nothing, and but they've got advisors who, if you don't really need I want to start a business, but I don't know how to start a business these places are a wealth of information.
• 59:00
  Speaker 2: They can come, they can point out things, they can help you through the process of finding the paperwork, finding the forms to fill out.
• 59:08
  Speaker 2: They'll help you fill the forms out if you have questions.
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: So those are a great and tremendous resource.
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: That is.
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that's out there.
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: Good point, I should probably go visit one of those, because I just kind of yeah, let me see what I want.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: Hey, what are you doing?
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'll do that.
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: Hey, I need some help.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'll do that.
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: I'm not.
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: I'm sure if somebody were to take a look at it they'd be like what in the world are you doing?
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: Ding dong man, I'm having fun, it's awesome having fun, so, all right.
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: So you're ready for the final closeout question.
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: Lay it on me.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: All right, so obviously, immense growth.
• 59:49
  Speaker 1: You've done a lot of learning, tinkering and improving things is is a common theme with you, and you can't you've always got to just can we tweak it a little bit better, and for the benefit of others, of course.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: So I'm interested in what your answer is going to be.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: So, what is the promise you are intended to be?
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: What is the promise I'm intended to be.
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 2: Yes, I would say, the promise that I am intended to be is a promise that it that you've already got and the knowledge that you've already got, to leverage that into a better, a brighter and a more efficient workflow and tomorrow.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: Nice.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: Yes, I agree, I'm lazy, I won't't do it, but I know that it's possible.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: I had a blast.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: I absolutely had a blast.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much you're welcome, brother.