Latest / Big Talk About Small Business / Ep. 44 - Harnessing Technology and Trust in Construction with Sy Kirby

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Ep. 44 - Harnessing Technology and Trust in Construction with Sy Kirby · Big Talk About Small Business

• 0:04
  Mark Zweig: Hey everybody, it's Mark Zweig and I'm back here with my buddy, eric Howerton what's up?
• 0:11
  Mark Zweig: And Cy Kirby Hello.
• 0:15
  Sy Kirby: How do you spell Cy S-Y buddy?
• 0:17
  Sy Kirby: Put that Y on the end to make sure there's no extra letters past it.
• 0:22
  Mark Zweig: That's right, that's right, Cy has a earthwork company by the name of Cy Con.
• 0:28
  Mark Zweig: I tried telling him I would have gone with psycho, but he didn't seem.
• 0:32
  Mark Zweig: He didn't seem to approve of that.
• 0:35
  Mark Zweig: You know, molest the marketing man.
• 0:38
  Mark Zweig: They wouldn't forget the name, okay, so we got to get psycho.
• 0:44
  Eric Howerton: You're not wrong.
• 0:45
  Eric Howerton: That's what I'm freaking.
• 0:46
  Eric Howerton: Y'all know who you need for your exclamation mark Psycho, got to get Psycho.
• 0:52
  Sy Kirby: Quick story on the name.
• 0:53
  Sy Kirby: My grandfather, commercial, fished in Newfoundland all of my life, my uncles, et cetera, but he would come home to Toronto and spend all summer working construction.
• 1:03
  Sy Kirby: He's the only person in my entire family home to Toronto and spend all summer working construction.
• 1:06
  Sy Kirby: He's the only person in my entire family.
• 1:07
  Sy Kirby: Well, when I was a five six-year-old kid, I would push my little dozers around the floor.
• 1:10
  Sy Kirby: No, not, he'd pick them up and write Cy-Con on them.
• 1:13
  Sy Kirby: I still have some of them.
• 1:14
  Eric Howerton: Is that all that's?
• 1:15
  Sy Kirby: cool.
• 1:15
  Sy Kirby: That's where the name actually came from and established from.
• 1:18
  Sy Kirby: That's so cool, and so his union card and his picture was in my first Maniacs until it completely sun faded out.
• 1:24
  Eric Howerton: He's looking down.
• 1:25
  Eric Howerton: That's cool, man.
• 1:28
  Eric Howerton: That'd be cool to bring that card to a podcast one time.
• 1:30
  Eric Howerton: You still got that thing.
• 1:31
  Eric Howerton: Oh, I have several.
• 1:33
  Eric Howerton: That's awesome.
• 1:36
  Mark Zweig: We have to properly introduce the show.
• 1:38
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, yeah, this is another episode of Big Talk About Small Business.
• 1:48
  Sy Kirby: I love it, absolutely love it.
• 1:50
  Sy Kirby: Thank you guys so much for having me.
• 1:51
  Mark Zweig: Seriously, you got it, man.
• 1:53
  Mark Zweig: Thanks for coming.
• 1:53
  Mark Zweig: Eric's told me that you've been great to work with on his project.
• 1:59
  Mark Zweig: That was all jacked up, so I'm glad somebody fixed the thing.
• 2:05
  Mark Zweig: Just want somebody.
• 2:08
  Eric Howerton: For the love of.
• 2:09
  Mark Zweig: God.
• 2:11
  Eric Howerton: Don't try to retire on my new project please, I worked really hard for over a decade just to be able to invest, to just have it all taken away.
• 2:23
  Eric Howerton: I know that's what happens.
• 2:26
  Eric Howerton: And then complete the job and let's figure out a good timeline and the things to just let me know.
• 2:33
  Sy Kirby: Give me a call Communicate Whoa.
• 2:36
  Mark Zweig: Your expectations are way too high.
• 2:39
  Sy Kirby: In my industry.
• 2:40
  Sy Kirby: Communication is so lacking.
• 2:42
  Sy Kirby: But to that point I mean, look at who you have in my industry leading our industry.
• 2:50
  Sy Kirby: Normally you've got a boomer from 55 to that 70 range either handing it off.
• 2:56
  Sy Kirby: You don't have many mid-30s really 30-year-olds that have established it themselves, trying to figure out their way in this industry.
• 3:06
  Sy Kirby: Number one they're not very accustomed to change.
• 3:09
  Sy Kirby: They've already made their money through whatever era, decade, et cetera.
• 3:13
  Sy Kirby: So why are we going to try and change the game?
• 3:16
  Sy Kirby: They're so used to it.
• 3:17
  Sy Kirby: They made the game.
• 3:18
  Sy Kirby: So now you've got somebody like myself trying to establish.
• 3:21
  Sy Kirby: Keep looking at these problems that a young business owner would run into in a very capital overhead heavy industry.
• 3:28
  Sy Kirby: How do you compete right and get to where they are through?
• 3:34
  Sy Kirby: This system that you're speaking of is terribly established from the get go.
• 3:39
  Sy Kirby: Like you mentioned, mark, design, design, design and that's literally why I've ventured off into this podcast realm is to hopefully sit down at a table with gentlemen like yourself and Eric and discuss how crappy it is, but see the good thing, I mean honestly no, sorry, you're right, but the good news is it gives somebody like you a chance to distinguish yourself very quickly.
• 4:05
  Sy Kirby: That's exactly what I'm trying to do, sir.
• 4:07
  Mark Zweig: Because they are so stuck in the past and do things the same way and are poor communicators, poor business people, poor billers, poor collectors, poor at doing contracts, poor at all of that, poor at innovating with the technology changes.
• 4:24
  Mark Zweig: Oh, technology is risk man, you don't want to do anything new.
• 4:27
  Eric Howerton: That's right.
• 4:28
  Mark Zweig: Okay.
• 4:29
  Eric Howerton: Yep, yep, you don't want it to be exposed.
• 4:31
  Eric Howerton: So that way you can pad things, you can add margins.
• 4:34
  Sy Kirby: You know it's all underground, so to that point, the GPS realm, like I was just referencing.
• 4:40
  Sy Kirby: You know they don't want to be adaptive to that change because they know how to do it old school Right.
• 4:45
  Sy Kirby: What am I facing?
• 4:46
  Sy Kirby: Well, I either have to go get those guys that have been doing it 30, 40 years and adapt to their system.
• 4:53
  Mark Zweig: Right.
• 4:53
  Sy Kirby: Or I slash labor.
• 4:55
  Sy Kirby: Figure out how to run this GPS system.
• 4:58
  Sy Kirby: Be the master at it.
• 4:59
  Sy Kirby: Not the master at it yet, but we are learning.
• 5:02
  Sy Kirby: We've invested very hard into it.
• 5:04
  Sy Kirby: But I have the people and the team and the average age at Cyclone.
• 5:08
  Mark Zweig: It's a different thought process.
• 5:09
  Sy Kirby: Exactly, average age at Cyclone is 31 out of 22 on staff right now.
• 5:14
  Sy Kirby: Wow, so we've got a young bunch of guys with like-minded, innovative mindsets.
• 5:19
  Eric Howerton: You know, I think another thing too that I've experienced in that industry is the lack of desire to grow.
• 5:25
  Mark Zweig: Yes, right which?
• 5:27
  Eric Howerton: is just a stalemate of growth, no question about it.
• 5:30
  Eric Howerton: We've talked about this common thread.
• 5:32
  Eric Howerton: If you're in business, you either grow or die.
• 5:34
  Eric Howerton: That statement is very true.
• 5:36
  Mark Zweig: The management model, as you said, is the baby boomer, like me, maybe got a son.
• 5:43
  Mark Zweig: He's probably an idiot but a functional idiot.
• 5:47
  Mark Zweig: Got a drug problem, alcohol problem, my wife left me.
• 5:53
  Mark Zweig: They repoed my Monte Carlo SS and my CK I think you love Mr Swat and then everybody else is like a high school dropout that takes orders from them and sometimes they show up and sometimes they don't Experience, and so that's the model and they don't want to grow it because there's a limit to what.
• 6:15
  Mark Zweig: When you don't have anybody who's really very intelligent out there working for you, you can't grow.
• 6:20
  Mark Zweig: It's only what you can do personally and direct people to do, and the span of control goes.
• 6:27
  Mark Zweig: You know it's pretty small.
• 6:29
  Eric Howerton: Well, the unfortunate thing is that the customer base has changed.
• 6:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, especially in an area like ours right.
• 6:37
  Eric Howerton: Yes, 30 years ago.
• 6:39
  Mark Zweig: We're getting more sophisticated, totally, the needs are different.
• 6:41
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, the projects are bigger.
• 6:43
  Eric Howerton: My expectations of communication are different in my expectations of planning.
• 6:47
  Eric Howerton: I mean, everybody that's in our area are typically professional white-collar folks, right, and they're the ones investing in these expensive projects, which helps your industry, right, of course.
• 6:58
  Eric Howerton: But then you hit this bottleneck and it just becomes you know, if you don't have a scalable, growing business model and you're not going for that, what you're doing then is you're just trying to monetize on lower or on lower quantity and then, and if everybody does that, you have this disastrous, freaking macro economic scenario like we have right now, where no one can scale their shit and no one wants to grow, but everybody's trying to retire.
• 7:24
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, I have one job sometimes.
• 7:26
  Speaker 4: Oh one freaking job.
• 7:27
  Sy Kirby: That's the thing.
• 7:30
  Eric Howerton: Man driveway should not cost $250 million freaking dollars, I know, I know and concrete is not that expensive yeah.
• 7:38
  Mark Zweig: It's high, but it's not that high.
• 7:40
  Eric Howerton: Everybody's like whoa whoa, whoa.
• 7:42
  Sy Kirby: He says I want concrete.
• 7:43
  Sy Kirby: Hold on.
• 7:43
  Sy Kirby: Now everybody's like whoa.
• 7:43
  Sy Kirby: Let me say something concrete hold on eight years and the eight years so nine years, 70 bucks a yard 240 why can't that?
• 7:49
  Sy Kirby: Change, though it can, but you don't want to even chase follow the money in the supply game of concrete.
• 7:55
  Sy Kirby: You're talking global, sir.
• 7:56
  Sy Kirby: There's three players in this in this country that control that game, and that is a very, very expensive game um we've got somebody.
• 8:04
  Mark Zweig: We've got projects like the walmart, you know complex that basically sucked up all the concrete.
• 8:10
  Mark Zweig: You're not, so it killed it.
• 8:11
  Mark Zweig: For these guys, I mean, it's hard, you gotta be.
• 8:14
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, it's like you can.
• 8:15
  Mark Zweig: Only, we're only taking orders at 6 am on wednesday and by 6 20 we're done.
• 8:20
  Mark Zweig: Okay, isn't that the?
• 8:22
  Sy Kirby: truth For the next week.
• 8:23
  Sy Kirby: You guys are both spot on and to your point of growing and not dying.
• 8:27
  Sy Kirby: So I've doubled my gross revenue for the past five years.
• 8:33
  Mark Zweig: It's awesome.
• 8:33
  Mark Zweig: Annually, every year, yes, sir.
• 8:36
  Sy Kirby: Of course, now we're in the millions.
• 8:37
  Sy Kirby: The plan was for me to grow again this year, was for me to to grow again this year, um, but with the macroeconomics and and everything that we have going on, um, people are very wary.
• 8:50
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, I think the system has um designed it.
• 8:54
  Sy Kirby: I've mentioned this to eric a lot of times.
• 8:57
  Sy Kirby: Say, you know, if, mark, if you could get with somebody that you trust as an installer that held weight to the design conversation and could help you save money from his eyeballs?
• 9:07
  Mark Zweig: of course you do not want to do that absolutely, and that's a huge problem.
• 9:10
  Mark Zweig: Always, exactly, designers aren't builders.
• 9:13
  Mark Zweig: They don't get out in the field enough.
• 9:15
  Mark Zweig: Some of these guys never even set foot on the site that they've designed, and that's a problem, and so yeah you want the contractor involvement, I I believe, and so, but that you've got to select a contractor to work with and not hard dollar, bid it Exactly and what the?
• 9:30
  Mark Zweig: hell did that mean?
• 9:31
  Mark Zweig: What that means is normally the way it works is the architects and engineers prepare a set of plans and specs yeah, so everybody's got the same thing and they put that out to bid for contractors.
• 9:43
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, hard dollar bid it.
• 9:44
  Mark Zweig: But you don't have to work like that.
• 9:47
  Mark Zweig: Okay, you can just have a negotiated deal where you work with somebody you trust and you select the contractor immediately, and then the engineer and the contractor work together and see, and it has saved you money in the past, has it?
• 10:00
  Mark Zweig: not.
• 10:01
  Mark Zweig: I've always liked that model better.
• 10:03
  Sy Kirby: I'm not a model once you go to low bid it's and you and honestly, you're not the way to get what you want usually in scheme of things, you know, unless you have some 10 15 contingency on this project, it's probably going to get up eight up anyways, because you went the low bid route and didn't speak with the guy.
• 10:23
  Sy Kirby: Because a lot of times when I figured this out in the commercial game I was trying to bid it to where I already knew what was going to transpire.
• 10:30
  Sy Kirby: But that's not what was on the prints.
• 10:32
  Sy Kirby: The prints were low budget value, engineered to beyond belief.
• 10:36
  Sy Kirby: So we get this low cut number.
• 10:39
  Sy Kirby: Well then the installer, after he deals with the general contractor that hard bidded for the ownership group, then I'm down as the installer now communicating with this general contractor who has no idea about the civil game.
• 10:51
  Sy Kirby: They've got some yayoo right out of college that's trying to understand.
• 10:55
  Sy Kirby: And then he's going to make up some verbiage to sound smart and most likely sound pretty ignorant to the ownership group and cause resentment to the installer.
• 11:03
  Sy Kirby: And so that's the exact hiccup in the system that we are going to change.
• 11:12
  Mark Zweig: Or the other model is, of course, people knowingly low bid at figuring the plans aren't good and will change, order them to death.
• 11:19
  Mark Zweig: Yes, yes, okay, because that's another model that some contractors and subcontractors use, as you well know.
• 11:27
  Mark Zweig: But anyway, it doesn't have to be like that.
• 11:29
  Mark Zweig: I mean, the whole construction business is just, it's an ugly business and it need not be so ugly.
• 11:36
  Mark Zweig: That's what I believe.
• 11:38
  Mark Zweig: But, as you said it, you've got to have people you trust, and the general trust of the public for contractors and subcontractors is low, unfortunately.
• 11:49
  Mark Zweig: I mean they just assume that you're bad.
• 11:53
  Mark Zweig: Yep, actually, it's true.
• 11:58
  Eric Howerton: Like as a consumer, I'm scared to death of the subcontractors not showing up.
• 12:04
  Eric Howerton: I mean, it's just like immediately.
• 12:05
  Eric Howerton: It causes anxiety throughout a whole project.
• 12:08
  Sy Kirby: It absolutely does, and that's all about your network.
• 12:13
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 12:13
  Sy Kirby: Really Do good by people and you'll have the good ones stand by you through the whole thing.
• 12:18
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, you've got to be a repeat buyer of these services because the one-off clients not really what they all want, and then you can have that trust hopefully and you got to be a quick payer.
• 12:30
  Mark Zweig: Okay, that's the other way to get guys like cy over there to perform.
• 12:35
  Sy Kirby: That's right he is the man.
• 12:38
  Sy Kirby: So and it's funny you say that and below me so let's talk about below me I have a concrete subcontractor that is really really good yeah, man holes and junction box but he is really really expensive and as everything is dropping, that's only one element Exactly.
• 12:54
  Sy Kirby: But how do we keep him?
• 12:56
  Sy Kirby: Repeat customer for Sycon, keeping up with my crews.
• 12:59
  Sy Kirby: Well, I got to pay that dude in 30 to 45 days and it don't matter if I get paid or not.
• 13:04
  Sy Kirby: I have got to pay that dude in 30 to 45 days and it don't matter if I get paid or not.
• 13:07
  Sy Kirby: I have got to keep him surviving.
• 13:07
  Sy Kirby: But you know how hard that is when that GC is holding out for 90 days because, the ownership's holding interest for 60 or whatever, whatever the parameters they had set up before.
• 13:16
  Sy Kirby: we even got hard bid and involved.
• 13:18
  Sy Kirby: So I've got to, and there's that cash flow, cash flow, cash flow.
• 13:23
  Sy Kirby: Well, in my world you want to know why we can't grow.
• 13:25
  Sy Kirby: Because you get to that 750 millimark.
• 13:28
  Sy Kirby: You've got a crew of guys, you've got maybe an excavator or so, but if you want to grow past that, you can't just, oh, we're going to add an extra, this piece, and add this much revenue.
• 13:40
  Sy Kirby: It's a jump.
• 13:41
  Sy Kirby: You've got to procure safety equipment as you get deeper, etc.
• 13:45
  Sy Kirby: Like we were talking.
• 13:49
  Sy Kirby: So I think the growth with the area I mean, of course the work is here, but the growth can be capped very quickly by capital and the overhead expense that we have to run.
• 14:00
  Sy Kirby: Yes, don't get me wrong, you can rent and lease everything in my industry, but it's just a complete write-off and you're not adding diddly nothing to your balance sheet.
• 14:08
  Eric Howerton: exactly how do you manage a cash flow problem like that mark?
• 14:13
  Eric Howerton: I mean, you'd be a perfect person to like.
• 14:15
  Eric Howerton: I mean, is it just?
• 14:15
  Eric Howerton: Is it what it is?
• 14:17
  Mark Zweig: it's a you got to do the dance is what we call it.
• 14:19
  Mark Zweig: But I mean you got to work with the right general contractors.
• 14:22
  Mark Zweig: You got to have ones that are running their business well, so they're billing and collecting on time.
• 14:27
  Mark Zweig: So, like you know, we were general contractors.
• 14:30
  Mark Zweig: I would say to a client every time when I start the job and at the contract, we get paid every week.
• 14:36
  Mark Zweig: Okay, that doesn't mean like we get paid this week and then next week you're on vacation and we don't get paid, and then you come back Every single Friday you're going to get a bill and I expect to get paid, because all these people out here have to get paid.
• 14:51
  Mark Zweig: We're not going to finance your project.
• 14:53
  Eric Howerton: You, as the GC, are telling the owner I'm going to send you an invoice every week and you need to pay it immediately.
• 15:02
  Mark Zweig: There's no, I'm not going to carry you for a week.
• 15:03
  Mark Zweig: That's a good GC I like.
• 15:03
  Eric Howerton: Immediately there's.
• 15:04
  Eric Howerton: No, I'm not going to carry you for a week.
• 15:05
  Eric Howerton: I like that, that is a great G-Sign, okay.
• 15:06
  Mark Zweig: And then my subs.
• 15:07
  Mark Zweig: I want to pay you like immediately he's going to have the best subs in town Because that's the way I get you to jump.
• 15:12
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, okay, when I got a problem and I call that sub and go holy cow, I got a really big problem here.
• 15:19
  Mark Zweig: Help, help me out.
• 15:28
  Mark Zweig: And what do they do?
• 15:29
  Mark Zweig: Then they help you.
• 15:29
  Mark Zweig: We just moved Eric knows, we just did a renovation in seven or eight weeks of the house in Fayetteville on Mount Sequoia.
• 15:32
  Mark Zweig: It's a freaking mansion, it's best state.
• 15:33
  Mark Zweig: Don't bet it's.
• 15:34
  Mark Zweig: It's, it's crazy, it's a crazy house.
• 15:35
  Mark Zweig: It's not a mansion by any means.
• 15:37
  Mark Zweig: But anyway, the only people were amazed that we could get done what we got done in the time we had.
• 15:43
  Mark Zweig: But it was planning.
• 15:45
  Mark Zweig: It's telling everybody on this day I'm going to need you to show up, okay, and then they give me a bill and I write them a check Done, or they send me an electronic bill and I send them an electronic payment immediately.
• 15:56
  Mark Zweig: Yep, just paid.
• 15:57
  Mark Zweig: My electrician sent me a bill this morning.
• 15:59
  Mark Zweig: It was paid 30 minutes later.
• 16:01
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, okay, that's the way you have to deal with it.
• 16:05
  Eric Howerton: But anyway, what I like about that weekly, though as an owner it helps me to see the progress.
• 16:11
  Mark Zweig: Right.
• 16:11
  Sy Kirby: Of course.
• 16:12
  Eric Howerton: Versus.
• 16:12
  Eric Howerton: I've had this other project on which you visited yesterday.
• 16:15
  Eric Howerton: I'd get just this surprise huge bills with 50 freaking invoices attached to it and receipts of stuff, and I mean it's overwhelming.
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 16:27
  Eric Howerton: But then it goes back and then they want to get paid immediately and I'm like I can't even, I can't even, I need $150,000 cash today or whatever it's like bro yeah, I know I need my house
• 16:36
  Mark Zweig: done.
• 16:37
  Mark Zweig: Right, I get it, but the thing you know.
• 16:40
  Mark Zweig: But back on Si's case.
• 16:42
  Mark Zweig: So you know he's got to deal with good GCs who are managing their businesses effectively.
• 16:47
  Mark Zweig: That's a big part of it.
• 16:48
  Mark Zweig: And then he's got to be fast at billing himself, you know, and he's got to be following up with people.
• 16:58
  Mark Zweig: If they don't pay, he can't be afraid to call and say hey, you know, I need to get or send a text and then send an email and then send a call.
• 17:04
  Mark Zweig: I mean consistent.
• 17:05
  Mark Zweig: Miss Shea in my office is hey, I didn't see anything.
• 17:10
  Sy Kirby: Did we receive this yes or no?
• 17:11
  Sy Kirby: I didn't see the red receipt and they are now in Eric's case in the NC, not just working with good GCs.
• 17:19
  Sy Kirby: I'm not going to lie to you, mark.
• 17:21
  Sy Kirby: I'm trying to go around them GCs and go directly to the owner, right, I understand?
• 17:24
  Sy Kirby: You should Anything out in the civil?
• 17:26
  Sy Kirby: hey pick whoever you want to build your tin can.
• 17:29
  Sy Kirby: I don't care how big it is, building whatever, let me handle everything in the civil.
• 17:33
  Sy Kirby: I can mitigate the mud.
• 17:35
  Sy Kirby: You're a site contractor, you bet Hard skate, I'll do.
• 17:39
  Sy Kirby: Retaining walls, storm sewer retention, underground retention, saving walls, storm sewer retention, underground retention.
• 17:44
  Sy Kirby: So let me get it to binders.
• 17:46
  Sy Kirby: Then have these guys come in.
• 17:48
  Mark Zweig: They're not fighting mud, you're not going to have to worry about sky tracks getting stuck trying to get lumber, or one guy screwing up the last guy's work Exactly.
• 17:56
  Mark Zweig: Yeah.
• 17:57
  Sy Kirby: And it gave damages for the ownership through the entire thing.
• 17:59
  Sy Kirby: There's different ways to combat this.
• 18:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 18:03
  Sy Kirby: But it's not the system right.
• 18:06
  Mark Zweig: And back on your sort of archetypal old fart, his son.
• 18:11
  Mark Zweig: You know what I mean.
• 18:13
  Mark Zweig: Yes, sir, those guys, as you said, they're used to doing things a certain way.
• 18:19
  Mark Zweig: They have absolutely no means of marketing.
• 18:21
  Mark Zweig: So they're totally dependent on the GCs because they don't do any marketing of any kind whatsoever.
• 18:27
  Mark Zweig: That's part of the problem.
• 18:29
  Mark Zweig: They don't even do any like branding.
• 18:32
  Mark Zweig: There's no branding.
• 18:34
  Mark Zweig: They don't even have a logo.
• 18:35
  Mark Zweig: Their trucks don't match.
• 18:38
  Mark Zweig: They got no signs on any of them.
• 18:39
  Mark Zweig: All their pickups look different, everything they've got and nobody's got a company shirt on.
• 18:45
  Mark Zweig: They don't even do simple working visibility type stuff.
• 18:50
  Mark Zweig: So there's no marketing, which then makes them dependent on a GC 100%, and that is probably 70% of subcontractors out there.
• 18:59
  Sy Kirby: So would you?
• 19:00
  Eric Howerton: advise that subcontractors if they all started changing and evolving into more business-centric branding and marketing, it would behoove the industry if they were doing that.
• 19:10
  Mark Zweig: Well, it's certainly going to help them.
• 19:11
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, well, it's going to get them into different conversations.
• 19:17
  Sy Kirby: It's going to get them to that ownership level.
• 19:19
  Sy Kirby: Hey, you did me a really great job on that tile, on this job right here across the road.
• 19:25
  Sy Kirby: I've got this little special little thing.
• 19:27
  Sy Kirby: I need you to kind of take care of for me.
• 19:29
  Sy Kirby: You go over there, that's your little test.
• 19:31
  Sy Kirby: You knock it out, that's his tile guy the rest of his life and he's going to hand it to everybody he knows.
• 19:37
  Sy Kirby: And it's just because he had Martin's tile on the side of his truck and then it it showed up and it was the same truck three weeks later and it was the same gentleman or the same crew that he saw working over there on his ownership walkthrough.
• 19:51
  Sy Kirby: That's exactly how you break into that mold and you get in, don't?
• 19:55
  Eric Howerton: a lot of GCs want to keep them under the radar, though.
• 19:58
  Eric Howerton: Isn't that kind of part of their?
• 19:59
  Speaker 4: business plan.
• 20:00
  Sy Kirby: No, not anymore.
• 20:00
  Sy Kirby: Gcs used to have all the work, but the market is evolving.
• 20:07
  Sy Kirby: It is every single day.
• 20:11
  Sy Kirby: You've got ambassadors trying to change the market.
• 20:15
  Sy Kirby: You've got guys wanting to stay in the market and keep it the same way.
• 20:21
  Sy Kirby: You know what I mean.
• 20:22
  Sy Kirby: But the subcontractors, to your point, mark, if they would just do just a little bit, just a little bit of branding, it's not that hard.
• 20:30
  Sy Kirby: I tried to keep all my trucks white, with Cycon on the side USDOT.
• 20:33
  Sy Kirby: They may not all be Fords or Chevys or whatever, but we've got a look.
• 20:37
  Mark Zweig: You know what I mean.
• 20:38
  Mark Zweig: The next time I want you to paint them yellow like that.
• 20:40
  Mark Zweig: Yeah you think I'm kidding, because everybody's got a white truck.
• 20:44
  Mark Zweig: I mean, I'm not being critical, but I did this with an environmental consulting firm years ago and I made them paint all their trucks purple.
• 20:50
  Mark Zweig: Two years later, the CEO called me and said that was the best thing we've ever done.
• 20:55
  Mark Zweig: That's crazy.
• 20:59
  Eric Howerton: We have so much business because of that and in your business.
• 21:01
  Eric Howerton: What's great is you can brand a site and get so much business.
• 21:05
  Mark Zweig: Oh yeah, Because all the drive-by traffic.
• 21:07
  Mark Zweig: Good signage, Seal fence.
• 21:11
  Sy Kirby: Yes, you've got a big sill fence on my property, on his property.
• 21:14
  Sy Kirby: It's a cycle on every project.
• 21:15
  Eric Howerton: It's like 900 freaking yards of branding Up here.
• 21:18
  Mark Zweig: Exactly, I love that.
• 21:20
  Mark Zweig: We used to do that at Miyamoto International.
• 21:22
  Mark Zweig: It was an earthquake engineering firm, structural engineers.
• 21:25
  Mark Zweig: We had the biggest signs.
• 21:26
  Mark Zweig: We'd wrap every building all four sides gigantic Miyamoto banner, bigger than the GCs, bigger than the architects.
• 21:35
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, they'd complain Sometimes we'd violate the sign ordinance.
• 21:38
  Mark Zweig: Okay, we'll get over there eventually and take it down.
• 21:42
  Sy Kirby: Are we ever doing anything if we're not pushing the envelope, though?
• 21:45
  Mark Zweig: Yes, I love it.
• 21:47
  Mark Zweig: So tell us, let's go back a little bit.
• 21:50
  Mark Zweig: Obviously your uncle was canadian.
• 21:52
  Mark Zweig: You said french canadian I was no, okay, sorry.
• 21:57
  Sy Kirby: Well, you said newfoundland, so vikings um.
• 22:00
  Sy Kirby: I was actually born and raised in toronto.
• 22:02
  Sy Kirby: Uh, I immigrated here with my mother in 2001 okay, um all my family it's like a suburb of detroit I'm sorry, but it's
• 22:15
  Sy Kirby: okay, uh toronto tribe and I'm not a city guy.
• 22:19
  Sy Kirby: I moved here in 01.
• 22:20
  Sy Kirby: But um, all my family's still back in canada, other than on my mother's side.
• 22:24
  Sy Kirby: My, my, my father is a british sailor, um and my entire family on his side was royal navy, royal marines and um, he still abides and lives in canada and I see him every once in a while.
• 22:38
  Mark Zweig: But that's kind of my history there so how did you get into this business?
• 22:42
  Sy Kirby: fair enough um did you go to school here, or what I did?
• 22:45
  Sy Kirby: I graduated from ro right here, in 2009,.
• 22:48
  Sy Kirby: Last graduating class of the Malleys, this industry kind of picked me.
• 22:53
  Sy Kirby: I did various things, 18 years old, just like everybody should be doing If you're not.
• 22:59
  Sy Kirby: I was jumping around industries trying to figure out number one, what I was good at that I could make a craft out of, and, honestly, boys, I never thought I was going to be entrepreneurial.
• 23:10
  Speaker 4: I had this different bone about me.
• 23:12
  Sy Kirby: There's no doubt about it, but I didn't really think I was going to be maybe worthy enough in my own mindset to make it there.
• 23:19
  Sy Kirby: Not really, so I never really sought out that.
• 23:21
  Sy Kirby: But if I could go to work for a guy and he's going to take care of me for the next 25, 30 years, I'm going to do the best job I can for him.
• 23:27
  Sy Kirby: So, bounced around, you were a hard worker, though I was a little lazy.
• 23:31
  Sy Kirby: I'll be straight up and honest with you.
• 23:35
  Speaker 4: I was trying to find out an industry I never got fired from any craft, ever Good job.
• 23:40
  Eric Howerton: I was 17.
• 23:41
  Sy Kirby: I was breaking horses.
• 23:42
  Sy Kirby: I worked at FedEx from 3.30 in the morning to 7.
• 23:44
  Eric Howerton: Breaking horses.
• 23:45
  Eric Howerton: Did you hear that?
• 23:45
  Eric Howerton: Yeah?
• 23:45
  Sy Kirby: Your daughter does that she does some.
• 23:47
  Sy Kirby: yeah, I did a lot of horse work.
• 23:49
  Sy Kirby: I paid a lot of bills back then, but FedEx from 3.30 in the morning to 7.
• 23:53
  Sy Kirby: And then Lowe's or another part-time gig retail from 8 to 5, 10 to 7.
• 24:00
  Sy Kirby: And then I would go break race horses in the evening until dark.
• 24:04
  Sy Kirby: I did that all around here in Northwest Arkansas, right there in Peabody Ridge.
• 24:07
  Sy Kirby: Yes, sir, all around here in Northwest Arkansas, right there in Pea Ridge.
• 24:09
  Sy Kirby: Yes, sir, really Yep.
• 24:10
  Sy Kirby: And so I moved into that in breaking horses.
• 24:13
  Sy Kirby: A really good friend of mine, curtis Wilchin, called me up.
• 24:16
  Sy Kirby: He's like, hey, the water department's got an opening you want on.
• 24:20
  Sy Kirby: And I'm like, yeah, For what I was 19.
• 24:22
  Sy Kirby: This is City of Pea Ridge Water.
• 24:24
  Sy Kirby: Oh, okay, okay.
• 24:24
  Sy Kirby: And in my world in the utilities you either have the municipality side or you have the contractor side.
• 24:29
  Sy Kirby: Contractors install municipalities, service and keep distribution for customers correct.
• 24:34
  Sy Kirby: So I got to learn a ton at Pea Ridge in a year.
• 24:39
  Sy Kirby: Then I moved on to Bentonville.
• 24:40
  Sy Kirby: I thought that was going to be a little bit— Moving on up Really that's what I thought.
• 24:44
  Sy Kirby: I was there about seven months and figured real quick that was not the position I wanted to be in.
• 24:50
  Sy Kirby: And then I jumped over the contractor side um worked for a couple of contractors, ran, ran, benton counties um contract for moving all the public safety commission meters, gas meters we have them here on the road and we had to move them to the house.
• 25:04
  Sy Kirby: We're moving eight to ten and I was stressing really, really hard and, um, I was actually working for my best man in my wedding at that time and I looked down and I said, hey, man, we've got to make some adjustments here.
• 25:16
  Sy Kirby: I'm doing a lot of stress and eight to ten people addresses a day were getting my card with my phone number my cell phone.
• 25:23
  Sy Kirby: It's 40 to 50 people a week that we were just showing up tearing their yard up, throwing a gas meter on our house.
• 25:29
  Sy Kirby: They weren't all pleasurable people, as you could only imagine, so I jumped off and shook hands with a guy that I probably shouldn't have Started a company called Apex for about three months.
• 25:41
  Mark Zweig: What they do.
• 25:43
  Sy Kirby: We were going to do utilities and kind of the same thing I was doing and sold my house, put my equity in it and I lost it all, Never got a paycheck out of that deal and from there I had a bunch of work.
• 25:56
  Sy Kirby: So I went and rented machines.
• 25:59
  Sy Kirby: I still rent from the same guy that I went and shook hands with.
• 26:02
  Sy Kirby: He helped me so big time from the get-go.
• 26:06
  Sy Kirby: Basically, instead of giving me a month's worth of rental, he shaved it down to a week.
• 26:10
  Sy Kirby: I don't think I'd be sitting here with the name on my chest if he didn't, and I still ran from him today.
• 26:15
  Sy Kirby: He's a big district manager anyways.
• 26:17
  Sy Kirby: Just started going and so he was able to.
• 26:21
  Eric Howerton: Instead of making you pay for an entire month of leaves, just do it by a week, by week, which no, I mean basically, I had the machines six weeks and he charged me for a week.
• 26:29
  Sy Kirby: Oh, he primed your pump for you.
• 26:32
  Sy Kirby: Absolutely he did.
• 26:33
  Sy Kirby: He saw something in me and I told him I've been a loyal dog in business.
• 26:37
  Sy Kirby: Has it screwed me?
• 26:37
  Sy Kirby: Absolutely it has, yeah, but I've always been the loyal dog to whoever.
• 26:43
  Sy Kirby: Hey, I'm not probably the best horse to bet on right now in this race, but where I'm going I will take care of you, and that's always been my message.
• 26:51
  Sy Kirby: I've never I always paid the guys on Friday.
• 26:54
  Sy Kirby: It's sitting here to this day, nine years, and I've paid every single invoice, whether I should or shouldn't have, in those nine years and I'm super proud to say that.
• 27:02
  Sy Kirby: I know a lot of folks that can't say that, but I've learned this business trial by fire.
• 27:07
  Sy Kirby: Education is expensive.
• 27:09
  Sy Kirby: Experience is absolutely priceless and I've gained a lot of experience within those short nine years.
• 27:16
  Sy Kirby: I'm 32.
• 27:16
  Sy Kirby: I started when I was 23.
• 27:19
  Sy Kirby: So fixing to be on that decade mark and I have the best team, the best team building over that last five years really truly developed a killer team.
• 27:30
  Sy Kirby: So what's your secret there?
• 27:32
  Sy Kirby: It's not about what you say.
• 27:35
  Sy Kirby: It's not about what you do.
• 27:36
  Sy Kirby: It's how you make people feel.
• 27:37
  Sy Kirby: That's my number one key there.
• 27:40
  Mark Zweig: Everybody Eric understands that he makes people feel good.
• 27:44
  Mark Zweig: Hell yeah man.
• 27:45
  Mark Zweig: That's why we all love him so much.
• 27:47
  Eric Howerton: I will yell very loud Thank you, man.
• 27:48
  Eric Howerton: Oh, I, we all love him so much.
• 27:49
  Eric Howerton: I will yell very loud Thank you, man.
• 27:50
  Sy Kirby: Oh, I get to be in a circle there.
• 27:51
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, man, it's a leadership principle that you have to walk with, and I give the example to my leadership team.
• 27:59
  Sy Kirby: Because let's talk about my project manager briefly.
• 28:02
  Sy Kirby: He was my second-ever crew.
• 28:05
  Sy Kirby: The first employee I ever have sits in my estimation team, my second-ever crew, the first employee I ever have sits in my estimation team.
• 28:10
  Sy Kirby: I've always dealt with these humans differently, because they all react differently.
• 28:14
  Sy Kirby: They take love and show love differently.
• 28:17
  Sy Kirby: Well, that's no different than 50 hours a week here, and if I want them buying into my system, I have to tell them how and why we're doing what we're doing, right.
• 28:29
  Sy Kirby: So Dalton comes on and I'm like hey, man, I need you to run a truck and I need you to run people hard, and he, by God, did.
• 28:35
  Sy Kirby: Every week I'd have somebody in my office going man, he's just so hard to deal with, he won't ever let me do anything.
• 28:41
  Sy Kirby: And then I would four to five test papers a month going well, that line finished out.
• 28:46
  Sy Kirby: Well, that came on your time.
• 28:48
  Sy Kirby: Wow.
• 28:48
  Sy Kirby: Papers a month going well, that line finished out.
• 28:49
  Sy Kirby: Well, that came on your time.
• 28:50
  Sy Kirby: Wow, by God, he blew through that one.
• 28:51
  Sy Kirby: What was I supposed to say Well, I'm sorry, your feelers are hurt.
• 28:53
  Sy Kirby: Now, don't get me wrong.
• 28:58
  Sy Kirby: There was never any lines crossed and if there was, I immediately addressed it and we focused on being a better leader.
• 29:01
  Sy Kirby: But when I elevated him into that managerial project manager, so in my world, that basically covers all of five crews that we have.
• 29:08
  Sy Kirby: So in my world, that basically covers all of five crews that we have.
• 29:10
  Mark Zweig: So he's the man, so he's basically like the COO in a way, the head of operations line unit what you do for a living, what you get paid for the work.
• 29:20
  Sy Kirby: The work itself.
• 29:22
  Sy Kirby: He has 100% been invested.
• 29:24
  Sy Kirby: In the first six months where I was going with this was a big shift for him because this dude was a bulldog, ran people and machines all day, but now I need him calling clients and dealing with engineers and suppliers and you can't talk to them honey.
• 29:40
  Sy Kirby: Honey goes a lot further than vinegar in those conversations.
• 29:43
  Sy Kirby: You know what I mean.
• 29:44
  Sy Kirby: So we had to posture and we had to plan.
• 29:46
  Sy Kirby: So, number one, big a lot of my, I got to give him a huge shout out.
• 29:51
  Sy Kirby: I wouldn't be anywhere without him.
• 29:52
  Sy Kirby: He's going to be five years next month and he's been my project manager the last almost three years and he's made that transition.
• 30:01
  Sy Kirby: Based on that, hey, I told him what to do.
• 30:04
  Sy Kirby: Well, why didn't it get done?
• 30:06
  Sy Kirby: Well, because they didn't hear you.
• 30:07
  Sy Kirby: After the second thing, you spoke to them.
• 30:10
  Mark Zweig: In that moment they were feeling closed off, so that's a little quick thing there.
• 30:15
  Mark Zweig: People always love that expression.
• 30:18
  Mark Zweig: You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.
• 30:21
  Mark Zweig: That's right.
• 30:21
  Mark Zweig: My response to that always was who says I'm trying to catch flies?
• 30:25
  Mark Zweig: Hell, yeah, okay, I'm not trying to catch any flies, but no, people do love to say that.
• 30:32
  Mark Zweig: But yes, you're right, it makes total sense.
• 30:34
  Mark Zweig: You just can't bark at people all day and you got to treat people decently to get them to want to do a good job.
• 30:43
  Sy Kirby: I'm a very honest guy.
• 30:44
  Sy Kirby: With all the guys, from pipe fitters to Dalton to Sarah, I mean huge account to my wife.
• 30:53
  Sy Kirby: I wouldn't be anywhere without her.
• 30:54
  Sy Kirby: We're 10 years married this year and she has been the other admin half of this for the last five, delving off big and building procedures and systems.
• 31:02
  Sy Kirby: And inside accounting is huge.
• 31:05
  Sy Kirby: If you guys, I'm telling you, if I could rewind five years, I would dive off way, way, way harder and find the right person and set up inside accounting procedures a lot differently it's critical a lot of small businesses don't do a good job with it.
• 31:21
  Mark Zweig: I promise you, we didn't know how to not sure it yeah, and I think it's very typical, though I mean at least you've learned and you're trying to fix it.
• 31:31
  Mark Zweig: I mean, not everybody does.
• 31:32
  Eric Howerton: Well, I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't recognize like, whenever I started this company, first thing I did, first person I hired, first thing I enacted was good An accountant that could establish the books.
• 31:45
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, and I mean, like you know, I mean it's just about knowing every transaction has been recorded so you can actually read your business when you need to start reading it right, because I was investing in it for a while.
• 31:58
  Eric Howerton: The gauges on the business, yeah yeah, you've got to have gauges.
• 32:01
  Eric Howerton: You've just got to know where everything's going.
• 32:03
  Eric Howerton: I mean, it affects everything 100%.
• 32:07
  Sy Kirby: No, it does.
• 32:07
  Sy Kirby: It does Inside accounting accounting.
• 32:08
  Eric Howerton: we had to learn that the hard way yeah, and it becomes so freaking messy too, so fast oh my god.
• 32:16
  Eric Howerton: And then it just takes up so much time.
• 32:18
  Eric Howerton: I'm like it's unbelievable.
• 32:19
  Eric Howerton: It's kind of like I would say accounting and then the next thing would be your customer relationship management system, your database of customers and clients see, it's not huge for me, that's not, that's it is.
• 32:32
  Sy Kirby: Don't get me wrong, it's all right here Now we're working on, we have a CRM system getting built for salesmen, et cetera, as we speak actually.
• 32:40
  Sy Kirby: But you're right, it is huge.
• 32:42
  Sy Kirby: The follow-ups, like you were mentioning, mark, not just on the monetary side but on the front of the house.
• 32:47
  Sy Kirby: You've got to be following up.
• 32:49
  Sy Kirby: Whether you were the first one, the third one to get your number in it doesn't matter.
• 32:52
  Sy Kirby: Follow up, have the conversation, figure out where it was.
• 32:58
  Sy Kirby: But no, I agree, thinking so, in my world, dirt utilities, we don't really have a whole lot of, I guess service industry, not a whole lot of service calls.
• 33:09
  Sy Kirby: You know you're not doing 30 invoices a week, you're doing four to five projects a month.
• 33:12
  Sy Kirby: So as long as you're keeping those happy.
• 33:14
  Sy Kirby: But you definitely need it in the front of the house.
• 33:17
  Sy Kirby: In my specific industry world, you know what I mean.
• 33:20
  Sy Kirby: Got to have that person and normally it's the guy wearing the operations manager hat in my world, still going up to the front of the house and going hey, where can I help and delve in and talk with who?
• 33:31
  Sy Kirby: Get with Mark, get with Eric, whatever we need to do, you know, and fill in the holes.
• 33:35
  Sy Kirby: But no, I agree Customer relations and building their credibility.
• 33:40
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, and just knowing how to get a hold of your contacts, what jobs have they done?
• 33:43
  Eric Howerton: Being able to read how many times this one person has delivered X amount of?
• 33:47
  Mark Zweig: jobs, yeah.
• 33:49
  Mark Zweig: And then think about how, if you could integrate all that with your accounting- oh yeah, so you know how fast they pay.
• 33:55
  Mark Zweig: So then when you do your cash flow projections, you know these guys pay in 62 days, 62 days.
• 34:01
  Mark Zweig: Out in the spreadsheet I'm going to show that $12,000 coming back.
• 34:05
  Eric Howerton: Well, whatever the number is, and I would say from our conversations, one of the things that a good CRM would do is it helps you to start, it helps you understand how long the sales cycle is for certain types of jobs.
• 34:18
  Eric Howerton: And then your objective is how do you close that sales cycle down?
• 34:22
  Eric Howerton: Because the more that you can close deals and eliminate that time waste Listen to this guy yeah 100%.
• 34:28
  Eric Howerton: You're able to read that and you can see the charts and you start to understand where your best target audience is within this bigger market and then you can focus and streamline on that and then you can then therefore invest in marketing in that and we get emailed and you can email them.
• 34:42
  Eric Howerton: You can send them freaking birthday cards, you can do all kinds of stuff once you identify that it's little things.
• 34:47
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, it is.
• 34:48
  Eric Howerton: But the likening to that, to having a good accounting system, is it's all good day to end, it's all about day to end.
• 34:55
  Eric Howerton: If you don't do it daily, like accounting, you're going to end up you're going to always be fighting for a CRM that's worth a shit, yep.
• 35:01
  Eric Howerton: But if you do it every and I tell the folks, like I was telling one of our guys just yesterday, we're starting a new CRM process, we've been added to it it's like I don't need you to know what the hell this CRM is doing and how to learn all the bells and whistles and make yourself effective and automate your life.
• 35:21
  Eric Howerton: I need you to do two things.
• 35:23
  Eric Howerton: Number one manually.
• 35:26
  Eric Howerton: Put everything that you come across in about a cluster into that database.
• 35:31
  Eric Howerton: Number two do that every day.
• 35:35
  Eric Howerton: Yep, do it every freaking, stinking day.
• 35:37
  Eric Howerton: So you might have a lot of contacts in QuickBooks or software, oh yeah.
• 35:40
  Eric Howerton: But if it's not in the CRM, you've got them right here in Outlook.
• 35:44
  Mark Zweig: That's the easiest place.
• 35:45
  Mark Zweig: This guy calls me Save.
• 35:47
  Mark Zweig: Yep, okay, and you're competing with outlook, which is why crms one reason why they have a problem yeah, but you can harvest those names out of outlook though, yeah no, you can.
• 35:57
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, I mean there's a system.
• 35:59
  Eric Howerton: It's like just a.
• 36:00
  Eric Howerton: It's the old uh rolodex.
• 36:02
  Eric Howerton: Right, it's a digital rolodex, is all it is.
• 36:05
  Eric Howerton: But if you didn't have that rolodex, you didn't know who to call.
• 36:07
  Eric Howerton: But this helps you measure things right and it takes time to get there.
• 36:09
  Eric Howerton: But.
• 36:09
  Eric Howerton: But if you didn't have that Rolodex, you didn't know who to call.
• 36:10
  Eric Howerton: But this helps you measure things right and it takes time to get there.
• 36:12
  Eric Howerton: But I mean, you can't start on that soon?
• 36:13
  Sy Kirby: enough.
• 36:14
  Sy Kirby: We are just delving into it.
• 36:16
  Sy Kirby: As we speak.
• 36:17
  Sy Kirby: I've had one estimator and we kind of doubled down this year and I hired a salesman this year to really this year is so different guys, just in the market in general We've been a lot of folks are shelving deals until you know Because of interest rates.
• 36:34
  Sy Kirby: You bet, of course, number one driver.
• 36:36
  Sy Kirby: I mean, I get it.
• 36:37
  Sy Kirby: I don't want to go spend 10%, 15% on a truck, and I get it.
• 36:40
  Sy Kirby: They don't want to do it on $40, $80 million, so I get it.
• 36:45
  Sy Kirby: But at the same time it's not just that.
• 36:48
  Sy Kirby: I think, Of course the election has got everybody fearful, et cetera.
• 36:52
  Sy Kirby: But next year I think there'll be plentiful and we're preparing for that.
• 36:56
  Sy Kirby: Just like you know, the residual after 08, I graduated in 09, 11, 12,.
• 37:03
  Sy Kirby: That started the real boom again after 08.
• 37:07
  Sy Kirby: And guys made great money until about 18, 19 and COVID covid hit and that was a really good time in in my industry for sure, because why there was so much work low interest rates and demand money was cheap and right.
• 37:22
  Sy Kirby: Sure, go get equipment, it didn't matter yeah and so now it's a totally different picture, Everything is totally different, but hey at least we're in a place where the demand is underlying.
• 37:34
  Mark Zweig: Demand is high due to growth.
• 37:36
  Mark Zweig: Yes, sir 100% People come into the area.
• 37:38
  Mark Zweig: We're going to be a million people by in 10 years or less.
• 37:41
  Mark Zweig: I bet it is.
• 37:42
  Mark Zweig: It's going to be, crazy, and so you've got that working for you and you do have to follow to a certain extent like what types of projects are most likely to be done.
• 37:54
  Eric Howerton: Yep you know, you know one thing, mark, I think it'd be just because I know with Basai.
• 37:58
  Eric Howerton: I talk with him quite a bit in this kind of change of era this year.
• 38:03
  Eric Howerton: What Basai's done is he's really leaned in on something that's really important.
• 38:08
  Eric Howerton: What's that?
• 38:08
  Eric Howerton: Marketing?
• 38:09
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, you know what I'm saying, absolutely.
• 38:12
  Eric Howerton: Like a lot of folks like if things start changing and shifting, they start tucking back.
• 38:16
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, they pull back.
• 38:17
  Eric Howerton: And they stop investing Wrong way to go.
• 38:19
  Eric Howerton: It is the opposite thing you've got to do.
• 38:22
  Eric Howerton: That's reassuring to hear.
• 38:25
  Speaker 4: Well, it is.
• 38:26
  Eric Howerton: But marketing, sales, marketing, sales, marketing, sales, marketing sales.
• 38:31
  Mark Zweig: It takes a little while for that to take effect and a lot of small business owners are not willing to fund that long enough until the results come back.
• 38:39
  Mark Zweig: Yep, but the selling is easy when you do the marketing.
• 38:43
  Mark Zweig: That's the bottom line.
• 38:44
  Mark Zweig: Without the marketing then it's like hey, what you got coming up.
• 38:48
  Eric Howerton: Yeah.
• 38:48
  Mark Zweig: This is Mark Sw's log over here.
• 38:50
  Mark Zweig: I'm with SciCon, you're familiar with us.
• 38:53
  Sy Kirby: Okay, we'll work.
• 38:54
  Sy Kirby: It's so funny.
• 38:55
  Sy Kirby: It's so funny, it's already proven your statement, because, literally as today we were dealing with some storm cleanup through YouTube, we've got this.
• 39:04
  Sy Kirby: I started this YouTube channel.
• 39:06
  Sy Kirby: We've got 17,000 subscribers organically in a year.
• 39:11
  Sy Kirby: Oh my.
• 39:12
  Mark Zweig: God.
• 39:12
  Sy Kirby: That's fantastic.
• 39:13
  Sy Kirby: Nine and a half million views.
• 39:15
  Sy Kirby: They love what you're doing.
• 39:16
  Sy Kirby: Yes.
• 39:19
  Mark Zweig: They love it.
• 39:19
  Mark Zweig: It's like those power washing videos I'm just transfixed.
• 39:24
  Mark Zweig: I love this.
• 39:25
  Mark Zweig: I'm trying to get my wife to watch them.
• 39:28
  Mark Zweig: No, because when she and I have the.
• 39:31
  Mark Zweig: Well, now I'm trying to get my wife to watch them.
• 39:32
  Mark Zweig: No, because when she and I have the Bauer washer, we were working this weekend.
• 39:34
  Mark Zweig: It's like I'm doing it.
• 39:35
  Mark Zweig: She's standing there watching me.
• 39:37
  Mark Zweig: It's like, okay, you want to take your time, she's doing it.
• 39:40
  Mark Zweig: I just like watching.
• 39:42
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, like watching the dirt come off.
• 39:44
  Mark Zweig: It's just so gratifying it is.
• 39:46
  Sy Kirby: Hey man, and so gratifying it is, hey man, and that makes again reassuring to hear.
• 39:49
  Sy Kirby: But it's just been a bunch of gobbledygook.
• 39:52
  Sy Kirby: It's just been a bunch of hey, this glitz and glam and I've gone in a little bit on the podcast Blue Collar Podcast, trying to delve in and that's kind of where that created and that's how I become to sit here and talk.
• 40:07
  Sy Kirby: But I've already got this YouTube thing going for me.
• 40:08
  Sy Kirby: It's amazing, and just so happened, to end up working with Eric at his place and through conversations and him going, no, you cannot pull back range right now.
• 40:17
  Sy Kirby: You need to freaking and I'm like man, all this it's been different for a dirt and pop guy, Because if you go, look pay-per-click for us, I probably shouldn't put this out there.
• 40:28
  Sy Kirby: It's absolutely nothing we don't market in our world.
• 40:31
  Sy Kirby: But what if you did?
• 40:34
  Mark Zweig: Right, that's the thing.
• 40:36
  Mark Zweig: What if you did when other people are not?
• 40:38
  Sy Kirby: I'm 32.
• 40:39
  Sy Kirby: I've got a long way to go and I've learned a lot, but I have so much more to learn and it's from conversations sitting here looking just like this, learning and sponging information and moving forward with that information and retaining that information.
• 40:57
  Sy Kirby: You know, I wish my whole team would retain as much information as I did, as quickly as I did yeah, trying experimentation.
• 41:04
  Eric Howerton: Well, that's the difference between you and me, Mark what are you doing over there, man?
• 41:10
  Mark Zweig: I got one of those things.
• 41:11
  Eric Howerton: He's got a hang down.
• 41:12
  Eric Howerton: Oh, he got a little hang down.
• 41:14
  Eric Howerton: It's hurting me, sorry, okay, no, I'm not listening.
• 41:16
  Eric Howerton: I mean jeez, call him out.
• 41:19
  Eric Howerton: I'm sorry, man.
• 41:21
  Eric Howerton: I'm sorry.
• 41:21
  Eric Howerton: It was the first time on a podcast.
• 41:25
  Mark Zweig: Every time I reach in my pocket every time I reach in my pocket it like gets that thing.
• 41:30
  Eric Howerton: Oh, I got you.
• 41:31
  Eric Howerton: No, I got you.
• 41:32
  Eric Howerton: You should cut that off.
• 41:32
  Eric Howerton: I'm just impressed that you had a fingernail clipper with you, bro.
• 41:36
  Mark Zweig: Listen, I've got dental floss too.
• 41:38
  Mark Zweig: No, in your pocket, I carry it with me at all times, of course that's beautiful.
• 41:43
  Mark Zweig: That's why I don't have receding gums.
• 41:46
  Mark Zweig: Is that dental floss?
• 41:47
  Mark Zweig: That's dental floss, right there.
• 41:48
  Eric Howerton: Look at that, oh my Bro.
• 41:50
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, that's a lot to carry around in a pocket, that is.
• 41:53
  Eric Howerton: It's not that bad.
• 41:55
  Mark Zweig: I don't wear those tight designer jeans Get in Get in.
• 42:01
  Eric Howerton: I'm not wearing tight designer jeans, bro, they're not.
• 42:07
  Mark Zweig: Are they like bedazzled in the pocket?
• 42:08
  Mark Zweig: No, no, Okay, turn around, they're pretty tight.
• 42:10
  Mark Zweig: They're not tight.
• 42:11
  Mark Zweig: Dude, dude, is your wife buying those?
• 42:18
  Mark Zweig: Hell, no, they're not tight.
• 42:20
  Eric Howerton: Getting just crazy, man she likes those tight jeans.
• 42:23
  Eric Howerton: I'm an anti-skinny jean person Me and you both.
• 42:27
  Eric Howerton: My marketing industry is riddled with skinny jeans and I'm out.
• 42:32
  Mark Zweig: Have you guys noticed all these young guys?
• 42:34
  Mark Zweig: Now they've got suits on and they all look like they're too small.
• 42:39
  Mark Zweig: Oh yeah, it's like you should be wearing a size 44 and you've got a 38.
• 42:45
  Sy Kirby: We've got eight inches above your ankle.
• 42:46
  Mark Zweig: They've got short pants.
• 42:48
  Mark Zweig: I don't get it, and then they have no socks.
• 42:50
  Mark Zweig: Oh yeah, what the hell is that?
• 42:52
  Mark Zweig: I don't want to see your ankle Change guys.
• 42:54
  Mark Zweig: It's changed.
• 42:55
  Sy Kirby: You don't have socks with suits.
• 42:56
  Sy Kirby: Why can't we change things that matter?
• 43:00
  Mark Zweig: That's what we're trying to do here.
• 43:01
  Mark Zweig: You're way too substantive.
• 43:02
  Mark Zweig: Okay, we're beyond that.
• 43:10
  Speaker 4: We're well beyond that.
• 43:10
  Speaker 4: It's just very different.
• 43:11
  Mark Zweig: It's attention grabbing.
• 43:12
  Mark Zweig: A significant endeavor versus trivial pursuits is what everybody is just trying to.
• 43:15
  Eric Howerton: It's just this constant climb of trying to get the most attention.
• 43:18
  Mark Zweig: Yeah it is, of course it is.
• 43:19
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, it's a sick culture.
• 43:21
  Eric Howerton: It is a sick culture.
• 43:22
  Sy Kirby: I mean, let's be honest, we want to sit our phones down and sit and have dinner anymore.
• 43:26
  Eric Howerton: Oh no, that's out, you know it's.
• 43:29
  Sy Kirby: It drives me crazy.
• 43:30
  Sy Kirby: You got kids?
• 43:31
  Sy Kirby: Oh, absolutely that's the whole purpose.
• 43:33
  Speaker 4: How old are they?
• 43:34
  Sy Kirby: I've got a beautiful, uh, five-year-old little girl and, uh, my little boy's seven, and I just recently found out, uh, we've got another one on the way coming christmas good for you.
• 43:43
  Mark Zweig: Congratulations, man.
• 43:44
  Mark Zweig: Thank you very much.
• 43:45
  Mark Zweig: Well, they're not fearing on their phones yet.
• 43:47
  Mark Zweig: Wait until they're teenagers.
• 43:49
  Eric Howerton: They definitely have.
• 43:51
  Mark Zweig: Oh man, it's a good-looking family.
• 43:53
  Mark Zweig: Thank you, sir.
• 43:54
  Sy Kirby: This is the whole reason I'm here.
• 43:55
  Sy Kirby: Was that you in a suit?
• 43:57
  Sy Kirby: That was Easter morning, sir?
• 43:59
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, you can travel, you know.
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: Oh, buddy, I clean up.
• 44:03
  Speaker 4: Well, I come from T-Town, he's in pretty good shape that all burnt out.
• 44:08
  Mark Zweig: No no.
• 44:09
  Mark Zweig: Another 30 years in the sun, maybe a little bit different.
• 44:15
  Mark Zweig: Being as he's a redhead, that's hard on him.
• 44:18
  Mark Zweig: You ever see him on the tan like that.
• 44:21
  Sy Kirby: No, that's beautiful.
• 44:22
  Sy Kirby: I'm a day walker, I ain't a ginger.
• 44:25
  Eric Howerton: It's a day walker, let's go back to that time period when you did that first business and you've refinanced your house, sold it, sold your house First ever house, got your cash, yep and you invested in the business.
• 44:39
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, let's hear about that one.
• 44:40
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, because I think people could buy comfort in the fact that you're successful now.
• 44:46
  Sy Kirby: Yes, good.
• 44:47
  Mark Zweig: Thank you.
• 44:48
  Sy Kirby: That was a.
• 44:50
  Sy Kirby: I was desperate.
• 44:52
  Sy Kirby: I was desperate for change, I was desperate to do something different.
• 44:57
  Sy Kirby: And you know what's so funny, just to let you guys know.
• 44:59
  Sy Kirby: So that transpired from a conversation at Applebee's.
• 45:07
  Sy Kirby: That was a bad start, right there.
• 45:10
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, it was terrible.
• 45:10
  Mark Zweig: I mean even Chili's would be better.
• 45:12
  Mark Zweig: I do like the sampler.
• 45:14
  Mark Zweig: I love the Chili's ribs I used to eat the Applebee's riblets, but they're just not that good.
• 45:21
  Mark Zweig: They're not anymore.
• 45:23
  Sy Kirby: Four cheese mac and cheese, honey pepper chili peppers.
• 45:25
  Eric Howerton: Where the hell have you guys just gone to?
• 45:30
  Mark Zweig: We're at Applebee's and just gone to.
• 45:32
  Sy Kirby: We're hungry right, it took them 25 minutes to make a taco before I got in here, so um, these guys always eat at 11 am too I eat whatever.
• 45:41
  Eric Howerton: I can track your world.
• 45:41
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, 11 am and it's that's lunch it's,000 calories, okay, two tacos and some queso rice.
• 45:50
  Sy Kirby: Anyway so essentially my wife and I we were, like I said, sold my house, so you were married at the time.
• 45:58
  Sy Kirby: We are married, been married 10 years, so this would have been 15.
• 46:02
  Sy Kirby: We got married in 14.
• 46:04
  Sy Kirby: We started this in 15.
• 46:05
  Sy Kirby: Lived in a camper on my in-laws' land and I promise you I never feel another moment as pressurized as the moment.
• 46:16
  Sy Kirby: This was just after.
• 46:17
  Sy Kirby: I'll go into brief a little bit more, but just after me and him split.
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: You and Arthur split.
• 46:24
  Sy Kirby: Yes, I started PsyCon on that Monday and we had some infertility struggles for struggles for three years trying to have Colt.
• 46:32
  Sy Kirby: And she looks at me on Wednesday and tells me she's pregnant.
• 46:38
  Sy Kirby: Wow, in that same week I just lost everything that I've ever had given to me in my entire life.
• 46:45
  Sy Kirby: I bought a house.
• 46:46
  Sy Kirby: I was 20 years old, bought it at a 2.8 interest rate, 79,500, right in the middle of Pea Ridge, and that first little real estate spike and it was worth a hundred K, by God.
• 46:58
  Sy Kirby: I was getting out.
• 46:58
  Sy Kirby: It's worth 200 and something now, but anyway it was cool.
• 47:03
  Sy Kirby: But I had just recently sold it.
• 47:07
  Sy Kirby: I'm not driving a truck worth of crap because I didn't want the payment.
• 47:11
  Sy Kirby: And now I've got this immense pressure of oh my God, if this little baby boy gets here in nine months, what am I going to do?
• 47:20
  Sy Kirby: I'm living in a freaking camper on my in-law's land.
• 47:23
  Sy Kirby: What a piece of crap.
• 47:24
  Mark Zweig: You know what I mean.
• 47:24
  Mark Zweig: That's how it felt.
• 47:26
  Sy Kirby: And so I don't want to go too delving off into that scenario.
• 47:30
  Sy Kirby: But essentially it was two guys.
• 47:31
  Sy Kirby: He bought the machine, he bought the trailer, I bought the truck.
• 47:38
  Sy Kirby: I told him I would bury him in work because I've got a pretty decent network, right back then even, and I did.
• 47:46
  Sy Kirby: But he just wanted to use the machine to work with his uncle and make cash, just enough to make it through the week, and he didn't really want to make this a business.
• 47:54
  Sy Kirby: So I kept running, kept running, and I never saw a paycheck for like 11 weeks, didn't see the bank account.
• 48:03
  Sy Kirby: Things were going south really quickly.
• 48:08
  Eric Howerton: So the money you sold your house for, you invested in a truck.
• 48:12
  Sy Kirby: Was it a dump truck?
• 48:13
  Sy Kirby: Well, that was just a dually, so you could haul the equipment.
• 48:18
  Speaker 4: I bought a camper with that $10,000.
• 48:20
  Speaker 4: That you were living in.
• 48:21
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, that I lived in right, and then the other $10,000.
• 48:23
  Mark Zweig: That you were living in?
• 48:23
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, that I lived in right.
• 48:23
  Sy Kirby: And then the other $10,000 basically was living expenses for me to live.
• 48:27
  Sy Kirby: That's what we lived off of for the next 11 weeks.
• 48:30
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, because I never had a paycheck, gotcha, and so so you were just kind of investing in your own time, absolutely Without any pay.
• 48:38
  Sy Kirby: Exactly.
• 48:38
  Eric Howerton: To go about sell jobs hope for the jobs to come back and pay you back.
• 48:43
  Sy Kirby: They did, but I never saw anything.
• 48:45
  Sy Kirby: Never saw it, and so I just cut the cord.
• 48:48
  Sy Kirby: I'm not the type of guy I used to have a really bad temper.
• 48:51
  Sy Kirby: It is what it is.
• 48:52
  Sy Kirby: I could have made a big scene, could have got a cord, all this other crap.
• 48:55
  Sy Kirby: I just took the machine and trailer out there and left the key on its front door and drove away and and left the key on his front door and drove away and I went home.
• 49:04
  Sy Kirby: Of course, failure is my worst fear in life.
• 49:07
  Sy Kirby: It's probably why I've driven to where I'm at.
• 49:10
  Sy Kirby: We hate failure, you can't have failure.
• 49:12
  Eric Howerton: We're not all about that.
• 49:13
  Eric Howerton: Get on that, Mark.
• 49:14
  Mark Zweig: I know you want to get on it.
• 49:15
  Sy Kirby: It's a state of intermission.
• 49:17
  Eric Howerton: Yap on it, bro.
• 49:19
  Mark Zweig: No, it's just you read this stuff online.
• 49:21
  Mark Zweig: It's's like failure is great Embrace.
• 49:22
  Mark Zweig: Failure, fail a lot, fail constantly.
• 49:26
  Mark Zweig: Okay, like sooner or later.
• 49:31
  Mark Zweig: The idea is to not fail.
• 49:32
  Mark Zweig: Let's learn from everybody else's mistakes.
• 49:35
  Mark Zweig: That's funny.
• 49:36
  Mark Zweig: Failure is costly.
• 49:37
  Mark Zweig: Yes, sir, it's embarrassing, it's humiliating, it's shameful.
• 49:41
  Mark Zweig: It is Right.
• 49:42
  Mark Zweig: Yes, if it happens, we must learn from it and move on quickly.
• 49:46
  Mark Zweig: We all agree to that, right Agreed, but it is to be avoided.
• 49:51
  Mark Zweig: So I agree with you.
• 49:52
  Mark Zweig: I try.
• 49:53
  Mark Zweig: I hate failure.
• 49:56
  Mark Zweig: I don't want to fail.
• 49:57
  Mark Zweig: I've thought about this.
• 49:58
  Eric Howerton: I'm paranoid as can be.
• 49:59
  Eric Howerton: I have made a million mistakes, but I haven't failed Right, because I think failure is quitting after you make mistakes.
• 50:07
  Eric Howerton: You make mistakes, shit doesn't work out.
• 50:09
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, it's not a mistake, it's not a failure yeah it's not a failure.
• 50:12
  Eric Howerton: So mistake often mistake forward.
• 50:15
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, I like that.
• 50:16
  Mark Zweig: That means you're experimenting, you're trying stuff.
• 50:19
  Sy Kirby: It doesn't all work out.
• 50:20
  Sy Kirby: All a winner is is a loser that tried to get.
• 50:23
  Mark Zweig: Right, exactly, you just don't give up.
• 50:25
  Sy Kirby: The big thing I talk about with my guys, though.
• 50:28
  Sy Kirby: In our world I say this all the time it's 50 to 1.
• 50:31
  Sy Kirby: Nobody cares, no one cares.
• 50:34
  Sy Kirby: Work harder, dude, on the 50 good jobs that you did.
• 50:37
  Sy Kirby: That's cool.
• 50:37
  Sy Kirby: You can brag about it all you want.
• 50:39
  Sy Kirby: You know, the one they're going to talk about is the one that you didn't do worth a crap.
• 50:43
  Sy Kirby: You didn't plan, you didn't operate.
• 50:45
  Sy Kirby: Everybody in town will know about it quicker than you can blank.
• 50:48
  Sy Kirby: It's still a small town around here, but the 50 to one ratio, so do a hundred jobs.
• 50:53
  Sy Kirby: So when that one does hit, we're going to be all right and the talking will be too loud, too loud, you know.
• 50:58
  Sy Kirby: But it's not about mistakes you make, it's how you handle them, and I've earned more customers off of mistakes.
• 51:04
  Sy Kirby: I've made than I have ever, not one time just doing the job perfectly.
• 51:08
  Sy Kirby: Gives you a chance to correct it.
• 51:10
  Sy Kirby: If I do a perfect job, 95% of the time they're going to price.
• 51:14
  Sy Kirby: Shot me the next time.
• 51:15
  Sy Kirby: I send a number in.
• 51:16
  Sy Kirby: But if I did something wrong, this is all grass steakhouse right here.
• 51:19
  Sy Kirby: I had to come in behind a contractor, yeah, twice.
• 51:23
  Sy Kirby: And then I rented a laser and that stung.
• 51:28
  Sy Kirby: I rented a laser, the calibration was off.
• 51:31
  Sy Kirby: This is when I was still learning and, um, actually, the head engineer had came and sat down, drove out to there and he said so I, I gotta tell you you've got to this.
• 51:42
  Sy Kirby: I've worked the numbers 85 ways.
• 51:44
  Sy Kirby: He said I don't get it though.
• 51:46
  Sy Kirby: You pass a camera.
• 51:46
  Sy Kirby: I've never seen 6-inch sewer line at a .16, which would be .52 for 6-inch His legal flat anyways going off in the weeds there.
• 51:57
  Sy Kirby: But I've never seen it pass a camera which they run a little buggy in the pipe.
• 52:00
  Sy Kirby: I've never seen it pass a camera which they run a little buggy in the pipe and it can't hold less than an inch of water over a three-foot span, or you've got to dig it up, it's a belly, et cetera.
• 52:08
  Sy Kirby: So 0.16 on six inches, not enough drop in it.
• 52:11
  Sy Kirby: So it's two-tenths over 100 feet.
• 52:13
  Sy Kirby: So you're talking minimalistic
• 52:16
  Sy Kirby: inches here.
• 52:16
  Sy Kirby: Anyways, what I'm trying to get at is he said you did a great job, but I need to fix it.
• 52:21
  Sy Kirby: They had concrete, the rebar was pouring parking lot back but my manhole, done like that, was sitting there and I had to shut everything down and look at the contractor and go hey look, I know, you paid me to fix it.
• 52:33
  Sy Kirby: It's fixed but it's not on paper and I can't make the inverts work and manholes the engineer can't.
• 52:41
  Sy Kirby: We've got to redo it.
• 52:42
  Sy Kirby: And with walk-ons open, this was two weeks as COVID hit so we knocked walk-ons out of power a couple of times.
• 52:50
  Sy Kirby: We were 19 foot deep.
• 52:52
  Sy Kirby: We had active walk-ons just had opened up and their three phase was ran right over the sewer main seven feet right over the top of our box.
• 53:03
  Sy Kirby: It was extremely difficult.
• 53:04
  Sy Kirby: We did it in seven days.
• 53:04
  Sy Kirby: We fixed it, had some help of a friend who loaned me a trench box and a machine, thank God, so I didn't have to rent them and eat all of that expense.
• 53:14
  Sy Kirby: But me and the guys did it in seven days while keeping the other restaurant open and I've earned some business off of that obviously.
• 53:24
  Sy Kirby: And it showed the city, showed the engineer that same engineer.
• 53:29
  Sy Kirby: But you don't freaking fail.
• 53:31
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, we're just problem solvers, guys.
• 53:34
  Eric Howerton: Yeah right.
• 53:34
  Sy Kirby: I'm just.
• 53:35
  Sy Kirby: You have a problem with a piece of land and you want it to look like that.
• 53:39
  Sy Kirby: Well, I'm the guy to fix that and I can handle everything under that umbrella you want me to.
• 53:43
  Sy Kirby: You may have certain people you trust and specific to pave or to blue top or whatever it may be.
• 53:49
  Sy Kirby: Okay, go ahead and deal with those guys, but let me handle everything else for you.
• 53:53
  Sy Kirby: It's my, it's my world.
• 53:54
  Sy Kirby: Let me speak to you directly, let me communicate and, as you can attest to, we do.
• 53:58
  Sy Kirby: It's a little different and you haven Go ahead.
• 54:00
  Sy Kirby: No, I didn't mean to In Eric's sense.
• 54:05
  Sy Kirby: I've had Dalton.
• 54:05
  Sy Kirby: I referenced him earlier.
• 54:07
  Sy Kirby: He's had eight projects going on.
• 54:10
  Sy Kirby: I didn't hand Eric as a owner, negotiated client, off to Dalton to make his world a little bit mess, because I've been mainly handling it.
• 54:18
  Sy Kirby: So I've kind of handled the project manager role of it as well.
• 54:20
  Sy Kirby: So it's just different.
• 54:23
  Sy Kirby: And when you know your team and like handing Dalton over to you, I knew how heavy of a communicator you were going to require and expect out of us.
• 54:31
  Sy Kirby: So why handle?
• 54:33
  Sy Kirby: Let's just send him up to fail on my side and you're going to cause resentment with me and then I'm not even going to know what happened and two weeks later you're going to call me and go hey, get your crap off the place.
• 54:43
  Sy Kirby: So you've got to see all that stuff kind of coming and so that's but yeah.
• 54:48
  Eric Howerton: So you were at a point, though, in your story where, no, it's fine, but you were talking about I don't fail.
• 54:54
  Eric Howerton: You know, you were talking about Hate failure, hate failure.
• 54:58
  Speaker 4: You just dropped your keys off.
• 54:59
  Eric Howerton: You just dropped your keys off.
• 55:00
  Eric Howerton: You were sitting there and found out your wife's pregnant, and that week was a dark week, right.
• 55:09
  Sy Kirby: Unbelievable, unbelievable.
• 55:11
  Sy Kirby: From there I rented machines like I referenced earlier, and every builder I would sit there on rain days and just hammer every builder I could find on Google, any source I could back feed and get me in front of somebody I will dig.
• 55:26
  Sy Kirby: I buried a lot of horses, sir, to pay for a lot of fuel to keep this company running.
• 55:31
  Sy Kirby: Um hell, I could be out there at one or two o'clock in the morning.
• 55:34
  Sy Kirby: It's dead.
• 55:34
  Sy Kirby: I'll be out there.
• 55:35
  Sy Kirby: I got machine untraded where we going.
• 55:37
  Sy Kirby: It hurt, as I was raising a young family.
• 55:39
  Sy Kirby: It definitely um those long nights.
• 55:43
  Sy Kirby: I was doing this, mainly by myself, in the first year, for sure.
• 55:47
  Sy Kirby: And then Dylan came on to help Sycon.
• 55:52
  Sy Kirby: I signed into a deal with my folks and they kind of co-signed for my first set of machines and they were paid back plentiful for that and, um, they helped me get my start.
• 56:08
  Sy Kirby: I didn't know what I was going to do and I kind of just sat there and said, hey, I've got all this work, but I'm 23 years old, nobody's gonna give me $150,000 worth of equipment.
• 56:17
  Sy Kirby: So, um, but from there, um, we've moved to here.
• 56:23
  Sy Kirby: But yeah, failure is being a dad, being a husband, being a leader, just in general, you can't.
• 56:31
  Sy Kirby: There is no failure Solutions.
• 56:34
  Sy Kirby: It's our job to provide solutions.
• 56:36
  Sy Kirby: Find the solutions, ask the what-ifs, ask outside of the box.
• 56:40
  Mark Zweig: How many guys, though, in a situation like that, would just storm off the job?
• 56:44
  Mark Zweig: Well, dang it.
• 56:46
  Mark Zweig: I did what I was supposed to do and I'm out of here, you know, and they ruin their reputations doing stuff like that.
• 56:55
  Mark Zweig: Yep, but it happens all the time.
• 56:57
  Mark Zweig: That one bad job job and and and around here.
• 57:00
  Mark Zweig: What's so distressing is that demand is so high that those same guys may end up getting hired by the same gc three years later.
• 57:09
  Mark Zweig: Uh yes, sir, I'm I've done it myself.
• 57:13
  Sy Kirby: I'm in a lawsuit with a gc and they're still sending us bid by a bid invites every day.
• 57:18
  Mark Zweig: It's crazy yeah, I, I've done it myself because you can't find anybody else, and then you tolerate that kind of behavior and now it should be it's, it's flipping over a little bit death.
• 57:29
  Eric Howerton: You know, there's something about our show, our listeners or entrepreneurs or spine entrepreneurs thinking about it.
• 57:36
  Eric Howerton: I think that there's a to your point mark we were just talking about.
• 57:40
  Eric Howerton: There's something about being an entrepreneur where you take on full accountability for whatever it is that you're doing.
• 57:48
  Eric Howerton: I mean, it is funny.
• 57:50
  Eric Howerton: I look back and I have always, since day one, to even your story.
• 57:55
  Eric Howerton: I am 100% responsible for the success of whatever project, communication, whatever it might be.
• 58:04
  Eric Howerton: I don't even really think about the business broadly like I'm responsible for it.
• 58:07
  Eric Howerton: I think about every single deal, yep, that it's ultimately the buck's going to stop here, and I admit it.
• 58:14
  Eric Howerton: And if it does not go well, I still admit it.
• 58:18
  Eric Howerton: I call and say, si, I'm sorry, man, we screwed up, but here's what I'm going to do about it.
• 58:24
  Sy Kirby: Here's my solutions.
• 58:25
  Sy Kirby: I got path one, path two, path three.
• 58:27
  Sy Kirby: This is the most cost effective, but it's going to cost you three weeks of time.
• 58:32
  Sy Kirby: This right here is the time saver, but it's going to cost you more Lay those out, give me a decision and attack.
• 58:38
  Eric Howerton: Here's what I'm also going to do.
• 58:38
  Eric Howerton: I'm going to do, I'm going to eat every bit of that shit too.
• 58:40
  Eric Howerton: Yep, I'm not going to charge you.
• 58:42
  Eric Howerton: I'm actually going to pay you.
• 58:43
  Eric Howerton: Just don't Do more.
• 58:44
  Eric Howerton: Just do more, go above and beyond and just freaking, and that's what you win them over for life Absolutely.
• 58:51
  Mark Zweig: Under promise over deliver Absolutely.
• 58:58
  Mark Zweig: But you know, I think part of it is like deal with a problem like that my point was that people shy?
• 59:05
  Mark Zweig: They're afraid, they're just fearful.
• 59:08
  Eric Howerton: They don't have that discussion I think that's what makes it hard for people to.
• 59:14
  Eric Howerton: You know, you've got entrepreneurs that go out and start their own business and they don't do well and it doesn't work out.
• 59:18
  Eric Howerton: They go back into the labor force Right, and you got people that just don't ever go there because they start realizing as they dig into oh shit.
• 59:26
  Eric Howerton: But if this had all this risk, right, and the risk is associated with the accountability to it, right, yeah, and so I mean like and uncomfortableness totally yes, you live in a state of uncomfortableness all the time.
• 59:37
  Eric Howerton: I don't know that there's that many people on the planet that have that ability to take on that accountability and say it's my fault and when I'm to my point, to this, your point, my deal straight up I never.
• 59:51
  Sy Kirby: I tell my guys all the time I'll never get mad at you for something you don't know, because guess why, it's my job yeah I'm the ultimate trainer here and if you walked into a situation and I didn't share that information or I didn't give you everything optimally that you needed to handle that situation, I failed you as a leader.
• 1:00:09
  Sy Kirby: But now, now, if we've discussed scenario 20 times no, one time, one time.
• 1:00:18
  Sy Kirby: And you didn't make a note or give me a solution leaning that way.
• 1:00:22
  Sy Kirby: I'm not asking for the full solution, one step, but don't just go here, boss, here, boss, right, I'm over that, guys.
• 1:00:31
  Eric Howerton: I'm paying you here too.
• 1:00:32
  Eric Howerton: Post office 5 o'clock, 4.59,.
• 1:00:35
  Eric Howerton: Got to go.
• 1:00:35
  Sy Kirby: And it's not like.
• 1:00:36
  Mark Zweig: I'm not Disconnect, total disconnection.
• 1:00:39
  Eric Howerton: Speaking of 49, I've got to go.
• 1:00:41
  Eric Howerton: We're out of time, I think.
• 1:00:42
  Mark Zweig: I know we could sit here and talk to Cy all day I know.
• 1:00:45
  Eric Howerton: Well, that's a good thing.
• 1:00:46
  Eric Howerton: I do want you to say something.
• 1:00:47
  Eric Howerton: Can you say something about his podcast that he has?
• 1:00:49
  Sy Kirby: going on.
• 1:00:49
  Mark Zweig: Yeah, please, what's it?
• 1:00:50
  Sy Kirby: called Blue Collar Business Podcast.
• 1:00:52
  Sy Kirby: I like that.
• 1:01:12
  Sy Kirby: It's literally earlier is not said aloud and there is such a closet about it.
• 1:01:19
  Sy Kirby: Nobody wants to talk about it, nobody wants to deal with it.
• 1:01:22
  Sy Kirby: Nobody wants to put it out there for somebody to deal with it.
• 1:01:25
  Sy Kirby: Nobody wants to talk about it.
• 1:01:25
  Sy Kirby: Nobody wants to deal with it.
• 1:01:26
  Sy Kirby: Nobody wants to put it out there.
• 1:01:27
  Sy Kirby: So somebody to deal with it but I'm learning so much through this podcast.
• 1:01:29
  Sy Kirby: Um venture, get to sit here and have this conversation, and the other conversations I'm having over there are mainly streamed.
• 1:01:36
  Sy Kirby: For gentlemen like myself, I don't care if you're HVAC, you're an iron worker, you're framer, don't care if you in the trades subcontractor, we talk contractual, we go off into the admin side of things.
• 1:01:47
  Sy Kirby: A lot of these guys are struggling with the inside accounting.
• 1:01:50
  Sy Kirby: So we're 11 episodes in.
• 1:01:53
  Sy Kirby: You can find that on any streaming platform right now, but you can find the first 9 or 10 episodes on PsyCon's YouTube page.
• 1:02:03
  Sy Kirby: And again, what is the name of the podcast?
• 1:02:06
  Sy Kirby: Blue Collar Business.
• 1:02:07
  Mark Zweig: Podcast, I think.
• 1:02:09
  Eric Howerton: Mark would be an excellent guest.
• 1:02:10
  Eric Howerton: I would love to have him on.
• 1:02:12
  Mark Zweig: I'd love to be on there.
• 1:02:13
  Mark Zweig: I've been a blue collar worker.
• 1:02:15
  Mark Zweig: You're welcome, bro.
• 1:02:16
  Sy Kirby: Let's go.
• 1:02:16
  Sy Kirby: That don't count as a guest discovery though.
• 1:02:20
  Mark Zweig: Okay, so that's great.
• 1:02:22
  Mark Zweig: I appreciate that.
• 1:02:22
  Mark Zweig: Now, what about SciCon?
• 1:02:24
  Mark Zweig: How can people find you on SciCon?
• 1:02:26
  Sy Kirby: SciCon.
• 1:02:27
  Sy Kirby: Actually, to our point about marketing.
• 1:02:29
  Sy Kirby: I've doubled down and we have a big presence on Facebook.
• 1:02:33
  Sy Kirby: Small presence on Instagram coming heavy, but our main presence right now is YouTube.
• 1:02:38
  Sy Kirby: Over the last year and a half, 17,000 subs.
• 1:02:43
  Sy Kirby: We have a weekly video at 9 am on Saturday.
• 1:02:46
  Sy Kirby: Time is fixing to adjust just a little bit, but we do have a weekly drop every single week.
• 1:02:52
  Sy Kirby: Lots of shorts.
• 1:02:53
  Sy Kirby: We are on TikTok and the smaller socials as well.
• 1:02:57
  Mark Zweig: And was it sy-con?
• 1:03:00
  Mark Zweig: It is.
• 1:03:01
  Eric Howerton: And that's your website sy-Y-C-O-N.
• 1:03:04
  Sy Kirby: Website is S-Y-C-O-N-E-X-Ccom.
• 1:03:07
  Eric Howerton: Working on.
• 1:03:08
  Sy Kirby: EXC.
• 1:03:09
  Sy Kirby: The first letters of excavation.
• 1:03:12
  Mark Zweig: Okay, EXC.
• 1:03:12
  Sy Kirby: S-Y-C-O-N-E-X-Ccom, and we do have a merch shop on there.
• 1:03:15
  Sy Kirby: If you have any type of blue-collar desirable shirts desirable shirts.
• 1:03:21
  Mark Zweig: Alright, I've been wanting to stock up on wife beaters.
• 1:03:24
  Mark Zweig: Most considered blue collar.
• 1:03:28
  Sy Kirby: It's perfect, to my point, to end with the stigma we have about us Say Honestly, I don't wear wife beaters.
• 1:03:36
  Mark Zweig: I don't either.
• 1:03:38
  Eric Howerton: You should wear one next week on our next episode.
• 1:03:41
  Mark Zweig: That sounds horrible, absolutely horrible.
• 1:03:44
  Sy Kirby: You think he'll look like Jamie Hunt?
• 1:03:47
  Sy Kirby: Did he go around in wife Peter?
• 1:03:50
  Sy Kirby: Oh yeah, first time I ever met Jamie Hunt?
• 1:03:52
  Mark Zweig: I didn't hear that.
• 1:03:53
  Mark Zweig: I swear to God.
• 1:03:53
  Sy Kirby: My wife knew him the only time I ever met Jamie Hunt.
• 1:03:56
  Sy Kirby: My stepdad actually worked for Brian, one of his sons for the last 23 years.
• 1:04:02
  Sy Kirby: Car business yeah, the dealers and he actually ran the buy-your-pay-your-recon center for him with Nita.
• 1:04:08
  Sy Kirby: Anyways, long story short.
• 1:04:09
  Sy Kirby: Now I completely forgot.
• 1:04:12
  Eric Howerton: JB Hunt.
• 1:04:13
  Sy Kirby: JB Hunt Met him at the dealership the first Everest dealership right here.
• 1:04:17
  Sy Kirby: That Everest dealership was best.
• 1:04:20
  Sy Kirby: It was the first dealership all-Moderly and I grounded the corner.
• 1:04:25
  Sy Kirby: I was still young, I was probably 11 or 12.
• 1:04:26
  Sy Kirby: We had just been here about a year or two.
• 1:04:28
  Sy Kirby: There was this man standing there very nice pressed jeans, very nice boots, wife beater and cowboy eyes.
• 1:04:33
  Sy Kirby: It was hot.
• 1:04:34
  Sy Kirby: It was 110 degrees outside.
• 1:04:37
  Sy Kirby: And you know what the funniest thing ever was this is the only communication I ever had with mr hunt and I said good morning, and he said I'm getting me a coke.
• 1:04:44
  Sy Kirby: I said yes, sir.
• 1:04:46
  Sy Kirby: I said I was gonna get me one too.
• 1:04:47
  Sy Kirby: He said yeah, they're free up here.
• 1:04:49
  Sy Kirby: My son owns the joint.
• 1:04:50
  Sy Kirby: And that's the only thing I've ever heard out of jb hunt.
• 1:04:52
  Sy Kirby: I've met miss john l several times.
• 1:04:54
  Eric Howerton: Yes, she's very classy, yes, um, I've actually worked on all our projects I love jb man the more like like he was straight up legit he had amazing stories about how that guy could sell.
• 1:05:06
  Mark Zweig: He was unbelievable.
• 1:05:08
  Sy Kirby: He was the ultimate blue-collar man.
• 1:05:09
  Sy Kirby: Yeah, he was he was I mean, starting from cotton seed pipe holes out of South Arkansas and going hey, I can do this again.
• 1:05:18
  Sy Kirby: Hey, I can do this again Now.
• 1:05:19
  Sy Kirby: Back then you could make money in the trucking world and we can go off on that whole industry right now pork fellers.
• 1:05:26
  Mark Zweig: Unfortunately, we're out of time so we're going to have to move on, but we appreciate your being here with us.
• 1:05:33
  Mark Zweig: Si, Seriously, it's been fun and great.
• 1:05:34
  Sy Kirby: Thank you, guys, so much Look forward to doing it again sometime.
• 1:05:37
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, get ready for all the publicity from our show man.
• 1:05:40
  Eric Howerton: It's going to blow your mind.
• 1:05:41
  Eric Howerton: It's going to triple your business.
• 1:05:44
  Mark Zweig: Let's go, and we are still looking for a sponsor here at BigTalkAboutSmallBusinesscom.
• 1:05:50
  Mark Zweig: That is true, shameless plug for ad money.
• 1:05:53
  Mark Zweig: If you have a product or service that you want to sell to small business owners, you want to talk with us.
• 1:06:00
  Eric Howerton: Yeah, you should have done one for CRM.
• 1:06:01
  Eric Howerton: If you were CRM, Si would have known about it and he could have subscribed to you Exactly.
• 1:06:04
  Eric Howerton: Well missed that opportunity.
• 1:06:08
  Mark Zweig: In any case, we'll see you next week, and until then, this has been another episode of Big Talk about.
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 4: Small Business, sorry, I read that it's good wwwbigtalkaboutsmallbusinesscom and click on the Ask the Host button for the chance to have your questions answered on the show.
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 4: Stay connected with us on LinkedIn at Big Talk About Small Business and be sure to head over to our website to read articles, browse episodes and ask questions about upcoming shows.