Latest / WCHS Network Podcasts / 07/16/2024 Ask the Expert: Celebrating Success with Ross Kirk of Marco Concrete Lifting
Transcript
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- 0:17this program do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of five ADWCHS it's employees,
- 0:23or WVRC Media. This is five eight WCCHS, the Voice of Charleston.
- 0:38It's a twenty two I'm Jeff Jenkins. Good morning to you, and
- 0:42welcome to Ask the Expert. And today okay, okay, and today we
- 0:48are going to talk to Ross Kirk, owner and founder Marco Concrete Lifting,
- 0:53and he is here in the studio and good morning, sir. How are
- 0:57you doing, sir? I'm beating the heat. Well, you know,
- 1:02he is no, he's no stranger to the air here and it's great to
- 1:07have him in here this morning to talk about what he does and a business
- 1:12owner, you know, which is great. And so we're going to talk
- 1:15about a little bit of the history of the company because i'd like to like
- 1:19you'd like to hear about that and exactly what they do at Marco Concrete lifting.
- 1:23And if you're a listener, and we have so many faithful listeners,
- 1:27they know your jingle. Oh yeah, yeah, they know your song.
- 1:30Yes, yeah. What's the history of that, by the way, Well
- 1:34you all did it, yeah in two thousand and two. Yeah, and
- 1:38I, I mean, I can't stand it, but everybody else, everybody
- 1:42else loves it. Yeah know, I'm thinking I don't like that, but
- 1:46that's a twenty things been on the air for twenty twenty two years now.
- 1:53Yeah, and I never did like it, but it's but I mean it's
- 1:59it's catchy. It's catchy, Yes, it did, it is it is
- 2:01very much so it really is catchy. And I'm sure that a lot of
- 2:05our folks who are out there listening right now, they're singing it right now.
- 2:07Yeah. I used to play that. I used to pound the air
- 2:10with that right before the home shows, right, and you knew it was
- 2:15working when you'd hear people they'd looked at my you know, look at my
- 2:17booth, and they they start singing that song. And I'm not going to
- 2:22sing it because I don't want everybody to quit listening. Well, Ross is
- 2:27good to have you in here this morning. And we were talking before the
- 2:30show and just wow, going almost forty years of owning of owning a business,
- 2:38right, almost forty years now twenty eight years, almost thirty years,
- 2:42okay, almost thirty years. What does it? First of all, let's
- 2:46go back to that. What what did you do? What did you do
- 2:50before that? And what caused you to make that decision? Well, I
- 2:53was in the I was in the car business for years and years, and
- 2:57I worked for Tom Pete and Chevrolet and back the fan days, and it
- 3:02just you know, I got to where I was having a family and this
- 3:07now nine to nine, you know, eight days a week, was just
- 3:12getting getting old. And I went to I went out to a friend of
- 3:15mine's house and I said, what is that truck? And he said,
- 3:21oh, that's a pressure grouting machine. And I never heard the term ever.
- 3:25This was in ninety six, and I said what does it do?
- 3:30And you know, I'd got to get into play golf or go fishing cause
- 3:35we loved bass fish together. And he said, boy, it raised his
- 3:38concrete and I went, you know, I brushed it off two or three
- 3:44times later, I said what what does that thing do? Actually, because
- 3:46I wouldn't get close to it it was so dirty. And he said,
- 3:50I'm gonna do my brother's driveway. You know where it goes into the garage.
- 3:53It dropped down an inch and he said, I drew holes and mix
- 3:57up grout, pumping in there and it comes up. I said, okay,
- 4:00I got to see this. I've got to see this. And and
- 4:04he said, well when I tell you, just turned the pump on and
- 4:08it raised that driveway right up. And I said, how many people do
- 4:11this in West Virginia because I was about done with the car business. He
- 4:14said no one. I went ding the light went off and built one of
- 4:21the trucks. Knew absolutely nothing about grouting. I thought, grouting is what
- 4:27you put in tile, and and we we started to company in and he
- 4:33quit three weeks after we started, and I said okay, and he moved
- 4:41away with his what is now his wife, And I said, how am
- 4:46I going to do this? I know nothing about this, and I've got
- 4:48a pregnant wife. I'm thinking, oh, this is not gonna be near
- 4:54as much fun as I thought it was going to be. And then,
- 4:58you know, one thing led to another and I learned how to do it.
- 5:00Actually, it's the way I learned how to do this. He taught
- 5:03me a little bit before he left. But then we got into still peering,
- 5:08and he looked peering and I would I didn't. I mean, I
- 5:11knew how to advertise working at Tom Peden all those years, who was a
- 5:14great advertiser. Yeah, yeah, but I didn't know how to how do
- 5:16you advertise raising sunken concrete. So I would go to like Cincinnati, or
- 5:24i'd go to Louisville or Pittsburgh, and I'd get a room and i'd look
- 5:29in the phone book because I had phone books back then, and I go
- 5:31to foundation repair and I cut their ads out of the phone book in the
- 5:36motel room, and then I would go with binoculars and find their you know
- 5:45address, and they go out and I kind of look at them with a
- 5:48binocular and I thought, Wow, this is something. And I take the
- 5:54ads home and and I put these ads together. And I don't really know
- 5:59how to build an ad, but I know I know when I see it
- 6:03right, and it's We started out lifting sidewalks and you know, garage floors,
- 6:11basement floors, and then got into steel peering, push peering that lifts
- 6:16foundations, and then got into you know, fast forward a little bit,
- 6:23got into abandoned coal mine grouting, auger grouting, auger hole grouting, and
- 6:30then sprang concrete on faces of coal mines. And then the coal boom hit
- 6:38and we were like wow, okay, and had twenty eight men at one
- 6:44time we had two miney had like seven or eight guys on a mining crew
- 6:48and three foundation crews and had just I was determined that I was in not
- 6:58going back in the car business. What's great. What's interesting about that ross
- 7:01is that you're intrigued right from the beginning. When you saw that, you
- 7:04were like, what's that? Yes, it did something to me. I
- 7:10don't know, the grout coming out the end of a hose and watching it
- 7:14go up, and watching piling go on the ground and then you lift the
- 7:17house back up level and I'm thinking, you know, this was And then
- 7:21got into concrete pumping. I actually bought statewide concrete pumping. Was had boom
- 7:28pumps and trailer pumps and everything was you know, going at a at a
- 7:32record pace, and twenty ten hit and I went, oh lord, and
- 7:40I've got kids in school and I've got kids getting ready to go to college,
- 7:45and fought through that, and then it came back. And then the
- 7:48last last few years just been the last few years of the toughest three years
- 7:55I've had in twenty eight twenty nine years. But you're persevering. I mean,
- 8:01so you you tell the story. I mean, your circumstances are different,
- 8:03but these are small business owner stories you're telling, right, I mean
- 8:07you built it. I mean you're a concrete lifting guy, so you built
- 8:09it from the foundation, literally first guy to do it. And I was
- 8:13the first guy to do it it, you know, at any kind of
- 8:22scale, anytime of scale. Yeah, any scale of it. But I
- 8:26remember coming in here in two thousand or two thousand and one, and I
- 8:33think Scott Schaeffer worked here, I think, And I said, I want
- 8:39to advertise this. He said, okay, what's your budget? And I
- 8:41said, I got six hundred dollars. He said, well, six hundred
- 8:46dollars a month is a pretty I know that's a year. But the one
- 8:52thing about advertising, and I learned that at Tom Peters Chevrolet, is once
- 8:56you started, never quit it of mine top of mind, right, top
- 9:01of mind awareness, and if you're going to start advertising. I've seen so
- 9:07many people that start and do it for three or four months. Well that
- 9:11don't work. I said, well, yeah, it will work. But
- 9:15it's it's just like your truck payments or your you know, equipment payments,
- 9:20or your you know rent whatever attacks. You know, you have to pay
- 9:26it. You have to do it continuously, continuously, continuously. Now you
- 9:31know, twenty eight years later and almost two million dollars in advertising, you
- 9:37know, mark a concrete lifting is a household word. Yeah, it is
- 9:41just top of mind absolutely if this is going to happen to you and and
- 9:45you see, I mean you this area, and I don't know if it's
- 9:48just because we're a lot of us on a hillside here, right, I
- 9:52mean there are a lot of slippings or a lot of things that, yes,
- 9:56that need lifted. Yeah. Well, and in our geographical region,
- 10:01the clay that we have here is so expansive. And you know in the
- 10:09you know, people saved a lot of times. Well my door sticks when
- 10:13it's in the winter, in the summer, whatever, Well, it's your
- 10:16the clay is going up and down. It's and and the way I explain
- 10:20it to like housewives, I said, you know, this this clay around
- 10:24here is like bread dough or flower. You know, in the summertime when
- 10:30this dries out, houses drop. In the wintertime, when that clay expands
- 10:37gets wet, it pushes in basement walls. So you know, in the
- 10:41wintertime we do you know, bowed walls. In the summertime, we have
- 10:46a lot, especially a year like this. Yeah, I was going to
- 10:48talk about ross Kirk with us here, Mark Marco concrete lifting. Very dry
- 10:52weather we're having, and some people may think, well, but this is,
- 10:56as you mentioned, the worst time for slipping down right. This is
- 11:01this is when a year like we're having now, like last year, when
- 11:09you have a super hot, dry year and you see the ground cracking and
- 11:15you see the earth plowing away from your sidewalk, it's it's just a matter
- 11:20of time for things start to settle. And of course it's vacation season right
- 11:24now. And I've said this many times, there's two things you're not going
- 11:28to compete with around here, and that's myrtle beach of Santa Claus. But
- 11:31you got, you know, everybody think all spring, everything's kick off.
- 11:37Now we stay steady. Now right right now, it's kind of slow.
- 11:41What what russ. What are some of the things we should look for if
- 11:45my house is slipping or something? I mean, what are what are some
- 11:48of the signs. A lot of things that you'll see is you know,
- 11:54if you have a brick house, you'll see cracking around windows open not un
- 12:00rigid areas, or you'll see a crack in your sheet rock around a window
- 12:05and then it goes into you know, many different facets from that, but
- 12:09those are the number one things that you'll see. Or you you know,
- 12:15one side of the house is start getting a little bit lower, and then
- 12:16you do the investigative work and you see cracks in your brick or cracks in
- 12:20your sheet rock, and that's you know, it's not gonna get it's not
- 12:24gonna fix yourself. I mean, I can't, like I tell people,
- 12:28I can't say it's gonna get any worse, but I can take it.
- 12:31It's not gonna get any better. Right, So you know, it's it's
- 12:35water your house, right right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so
- 12:39when you like, if you get the call, you come in and there's
- 12:43good of I mean part of what you do. It's investigation, right,
- 12:48there's an investigation. Talk about that if you will Well. You know,
- 12:52the call comes in and I'm the one does the estimates now, and they
- 12:56say I'm an expert at it now. But you know, I can go
- 13:01out and look, and I've been looking to stuff, you know, pushing
- 13:05three decades, and I'm like, I can when I pull up as many
- 13:11of these as I've looked at over you as I can just about tell from
- 13:13the driveway. And and you know there's some sometimes that I just tell them,
- 13:20I know this house is doing something it shouldn't. I do not know
- 13:24what it's doing. But you know, here's a list of engineers that you
- 13:28can call one of them. Jared Gray's one. He's a great engineer.
- 13:33Jason Merritt's a great one. Jennifer Casey's a good one. And I say,
- 13:37I'd rather them come in here, because you know, when I can't
- 13:41figure it out, I'm not going to spend your money, right because if
- 13:45I if you tell me to go ahead and do it, I'm old kill
- 13:48it. So I make sure I catch it all right. But a lot
- 13:50of times I'm not a lot. But you know a few times I'm like,
- 13:56I know it's doing something. I just don't know. We're to spend
- 14:00your money, so you know, but that's doesn't happen often. Many times
- 14:03you can figure it out. Yeah, most of the time. Ninety percent
- 14:07of the time I can figure it out. It might sometimes it takes this
- 14:11one house I did in Catlisburg. I went back to that thing five times,
- 14:16and I finally and I take the guys that I have working for him.
- 14:20It's I've been there twenty over twenty years, and take I said,
- 14:24here, what do we got going on? And there's been a few times
- 14:28we all walk away scratching our hasts. Here you need to call on these
- 14:31engineers cause you got ground and structures and pressures, and they can all do
- 14:37different types of things. And you have hillsides. This is not you know,
- 14:43Florida, Georgia, a lot of places where I've learned it's flat.
- 14:46But in West Virginia you have a cut and fill a lot and cut outside
- 14:50of the mountain, build a house up against it, put to fill out
- 14:54front, and it's this is this is a different, different animal around here.
- 15:00Right Ross Kirks with us Marco Concrete Lifting just now thirty years owner and
- 15:05operator of this business and helped dozens and dozens and dozens of homeowners. Yes.
- 15:11Yeah, And I would like to thank all the people in the valley
- 15:16and the tri State area for having, you know, competence and faith in
- 15:20us to fix you know, their home, because that's, you know,
- 15:22home is a pretty big investment. Oh yeah. And we were talking before
- 15:26we went on the Aaron Ross was talking about, you know, thinking that
- 15:31sometimes you've seen it all, and you've kind of even this year, you've
- 15:35seen some things that you know, if you could share some of that a
- 15:39little bit. It's some of the stuff that we uncover when we go to
- 15:46do the home and a lot of times, you know, I'm looking at
- 15:50it, me and the homeowner, we're just you know, standing in the
- 15:52yard looking at the house, trying to figure out what's going on. I
- 15:56get a good grasp of it. We'll start the project and I'll have one
- 16:00of my foremans say, hey, boss, you need to come down here
- 16:04and see this. I said, what is it? He said, you
- 16:07did not gonna believe this one. And I'm thinking, oh, you know,
- 16:11I've seen everything and to get into the details of it and nobody will
- 16:18understand. I mean, I've seen two storyhouses built on patios with no footer.
- 16:26I've seen h I mean, it's just vast what I've seen in if
- 16:33you can cover it with dirt or if you can cover it up with concrete.
- 16:37A lot of times, you know, people do that front porches.
- 16:42Those are trash cans. You know, when you're building a house, everything
- 16:45goes in the front porch foundation. Then you put sand or gravel in it
- 16:49and put it concrete, and that stuff deteriorates. And we've fixed probably more
- 16:55front porches and than we have anything. Garage floors where they used to use
- 17:03when I guess aimis used to get flash away years before they figured out you
- 17:07could use this stuff. Garage floors build on flash just after time and stuff
- 17:15compresses, dries out, compresses, and then you know, we go in
- 17:18and drew holes in it, pump growd in it, lift it, lift
- 17:22it right back up right. Wow. And I'm sure the homeowners look at
- 17:26that and they're wide eyed and amazed what happens. Oh yeah, And it
- 17:32is as actually, you know, as far as the steel piers that we
- 17:36put in and the helical piers that we put in and and the grouting.
- 17:41It's all this. You know, people think this is a big deal,
- 17:47This is going to be this and that, and when you see us do
- 17:49this, it is And I've told many people I said, this is so
- 17:55simple, stupid. It's just knowing how when we're to do lot, when
- 18:00to do what because it's slow, you know, and everybody wants, oh,
- 18:03I want to be there when you lift the floor, and you know,
- 18:07twenty minutes later you can't find anybody to talk to. Ross. So
- 18:14this is a simple question to pray has an obvious answer. But what are
- 18:17the dangers of not doing anything? If you've noticed some issues? Well,
- 18:22you know, I've had a lot of people ask me, you know,
- 18:23how long do I have? Well, you know, they don't make the
- 18:26batteries for my crystal ball that I used to have. I can't tell you
- 18:30how long you have. The only thing I can tell you is it has
- 18:33the potential to get worse. It's not going to fix itself. And you
- 18:37cannot sell this house until you do that. Until you fix this foundation and
- 18:44put this thing on steel piling. As you know, banks won't lean money
- 18:48on them anymore. Yeah, So what's the process at Marco Concrete Lifting to
- 18:52put the talk about the steel piling? If you would, how you go
- 18:56under it work? Just you talk about Well, first, you you know
- 19:02you're gonna have a down corner downside, dig it out, see what kind
- 19:06of foot you got, Trimmed the foot back to flush with the block,
- 19:11amount of bracket to the foot, drive the piling through the bracket one at
- 19:15a time and when it hits solid, you let the pressure off that one
- 19:19and go the next one. And when you get all that done, the
- 19:22prep workers. Lifting the house doesn't take you know, an hour prepping it
- 19:27can take a month, you know, or two weeks because you never know
- 19:32what you're gonna get into, especially in the older houses like Charleston Huntings and
- 19:37some of the old real old blue blood houses. The technology that they and
- 19:45and and the processes they're used in the forties are not be always the way
- 19:53we see things today. So you know, you get in there, you
- 19:59get your lab out done, which I do that prior to. And you
- 20:04just started at the furthest you know, the corner of that's down the most
- 20:08and that's where you start lifting it. Once you drive the pilon and how
- 20:12has that and you mentioned technology, then we're going to take our break after
- 20:15you answer this. It's eight forty two ross kirks with us a market concrete
- 20:18lifting lifting, How have you How has kind of technology changed in the nearly
- 20:23thirty years you've done it, because you know there's certain things. I'm sure
- 20:26they've changed. Yeah, there's a at our technology. I still use the
- 20:30same system that I did from day one. Yeah, I still got the
- 20:33same drout machine. This wore out five or six trucks. The way things
- 20:41are built, I mean, I mean, nothing surprises me. Nothing.
- 20:48I can't really the technology that some of the stuff that we do is the
- 20:55way it was in ninety six when we started in ninety seven, and then
- 21:00of course we've evolved with technology as well, but it's the same, basically
- 21:03the same thing. But I'll tell you after after last Saturday, nothing surprises
- 21:11me anymore. And you know, my heart and prayers goes out to the
- 21:15people in Pennsylvania and the Trump family and that was just a horrific scene.
- 21:21Yeah, yeah, it really was. But it but I'm sixty five here
- 21:26in October and nothing surprises me. Three four, three four, five fifty
- 21:33eight fifty eight rosses with us Rock Kirk Ross Kirk of Marco Concrete Lifting.
- 21:37We're going to take a run and only break. It's eight forty four three
- 21:40oh four, three four, five fifty eight fifty. Any questions about what
- 21:44they do and how they help homeowners will have more in a moment on five
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- 23:48one zero five five eight wcchs The Voice of Charleston. It's forty seven and
- 24:00we are with Ross Kirky, owner and founder of Marco concrete lifting, local
- 24:06company owned and operated and Ross, there's an important date coming up, and
- 24:11we're just this is this coming Sunday, your anniversary here right of the business.
- 24:15Yes, July twenty first marks twenty eight years. And July twenty first
- 24:23is my grandson's eighth birthday. July twenty second is my granddaughter's fifth birthday.
- 24:32And since I was here last year, we've got another one. They've got
- 24:36a little sister now that's eight months old, seven or eight months old.
- 24:40Wow, a little Riley right, and she's she's the prettiest little butterball you've
- 24:47ever seen. Good, little baby doesn't cry. So you didn't take after
- 24:51your brother and sister. ROSSI when you think back to that time nineteen ninety
- 24:56seven, you sign your name on the dotted line based your son in your
- 25:00life, I mean this is right. I mean you're putting in was it
- 25:06was? It was it scary or you were I mean you had confidence.
- 25:08Obviously you knew you could be successful in things. Well, I knew.
- 25:15There's a big difference between dedication and discipline. And dedication gets you there,
- 25:19discipline keeps you there. I remember I came home, I was done with
- 25:25the car business. And I told my wife, I said, I quit
- 25:27the car business and I want to build a truck that raises sunken concrete.
- 25:32And she looked at me with big tears, and I she said, what
- 25:36I said, trust me to work, bear with me, and we incorporated
- 25:41July twenty first, nineteen ninety seven. And in that October I was roofing
- 25:48helping a friend of mine roof of church, just for food. And she
- 25:52pulls up and said, hey, come here, guess what I said.
- 25:57You got promoted at at and T. She said, no, I'm pregnant
- 26:00and I quit my job. And you talk about heart sinking. And that
- 26:07was she was pregnant with our daughter, Zoe, who just passed her board
- 26:11and is going, uh is going to be an orthopedic surgeon. Oh wow,
- 26:15congratulations. Then yeah, thank you, and she's actually started her rotation.
- 26:21And then about two and a half two and a half years later,
- 26:26I get to call again, guess what, and I went, oh,
- 26:30no, she said, we're having a little boy. I went, oh,
- 26:37okay, wow, he said, and she said, well, if
- 26:41you wait till you can afford kids, you'll never have one. Now you
- 26:45hear that? Yeah, Well, I wish you'd have picked the time.
- 26:48When I go from you six figures to four figures a year. Well,
- 26:55but you know what, ross it says a lot for you, you know,
- 27:00to stick with this. I mean, being a business owner isn't easy.
- 27:04No, obviously, there's ups and downs. You described some of those
- 27:07early, the ups and downs, things out outside your control. Well,
- 27:11the weather, yeah, I mean, you know, and three and four
- 27:15with the three was the wettest year in Westvinia history, only to be broken
- 27:21in four. And when it rains, houses don't settle, and you know,
- 27:26you're only five six years old as far as a business goes. And
- 27:30then you know, in twenty eighteen was the wettest year to date. And
- 27:37but of course now that's twenty some years later and we're established, excuse me,
- 27:42and we had you know, we had worked through that. It was
- 27:45hard. I mean when it like two years ago it rained two feet here
- 27:48in August, I thought, Lord, and in inflation and the diesel fuel
- 27:56for our trucks just is is one of the biggest things you know that we
- 28:02have to the biggest hurdle we have is fuel. Yeah, but here you
- 28:07are twenty eight years, twenty eight years later, and you're still trucking.
- 28:10I mean you're still going, yes, sir, yes, sir. And
- 28:12we've got a very good name because we don't. I've been doing this twenty
- 28:18eight years, twenty nine years, and I go out and tell people,
- 28:21look, let's just fix what little fuss, fix the problem we got here.
- 28:25This stuff's not pretty, it's expensive something, it's the other side of
- 28:29the house or something happens, you know, eight or ten years down.
- 28:32Ready to address it then. But yeah, I started out slab jacking,
- 28:40like I said, raising sidewalks and basement floors and garage floors, and that
- 28:45went into raising Walmart floors, and I mean, you name it, you
- 28:52name it. I've raised it from stamping plant to special metals to I mean,
- 28:59it's just it's endless, right, endless, right. I'm getting ready
- 29:03to lift a drag strip in Mingo County here in the next couple. Wow,
- 29:07dragstrip. Yeah, but a really nice drag strip up on an old
- 29:12strip mine. Okay, so it's it's they've already started it. But one
- 29:17side went down five inches and I got to go and figure out how to
- 29:19get this thing up level. Southern drag race cars now that's a new one.
- 29:23Yeah, And it's well, how has that ross? Just being able
- 29:30to do I mean houses have been obviously the the you know, the probably
- 29:34the most you've had, but just just being able to do other things with
- 29:38this because it's technology, right, I mean, it's it's just not houses,
- 29:42it's other things. It's it's all the same. Yeah, if there's
- 29:47a flat work, if you've got streets, basement floors side, it doesn't
- 29:51matter. It doesn't matter. Now some of them are tougher than the other
- 29:55ones, but you know, if if there's a structure and it's settling,
- 29:59we can move it by cap. If there's flat work, whether it be
- 30:02highways, I've done bridges on I sixty four, we had to shut the
- 30:07interstate down at night, you know I've done. I mean, it's just
- 30:15endless, endless. But we're the ones that they usually call simply because of
- 30:22our experience. And when you do a job as a small business owner,
- 30:26i mean your that's that's your business. I mean your name's on the line.
- 30:30Oh yeah, it's it's done right. Yeah. I mean it might
- 30:33not be the cheapest game in town, but you only got to call me
- 30:36once. But when we start a job, we don't leave until we're finished.
- 30:41I mean, it's not work a day here, day there, and
- 30:42we get on a job, we stay on there until it's finished. We
- 30:48did I did one for Mayor Jones, Danny Jones beside the big patio beside
- 30:56his house and everything on. That truck broke down on Danny Jones's job,
- 31:02but we stayed right there until we finished it. I thought, is there
- 31:06anything else can go wrong with this track? But now it's it's it's been
- 31:11a good business. It's you know, we do a lot of Now people
- 31:15are starting to catch on a new construction, putting deep foundations in before you
- 31:22pour your footter. So it's you know, sitting on steel piling. We've
- 31:26done, drilled, micropiles, grouted, abandoned coal mines, you name it.
- 31:33It's it's it's it's vast the stuff that we can do. And I
- 31:41just had I understood it from from an early point. I understood it.
- 31:45I understood what it takes to do it and how to make it work.
- 31:51And that's from many, many, many many days of being on the end
- 31:56of that nozzle, watching floors come up and what to do, what not
- 32:00to do. It's it's it's it's been a good ride. And well,
- 32:07I've been threatened to retire, you know, for about the last five years.
- 32:12But I'm you know, you're getting groove of this stuff. It's kind
- 32:15of hard to think you'd ever just walk away, right, Well, this
- 32:20is something that you created, yes, sir, Yes, sir, it
- 32:22is. I was. I was, for lack of a better term,
- 32:27the pioneer of this in this valley. And there's a couple of other people
- 32:30that did a little bit here and there. But to do it at at
- 32:36the at the at the at the volume that we've done it, and and
- 32:39the the many, many, many services that we can do and we don't
- 32:49pour concrete. I learned that early on. That's hard work. But it's
- 32:55uh, it's been good to me. It's been stressed full, you know
- 33:00sometimes. But you've helped people. I mean, you're in the business of
- 33:04helping people. And I'm sure they're satisfaction in that too. When people have
- 33:08a bad foundation problem, they are panic stricken, and I try to put
- 33:15them at ease a little bit. I say, hey, look, it's
- 33:17not gonna fall down today. Let me let me look at this, let
- 33:21me figure out what we can do. And you know, but they panic
- 33:25when they said, big crack in the side of the house. Oh no,
- 33:29they're sheet rock cracks. And I think to calm down, it's taking
- 33:34this long to do this. It's not you know, it's not going to
- 33:37implode or fall down tomorrow. So you try to put people to the east
- 33:40for us, right, yeah, because it happened to my house. I
- 33:43bought my first house in Saint Albans. Well it was my third house,
- 33:46but my first one in Saint Albans, and two months later had to put
- 33:50twelve peers under my own house. So it can happen to anybody, right
- 33:54right now, it's it's uh, it's it's good. But like I said,
- 34:00I say, I'm going to retire when I'm sixty seven. It was
- 34:05sixty five now it's sixty seven, so you know, I'll probably be around
- 34:08for until I can't do it anymore. What is the best way to contact
- 34:15Macro Concrete Lifting? What is the best way to get a hold of you
- 34:17guys? Three oh four seven two two L I f T there you go
- 34:22seven to two lift. It's you know, there's a lot operator right,
- 34:30every time you call, you'll get somebody. Yeah, you know it might
- 34:34be me, but we have operators, intake operators, try to get a
- 34:38feel for your problem. Yeah, and then you'll go out and take a
- 34:42look. Somebody will come out and take a look, right, look,
- 34:44Jackson County yesterday, Mingo County last week. I've done work from Virginia to
- 34:53Washington, PA, to Jackson, Ohio, pipe of Kentucky. I mean,
- 35:00we go, we go anywhere anywhere right, anywhere, right right,
- 35:05and take a look at it. And sometimes and just real quick, you're
- 35:07wrong. Sometimes the problem may not be as bad as people think that is
- 35:10correct, and they're scared to death and I said, I have this is
- 35:14nothing. And a lot of times they think something's going on. I say,
- 35:16well, you know, I can tell you that you got a bad
- 35:21problem, but enjoy your house. You don't have a problem. Seeing I've
- 35:25had people, you know, I've had people start crying. I swear I've
- 35:32had people start crying and thinking at their house. I said, there's nothing
- 35:37wrong with it. Well, but yeah, it's it's been a good business.
- 35:42Yeah, it's been a good business. And I'm glad that. You
- 35:45know, again, think the people in this area that tries that area,
- 35:49that has had faith in my company and has faith in us because and you
- 35:54can tell that it's the ethics that's been there because ninety percent of my work
- 36:00is word of mouth. Yes, oh, I still pound advertising, right,
- 36:04which we appreciate. Yeah, I don't. I learned how to advertise
- 36:09in the car business, and I knew that when you advertise, you don't
- 36:14stop. You just keep going a little bit, a lot, a little
- 36:17bit of whatever you get order right, right, right, but don't stop.
- 36:21Right. Well, it's good seeing you. Hey, congratulations on the
- 36:23new grand baby, yes, thank you. And and the two that are
- 36:27getting older now right yeah, yeah, yeah, and congratulations on your business
- 36:31anniversary that's coming up coming up on Sunday, your business anniversary. So it's
- 36:37nice to meet you. I've heard you on the air before, and of
- 36:38course i've heard your song. Yeah, I've heard your name. I've never
- 36:43met because you're the Dale Cooper but uh, it was it was. It
- 36:47was good to meet you, and thank you very much, all right,
- 36:51Ross, thank you a lot. Don't forget Marco Concrete lifting. You can
- 36:53go also to Marcoconcrete dot com. Yes it's their website. Okay, news
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