Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Chad Riddersen & Kyle Voss - Epic Septic Co-Founders | Why Boring Businesses Beat Sexy Startups

Transcript

Chad Riddersen & Kyle Voss - Epic Septic Co-Founders | Why Boring Businesses Beat Sexy Startups · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I need to understand where does this idea come from?
• 0:02
  The idea to do something that doesn't even cross people's minds.
• 0:05
  It's all about just finding a big problem to solve regardless of what industry it is.
• 0:10
  I've always just like helping people.
• 0:12
  Some advice for entrepreneurs, think about how you exit the business.
• 0:15
  Should somebody think about that from day one or is that something that you worry about later on?
• 0:19
  If you were to start at the end of mine, you might actually set a limiting belief for yourself.
• 0:23
  Today's guests are Chad Ritterson and Kyle Voss, the co-founders of Epic Septic and Service.
• 0:27
  Chad brings years of experience in entrepreneurship and marketing, while Kyle is a former professional football player and Marine Corps captain turned entrepreneur.
• 0:36
  Together, they saw an overlooked industry and built Epic to challenge the traditional septic business with bold branding, technology, and a scalable model.
• 0:46
  What would be the hardest lesson you guys had to learn building Epic?
• 0:49
  The hard part about it is like the opportunity cost.
• 0:51
  The moment you have this little soul that you have as like this baby, everything becomes so finite because you like... Oh, this is for a concern.
• 1:01
  You start to miss like a few things.
• 1:03
  Chad's on this journey with me and sacrificing so much time away, missing dinner with his boys, his wife.
• 1:09
  As they get older and more time you spend away, that guilt compounds.
• 1:12
  If you want to do something great, it requires great sacrifice.
• 1:18
  MyFitnessPal is a success story partner.
• 1:20
  Now, everybody wants more energy.
• 1:23
  Everybody wants better sleep.
• 1:24
  Everybody wants to feel sharper during the day, to not hit that wall in the afternoon where your brain just checks out.
• 1:30
  And people try a lot of things to get there.
• 1:32
  So new routines, new supplements, better sleep habits, more coffee, less coffee, all of the above.
• 1:38
  And some of that stuff works, but the single biggest lever you have for how you feel on any given day is what you eat.
• 1:44
  It's not the most exciting answer,
• 1:46
  Nobody's making a viral reel about eating lunch, but food is the foundation, right?
• 1:50
  Your energy, your sleep, your weight, your recovery, how you perform at work, how you feel when you get home.
• 1:56
  It's the one input that touches everything else.
• 1:59
  Now, the problem is that most people have no idea what they're actually eating.
• 2:02
  They have a general sense.
• 2:03
  They can say, I eat pretty healthy, okay, but,
• 2:06
  How much protein are you getting?
• 2:07
  And how does that break down across your day?
• 2:09
  Are you eating enough in the morning?
• 2:11
  Are you stacking everything at night?
• 2:13
  Those details matter a lot.
• 2:14
  And you can't answer those questions without logging what you eat and looking at the data.
• 2:19
  And that's why I use the MyFitnessPal app, because you log what you eat and it shows you exactly what's going on.
• 2:24
  Your macros, for example, that's just your proteins, your carbs, your fats.
• 2:28
  those are broken down by grams.
• 2:29
  And on premium, it breaks those numbers down by meals.
• 2:31
  So you're not just seeing one number for the day, you're seeing what breakfast looks like versus lunch versus dinner, and that changes things.
• 2:38
  Because your body doesn't run on daily averages, it runs on what you give it right now.
• 2:42
  The food analysis, another great feature, it shows you patterns across the week too.
• 2:46
  Where things are consistent, where they start to drift, and you're gonna notice how what you eat impacts your energy and why you wanna stay consistent, and when you don't, why you start to feel like you're hitting walls
• 2:57
  in the afternoon.
• 2:58
  Now the food logging.
• 2:59
  This is where a lot of people think it's going to be a whole thing.
• 3:02
  It's not.
• 3:02
  For example, I can say what I ate out loud.
• 3:05
  There's a voice logging feature and it's done.
• 3:07
  Or I can scan a barcode of something I ate, two seconds.
• 3:10
  There's also a meal scan where I just point my camera at a plate and the app captures exactly what I ate and all the macronutrients.
• 3:18
  And MyFitnessPal has the largest food database out there.
• 3:21
  So whatever I'm eating is already in it.
• 3:23
  And it remembers what I eat regularly.
• 3:25
  Also, it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables.
• 3:28
  So everything goes into one spot, all of my health, wellness, and nutrition.
• 3:33
  So if you have been trying to figure out why your energy dips in the afternoon, or why you're not sleeping as well as you used to, or why you just feel off and you can't put a finger on it, look at your food first, before you buy another supplement or you try some other hack.
• 3:46
  The answer is usually in nutrition.
• 3:49
  And this is the easiest way that I found to actually see what's going into your body and track it and pay attention to it and improve it.
• 3:56
  So do yourself a favor.
• 3:58
  Go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott.
• 4:01
  That's S-C-O-T-T, all uppercase.
• 4:04
  That gives you 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.
• 4:07
  One more time, that is podcast.myfitnesspal.com.
• 4:11
  Code Scott.
• 4:11
  That's giving you 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.
• 4:20
  You guys call yourselves brown collar.
• 4:23
  What does that mean?
• 4:24
  We're the brownest of the blue.
• 4:26
  That's where I, it's something that we've adopted because I come from like Brooks Brothers white investment banking collar.
• 4:34
  Kyle comes from a football pad NFL collar.
• 4:38
  I don't know if there's a collar in that, but that's where for us, like really embracing the dirty aspects of being septic empire builders.
• 4:47
  Yeah.
• 4:48
  When you think about all the different jobs you could do and all the different kinds of businesses you could go into, I don't think most people raise their hands and say, hey, I wanna deal with people's shit.
• 5:02
  I need to understand, as entrepreneurs, where does this idea come from?
• 5:08
  Where is the idea to do something that
• 5:10
  doesn't even cross people's minds?
• 5:13
  Where does it come from?
• 5:14
  That's a loaded question.
• 5:14
  I mean, for me, it's all about just finding a big problem to solve regardless of what industry it is.
• 5:22
  So I think a lot of people, they get predispositioned to doing what's cool in life.
• 5:28
  You know, like I want to go be an investment banker.
• 5:31
  I want to go be an actor.
• 5:32
  I want to do this fun, sexy thing.
• 5:35
  For me personally, like I've always just like helping people, getting my hands dirty, like sweating out in the field.
• 5:42
  Like I started in roofing, you know, that's what I did when I first got out of the Marine Corps.
• 5:47
  And septic's one of those industries that's 10, 15, 20 years behind what...
• 5:55
  big service industry is like plumbing HVAC electrical is like the big, big three or four septics.
• 6:00
  One of those ones that hasn't been touched.
• 6:01
  It's extremely fragmented.
• 6:02
  Um, nobody knows how to brand a market in this industry.
• 6:04
  And we saw that it was like, Hey, there's a big problem to solve septic in itself.
• 6:08
  A hundred to $150 billion total addressable market.
• 6:11
  There's tons of opportunity out there.
• 6:13
  Nobody's grabbed that bull by the tail or by the horns and went after it.
• 6:17
  And we're trying to do that.
• 6:19
  You know, this reminds me of, do you know who Scott Galloway is?
• 6:22
  Have you seen his content before?
• 6:23
  He's like a business podcaster, but he has this idea that everybody wants to go into vanity businesses.
• 6:32
  And a vanity business could be like an actor or an athlete or podcasting is very much a vanity business.
• 6:38
  Like it's like so sexy, even like being a startup software founder.
• 6:43
  Yeah, it gets glamorized.
• 6:44
  Vanity business.
• 6:46
  But the issue is in vanity businesses, like 0.001% of people really make money.
• 6:53
  Like how many podcasts out of all the podcasts on earth make over $100 million?
• 6:58
  Well, okay, Jay Shetty just got a deal.
• 7:01
  Joe Rogan's got a deal.
• 7:02
  Maybe Howard Stern has a fire SiriusXM deal.
• 7:06
  There's not a lot of podcasters that make real money.
• 7:09
  And these are not even, you know, billion-dollar unicorn podcasts are just...
• 7:14
  significant deals.
• 7:15
  But in all of these unsexy industries, it's not the 0.001%.
• 7:22
  If you are in like the top 1% or even the top like 5% of septic and there's a whole bunch of other unsexy, non-van, like you're flying private, you're killing it, your life is incredibly good.
• 7:36
  Why do so many people stay away from these unsexy jobs when there's so much money in it?
• 7:42
  I'll take a crack at that because...
• 7:45
  I'm the eldest child.
• 7:47
  I have wonderful parents.
• 7:48
  And not that they push me in any direction, but there is like, there may be like this external vanity that comes from like making my family proud.
• 7:57
  And that's something that going out of school and then going into investment banking, it's like, okay, like Chad's got it.
• 8:03
  Like that made sense from everybody's perspective.
• 8:06
  And then you kind of,
• 8:09
  You kind of go along in a career and there was an episode that you did where you were talking about career reinvention.
• 8:15
  And there's, you know, I think the likelihood of maintaining the same position role industry for an entire career, unless you're a podcaster, like it's pretty low.
• 8:25
  And so...
• 8:26
  Having this career reinvention, the odd thing, as I've had my own kind of reinvention and reincarnations in my career, which went from like iBanking to owning a marketing agency, now in a poop-pumping business, like that's something where my father,
• 8:42
  is like most proud of me now.
• 8:43
  He's like, Oh, finally you're doing something like for real.
• 8:46
  And so it's like all this time I was like a big charade thinking I was making mom and dad proud, which is something that I think is like just very much baked into my subconscious.
• 8:57
  The, the funny thing is like, this is the one thing they're like, Oh, this is going to be the big one.
• 9:00
  Chad, good word.
• 9:01
  So I think everybody has that expectation.
• 9:03
  I've actually, I don't know which podcast you're listening to, but I I've mentioned this several times where, uh,
• 9:10
  What people think success is, career success or, you know, other parts of their life, who they marry, where they live, a lot of it is dependent on what their parents actually sort of embed into their subconscious when they're kids.
• 9:22
  And I don't think a lot of people ever challenge it.
• 9:24
  And then I think one day you wake up and you're like, why am I even living the life that I'm living?
• 9:28
  And...
• 9:30
  There's a lot of reasons why people don't go into unsexy, like hard businesses.
• 9:36
  But to your point, I don't think a lot of people who are in your position who feel like
• 9:42
  their family wants them to do this thing, go into investment banking, go into the white collar corporate job, make a lot of money in a different way.
• 9:49
  I feel, I don't even think they really check to see if it's what they want, if it's what their family wants, if it's just what they think their family wants.
• 10:00
  And we kind of just live life on autopilot.
• 10:02
  And most people don't wake up until they're like 50, 60, and then they have this midlife, late life crisis about what am I doing with my life.
• 10:09
  So you kind of, Kyle, I don't know your whole story compared to Chad, but you kind of woke up and you said, the path that I'm on is not for me.
• 10:19
  This is like, I'm not getting lit up by this job in investment banking.
• 10:24
  Like, how do I do something?
• 10:26
  I'm still entrepreneurial.
• 10:27
  I still want to build something.
• 10:28
  I still want to be successful.
• 10:29
  Let me take a different road.
• 10:30
  So I'm curious.
• 10:32
  Chad, what made you pivot and sort of come to this realization way younger than most people?
• 10:39
  But then also, Kyle, did you have a similar story or is yours a little bit different?
• 10:42
  Mine's a little bit different.
• 10:44
  I kind of my story starting back, I'll start in college.
• 10:48
  Like I come from a small town in Texas.
• 10:51
  And, you know, my dad beat into me like sports, sports, sports, sports, sports.
• 10:55
  So you got to be a good athlete.
• 10:57
  Still a lot of expectations from the parents, though.
• 10:58
  Lots of excitation from the parents.
• 11:00
  It's like, go to college, get a degree, all that stuff.
• 11:02
  And I followed that.
• 11:03
  I was a good football player.
• 11:05
  I had a chance to play in a collegial level, played professionally for a brief stint.
• 11:08
  Then when I retired, a step away from football, I came back to America, and I got a corporate job.
• 11:13
  I got a software sales job.
• 11:15
  I was beating my head against the computer all day, every day.
• 11:18
  And my best friend I made...
• 11:21
  In college, he was a recon Marine.
• 11:23
  So our special form of special forces.
• 11:25
  I would call him every day just as like a confidant.
• 11:28
  It's like, hey, Aaron, I hate my job.
• 11:30
  Like, what do I do?
• 11:31
  He's like, Kyle, if you call me one more time and complain about where you're at in life without making a change, I'm going to fly down there.
• 11:37
  I'm going to drag you out of your office.
• 11:38
  I'm going to make you go quit your job and tell your boss like a little child.
• 11:41
  And you're going to come move in with me into a small town.
• 11:44
  I'm really you're going to join the Marine Corps.
• 11:45
  I'm like, yeah, right, whatever.
• 11:47
  Three days later, he knocks on my door because I shot him a text like I'm done.
• 11:51
  He's like, let's go.
• 11:52
  And I quit my job literally two days later.
• 11:54
  He helps.
• 11:55
  He called a moving company, helped me pack up my apartment.
• 11:58
  And I moved in with him.
• 11:59
  I because I I was drinking.
• 12:01
  I gained a bunch of weight after football.
• 12:02
  I was kind of like just lost, you know.
• 12:05
  And I went from, you know, three-mile time, 30 minutes, down to 19.
• 12:09
  I joined the Marine Corps and did that for 8 to 10 years, and I never looked back.
• 12:13
  And after the Marine Corps, I got off active duty four and a half years at this point.
• 12:18
  It was the next big transition in my life, and that one was even harder.
• 12:20
  It hit me like a break.
• 12:21
  For all the veterans listening out there, you probably relate.
• 12:24
  You get out.
• 12:26
  You do it for so long and you get out to the real world and you're like, man, what the hell is this?
• 12:31
  You're like, what do I do with my life?
• 12:33
  And I took a six-month hiatus just trying to figure it out.
• 12:37
  And my best friend, my other good friend who I played college football in, he ran one of the largest home remodeling companies in Austin.
• 12:44
  Their $100 million office called Power Home Remodeling.
• 12:47
  He's like, Kyle, you're not doing anything.
• 12:49
  Why don't you come work for me?
• 12:50
  I'm like, all right, what do you want me to do?
• 12:52
  He's like...
• 12:53
  you're going to come knock doors for me and generate leads for my sales reps.
• 12:56
  He's like, it's something for you to do.
• 12:57
  I'm like, okay, whatever.
• 12:58
  So I come fresh off the boat, my last deployment, leading 160 Marines on my last deployment as, as you know, as an officer to my first civilian job, knocking on doors for a roofing company, getting spit on and screamed at.
• 13:10
  My first week I got a guy pull a gun on me.
• 13:11
  I'm like, I'm right back where I need to be.
• 13:13
  This is awesome.
• 13:14
  And I, I,
• 13:16
  What that taught me, it, it, one, it, it helped me transition from military civilian life, but two, it, it gave me, it built, helped build the skills that I need to like be successful.
• 13:26
  Not only, not only in like society, but in the service business.
• 13:28
  Cause if you can go around and knock doors for a roofing company, really successful, you, you can, you can do anything, you know, it's, you gotta be pretty fearless when it comes to that.
• 13:35
  So I.
• 13:37
  I did that.
• 13:37
  I became the number one sales rep in the company of like 3,000 sales reps. Made more money I knew what to do with.
• 13:42
  I started my own roofing consulting business after that and went to go sell for a bunch of local mom and pop shops because they need to get sales reps. And I saw private equity get involved.
• 13:50
  I started rolling up roofing companies, the guys that I consulted for, and everything went to crap.
• 13:56
  And I didn't want to be dependent on an industry that's dependent on the weather either and insurance companies.
• 14:01
  So I was like, okay, what's next?
• 14:02
  And this is actually a good segue to how we got into septic.
• 14:05
  I want to like also just unpack like how did you – because you've both gone through so many different reinventions.
• 14:11
  So I want to go into septic, but I also want to understand like advice for people that are in both of your situations because the situations you just spoke about –
• 14:21
  coming from a family of high expectations, sports and career, and then you going through military, reinventing the civilian life, going through employee, reinventing the entrepreneur.
• 14:32
  I think you just literally spoke to like a couple hundred million people that are struggling in life and not happy.
• 14:39
  So like I need advice on how you did this successfully.
• 14:41
  Can I jump in real quick?
• 14:42
  Yeah, you can.
• 14:43
  Because I want to modify, like, I wasn't fully unhappy.
• 14:48
  Like, I actually liked going through the investment banking side, and I liked what I was doing before.
• 14:52
  But there was something deep down inside that was like, there is something else.
• 14:57
  And, like, that's actually the harder, in my opinion, the harder...
• 15:02
  reason for making a change it's if you're like if you're pretty happy it's way harder to try to try to leave that behind and go for something great because if you hate your life and you hate your job which a lot of people kind of get to that point eventually like it's a little bit easier like okay i'm gonna go like it's gotta be better than this the real hard transition is like i'm sitting in a fortune 500 job i'm making good money you know selling to whatever you know
• 15:23
  selling to Fortune 500 companies, like doing that whole thing, but to then go and take a leap into media or go take a leap into a septic tank or whatever you end up doing in life, like that actually is the probably more challenging decision to make in life.
• 15:38
  You don't know what's on the other side until you take the leap.
• 15:41
  If you're somebody sitting at your job right now, you're not happy, but you have that deep fire inside, like telling you to do something, listen to it.
• 15:48
  Something great's on the other side.
• 15:49
  You just have to take a leap and believe in yourself.
• 15:52
  Cut out what all your parents tell you, what your friends tell you, the pure pressure of society.
• 15:56
  If you believe in something, just go for it.
• 15:58
  Just like you, Scott.
• 15:59
  Did you ever think you were going to be a successful podcast?
• 16:02
  No, but but you but but you're like, dang, this is this is something that makes me happy.
• 16:06
  It fires me up.
• 16:07
  You came from a really demanding family, law enforcement.
• 16:10
  Dad was in special CIA.
• 16:11
  I don't know how much I can disclose on the podcast, but everything I've known about you and he was a hard ass.
• 16:16
  He was a hard ass.
• 16:16
  Right.
• 16:17
  But like.
• 16:18
  He's like, you're doing what?
• 16:19
  Like, you know, but look at you now.
• 16:21
  You believe in yourself.
• 16:22
  You took the leap.
• 16:23
  And if you never take the leap, you're never going to know what the other side looks like, man.
• 16:28
  I've reinvented myself so many times.
• 16:31
  It's not even funny.
• 16:32
  Football, Marine Corps, a bunch of jobs.
• 16:34
  People are like, what are you doing, Kyle?
• 16:35
  But I'm here now.
• 16:36
  And you'll find the thing.
• 16:37
  It could take you 20 times to find the thing.
• 16:40
  You will find the thing if you keep trying.
• 16:42
  Now listen, a lot of people, this is my biggest issue with everybody who's listening, who will listen to this and not do shit.
• 16:49
  Yes.
• 16:49
  With the information.
• 16:50
  They'll get motivated for two minutes and be like, no.
• 16:52
  I'm like, you know what?
• 16:54
  If you just write down one thing and then do it and you stop listening to my podcast and your life changed, like, you know, job well done, Scott.
• 17:00
  I'd be happy with that.
• 17:03
  There's two ideas that are really important.
• 17:06
  One, you need to take action.
• 17:07
  And if you're talking about golden handcuffs, if you feel like life's good but not great, doesn't matter.
• 17:12
  Like you live once, go do it.
• 17:13
  But the second thing about going into septic in particular and dirty jobs, it's,
• 17:21
  There's so many options to make money and live a life that you have not thought about ever.
• 17:27
  And I think that's not discussed enough.
• 17:32
  How many ways there are to make money.
• 17:36
  I don't know.
• 17:36
  I feel like it's like sometimes I feel like I'm oversimplifying.
• 17:40
  But if you just spend enough time focused on one thing, figuring it out, and you find a way to not have to quit that thing.
• 17:47
  I don't care if it's septic, podcasting, like outside of maybe you weren't born seven foot five and you're not going to play in the NBA.
• 17:55
  Most things most people can figure out.
• 17:56
  They put enough energy and time and resources towards that thing.
• 17:59
  In our society, we're distracted, you know, and we have this phone and we get motivated.
• 18:05
  I would say as long as you're curious, if you stay curious and you consistently seek knowledge and consistently try to learn new things, you'll find your thing.
• 18:14
  It's the golden handcuffs, like torture that, oh, I got this $250,000 a year tech job.
• 18:20
  I get to drive my Corvette.
• 18:21
  Everybody, I'm cool.
• 18:22
  Look at me.
• 18:22
  But deep down inside, you know, you're meant for something more.
• 18:25
  It's like, dude, just go do it, man.
• 18:28
  But I also want to add, there is power in the reinvention because- There is, yeah.
• 18:32
  Like if I were to put myself on a scale of investment banking, when I was like fresh out of school, I was like, I was at like, you know, mid-pack and, you know, but then I go and do marketing.
• 18:41
  I was like the guy who was the marketing agency owner that also knew investment banking.
• 18:46
  And I put myself in this like nice little category.
• 18:48
  And then we get into septic, which we haven't really talked about a whole lot.
• 18:51
  But like now we're all of these things that kind of- But does experience come?
• 18:56
  It's like that's where the magic is.
• 18:58
  Like the magic is actually in the reinvention because with your Fortune 500 experience, you can go land HubSpot as an advertiser.
• 19:06
  LinkedIn as an advertiser.
• 19:08
  Hewell as an advertiser.
• 19:10
  But not everyone can do that.
• 19:11
  Like it's because you can go sell and you have that meta skill set that puts you in the room with these huge companies and you're like,
• 19:18
  Yeah, this audience that's listening to this most valuable audience in the world.
• 19:22
  Literally, there's not a more valuable audience than what you have.
• 19:24
  People looking to make a change in business like that's there's nothing bigger than that.
• 19:29
  Still, I need to know.
• 19:30
  I need to understand because you all the different mental models that we're talking about.
• 19:35
  These are things that you both live.
• 19:37
  So what's interesting to me is, I don't know, maybe you'd listen to a podcast or had some inspiration, but I always like to understand why do Chad and Kyle look at the world differently than 99% of people?
• 19:48
  Why were you able to reinvent yourself repeatedly, go into an industry that really nobody has ever thought about going into when you didn't have parents that were in it, didn't have like a friend that was like, hey, I just had a hundred million dollar, billion dollar exit in septic.
• 20:00
  Like without the influence, people rarely take action.
• 20:03
  So what happened in your lives?
• 20:05
  Call me crazy.
• 20:06
  I don't know, but I've always loved, ever since I was a little kid, it started with sports.
• 20:12
  And I was never the fastest.
• 20:14
  I was never the strongest.
• 20:15
  And everybody always told me no.
• 20:16
  Every time I would like speak things into existence, like, no, Kyle, you can't start on varsity as a freshman.
• 20:20
  No, Kyle, you can't do this.
• 20:21
  No, Kyle, you can't go play college football.
• 20:23
  I wanted to prove people wrong.
• 20:25
  And I always want to put myself in the hardest environments possible just because I'm crazy.
• 20:30
  I always want to surround myself with people who are better than me, just consistently push myself.
• 20:34
  And to answer the question, like I.
• 20:38
  Again, call me crazy, but I put myself in positions to get my ass kicked.
• 20:42
  And through those ass kickings I've had every single year, it's built the calluses to help see the world in a different life.
• 20:47
  But if you're not willing to put yourself out there and get your ass kicked and actually enjoy it, like it's probably not for you.
• 20:54
  Entrepreneurship is probably not for you because it's not for the weak and it's been hard.
• 20:58
  This hasn't been an easy journey at all, but I enjoy every single minute of it.
• 21:03
  It's exhilarating.
• 21:04
  And someone who's listening to the success podcast here, the success story podcast, halfway through, you're already in your own rarefied territory.
• 21:13
  Like to be here listening to this right now puts you in a spot where you could have watched TikToks and scrolled into some deep, dark meme cave.
• 21:23
  I want to give people credit, too, for what they're doing actively as, like, they're listening to this.
• 21:27
  Because, like, there's so much distraction, which we're talking about.
• 21:31
  But to listen to long form, like you have here, and to really ingest this.
• 21:35
  Like, the only reason that we're on this, there's a guy named Richard Sloss.
• 21:38
  We call him number uno.
• 21:39
  Shout out Richard Kansas City.
• 21:41
  Yeah, and he was, like, he, like, sent us you, and he was, like...
• 21:45
  I have to go buy him a beer.
• 21:47
  We do need to buy him.
• 21:49
  He likes beer.
• 21:49
  He was like, this guy's legit.
• 21:51
  Like, the people that he interviews are insane.
• 21:53
  Like, he was talking about, like, all the things that you've talked about throughout these.
• 21:58
  And then the through lines, which I think there's the entrepreneurial through line, the bet on yourself through line.
• 22:03
  Like, being able to just, like, go out.
• 22:06
  We were talking in the preamble here, like, to be aggressive.
• 22:09
  I think as a characteristic in a lot of...
• 22:13
  like places in society being aggressive has been like something that you're like oh you can't can't be too aggressive like you can't want it that much but like you were talking about you want to get your ass kicked like that's an aggressive statement and i think there are realms where that degree of aggression is warranted septic is one of those certainly but like just aspects of business if you want something go after it aggressively
• 22:34
  Well, I know we still haven't answered the question how we got in the septic.
• 22:36
  I don't even know what's the question.
• 22:37
  Oh, that one.
• 22:39
  Which I could segue into that.
• 22:40
  Go for it.
• 22:40
  Okay, so how we got in the septic, finally.
• 22:44
  Tangent, tangent, tangent.
• 22:47
  So it came.
• 22:47
  So again, four and a half years ago or so, I got a factory Marine Corps, went into roofing, was making a transition, and I was done with roofing.
• 22:55
  Insurance companies raising premiums 2%.
• 22:57
  Everybody and their mom, there's no regulation or rules for roofing.
• 23:00
  So anybody with a hat and a shirt and a truck can start a roofing company, especially in Texas.
• 23:04
  There's no license requirement.
• 23:05
  It's the Wild West.
• 23:06
  And I was like, okay, well, I need a little bit more something defensible to bet the next 20 years of my life on.
• 23:13
  Ironically, true story, my neighbor at the time, sweet old lady, she's like 72 years old.
• 23:18
  I see this truck roll in.
• 23:20
  It looked like something out of a horror movie.
• 23:21
  It was rusted to all get out.
• 23:23
  Had no sign on the side.
• 23:25
  The guy that got out had no teeth.
• 23:27
  Smelled like pot.
• 23:27
  Like literally opened the door.
• 23:28
  Just whoosh, right in your face.
• 23:30
  And I'm like, okay, well.
• 23:32
  I fixed that.
• 23:33
  And then he took 15 minutes, pumped out one portion of the tank.
• 23:36
  No, we don't know now.
• 23:37
  All you pumpers out there, you know, you just don't pump one section of the tank.
• 23:41
  Left, charged her $1,500.
• 23:44
  And she was like freaking out.
• 23:45
  She's like, I don't know what to do, Kyle.
• 23:46
  So I followed him.
• 23:47
  I found him at a gas station.
• 23:48
  I said, hey, brother, you need to come back and finish your job.
• 23:50
  I convinced him in a very nice way.
• 23:52
  To come back and finish.
• 23:53
  So he was just scamming old ladies.
• 23:55
  He was scamming everybody.
• 23:56
  But this is the septic industry.
• 23:58
  And I'm like, I can fix that.
• 24:00
  And this is like, I don't care what it is.
• 24:02
  Septic, you know, carpet cleaning.
• 24:04
  It's like, okay, I can fix that.
• 24:06
  That's what I can fix.
• 24:07
  So I went to Chad.
• 24:07
  I'm like, Chad.
• 24:09
  This is it.
• 24:10
  I do guys know each other.
• 24:11
  We're brother-in-law.
• 24:12
  Yeah, yeah.
• 24:12
  Oh, that's right.
• 24:13
  Okay, so you're, okay, I understand.
• 24:14
  Our wives are sister, not married.
• 24:15
  I used to say our wives are married.
• 24:16
  It got really weird.
• 24:17
  No, I corrected it.
• 24:19
  We're not in a polygamous situation.
• 24:21
  That got me thinking.
• 24:22
  I'm like, then I went to my wife, and I bought the truck before I even got Chad involved, by the way.
• 24:27
  Did you even get Natalie's permission?
• 24:28
  No.
• 24:29
  You're still an investment banker.
• 24:30
  So at that point, Markie and Asia.
• 24:32
  Markie and Asia, okay.
• 24:33
  marketing.
• 24:33
  So I, I will on a whim, on a whim.
• 24:35
  I'm like, this is it.
• 24:36
  Boom.
• 24:37
  Light bulb.
• 24:37
  I called my Mac daddy, Mike, shout out Mac daddy, Mike, uh, who's our Mac dealer.
• 24:42
  He's a character.
• 24:43
  He'd be an interesting guy to have a show, but I'm like, make me a septic truck.
• 24:47
  I don't know what I'm doing.
• 24:48
  Go.
• 24:48
  So what did I do?
• 24:49
  I bought the most expensive,
• 24:50
  Expensive septic truck.
• 24:51
  I got raked over the coals on the first one still have it Really great, but I didn't know anything about it.
• 24:56
  We we put a really cool brand on it I wrapped it I was watching YouTube videos on my way to my first pump out We put a little Google map location had no idea what I was doing and first call comes in.
• 25:06
  I'm like, oh my god Like yeah, sir.
• 25:08
  He's like hey man, I need it pumped out.
• 25:09
  Can you make it out here?
• 25:11
  You know in the next couple I was like, yeah, sure man.
• 25:12
  I got you covered.
• 25:13
  He's like how much you charge?
• 25:14
  I'm like, I'm
• 25:15
  I don't know, like, yeah, 500 bucks.
• 25:16
  She's like, yeah, done, come out.
• 25:18
  And I was like $300 less than like everybody else in the area, you know?
• 25:21
  And I was like, okay, what am I doing?
• 25:23
  Watching YouTube videos.
• 25:24
  I show up.
• 25:24
  I'm like, oh, there's the green lid.
• 25:25
  Let's unscrew that.
• 25:26
  And I did it, and I got paid, and I was hooked.
• 25:29
  And, I mean, I don't know if we talk about like where we're like going to that.
• 25:33
  But that's how we got into it.
• 25:33
  That's how I literally just figured it out.
• 25:38
  Well, in the artillery community, I don't know if I can cuss on the podcast.
• 25:41
  You can if you want, but.
• 25:43
  You can bleep it out.
• 25:43
  But in the artillery community in the Marine Corps, it's called Fifi.
• 25:46
  Fuck it.
• 25:47
  Fire it.
• 25:47
  Okay.
• 25:48
  Fifi.
• 25:49
  Yeah.
• 25:50
  It's Fifi.
• 25:50
  So I full sent.
• 25:52
  Dispired it.
• 25:53
  Didn't know anything.
• 25:56
  I paid $200,000 on a truck.
• 25:58
  Didn't know what I was doing.
• 25:58
  And the first month I did $25,000 my first month.
• 26:02
  Just me behind the truck.
• 26:03
  Based on YouTube videos.
• 26:04
  On YouTube.
• 26:05
  Me just learning out on the fly.
• 26:06
  I do.
• 26:06
  Yeah.
• 26:07
  Yeah.
• 26:07
  And then you can go into the rest.
• 26:08
  But that's how we got into the septic industry.
• 26:09
  I think technically it wasn't 25.
• 26:11
  It was like 22 and change.
• 26:12
  Because we're under this whole like FDD, like because it's franchised now.
• 26:16
  And so like.
• 26:17
  We got to be careful.
• 26:18
  And then, and then it was like 56.
• 26:20
  I get a little lower.
• 26:22
  Yeah.
• 26:23
  Okay.
• 26:24
  54.
• 26:25
  And then it was like.
• 26:26
  I don't, I don't know the difference.
• 26:27
  So like if you get yourselves in trouble from.
• 26:29
  Yeah, no, no, it's okay.
• 26:30
  No, we will.
• 26:31
  We always toe the lines.
• 26:32
  We got a legal team.
• 26:34
  It was a million dollar run rate in the first 90 days of business.
• 26:37
  And it's like, oh, damn, the trades?
• 26:39
  You're telling me I worked like how long to get to a million dollars?
• 26:42
  I worked years to make an agency that was doing a million dollars.
• 26:45
  By the way, you're talking about your franchise disclosures.
• 26:48
  Yeah, that's what we're talking about.
• 26:49
  I understand.
• 26:49
  Yeah, yeah.
• 26:50
  Okay.
• 26:50
  Which we're in the clear on all that stuff.
• 26:52
  This is in the clear, public record.
• 26:54
  We already have soiled.
• 26:56
  We're safe.
• 26:57
  But the point is, in 90 days, you had a million dollar.
• 27:01
  So run rate.
• 27:02
  Run rate.
• 27:02
  Run rate.
• 27:03
  Okay, okay, okay.
• 27:04
  And so that's where.
• 27:05
  So like 83.33.
• 27:07
  Yeah.
• 27:08
  That's incredible.
• 27:09
  But this thing was, and this thing was.
• 27:10
  And it's a recurring revenue business.
• 27:11
  So there's, well, yeah, that's a great, great segue.
• 27:14
  There's five pillars to the segment.
• 27:15
  Got a lot of questions.
• 27:16
  Scott, five here in questions.
• 27:19
  For those of you who don't know anything about the septic industry, what is septic?
• 27:22
  Let me give you a brief history lesson on septic.
• 27:24
  All right.
• 27:25
  On-site wastewater, all right?
• 27:27
  Your billion-dollar wastewater treatment facility in Miami that treats all people's poop here in Miami.
• 27:33
  That same process of trash to aeration to treatment to in your Dasani water bottles, right?
• 27:41
  That's it.
• 27:42
  I'm just saying it.
• 27:45
  There's never an average chance of ever getting a designer sponsor.
• 27:49
  So straight.
• 27:49
  They're not owned by Coca-Cola or anything.
• 27:51
  Don't quote me on this.
• 27:52
  I believe this is like 82.75% accurate.
• 27:56
  I don't know.
• 27:57
  But back in the 80s, I think it was Reagan.
• 27:59
  I don't know.
• 28:00
  I don't know my president.
• 28:01
  I don't know my president's Reagan, not Roosevelt.
• 28:03
  Roosevelt's way.
• 28:03
  There's lots of.
• 28:04
  Yeah.
• 28:05
  But back in the 80s, every the whole thing was I'm putting it.
• 28:08
  We're providing.
• 28:09
  city infrastructure for everybody.
• 28:10
  We're going to put you on city sewer water utilities.
• 28:12
  Everybody's getting supported by us, you know?
• 28:15
  And they figured out real fast it was expensive to take that city sewer line all the way out.
• 28:19
  So all the people on the outskirts of the city, their water wasn't being treated.
• 28:24
  So people were getting sick.
• 28:26
  There were harmful pathogens, viruses, bacterias getting spread into people's drinking water.
• 28:30
  And like, oh, we need to figure something out.
• 28:32
  So on-site wastewater became a thing.
• 28:35
  The same technology that you have in your billion dollar wastewater treatment facility here in Miami is in a package unit in people's homes.
• 28:43
  It's called Onsite Wastewater Treatment Facility, OSSF.
• 28:47
  And that is a 100 plus billion dollar a year industry.
• 28:52
  across the country.
• 28:53
  People don't realize it.
• 28:54
  So back to the five pillars.
• 28:56
  A lot of people think we just pump poop.
• 28:57
  That is far from the truth.
• 28:59
  We do.
• 29:00
  We do that.
• 29:01
  We do.
• 29:01
  But there's pumping, which is pillar one, residential, commercial, grease traps and things like that fall into that category.
• 29:07
  You have maintenance with recurring revenue.
• 29:09
  So in certain states, and we can get into the craziness of septic across the country, but for high level stuff.
• 29:15
  Maintenance contracts, certain states, Texas, I can speak for Texas, for example, if you have an aerobic septic system, which is a certain type of septic system, the states and the counties require you as the homeowner to contract with a licensed maintenance provider in the septic side to come out three to four times a year, and it's mailbox money.
• 29:33
  You go out, you do the inspections, you have to file paperwork with the county to make sure that septic system is not dumping untreated water into the water table.
• 29:40
  Does that make sense?
• 29:42
  The third one is repairs.
• 29:43
  So there's that middle layer of things break on these systems.
• 29:45
  You go fix it.
• 29:47
  The fourth one, which is like big ticket items, is new system installs.
• 29:50
  So for range of reference, like residential installs, you look at, depending on the market you're in, like $20,000 to $60,000 to $100,000 on the residential side per install.
• 30:01
  And then on decentralized wastewater treatment facilities, on the commercial side, 3,000 gallons per day and up, you're looking at $300,000 to $30 million on that.
• 30:11
  When you get into that, it's the infrastructure business, right?
• 30:15
  And anytime you see like a pump truck on the road, this industry is run by small owner operators.
• 30:21
  There are some that rise to the top because a lot of guys start off in residential and then they get their first commercial job and they get hooked and they totally like just forget about that business altogether.
• 30:30
  But what sets us apart is we're true full service.
• 30:34
  We do all five pillars in our business.
• 30:36
  Inspections was the fifth one.
• 30:37
  The inspections, real estate for resale inspections is the fifth one.
• 30:40
  If you go, if you do your market research, pumpers typically only do pumping.
• 30:45
  It's super fragmented.
• 30:46
  Maintenance providers only run a maintenance provider service business.
• 30:50
  They don't do pumping and repairs.
• 30:52
  Installers only do installs and then inspect.
• 30:55
  They all kind of all do inspections, but they all refer business to each other.
• 30:58
  So it's like a good old boys network.
• 31:01
  But we're like, why do we want to leave all the other revenue on the table?
• 31:03
  Let's become full service.
• 31:05
  So if you look at every single septic company across the country, I would say the less than 1% of them are true full service.
• 31:10
  Is it because it's the case of, oh, it's just always the way we've done it?
• 31:15
  And then nobody wants to improve, modernize, change, whatever.
• 31:19
  And that's the opportunity.
• 31:20
  It's that.
• 31:21
  And then there's a big barrier to entry in the septic business.
• 31:24
  Capital equipment, right?
• 31:26
  Not a lot of people have money to fund, like keep reinvesting into the business.
• 31:30
  How much to get in?
• 31:31
  I mean, well, we can talk about the franchise, but if you were just an owner-operator and wanted to buy a used truck, you can buy a used truck for $150,000.
• 31:40
  Okay.
• 31:41
  You know?
• 31:41
  So it's not money.
• 31:42
  It's not zero.
• 31:43
  It's not a million.
• 31:45
  Right.
• 31:45
  Yeah, but the other problem with this industry is, unlike plumbing, HVAC, electrical, what's the fourth one I always forget?
• 31:51
  Roofing.
• 31:51
  Roofing.
• 31:52
  There it is.
• 31:53
  There's like industry-wide training programs.
• 31:57
  There's university technical trade schools for these universities.
• 32:00
  Plumbing and HVAC and electrical, I think it's 10,000 hours to get your journeyman or 8,000 to 10,000 hours to get your journeyman.
• 32:07
  So it's like when you get out into the field, you know what you're doing.
• 32:11
  In septic, talent pool is like...
• 32:14
  shrunk, right?
• 32:16
  The amount of time it takes to get your license in the state of Texas, it's a one-day course, and you pass one test, and you have your license within a month.
• 32:23
  That's it.
• 32:24
  There's no 10,000 hours to get your license.
• 32:25
  Then you can do whatever you want.
• 32:27
  Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner.
• 32:29
  Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga.
• 32:32
  I've actually had him on the show.
• 32:34
  I met him in person, and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword.
• 32:37
  calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley.
• 32:40
  The book is Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.
• 32:43
  About 170 pages.
• 32:45
  It's already a national bestseller.
• 32:47
  It's his framework for figuring out whether an idea is actually worth going after before you put serious time and money into it.
• 32:53
  Not theory, the way he actually does it, and he's repeatedly built successful businesses.
• 32:57
  On top of that, you can read it in a weekend.
• 32:59
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• 33:02
  So right now, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash success, you get two copies for $32.
• 33:08
  That's $16 each.
• 33:09
  Mark is paying for the second copy himself because he wants you to give it to somebody, a friend who's been sitting on an idea, someone who needs to push, whoever.
• 33:16
  That's getmarksbook.com slash success.
• 33:19
  Mark with a K. Buy one.
• 33:21
  Second one's free.
• 33:22
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• 33:24
  People always ask me how I have time to track what I eat, pay attention to my nutrition when I have a daily podcast, I have a weekly podcast, I have a newsletter, I run a marketing agency, my days are super full.
• 33:33
  But honestly, that's exactly why I have to do it.
• 33:35
  See, when you're running that many things, when you are a high performing person, you cannot afford to have your energy be inconsistent.
• 33:42
  Food is a foundation for everything, for energy, for sleep, for weight, for recovery, for performance.
• 33:46
  And the days when I'm not paying attention to what I'm eating,
• 33:49
  I feel it.
• 33:50
  The MyFitnessPal app makes tracking a non-issue.
• 33:52
  I can say what I ate, it has voice logging, or I can point my camera at a plate with meal scan and it figures out what's there.
• 33:59
  See, I'm not sitting around entering all my ingredients.
• 34:02
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• 34:04
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• 34:10
  One picture of what's happening instead of having to piece everything together myself.
• 34:14
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• 34:15
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• 34:19
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• 34:21
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• 34:27
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• 34:31
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• 34:33
  Every entrepreneur, founder, CEO is listening right now needs to pay attention.
• 34:38
  I have a question for you.
• 34:39
  When a buyer asks AI for a solution or a product that your business sells, does your business come up?
• 34:47
  The answer is that most companies have no idea.
• 34:50
  They don't know if their name shows up in any of the AI tools, chat, perplexity, clod, and by the time they find out, they have lost tons of traffic and tons of deals to someone who did show up.
• 35:04
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• 35:06
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• 35:13
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• 35:18
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• 35:22
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• 35:28
  They are the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
• 35:32
  You want to hire somebody, you have to have your own standards or you're going to have like this very wide range.
• 35:38
  We have core values and we have a higher standard, but the best hires we've ever made in our organization come from outside the industry.
• 35:44
  And I want to bring it up to, like, the 30,000-foot level a little bit because I know people listen to this.
• 35:48
  They're like, maybe I'm interested in pumping poop.
• 35:51
  But I think, like, the business-building side of this is really interesting because when we came into this, Kyle went full send on a truck.
• 35:58
  And, you know, it was 180-some-odd thousand or whatever.
• 36:01
  It ended up being a little over – and then –
• 36:04
  And then all of a sudden the revenue came and ramped.
• 36:06
  And then you asked the question like, what are the challenges that people have?
• 36:10
  Like, why isn't everyone full service?
• 36:13
  My answer, and I come from a marketing background, but it's the ability to generate your own leads.
• 36:18
  Because a lot of those leads are good old boy, like refer, refer, refer.
• 36:21
  And if you can come out with a phenomenal brand and marketing, you now control the industry and you can just arbitrage labor.
• 36:29
  It's like, all right, if I can capture 50% of the leads in this market, then I'm going to get the ability to control where the labor goes and I make my margin off that.
• 36:37
  And so from an investor standpoint, we've created this phenomenal brand.
• 36:42
  And the number of door knocks that we get on a week-to-week, day-to-day basis saying, I will write whatever check you want to own a piece of this epic situation is significant.
• 36:51
  And all the time, because I almost went to private equity, I'm like...
• 36:54
  Yeah, you can go after.
• 36:55
  Like, I'm not going to sell to any private equity guy.
• 36:58
  Although, you know, that's where I get to say that because I was almost one of those guys.
• 37:02
  But it is something that the respect that we have for the owner operator, the type of guy that's like willing and gal, but willing to go out there and get their hands a little dirty and build an empire by scaling people and, you know, doing all that side is significant.
• 37:15
  We did want to rip the spirit of what Septic is, that it's owner-operator, small business, somebody who can literally start with a truck and run a million-dollar-plus-year business, starting with nothing, from ground zero.
• 37:27
  Like, I wanted to give the people that opportunity.
• 37:30
  Totally.
• 37:30
  And because no one's ever, no one's ever, like...
• 37:32
  Oh yeah, Private Equity, they went and bought up all these plumbing companies.
• 37:35
  And it's so nice.
• 37:36
  I'm so glad Private Equity owns all that.
• 37:38
  The only people that win are like the limited partners behind the scenes.
• 37:41
  Like the consumer loses, the management loses.
• 37:45
  Like there's one big fat cat winner that sits in.
• 37:48
  If we decided to go in plumbing, I'm competing against BlackRock and State Street.
• 37:53
  Like what chance do I have?
• 37:55
  But you know what?
• 37:56
  You say that, but I actually think a good chance because just because somebody buys it doesn't mean you know how to run it.
• 38:02
  I'm dead.
• 38:03
  Like so many people sell their company and then the non-compete expires and then the person that acquired it sucks.
• 38:10
  And I mean, look at Dave Portnoy with Barstool Sports or like, that's again, that's a good media business, but there's so many examples of you sell it, the parent company who bought it screws up,
• 38:21
  And then you either buy it back for pennies on the dollar or you start it again.
• 38:26
  I just had a podcast with Daniel Lubezki, who's the billionaire founder of Kind Bars.
• 38:31
  And he bought back a portion of Kind after selling it for, I think, 220-some million dollars.
• 38:37
  And he made a bet on himself.
• 38:38
  And now he sold it for billions.
• 38:41
  Sold it twice.
• 38:42
  Yeah.
• 38:42
  And a lot of people sell it.
• 38:44
  multiple times because just because somebody has capital does not mean they know how to run the business.
• 38:50
  I redact my statement.
• 38:52
  Yeah, no, I was actually, so I want to, we'll go more into this, but I was actually, I was just laughing because you're talking about private equity and I'm just wondering how this is going to age.
• 39:05
  The plans to go public.
• 39:06
  In five years from now.
• 39:09
  You only have so many different ways to exit.
• 39:11
  You could be Tommy Mello and sell it for two minutes.
• 39:13
  Could be Tommy Mello.
• 39:14
  Wait, hold on.
• 39:15
  We never said, well.
• 39:16
  No, I'll be on record.
• 39:18
  I'm joking.
• 39:19
  We can.
• 39:20
  No, I will go on record saying I hate private equity.
• 39:23
  I do.
• 39:23
  They ruin the trades.
• 39:25
  There's going to be so many people that agree with me, except for the private equity.
• 39:27
  In fact, the private equity people probably will agree with me in many cases as well.
• 39:30
  But there are certain alpha and edge that you get by aggregating a bunch of little turtles that you can have a little bit of economies of scale.
• 39:37
  You can build a real brand.
• 39:38
  You can bring professional management.
• 39:39
  You can go in.
• 39:40
  But ultimately, they're looking to trade.
• 39:42
  And I think if you can find people like the kind guy that are willing to go long and...
• 39:46
  play like reinvent a business not just themselves but reinvent business as well like this whole theme of reinvention is something that isn't just for humans it's for these ambiguous business entities the only person that could have turned that situation around i don't know if they were actually fledgling or not the only person to get it back to growth is the founder that founder energy is that is what created that opportunity you have the goal of of building this of epic to over a billion dollars in
• 40:12
  valuation and maybe one day revenue too, which would be an incredibly sized, a great company.
• 40:19
  How do you do that?
• 40:20
  How do you, so this whole industry is fragmented.
• 40:23
  You said there's like 100 billion, 150 billion dollar opportunity.
• 40:28
  Who are the big players in this industry?
• 40:30
  There's like maybe one.
• 40:33
  Yeah.
• 40:33
  There's one.
• 40:34
  And is that a billion?
• 40:35
  It's a lot.
• 40:36
  I don't know the revenue number.
• 40:37
  They've acquired like 60.
• 40:38
  It is a private equity roll.
• 40:39
  Oh, yeah.
• 40:40
  It's called Wind River.
• 40:40
  It's called Wind River and Dire Manor.
• 40:42
  Septic private equity specific, like focus?
• 40:45
  Strictly, if you go on their website, it'll show you all the local companies they've rolled up.
• 40:50
  Yeah.
• 40:50
  I think it's like 87 at this point.
• 40:52
  It's really hard to roll up septic because it is so fragmented.
• 40:55
  And any business that's doing south of two million is very key man risk.
• 40:59
  And you would put yourself in a position where you have to find that operator.
• 41:02
  And so what they've done now, I don't know all 70 entities, but if you can find that north of two million and some recur revenue from like...
• 41:11
  commercial then you have something of substance worth buying but we have so many people that come into the epic septic like franchise pipeline where they're like i went down a process with multiple other companies just like kyle and i went down processes and then they just disintegrate at the end because the operator gets spooked or it's like what am i going to do now or like i didn't that the ability to get in there's a lot of people that want to get into the most unsexy business ever which is septic
• 41:35
  And we've made Septic Sexy and we've provided this on-ramp that really is the only pathway for a lot of people, unless you're going to go in and acquire some like $10 million whatever entity, but you really are playing against private equity money at that realm.
• 41:48
  So when you think like some advice for entrepreneurs, think about how you like think about how you exit the business at some point or what's your plan?
• 42:00
  Should somebody think about who they're selling to or there's going to be some succession plan?
• 42:05
  They're going to pass it on to the kids.
• 42:06
  Like, should somebody think about that from day one or is that something that you worry about later on?
• 42:11
  I'm going to answer that and give you time to provide an answer.
• 42:14
  There is the adage, start with the end in mind or reverse engineer.
• 42:18
  And as much as I want to say that makes sense in an academic setting, did you start with the end in mind when you came to podcast land?
• 42:26
  No, I did not.
• 42:27
  Because the end that you would have put would have limited your belief of what was possible.
• 42:32
  And now you're in the unlimited game of media where you're going and doing billionaire interviews and you have all these crazy opportunities.
• 42:39
  And so if you were to start at the end of mine, you might actually set...
• 42:43
  A limiting belief for yourself.
• 42:44
  A limiting belief for yourself, yeah.
• 42:45
  But I think the other thing is if you don't enjoy the damn journey along the way, you also are going to just ruin your life again.
• 42:53
  Like if you leave your corporate job to go and pursue something that some guys on a podcast said sounded awesome, like you could also end up
• 43:02
  just in the same position that you were before.
• 43:04
  So I think if you set out to just enjoy a journey and build, build, build, be aggressive, create momentum, create opportunity for your family, you're going to die at the end of the day anyways.
• 43:13
  And so if you really care about how much is in the bank, like that's a problem in and of itself.
• 43:18
  And so let's find the infinite game that you want to play.
• 43:20
  That's what we should really be finding.
• 43:22
  Yeah, I think my comment on that is just like,
• 43:25
  As long as you love it and as long as you run hard, run fast, as long as you can until you'll know when the time is to, to, to let it go.
• 43:32
  Yeah.
• 43:32
  You know, just like you, like there's going to be a time where you don't want to do podcasting anymore.
• 43:37
  You're going to have to reinvent yourself too.
• 43:39
  Like we'll see how this one ages and you know, um, but you're doing something extremely successful now, but 10, 20 years down the road when you have kids, for example, you don't know how our lives have totally been flipped upside down with kids.
• 43:51
  Like, thank the Lord that we have supportive wives that let us come to Miami on a whim to talk to you.
• 43:57
  Yeah, that was like a 24-hour, like, hey, we're going to be there.
• 44:01
  Can I give the real story?
• 44:02
  We were in our headquarters.
• 44:04
  Yeah.
• 44:04
  And Chad's like, it's on.
• 44:06
  We didn't, this is the same clothes we wore.
• 44:08
  We didn't pack a toothbrush.
• 44:09
  We didn't pack anything.
• 44:10
  We went to the office.
• 44:10
  Got on a plane and we never came home.
• 44:12
  Yeah.
• 44:12
  Yeah.
• 44:12
  Which is a very wife unapproved thing to do.
• 44:15
  Like, like, they're like, you forgot your, you forgot your everything.
• 44:18
  So we, we, I don't know if we should say this, but whatever.
• 44:21
  So like, we were at a hotel, the hotel, um, mind you, we're brother-in-laws.
• 44:25
  So like, I was like, kind of like, I really think we should wash our clothes before we meet Scott.
• 44:30
  This is like behind the scenes.
• 44:31
  This is entrepreneurship in a nutshell.
• 44:33
  This is, this is just getting shit done.
• 44:35
  Getting shit done.
• 44:36
  And we're like, oh, it's a Nike dry fit.
• 44:37
  I don't think he'll be close enough to smell me.
• 44:39
  It's fine.
• 44:40
  And so Kyle's like, no, no, I think I should, like, wash our clothes before we meet on this really important interview.
• 44:47
  So he went downstairs in a towel to the little laundry.
• 44:52
  I acted like I was going to the pool.
• 44:53
  I had towels around me.
• 44:55
  We didn't have a change of clothes.
• 44:55
  I'm like.
• 44:58
  Looking around the corner, looking around the corner.
• 45:00
  Okay, we're clear.
• 45:00
  And I run into the laundry room.
• 45:02
  Boom, boom, quarter, quarter, quarter, quarter.
• 45:03
  Run back up, wait 30 minutes, fall asleep.
• 45:05
  Go down.
• 45:06
  Yeah.
• 45:07
  Go down, dryer.
• 45:08
  And then he, yeah.
• 45:09
  So we were texting you at like midnight when you're coming back down to Florida in like towels waiting for our same clothes to dry for today.
• 45:16
  So I was, I thought you guys were flying in early.
• 45:18
  I didn't know you were already here last night.
• 45:20
  Okay.
• 45:21
  We were in Atlanta with one of your guests, John Ostinson.
• 45:25
  I was at Atlanta this morning.
• 45:26
  Atlanta.
• 45:26
  I met with John this morning in Atlanta.
• 45:28
  He got on a plane, came down here, drove here, and we're about to duck.
• 45:31
  We listened to the John podcast.
• 45:33
  That was the one that we listened first of yours.
• 45:35
  And then he's like, he's the number one business broker in the entire country.
• 45:39
  I know.
• 45:40
  He's incredible at what he does.
• 45:41
  Yeah.
• 45:42
  And then everyone said on our team, like, yeah, you don't meet John first because he's the guy that you meet after you know what you're supposed to talk about, not supposed to talk about, and you're really refined.
• 45:51
  And at that point, we just had already booked the flight and we're going there.
• 45:56
  So entrepreneurship is so messy and so not the way that it's portrayed on social media.
• 46:03
  It's like everyone thinks it's like so sexy and fun and like you're fucking driving Lambos and all the other bullshit that comes with entrepreneurship, which is not the case.
• 46:13
  What would be the most important lesson or hardest lesson you guys had to learn building Epic?
• 46:20
  Because you weren't entrepreneurs, either of you really.
• 46:24
  Your parents weren't, I don't think either.
• 46:26
  So this is sort of like your first, I want to like...
• 46:30
  You guys are killing it.
• 46:31
  And not just the fact that the job is difficult and the industry is tough, but all the other behind the scenes stuff.
• 46:37
  It doesn't matter what you're doing, those crazy adventures in a hotel trying to get ready for an event or a conference or whatever.
• 46:43
  That happens to everybody.
• 46:45
  Everybody has those stories, nobody tells them.
• 46:47
  And I think that sometimes people are like, they choose to become entrepreneurs and there'll be a moment where they're doing exactly what you did and they're just like, what the fuck did I sign up for?
• 46:56
  But everybody I watch on podcasts
• 46:59
  they always try to be so polished.
• 47:01
  There's very few people who are willing to be vulnerable on these things, and I'm not afraid to get real and down and dirty.
• 47:08
  When I first started this business, I was taking two 3 a.m. emergency service calls, waking up while my wife was holding our baby, crying, because I literally...
• 47:19
  sacrificed everything.
• 47:20
  I gave up like, you know, I was made high six figures in roofing and I threw all that security away to bet on this.
• 47:27
  And my wife believed in me.
• 47:28
  But if you're not willing to sacrifice things, if you're not willing to sacrifice comfort, there's times where I go out in a two, three o'clock in the morning service call and I had the vacuum on pressure and I'd turn it on and I was covered in 20 gallons of shit water at 3am in the morning.
• 47:50
  Let me hear that story.
• 47:51
  You know, having panic attacks in the middle of the night, you know, because I'm so stressed because we're growing so fast and I don't know what to do.
• 48:00
  You know, if you're not ready for that, like, it's probably not for you.
• 48:05
  And riding the lightning financially, you know, when we first started it, we started eating into our savings real fast.
• 48:12
  Capital equipment, labor, growth.
• 48:14
  It goes fast.
• 48:15
  And you know that as much money as you make, you spend it just as fast.
• 48:19
  And especially starting in the growth phase.
• 48:21
  And, you know, we're in a better spot now, but you, you really have to, one, I think the biggest lesson for me, and I've finally started to get better about this is putting yourself first.
• 48:33
  You got to take care of yourself.
• 48:34
  If you're going to be the leader that others expect of you to like go through the day and like do a good job, like, you know, go into the gym, eating healthy, eating, eating, eating,
• 48:41
  You know, you have to take care of yourself first before you can take care of others.
• 48:46
  You have to be the best version of yourself for your wife, for your child, for your employees.
• 48:50
  You got to take care of yourself first, man.
• 48:52
  In the Marines, like it was drilled into me, like put your Marines first and like leaders eat last, like their whole methodology.
• 48:58
  It starts with you, dude.
• 49:00
  Like if you're not mentally good, if you're not physically good, if you're not spiritually good, there's no way you're going to be able to go out into the world and conquer and grow a huge business.
• 49:09
  Because when I first started out, and Chad will tell you, he's my brother-in-law, I see him every – he lives one mile away from me, by the way, down the hill.
• 49:15
  We see each other every day.
• 49:16
  It's been a journey.
• 49:19
  I can go vulnerable.
• 49:20
  I can actually go real vulnerable on this one.
• 49:23
  Like, I think the hard part about it is, like, the opportunity cost side.
• 49:26
  And so, like, you do something and there's, like, oh, like, I'll compare against the former salary I was making.
• 49:31
  And, like, you feel like, oh, that's a quantified opportunity cost.
• 49:35
  But then there's, like...
• 49:36
  the opportunity cost of time.
• 49:38
  And so you right now live in this pre-kid era of your life that time and space are fluid and infinite.
• 49:47
  The moment you have this little soul that you have as like this baby, everything becomes so finite because you like, this is for, you start to miss like, I don't actually want to cry, but you start to miss like a few things.
• 50:02
  Ah, can you say what I was going to say?
• 50:04
  Chad has two beautiful boys, Rome and Rocky.
• 50:09
  Um, I've known them since they were born and
• 50:15
  Chad, it eats Chad alive to be away.
• 50:18
  And the older my daughter gets, she's a year and nine months now.
• 50:21
  Like she started to remember things.
• 50:23
  She started to ask where daddy is.
• 50:25
  And the fact that Chad's on this journey with me and sacrificing so much time away, missing dinner with his boys, his wife, those precious moments that you remember as a kid when your dad would like throw a football with you in the backyard and play catch.
• 50:40
  He's missing that.
• 50:41
  Yeah.
• 50:42
  I'm missing out on my daughter.
• 50:43
  My daughter's a little younger at that point, but as they get older and then more time you spend away, that guilt compounds.
• 50:49
  But that's, those are the sacrifices you make to grow a company.
• 50:54
  It's like there's, dude, there's, if you want to do something great, it requires great sacrifice.
• 51:03
  I can talk again, I think, on the switch.
• 51:05
  Yeah.
• 51:05
  Are you okay, dude?
• 51:06
  Thank you.
• 51:07
  I didn't expect to cry on this podcast.
• 51:08
  It's not a cry podcast.
• 51:10
  Do you need a Red Bull or a Magic Mile?
• 51:13
  I don't know.
• 51:13
  Whatever you need.
• 51:14
  No, I think it's heart-wrenching because, like, the opportunity cost of us.
• 51:18
  I'll try to finish my comment there.
• 51:21
  Like when you miss something, like because they're evolving so quickly, you can miss like, you're like, oh, I was really busy for this week or this month.
• 51:29
  And it's like, oh, you miss like some actual life changing things for them.
• 51:33
  And that's where when you get into kid mode, which hopefully God willing, you'll be in that mode not too long from now.
• 51:40
  you want to be present for that.
• 51:41
  And I come from a former business where I got to be present for everything because I worked from home all the time.
• 51:45
  And so it was awesome.
• 51:46
  I was like marketing, virtual entity, all the things.
• 51:49
  But then there was something inside where I was like, I need the big, big one.
• 51:55
  Like that's where, you know, I've been around a lot of success.
• 51:58
  I've been a part of a lot of success, but I haven't had the one where I was like, that was me.
• 52:02
  Like I really wanted to hit a home run.
• 52:04
  And so that's what I'm going out.
• 52:06
  And with this endeavor, like we're on the pathway there.
• 52:09
  But to create opportunity in this world, like going in person like we did, we just got on a plane.
• 52:15
  Part of the reason, Scott, to tell you like the honest truth and why we didn't book this to the last little bit is like it's hard to book it far in advance because that's when you have to like tell your wife and tell your kids and make the plans.
• 52:26
  And it feels so much harder.
• 52:27
  But if it's like I wake up, go to the office and then all of a sudden I like send it.
• 52:31
  I shouldn't have done it this way.
• 52:32
  Like send a text message like, hey, we're going to be back not tonight, but tomorrow night.
• 52:36
  We're going to Miami.
• 52:37
  And that's not the words they want to hear.
• 52:38
  Um, but it was easier psychologically for me because it's like, oh, I'm just like gone a little bit longer.
• 52:44
  I'm not like going to miss as much as kind of where it is.
• 52:47
  But like, I don't know, I'm kind of going, going on this topic, but the opportunity cost and like, especially when you get a kid, it's like it's going to change the way you operate your life.
• 52:56
  It totally is gone.
• 52:57
  I'll add something to that because I think it's important.
• 53:00
  So I'm well aware.
• 53:02
  And thank you for opening up because I don't think a lot of people are comfortable.
• 53:07
  It's easy to say, you know, life's great, building the business.
• 53:11
  But I see a lot of people on the other side of 30 years of just building the business and ignoring everything else.
• 53:18
  And they won't say it, but you can see like part of their life is not complete, a majority of it.
• 53:25
  And I look at people who I sit down with who are wildly successful and have sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars and some billionaires.
• 53:31
  And there's sort of like two versions of those people.
• 53:32
  Like one of them has maintained...
• 53:35
  the relationship with their kids, their family, their wife or their husband, and the other one hasn't.
• 53:39
  And the person who hasn't is just not happy and not fulfilled.
• 53:43
  And they're always chasing and trying to get something back.
• 53:47
  They let go and they shouldn't have let go of it and forgotten about it for so long.
• 53:51
  You've interviewed some amazing people.
• 53:54
  I haven't watched all your episodes.
• 53:55
  I've watched a couple.
• 53:56
  Have you learned anything like even off camera?
• 53:59
  Like what would be like the one thing that you've learned from some of these extraordinary people that you've interviewed on how to balance it all?
• 54:22
  and you not allowing things to distract you from it.
• 54:26
  I don't know if that makes sense, but the people that care about things outside of work, they just make it a priority.
• 54:32
  It's not like their life is easier or there's less commitment on their calendar.
• 54:36
  They block off time for it.
• 54:37
  They focus on it.
• 54:39
  They maybe, you know, they don't go after every opportunity, even if it's exciting, because that thing would conflict with the family thing.
• 54:46
  And they leave money on the table in some cases because family is important.
• 54:51
  I think that what I do, and I'm not like super proud of it, but sometimes I want kids.
• 54:57
  But I don't feel the pain of not having kids yet because I distract myself with work.
• 55:02
  And that's something that I'm working on.
• 55:04
  Like I'm consciously, and with Gina, and we talk about it a lot, like we have to create space in our lives.
• 55:10
  Because if you're single, it's not like, especially when you're building your own thing, it's not like you don't have to have downtime.
• 55:20
  Like there's always something for me to do.
• 55:22
  Like if I clear my inbox, which is rare, I can still like find another cool person to interview or I can go through my emails and somebody asked me to go on their podcast or come to this event in this part of the country or even outside the country.
• 55:34
  Like there's never an end.
• 55:36
  And all of it usually comes with some form of money or a cool connection.
• 55:39
  So it's like...
• 55:40
  But you have to be like, okay, that's not my priority.
• 55:44
  And if I keep this up, I can keep operating like this for the rest of my life.
• 55:47
  And then I'll just never have kids and I'll never miss them until one day, like I won't be able to work anymore.
• 55:52
  And then I'll have all the time.
• 55:53
  And all I'd be thinking about is why didn't I do this?
• 55:54
  Like,
• 55:56
  50 years ago.
• 55:58
  And I think about that a lot.
• 55:58
  And I just, you know, I just have to stop distracting myself with work and that's super hard for me because work is a lot of my identity.
• 56:06
  But I think that's what a lot of people struggle with.
• 56:07
  And then I just don't, I think I'm fortunate because I have like a, you know, the access to people who were in my position at my age and could have gone in both directions.
• 56:21
  One being stop working all the time and build out a family and be fulfilled across all these areas of your life.
• 56:28
  And the other version being I'll have kids later, I'll have kids later, I'll have kids.
• 56:32
  And I just see the end result of that second person.
• 56:35
  I just don't want to be it.
• 56:36
  So then it's very easy for me to make a conscious decision to like not do as much and then have like focus on family and shit.
• 56:42
  So a lot of the viewers you listen to, I would say all of them, but there's some 9-to-5ers out there that, to your point, have golden handcuffs.
• 56:50
  With that in mind, what would be your message to them?
• 56:56
  Somebody who wants to make a jump.
• 56:58
  I mean, we have an answer to this, but somebody who wants to make a jump to go after something.
• 57:02
  And are too scared to do that, what would be your... Well, I think you have to know what season of life you're in.
• 57:07
  So in all seriousness, entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and it may not be for you now.
• 57:12
  Or it could be, but you've got to figure that out.
• 57:14
  So if you're going to make a jump, it's not going to be easy.
• 57:18
  It's not going to be less work.
• 57:21
  It'll probably be more work for less money in the short term.
• 57:23
  Yeah.
• 57:25
  But that's okay because if you do it for 10, 15 years, you'll find a way to make it work.
• 57:30
  But is that where you're at in your life right now?
• 57:33
  I think the answer is set proper expectations and know what it's going to take.
• 57:38
  And if you just had a kid and you don't want to miss these, like I don't have kids, but I have friends with kids, and time goes by very quickly, maybe you don't do that just yet.
• 57:54
  Maybe you work the 9 to 5 because you have 5 to 9 and the weekend's off and you can spend time with your kid.
• 58:02
  So don't do what Kyle and Chad did.
• 58:04
  Do it.
• 58:06
  I think it's tough.
• 58:07
  I think, like, listen, there's no right or wrong advice.
• 58:09
  It's very unique depending on what you want your life to look like.
• 58:12
  I just think that the worst case scenario is, like, if you don't know what you're getting yourself into, and then you're, like, you hate and resent your life because you signed up for something, you didn't expect it to be this much work, and now you're, like, missing out.
• 58:25
  Kind of like what you're going through.
• 58:27
  It's tough.
• 58:27
  You'll figure it out.
• 58:29
  But...
• 58:32
  What you're going through is not.
• 58:34
  a lot of people would not survive what you're going through.
• 58:37
  Not like literally, but like figuratively, they wouldn't have the fortitude to deal with it, especially if they're on their own.
• 58:45
  You have two business partners.
• 58:47
  Third one's not here right now.
• 58:48
  We'll get them on the podcast eventually, but you have like friends and peers that can help you through this.
• 58:55
  Entrepreneurship is super lonely.
• 58:57
  So if somebody is gonna do it, maybe that's the answer.
• 58:59
  Maybe share some of the burden, you know, whatever it is.
• 59:03
  I don't know if that's the best advice, but it's like the advice.
• 59:06
  It's not going to make somebody feel good, but I don't care about making people feel good.
• 59:12
  I want people that live a good life that they enjoy and lights them up.
• 59:16
  I want to double click on a comment and also give you a compliment.
• 59:21
  One was I thought it was really insightful what you said about the timing.
• 59:25
  Because the podcast, especially the stuff that I listen to, is like super bro podcast stuff where it's like, the time is now!
• 59:32
  And it's in a voice.
• 59:33
  Good.
• 59:36
  There's nuance to that.
• 59:37
  Like the time might be soon, but the time isn't always now.
• 59:41
  Or like if it is like, you know, it's your own journey, but like you got to be conscious of the sacrifice.
• 59:45
  So I think your comment about like the right timing is very insightful.
• 59:49
  The compliment that I wanted to give you is like, you are in a very fortunate position through all the work that you've done, where if you get into dad mode, Scott, Scott the dad, what are you gonna call yourself as a dad?
• 1:00:02
  Dad Scott, Scott dad?
• 1:00:03
  I guess Scott's the dad.
• 1:00:05
  I don't know.
• 1:00:05
  Scott's the dad.
• 1:00:06
  I guess.
• 1:00:06
  I don't mind that.
• 1:00:07
  We'll put him on to it.
• 1:00:09
  But now you're like putting on this like new identity because you have Scott the podcast success story.
• 1:00:15
  And that's something that's like grown as a media empire quickly but also slowly at the same time.
• 1:00:21
  It's like the 10-year overnight success.
• 1:00:23
  I think it was 2019 was your first endeavor in there.
• 1:00:26
  And so, yeah, to be able to do in seven years as much as you have.
• 1:00:30
  Like if you were to actually –
• 1:00:32
  take a paternity leave as they call it in like the normal nine to five like you could actually do it and like you could Scott the podcaster could still you could put that back on and no one would know the difference like you could go out have a baby spend six months being Scott the dad and learning what that new coat of armor feels like and there's not everyone that gets that luxury so the fact that you've been able to accomplish what you have and feel confident in what you've accomplished.
• 1:01:00
  is like a really blessed and fortunate opportunity that you have.
• 1:01:03
  So it's a compliment.
• 1:01:03
  Yeah, you've built something where you're able to, like whenever the time does come, you can just enjoy that time.
• 1:01:10
  I would challenge you to enjoy it because it's going to be a really big challenge.
• 1:01:13
  I would say one more thing too.
• 1:01:16
  And this is actually kind of how you set entrepreneurs up.
• 1:01:18
  And I think it's actually a really interesting, this is what I was talking to John about with like franchising and whatnot.
• 1:01:25
  There's so many versions of entrepreneurship.
• 1:01:28
  So there's versions of entrepreneurship
• 1:01:31
  where you, I don't really agree, this is the best way to do it, but like you quit your job, you go all in, you build something from scratch.
• 1:01:38
  This is like the glorified social media, Stanford, whatever, right?
• 1:01:45
  I think for most people, if they really want to build something, there's easier ways to do it where it doesn't candidly like destroy your life for the first five plus years.
• 1:01:56
  This is like how you guys set up all your franchise with Epic.
• 1:01:58
  This is like, you're talking about John, he does this for a living and he's such, it's not just like a plug for franchise.
• 1:02:03
  There's a lot of other ways to build a business without destroying your life.
• 1:02:07
  But I just think like,
• 1:02:10
  Just build a life you actually want and find a vehicle to get yourself there.
• 1:02:14
  And there's like whether or not it's going into a septic or a random unsexy industry that no one's ever spoken about.
• 1:02:22
  There's like so many things that you can do to build a life that you actually want to live.
• 1:02:26
  That is not what Instagram is going to advertise to you.
• 1:02:31
  Tell them about Richard.
• 1:02:32
  Our first franchise fits that mold perfectly.
• 1:02:35
  What's wonderful is Richard didn't even have to quit the big Fortune 500 situation.
• 1:02:39
  He makes an amazing amount of money.
• 1:02:41
  And then he's like, I want to build something that my kids can be proud of, which is interesting.
• 1:02:47
  Kids don't really care about the Fortune 500 thing as much, but when they see mom and dad going out there and building something that they own, there's something intangibly valuable about that.
• 1:03:00
  And so for the Scots of the dad of the world, so to speak, there's the full send, high risk, potentially high reward of startup, figure it out on your own.
• 1:03:12
  And then franchising, which...
• 1:03:15
  The word franchise, like franchising gets a bad rap in certain situations where even Kyle and I were like, are we sure we want to do this?
• 1:03:21
  Because there's some connotations and some bad apples and all the things.
• 1:03:24
  But like when you talk about with John, you're talking about like it's kind of its own asset class.
• 1:03:29
  It makes a sexy spin on an unsexy industry in many ways.
• 1:03:33
  Creates a playbook where if you were going to accomplish something over a five year period with the right playbook, you know, connections, buying power, marketing power, etc.
• 1:03:42
  You might be able to accomplish that in two years.
• 1:03:46
  leave your family like destitute or leave you still can be like chad the dad and like be able to build something where my risk tolerance has to adapt slightly because i'm no longer the guy who graduated from usc that can go and like travel the world and do whatever i want and be remote and like you know that was me like a couple but now i'm like i got rome and i got rock and i my two little boys and like the risk that i take
• 1:04:12
  It is this compounding lever where if I go and something breaks, it breaks them, which would break me.
• 1:04:18
  That would break me.
• 1:04:20
  So that's where the opportunity to do something of like a trodden path of franchising this instance, it's a really interesting opportunity.
• 1:04:30
  I don't know if you, is that what you want to re-say?
• 1:04:31
  Well, in the famous words of Josh Cohen, you're in business for yourself, but not by yourself.
• 1:04:37
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• 1:06:20
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• 1:06:22
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• 1:07:56
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• 1:08:21
  So you've gone through this, this sort of learning experience, building Epic, and you've, and you've learned, I mean, like, you know, you, you stress about parts of it because it's so hard and it's a lot of work and it takes you away from your family.
• 1:08:35
  Ironically, it's like incredibly successful and you're growing.
• 1:08:39
  And I know that you're on a couple of different shows, you were talking about like a playbook to get to a billion and you can actually break it down, which is incredibly, you know, any entrepreneur, oh my God, this is exactly what I want.
• 1:08:52
  but the question more is around how do you, if you go back and tell Chad and Kyle when you were just starting out,
• 1:09:02
  like a piece of advice that would help you decide how you want to be entrepreneurs?
• 1:09:07
  Like, how do you think through what your life should look like?
• 1:09:09
  Because I think you would probably, maybe you do things differently, maybe you wouldn't.
• 1:09:13
  But like, what's that piece of advice for somebody who's now in a job, who is trying to decide, should I start something from scratch?
• 1:09:21
  Should I stay in my job?
• 1:09:23
  Should I invest into a franchise?
• 1:09:25
  Like, how do they, what's the decision framework that you should have done that you hope somebody else would do?
• 1:09:32
  I don't think there's a perfect decision framework, but it goes back to what you said earlier.
• 1:09:36
  Knowing what phase of life you're in, number one.
• 1:09:39
  Doing an audit of yourself, number two.
• 1:09:42
  Write it down.
• 1:09:43
  Write your pros and cons.
• 1:09:44
  Where am I at financially?
• 1:09:46
  Where am I at spiritually?
• 1:09:47
  Where am I at at this phase of my life?
• 1:09:49
  Do I have the ability to do this?
• 1:09:52
  But at the end of the day, no time to jump is perfect at the end of the day.
• 1:09:57
  There's no decision matrix.
• 1:10:04
  box.
• 1:10:04
  There's no perfect way to do it.
• 1:10:05
  And I would just say it comes down to knowing yourself, doing the research, whatever industry you want to go into, do diligence.
• 1:10:13
  Do not do what I did and just buy a truck and figure it out on the web.
• 1:10:15
  There's so much information out there.
• 1:10:17
  We live in the most amazing, amazing, I almost sounded Canadian there for a minute.
• 1:10:22
  But we live in the most amazing time in history.
• 1:10:25
  There's so much information out there for you to make educated decisions.
• 1:10:28
  We have AI.
• 1:10:29
  We have all these tools.
• 1:10:30
  Like, leverage that.
• 1:10:32
  Learn that.
• 1:10:32
  Like, do so much due diligence.
• 1:10:34
  You know that industry backwards and forth before you even make the jump.
• 1:10:38
  There's so – like, don't go blind like I did.
• 1:10:40
  If I just took, like, six months to do, like, deep dog – like, the way I do diligence is the Marine Corps way to do diligence.
• 1:10:45
  Just run head first and figure it out later.
• 1:10:47
  He's a little bit different.
• 1:10:48
  But, like –
• 1:10:49
  Like, do your research.
• 1:10:51
  Do diligence and get to a point where you feel confident enough to make a leap.
• 1:10:54
  But at the end of the day, it's going to have to be on you.
• 1:10:56
  You're going to look at yourself in the mirror and be like, I'm doing this shit or I'm not.
• 1:10:59
  Like, it's going to be a personal decision.
• 1:11:01
  I'll take a swing at that question because I think it's a good question.
• 1:11:03
  The...
• 1:11:05
  There was one point in my life where I had like five really good tangible decisions, each one of which would have changed my entire direction of my life.
• 1:11:14
  And that was what was making my college decision, which I'm assuming some percentage of your audience is in that world.
• 1:11:18
  But you can make the same setup for business because a lot of people run into a situation like...
• 1:11:22
  It could be an epic franchise.
• 1:11:24
  It could be an ice cream parlor.
• 1:11:25
  It could be a podcaster.
• 1:11:26
  It could be whatever.
• 1:11:28
  You have lots of exciting opportunities.
• 1:11:29
  How do you figure out which one of those opportunities to really run at?
• 1:11:32
  Because what we were talking about before is like, run aggressive, run for a long distance.
• 1:11:37
  This is like a big decision to make.
• 1:11:40
  Now, for me, I had a stepmom at the time where there was a lot of problems with her.
• 1:11:45
  She was cheating on my dad and all this stuff.
• 1:11:47
  But she gave one really fabulous piece of advice.
• 1:11:51
  But that was really good advice.
• 1:11:52
  Yes.
• 1:11:54
  That piece of advice is like...
• 1:11:56
  All right, Chad, you're sitting here and you're looking out at all of these decisions.
• 1:12:00
  And so I was looking at the I was looking at Notre Dame, which in Midwest is like the equivalent of Harvard.
• 1:12:05
  It's like Harvard and there's Notre Dame at the same level.
• 1:12:08
  And then I also had Boston College.
• 1:12:10
  I had Northwestern.
• 1:12:12
  I got, I wait, well, I wanted to go to University of Pennsylvania, go to Wharton.
• 1:12:16
  I got denied by them.
• 1:12:17
  So I didn't care about my decision anymore.
• 1:12:19
  And now I went to like a football competitor of Notre Dame, USC, which a lot of people on the East Coast are like, cool, that's South Carolina.
• 1:12:26
  I was like, no, the West Coast version, like it's the Southern California, bougie rich kid version.
• 1:12:31
  And so that's where my, I couldn't make the decision.
• 1:12:34
  It was a really hard decision for me to make.
• 1:12:36
  And my stepmom in her finite wisdom in this moment, she's like, okay.
• 1:12:41
  In your brain, Chad, like, make the decision, like, go through the decision mentally.
• 1:12:45
  And so, you know, imagine yourself a year from now at Notre Dame, imagine yourself a year from now at USC, and all of a sudden, like, everything faded away.
• 1:12:55
  And I was like, this is...
• 1:12:56
  The only place that I want to be in my life is like sunny Southern California.
• 1:12:59
  I was from Minnesota.
• 1:13:00
  So maybe it's like my inner Canadian that was like viasing this decision.
• 1:13:04
  But like it was the one that had the right level of football with the right amount of AP credits with all these different things I evaluated.
• 1:13:11
  But if I like ripped my head off and I took, you know, like I no longer was thinking about the decision.
• 1:13:15
  I was feeling the decision.
• 1:13:17
  That was where it was completely obvious.
• 1:13:19
  I have to go to USC.
• 1:13:19
  Yeah.
• 1:13:20
  And I loved it.
• 1:13:20
  It was the best decision.
• 1:13:21
  I met my wife there in ballroom dancing class.
• 1:13:23
  My entire life would have been so different had I gone to Notre Dame.
• 1:13:28
  I ended up Catholic anyways, but I wasn't even Catholic at the time, and I somehow found my way to Catholicism through that.
• 1:13:33
  So this is kind of my way of making decisions, might be to rip your head off and think about that future state of heart.
• 1:13:40
  It was also like also knowing where you're at in life.
• 1:13:42
  Chad was 18.
• 1:13:43
  He's like, let me close my eyes.
• 1:13:45
  I'm going to be Southern California, hot chicks,
• 1:13:47
  Let's go.
• 1:13:49
  When I came, it was like, be real.
• 1:13:50
  There was literal sunbathing.
• 1:13:52
  There was sunbathing in the quad.
• 1:13:53
  It was like out of a movie.
• 1:13:55
  You were just sick of wearing it.
• 1:13:56
  If you went to Notre Dame, everybody's covered up and cold.
• 1:13:58
  You know, it's boring.
• 1:14:00
  I know.
• 1:14:00
  Do you mean oyster Notre Dame?
• 1:14:01
  Just like Minnesota.
• 1:14:02
  Yeah, you're from.
• 1:14:04
  I want to break down how you build a business to a billion dollars in revenue and break it down in a way.
• 1:14:12
  Because if somebody says, oh, yeah, I wish my business was a billion dollars in revenue, but...
• 1:14:16
  The only other person I've actually heard do that, ironically, was Tommy Mello, who broke down exactly how he's going to build.
• 1:14:24
  I was listening to a reel that he did two years ago on School of Hard Knocks when he literally said, I'm going to be a billionaire in two years.
• 1:14:32
  And now he just sold for $2 billion to KKR.
• 1:14:34
  So congrats, Tommy.
• 1:14:35
  Selling.
• 1:14:35
  Or is that done?
• 1:14:36
  Selling.
• 1:14:36
  Selling.
• 1:14:37
  Yeah.
• 1:14:37
  Not finished transaction yet.
• 1:14:39
  It depends when this airs.
• 1:14:41
  Yeah.
• 1:14:42
  It's what I had been.
• 1:14:43
  Knock on wood.
• 1:14:44
  I like him a lot.
• 1:14:44
  Give Tommy a round of applause.
• 1:14:47
  Tommy, good job.
• 1:14:47
  He skilled it.
• 1:14:49
  And he broke down.
• 1:14:51
  While I was looking at some of the podcast clips, because he was on the show about a year ago, and there was another one that pulled up, and it wasn't School of Hard Knocks.
• 1:15:01
  He was on another show, and he was talking about how he broke down to his managers.
• 1:15:06
  He said to his managers in the room, we're going to be a billion-dollar company.
• 1:15:10
  And not billion dollars in terms of valuation, billion dollars in revenue, which is a wild amount of money.
• 1:15:22
  And he said, what I need is I need, I think he said, how did he say?
• 1:15:27
  He said he needs 2,000 techs doing half a million dollars a year.
• 1:15:33
  And if 2000 texts do half a million dollars a year, then let's work backwards from that.
• 1:15:38
  And let's figure out, okay, so for that, how many recruiters do we need?
• 1:15:42
  And he had mapped out, like he reverse engineered exactly to the employee, to the activity, to the task, how to turn 2000 texts and $500,000 a year into a billion dollars in revenue.
• 1:15:56
  And it just was so clear.
• 1:15:58
  And I mean, this is the mind that you have to have to exit for two billion plus, which he's on his way to do.
• 1:16:04
  So you were speaking about how to build your company to a billion dollars in revenue, and I want you to break down how you think through it, because just by you breaking it down, I think that's how all entrepreneurs should know their KPIs.
• 1:16:18
  And it makes these revenue milestones, goals, KPIs, like way more manageable.
• 1:16:24
  But I don't think many people do it properly.
• 1:16:26
  Know your numbers.
• 1:16:28
  Chad is probably the best one.
• 1:16:29
  He's a number.
• 1:16:30
  I was a Marine, you know.
• 1:16:31
  But we're going to approach it a little bit different than Tommy approached it.
• 1:16:36
  Because franchising, you can still get there.
• 1:16:38
  It's just different.
• 1:16:40
  Um, it's still a numbers game at the end of the day, but just chat.
• 1:16:43
  I'll do quick numbers because then I put the heart behind or do you want to?
• 1:16:46
  Yeah, no, you go do the quick numbers and I'll just give like, are you public about your revenues now or not?
• 1:16:50
  So there's parts that we can be public ish about, but we have to be careful on how we talk about like earnings and things like that.
• 1:16:57
  But, but let's just do.
• 1:16:58
  We can talk off the record.
• 1:16:59
  There's a top down and a bottoms up analysis when we get into investment banking in terms of things.
• 1:17:03
  Tops down is like, we look at a hundred billion dollar industry, can we get 1%?
• 1:17:07
  Hell yeah, like let's go.
• 1:17:08
  We can build a billion dollar enterprise value through that.
• 1:17:11
  But then the bottoms up, which is what Tommy did, cow, I'm so bad at microphones, which what Tommy did, that's really like the more gritty, real road mapped version of it.
• 1:17:21
  And so for us, if we have 100 franchise locations,
• 1:17:26
  And these might have varying degrees of territory.
• 1:17:28
  But there's like 1,000 to 1,100, we believe, especially if we include our Canadian brothers to the north.
• 1:17:34
  We get a lot of inquiries in Canada.
• 1:17:35
  Yeah, there's a lot of great septic up in Canada, not surprisingly.
• 1:17:38
  A lot of Canadians are not living in that grid, right?
• 1:17:42
  They're off the grid a little bit.
• 1:17:43
  They have a lot of cottages, a lot of wealthy people.
• 1:17:47
  Canada is a multi-billion dollar septic industry.
• 1:17:50
  Yeah, multi.
• 1:17:50
  It's a great industry.
• 1:17:51
  It's all septic.
• 1:17:52
  All of them.
• 1:17:53
  All these cottages, all these homes in these smaller towns, they're all septic.
• 1:17:56
  Yeah.
• 1:17:57
  So if we can include our Canadian brothers there, there's definitely, we're grabbing, let's just say 10% of like the sellable markets there.
• 1:18:06
  Kyle likes to think about in football terms, it's like, if there's a professional sports team there, we should be able to build a monster in it.
• 1:18:11
  And then, so now let's just say we found, you know, a hundred, a hundred of these find us is really what the way it goes.
• 1:18:16
  And then each one of those is going to be doing, now this is where I have to be careful on earnings claims, but that's where like,
• 1:18:23
  The margin of this business, you can imagine it's a trade business.
• 1:18:27
  And we're not razor thin margins.
• 1:18:28
  We're a nice margin in a business like this.
• 1:18:31
  And so for a couple million dollars worth of revenue, which Kyle kind of go into the revenue trajectory here, you're able to drive a...
• 1:18:39
  aggregation of these this is where tommy gets to answer better than i do because he was just the guy in all this but in aggregation um if let's just say each one is doing five hundred thousand dollars of profit we now get up to in aggregate we have a hundred of those at fifty million dollars of profit that's coming off of this these are generalizations these are generalizations hard and fast rules that every franchise will hit but this is an average yeah
• 1:19:02
  I want to answer the question.
• 1:19:03
  I don't want to get sued after the fact.
• 1:19:05
  But now you've created $50 million of profit that's coming.
• 1:19:10
  Let's just call that EBITDA.
• 1:19:12
  And then when you look at trade multiples, now Tommy's multiple is probably significant.
• 1:19:17
  He's got a point.
• 1:19:17
  Yeah.
• 1:19:39
  Just like Epic, you could envision an opportunity where it's not just septic, it's all these other things in this Epic universe.
• 1:19:45
  Sounds like a comic book.
• 1:19:46
  So long story short, 100 franchisees, which we know we can close to 100 franchisees, doing a scaled version, which Kyle will talk about how that scales, where they're getting $500,000 a year of profit.
• 1:19:58
  We've created a system that's doing a billion dollars of realistic enterprise value.
• 1:20:03
  Now, that's where, Kyle, I've wanted to give it over to you because you can go through growth mode on this.
• 1:20:06
  You probably have things to add on it.
• 1:20:08
  We did an analysis of the entire country on hot septic markets.
• 1:20:11
  I think it's like 1,000 to 1,500.
• 1:20:12
  Like 1,500, right?
• 1:20:14
  If I ever have one truck in every single one of those markets, there's a million dollars in revenue potential in each one of those markets.
• 1:20:22
  And there's 400 million people in the United States.
• 1:20:24
  I just have to find less than a percent of that.
• 1:20:27
  And that turns you into a billion dollar.
• 1:20:29
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:20:30
  Yeah.
• 1:20:32
  And it's something that I know I want to be a little bit more transparent on this, but that's where because we're under all these FDD regulations, there'll be this is a good reminder.
• 1:20:41
  Maybe we just disclose how we do that on our FDD.
• 1:20:43
  Yeah.
• 1:20:44
  But anyways, that's where.
• 1:20:46
  Well, I think, no, but you it's not it's not a bad idea because also people listen to this.
• 1:20:52
  We just spoke about the fact that they are looking for like different ways to entrepreneurship.
• 1:20:57
  So.
• 1:20:58
  What we just really spoke about was, okay, you want to start your things from scratch?
• 1:21:01
  Cool.
• 1:21:01
  You want to join a franchise or you want a different way to become an entrepreneur?
• 1:21:05
  That's also cool.
• 1:21:06
  Yeah.
• 1:21:07
  There's various degrees of risk, of time, of energy required to do both.
• 1:21:12
  And like pure entrepreneurship, building Epic from scratch, or a version of Epic, or it doesn't have to be in septic, is like the most extreme version of entrepreneurship where you give your whole life to this thing.
• 1:21:23
  So maybe it's important to also break down like the alternative path, which is, okay, if you want to join a franchise,
• 1:21:30
  What are the margins?
• 1:21:31
  What does it mean to join a franchise?
• 1:21:32
  What's the difference?
• 1:21:33
  What's the risk?
• 1:21:35
  Because not everybody knows what a franchise even means versus just starting.
• 1:21:39
  I'm going to answer it.
• 1:21:40
  He's going to actually answer it.
• 1:21:41
  But some serve pros of franchise that I respect, within these mega franchise brands, you have these mega operators.
• 1:21:51
  You can run a $100 million enterprise company under a franchise business.
• 1:21:56
  For example,
• 1:21:57
  There's the Olsen, shout out Olsen, Olsen, Team Olsen in ServPro.
• 1:22:02
  He, I think, I forgot where he started.
• 1:22:04
  I think he started off in Colorado.
• 1:22:06
  But from there, he started like acquiring territories.
• 1:22:09
  What does he do?
• 1:22:10
  Sorry.
• 1:22:10
  ServPro is restoration.
• 1:22:12
  Okay, cool.
• 1:22:12
  Restorate ServPro, like the green trucks are down here.
• 1:22:14
  They're all over Florida, I'm sure.
• 1:22:16
  There's a lot of hurricanes down here.
• 1:22:18
  But he bought one territory, and then he went bonkers and grew it to scale.
• 1:22:23
  And he runs, I believe it's over $100 million in enterprise value and just his ownership in ServPro.
• 1:22:30
  And there's these companies.
• 1:22:31
  I forgot what Josh said, but...
• 1:22:34
  Within these franchise organizations, like there's these investors that these entities that go public that own franchises.
• 1:22:40
  Because I think when people think franchise, they think that they're playing small.
• 1:22:44
  But this is what you're saying is not the case.
• 1:22:47
  So the episode where John talks about how the big investor mind individual goes at this with the alternative asset class.
• 1:22:53
  And that I think is an interesting lens to view it through.
• 1:22:56
  Because you can also look at it as like an interesting degree of diversification where it's like you have your 401k, you may still have your Fortune 500 salary, and then you've created this new path of income through a franchise brand and it lends itself well to individuals who have...
• 1:23:12
  like other things going on because there's this nice playbook you install a gm the gm runs the playbook you add your value in the way with your connections your on your mentorship your things but when we look at how we can add value systemically i.e as a franchise there's a couple of things that we look at and this is the big three is like the technology the brand and lead generation and then you get into the systems the processes and the training the playbook
• 1:23:36
  There's some other things that we do around that.
• 1:23:38
  But the technology, we have this whole epic operating system that helps out with maintenance contracts.
• 1:23:42
  It's AI enabled.
• 1:23:44
  It brings down the administrative costs.
• 1:23:45
  It's awesome.
• 1:23:46
  The second thing that we have is all like the marketing demand generation.
• 1:23:50
  I come from a world with...
• 1:23:51
  my own marketing agency where my clients were harvard university and go daddy i helped the guy get a grammy nomination and worked in the music industry and that's where brand marketing all that like you you better be getting that if you're going into a franchise system just like mcdonald's if you open up a mcdonald's which we walked by one on the way here people walk in the door just because it's mcdonald's and they're you know they're hungry
• 1:24:13
  And they do a lot of advertising for that.
• 1:24:16
  And so that's another thing you're paying for.
• 1:24:17
  I need demand generation.
• 1:24:19
  And then the playbooks and the training and the systems and the processes.
• 1:24:21
  So for us, we have this like marine that's involved.
• 1:24:24
  So we're able to use a lot of that same military mindset when we develop SOPs.
• 1:24:29
  And so we have our sit rep in the morning that our driver sends to make sure his day is going to be fully optimized.
• 1:24:33
  And that playbook, we're talking about the investor mind who can invest.
• 1:24:36
  install the GM or maybe your own GM at the beginning and you spin it up for a couple months, couple years, and now you install someone to replace yourself and now you're really humming and maybe you're Team Olsen and you're starting to aggregate other operators in your own system.
• 1:24:49
  And so you can imagine a world where even within this mothership, I think the other one that you look at is like 7-Eleven.
• 1:24:55
  That's like a minnow eating whale situation where you had 7-Eleven, which was fledgling in America, and then you had Japan where these guys were crushing in Japan.
• 1:25:04
  And they had a totally different way of working with their franchise, like their franchise brands.
• 1:25:08
  They were there and kind of let them do their own thing.
• 1:25:10
  And all of a sudden the Japanese were like, oh, we're just going to acquire all of America.
• 1:25:14
  And now this is like it's an amazing story.
• 1:25:16
  Like that literal franchisees went and acquired the franchisor.
• 1:25:20
  I think that, I mean, that is, I didn't know that story.
• 1:25:25
  I did actually, I had no idea that happened.
• 1:25:27
  Look into the 7-Eleven story.
• 1:25:28
  It's nuts.
• 1:25:29
  I have a lot of respect for 7-Eleven.
• 1:25:31
  If you go to their merch store, they sell like diamond encrusted 7-Eleven.
• 1:25:34
  They do all this stunt marketing, which is kind of my world.
• 1:25:36
  I didn't know this at all.
• 1:25:37
  The cult of 7-Eleven is significant.
• 1:25:38
  Yeah, dude.
• 1:25:39
  Yeah.
• 1:25:39
  It's crazy.
• 1:25:40
  You go there and like, yeah, this will be a good onscreen segue thing.
• 1:25:43
  But like shout out to 7-Eleven.
• 1:25:45
  I've never shouted them out before, but that's where I don't even shout anything out because I don't have an audience.
• 1:25:50
  Shout out the pizza and corn dots at two in the morning.
• 1:25:53
  They put their sushi and they have all the.
• 1:25:55
  I've been to 7-Eleven in Japan.
• 1:25:57
  You have.
• 1:25:57
  It was amazing.
• 1:25:58
  But I didn't know they I didn't know this whole story behind them.
• 1:26:01
  All the 7-Eleven lore.
• 1:26:02
  I had no idea.
• 1:26:03
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:26:04
  That should be your next podcast.
• 1:26:05
  That would be an amazing guest.
• 1:26:06
  Find that big dog in charge.
• 1:26:07
  Yeah.
• 1:26:08
  Whoever pulled that one off, you can find him.
• 1:26:10
  Well, and what they did, too, not to go too deep in the weeds.
• 1:26:13
  They created these micro-distributions around regions so that what they have is fresher food that's coming in.
• 1:26:19
  Because 7-Eleven, the corn dog version, that's what was killing people.
• 1:26:23
  Because in America, you've got to look jacked like Scott.
• 1:26:25
  And it's not from corn dogs.
• 1:26:26
  It's from meat and meat and then more meat.
• 1:26:28
  But in order to get fresh meat into your local place like you have What did you eat when you're at 7-eleven in Japan did you have anything cool?
• 1:26:36
  It was like the little like seaweed wraps Rice things with like the tuna in the middle of I can't remember what it's called Anyone know for the audience?
• 1:26:45
  I'm supposed to I lived in Japan for a year and so I'm supposed to know I forgot the name but lived on this delicious Yeah, but all of all of it was fam delicious um
• 1:26:54
  But that's where they brought that model to America.
• 1:26:56
  That model didn't exist.
• 1:26:57
  They innovated that model of bringing freshness from these little distribution all the way out there.
• 1:27:01
  And so America, they're doing that same playbook where they're bringing in more food, which 7-Eleven.
• 1:27:06
  Well, I had Jim Keys on, who was the old CEO of 7-Eleven and CEO of Blockbuster, but we didn't go into that part of it.
• 1:27:14
  We didn't go into that part of it.
• 1:27:15
  But like how 7-Eleven in Japan is like a massive logistics business.
• 1:27:21
  So they're fresh shipping like multiple times per day, which is why the food taste.
• 1:27:26
  I don't know if 7-Eleven in the U.S. has the same.
• 1:27:30
  They're trying.
• 1:27:30
  They're trying, but it's hard.
• 1:27:31
  The U.S. is massive, too.
• 1:27:32
  Like you're not on a little baby.
• 1:27:34
  Japan's a big island, but yeah.
• 1:27:36
  No, no.
• 1:27:36
  Smaller in terms of geographical footprint than the U.S., yeah, for sure.
• 1:27:40
  For somebody that's listening to this, because this audience is split, half of them are in a nine to five.
• 1:27:45
  The other half of them.
• 1:27:47
  Most of them are looking at entrepreneurship in a traditional sense, like they're trying to figure out how to start a business from scratch.
• 1:27:54
  I want you to leave some sort of last words of wisdom for both groups.
• 1:27:58
  So the person who's in the nine to five right now who probably has thought at some point about starting a business but has shied away from it, or the person who is building something right now and is just trying to build from scratch and it's not working out.
• 1:28:10
  What is the last piece of advice, words of wisdom you want to leave both of them?
• 1:28:15
  let me answer the nine to five one because there's a lot of people who think and they're great at thinking and then for whatever reason they don't do because I think the nine to five is something that is probably the most powerful unlock of it's the most powerful unlock of potential there's so many individuals that have so many amazing skill sets and they're stuck in some corner of some monolithic company where it's like man I never thought it'd be so good at like HR implementation of some ER I don't know what this is it helps them realize
• 1:28:44
  their own potential yeah but and and like being able to start going from idea to action you don't even need all the plans like all the stones don't need to be set out in front of you for you to skip across the pond on you just need to start taking the one step in front of the other and and maybe if this is a helpful exercise for people plan it failing
• 1:29:03
  Plan your first one is going to fail.
• 1:29:04
  That way the pressure of making a success is no longer there.
• 1:29:08
  But I'm just going to do this one for fun because it's supposed to be fun.
• 1:29:11
  And this is a fun thing in my life.
• 1:29:12
  And I'm going to be a Pokemon card collector.
• 1:29:14
  And I'm going to be like the best collector ever was.
• 1:29:17
  The greatest of them.
• 1:29:18
  What's the Pokemon phrase?
• 1:29:19
  Kyle collected Pokemon.
• 1:29:21
  But that's some gotta catch whatever.
• 1:29:23
  Gotta catch Moe's the phrase.
• 1:29:23
  But what's the statement in like the song where it's like Pokemon?
• 1:29:26
  I don't know.
• 1:29:27
  Pokemon.
• 1:29:28
  I'm going to be the very best.
• 1:29:29
  I'm going to be the... No one ever was.
• 1:29:31
  Thank you, Scott.
• 1:29:33
  That's right.
• 1:29:34
  I'm going to be the very best.
• 1:29:36
  God, it was a Pokemon.
• 1:29:37
  Yeah.
• 1:29:38
  Were you actually in the Pokemon card?
• 1:29:39
  So it was hockey and Pokemon.
• 1:29:41
  That was like the... Let's land the point.
• 1:29:44
  Okay, fine.
• 1:29:45
  Yeah, we're going to talk about Pokemon.
• 1:29:47
  So we came out of the podcast with you today, Scott, not to just...
• 1:29:51
  toot the horn of epic, even though that is like, we can't, we're wearing all this epic drip.
• 1:29:55
  I even put hats like secretly in there.
• 1:29:57
  So we have subconscious epicness happening.
• 1:30:00
  So that wasn't even the point.
• 1:30:02
  The point is like, you know, illustrate a story and then the rest has gravitational pull.
• 1:30:06
  If someone is actually interested in septic, like there is a whole rabbit hole that lands in the sludge of septic at the very bottom that we'd be happy to take them on.
• 1:30:14
  But if there is an interest in going into any industry, whether it's a septic industry or otherwise, trades possess a really interesting characteristic where you have these legacy family businesses where this current generation is like granddad's business that they've taken over.
• 1:30:28
  And they don't care at all about the business, but they're making like a million dollars a year doing whatever the heck some random corner of trade is.
• 1:30:35
  If you came in and you just went like God mode, like go like, I'm going to just...
• 1:30:40
  I'm going to be insane and I'm going to do all the things like you can compete at a level that no one.
• 1:30:44
  And if you look at it from a professional sport, which Kyle played professional football, he was going up against crazy competitors and he's an amazing athlete himself.
• 1:30:53
  But it was hard to find a way to play on Sunday in this industry.
• 1:30:58
  we can play at a level that no one competed against like that the ability to come in with a better brand in this industry compared to my prior life which is all this like big tech like it that world changes so quickly it's so hard to stay on top of the latest implementation of ai you go to if you find yourself an industry that's forgotten in a corner an industry like septic and you bring your white collar badass approach to something you're gonna crush
• 1:31:23
  you're gonna, and you put it at a local or regional level, you're gonna destroy, there's no one else like it.
• 1:31:29
  Put polish, especially in this industry, if you put a little polish in any really blue-collar brand, you're gonna crush.
• 1:31:36
  That's where the opportunity is.
• 1:31:38
  It's where the opportunity is.
• 1:31:39
  Like, to close it out, why Epic, right?
• 1:31:43
  Like, if you're considering, like, a trade, not just Epic, but any trade, if you're looking for something to actually get your hands on and actually feel that you're making a difference, this is the infrastructure.
• 1:31:53
  Because every trade that you have, you're actually contributing to society.
• 1:31:56
  You'll be able to go drive 10, 20, 30 years down the road and say, look, look, son, I put that roof on that building.
• 1:32:02
  Hey, look, son, like, I was responsible for making sure that those toilets for us right there.
• 1:32:06
  It's something you can actually build in the world.
• 1:32:08
  And put your hands on and it'll be there for generations.
• 1:32:10
  Your legacy will be there for generations.
• 1:32:13
  I can't say the same about software.
• 1:32:14
  You know, I can't say the same about certain white collar trades, but in the trade, in the actual blue collar, brown collar trades, the stuff that you do at your community lasts a lifetime as long as you're on this earth.
• 1:32:23
  And that's exciting to me.
• 1:32:24
  If that's exciting to you.
• 1:32:26
  Everybody's stressed about AI, which could be its own podcast, but this industry never goes away.
• 1:32:31
  Where can people connect with you guys?
• 1:32:33
  You have your own podcast.
• 1:32:34
  So drop website, socials, podcasts.
• 1:32:37
  We'll put everything in the show notes too.
• 1:32:38
  So on YouTube, the podcast is called The Epic Uncut Podcast.
• 1:32:42
  Also, if you want to find our handle, any social media platform, it's at EpicSepticCo, C-O.
• 1:32:48
  So you find us on any social media platform, TikTok, Instagram, everything.
• 1:32:52
  EpicSepticCo.
• 1:32:53
  Both of you, each one of you take this, if you could, you know, you've had a crazy journey, you did not expect to end up where you are at today.
• 1:33:03
  When you first started out from white collar investment banking, joining the military, if you could go back and give your 20 year old self one piece of advice, what would it be and why?
• 1:33:15
  At 30, I really wanted to have, for whatever reason, my number was $30 million by the time I turned 20.
• 1:33:21
  I wanted to have $30 million by the time I turned 30.
• 1:33:23
  And that's something that I did not hit.
• 1:33:26
  And it pissed me that off.
• 1:33:28
  And I'm like now trying to make up for lost time.
• 1:33:31
  And the advice that I'm giving to myself, as much as it's good to have a goal, we've talked about this before, to sprint towards, to work towards, I think the journey along the way, that was like my high school quote in the yearbook was like,
• 1:33:45
  It's good to have a journey, but it's the journey that matters at the end.
• 1:33:49
  It's good to have whatever it is.
• 1:33:50
  It's good to have a goal, but it's the journey that matters at the end.
• 1:33:53
  I can't even say my own high school year of a career.
• 1:33:56
  But it's so important.
• 1:33:58
  I think for me, it's don't take yourself so seriously.
• 1:34:01
  Don't take everything so seriously.
• 1:34:03
  Yeah, you can have high standards.
• 1:34:05
  Yes, you can have these crazy...
• 1:34:09
  crazy journey as you go on, but man, just enjoy the ride, man.
• 1:34:12
  Like if you're going to go on a journey, go it and just expect to fail, but have fun doing it.
• 1:34:16
  You know, I always take myself so seriously.
• 1:34:19
  I used to beat myself up when I would like lose a game or, or just, just go, you know, just have fun.
• 1:34:24
  Just let it ride, dude.
• 1:34:26
  I love it.
• 1:34:26
  Thank you.
• 1:34:27
  Thank you, Scott.