In episode 53 of The Kitchen Table, Ken Baden sits down with Josh Steinberger, a fellow roofer and business owner as they discuss their experiences in the roofing industry, the challenges they've faced, and their strategies for success. From recruiting and training new team members to navigating the ups and downs of the market, Ken and Josh share valuable insights and lessons learned.
Tune in to gain valuable insights into the world of roofing and business management.
TIMESTAMPS
[00:08:36] Creating a Culture for Success.
[00:11:13] Open Book Playbook Approach.
[00:19:21] Sales Success and Overcoming Challenges.
[00:22:35] Insurance Companies and Roofing Claims.
[00:28:20] Moving and Starting Fresh.
[00:33:09] Insurance Jobs and Sabotage.
[00:36:14] Insurance Company Tactics and Claims.
[00:41:13] Building a Strong Sales Team.
[00:44:56] Spending Money to Make Money.
[00:47:28] Paying Suppliers Weekly Instead of Monthly.
[00:49:23] Cash Flow and Business Challenges.
[00:54:39] Training Process and Expenses.
[00:56:37] Hiring the Right People.
In this episode, Ken Baden and Josh Steinberger highlight the approach to success in the roofing industry revolves around building a team of talented and hardworking individuals. Josh believes in hiring the best of the best and fostering a strong company culture. Continuous training and development are also paramount for his team members as his ultimate goal is to create a company that can handle any challenge and provide exceptional service to its customers.
Additionally, Ken and Josh discuss the importance of recruiting and training during the off-season, as well as the strategies Josh has implemented to attract and retain top talent in his company. Overall, Josh's experience serves as a reminder of the importance of open communication and conflict resolution in business relationships. By addressing conflicts and finding common ground, individuals can rebuild trust and work towards a more productive and successful partnership.
QUOTES
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Ken Baden
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/officialkenbaden/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheKenBaden
Josh Steinberger
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshsteinberger/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/josh.steinberger/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-steinberger-19a83b215/
WEBSITES:
The Kitchen Table Podcast: https://thekitchentablepodcast.net/
Blue Collar Ballers Union: https://bluecollarballersunion.com/
NextGen Restoration, Inc.: https://nextgenrestoration.net/
Welcome to the Kitchen Table, a podcast about where business is done. So pull up a chair and join your host, Ken Baden.
Welcome back to another episode of the Kitchen Table podcast. I'm your host, Ken Baden. I'm here with my good friend, Josh. I always want to call you Steinbrenner because I know that's like the Yankees owner, but I know that isn't your last name. Please correct me and introduce yourself, Josh Steinberger, right? Josh Steinberger, correct. Yes. Dude, see, I've got it up here. It's right here. I'm sure you wouldn't be being a Steinbrenner. That would be pretty sweet.
You're not the first one to go with the Steinbrenner, so yeah, no worries.
Again, it could be worse, though, right? I mean, that would be like, well, if I had their money, not that you're doing bad, but man, you know, Steinbrenner money, you're buying the Yankees, dude. Roofing's out. Maybe if it's a passion project, I don't know. Right. And I just kind of boiled it. Josh is a fellow roofer friend of mine. We're on the same business association. We've been rocking together for about a year now. Josh does a lot of really cool stuff within the industry himself. And how are you doing today, man? What's the weather like in St. Louis?
Kansas City.
Yeah, we St. Louis, Kansas City, tomato, tomato, Missouri, whatever, you know, small state.
No, I'm just kidding. It's kind of the same, right? We got overcast. It's about 40 degrees, I think. It's 38 degrees and foggy. So we're we're burning off the leftover snow right now. Next week, it's supposed to be 55 to 60 degrees and sunny five days out of the week. So, yeah, you know what it is right now?
I'm sure it's not not 40. It is 70 fucking degrees outside right now. So that's Maryland right now. Do we had? What? I don't know. Foot of snow. I mean, Maybe, maybe too. I don't know. Our last two weeks have been completely ruined by snow and cold and 20 degrees and 70 degrees. I walked outside this morning, I was like, dude, this is bizarre. It's just weird. I'm not complaining. I mean, we need it. We need it. But like, man, weird. So first time we've been able to get out in a while. I mean, what what do you typically do in the winter? I mean, before we jump into how you got here, do you guys shut down and keep rocking? I think you're like me. We just keep going. We just play weather, man, and keep it moving. We just don't stop.
Do you? We I actually doubled down in the winter, man. You know, one of the biggest things that I learned in business a long time ago is that when people contract, you expand. And so, you know, when locally like our market specifically is filled with a bunch of pussies. And so they like sales wise, they on December 9th closed their office completely and say, hey, sales activities are completely closed down. Production is going to finish punch list stuff and answer phone calls. But we don't expect anybody from the sales department. Nothing no longer is mandatory. They don't have weekly meetings, monthly meetings, hourly, but nothing. And they open back up on March 1st. And I said, you know, I just, I can't, I can't do that for three months. I let my guys, you know, obviously have time to, you know, go to the beach, take your time, stack it up. You want to, you got, you got money and you made arrangements and you want to go ski, you want to go whatever. Like I'm not captain Ahab by any means. So like, you know, locking in, but we don't close down anything. We triple down on, um, triple down on training. So like right now, I think I have 14 PowerPoint training modules that I have on my list of, you know, scholastic, you know, time in the computer here to put together roughly 20 minute half hour trainings. So this, the guys can take our training board and you know, it's, it's one of those like the at the fair with a little clicky thing on it and ding, you know, training module 12. Okay, cool, we pull it up. And now we got a half hour meeting on it randomly to just make sure that we're touching on stuff. Instead of always having to be, you know, sales wise, and the leadership side being completely on with coming up with the game plan and the process. It's like, you know, hey, we all know this stuff. So let's just plug in, pick a module and do it. So you know that that's on my list right now to be doing on that one we have Actually downstairs in the sales, in our atmosphere room, they're doing the restoration referral training system with Matthew Danskin. So he's in the office yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So right now we are live calling insurance agents to set up referral partnerships in the Kansas City market here, recording all the moving pieces to that one, live calls with that. take that information, take it back to the Cleveland office, train those guys up on with that one next week. And then my favorite part in the offseason here, offseason is recruiting, man. It's draft season for me. Every big football team that you've ever seen, every one of them, man, they turn up and it gets wild during that season. And this is the first year that I've participated in and what I'm calling the draft. I've been a passive player in the past because same thing, I'm usually like locked in with snow mentally. I'm ready for just like veg out for a couple of weeks, stare off at the wall, but we got really intentional with everything this year with the growth that we're trying to facilitate and all that. So I said, normally I like to hire my sales guys at bars, waiters, servers, and, you know, other service industries like that and train them up to be who we want them to be. And instead of taking people with bad habits and things from other companies, you know, they're complaining about their pay and their boss over there. Cool. I'm going to bring them over there.
Well, great. Congratulations.
Yeah, I'm not going to make you happy here. Maybe, maybe not, right? There's opportunity there. And so I've kind of come back to the realization that a lot of employers kind of suck. And so if other employers suck, then maybe the complaint, as long as they haven't been at 20 new companies in the last five years, they've been at somewhere long term, they're not actively looking. And I personally hit them up in their DM and say, hey, I don't know if you're interested in a new opportunity, but I'd like to talk to you. And I have the ability to recruit them. Well, that's a different person altogether than somebody that's actively looking to just, you know, pick the next guy that's going to give them a draw and facilitate whatever that is. So, you know, active recruiting, going to, you know, behind enemy lines in certain situations, and, you know, actively making conversations intentionally with these guys that, that, you know, from afar via social media look like they fit the company culture and processes, procedures, the way that we would want to do things to say, hey, I don't know if you're being supported in what I see over there, right? I see a lot of your information on your social media. I see a lot of what you're doing. And you're getting in the gym. And you're getting after it. And you're sharing for sales, Zoom, and stuff. Things are rolling in a way that aligns with how I would do it. But I don't see anything where you're sharing your team members. I don't see the rest of your company people involved in that. What's going on, man? Are they not part of the same thing? Are you on an island by yourself trying to do a bunch of stuff better? You got support. And if you can pick off one of those guys that's trying to do a bunch of good stuff and they just legitimately aren't being supported in that same process with where they're at. you got an opportunity to have a conversation with somebody that might have been content with the overall pay and hours and was okay, good at the job, but wasn't supported on the savagery level to be like, hey man, we got that, but then everything else that you might want, so why don't you come over here? It might not be a huge pay increase or whatever, it might even be a pay decrease technically by job, but we got all the other stuff.
Yeah, I mean, we definitely do the same in the offseason in terms of recruiting and a lot of it is not traditional, but I'll say that and it is. I mean, what you just said is we look for the same folks every time. Ex-athletes, I do a lot of gym recruitment. I've even done post-ups at the gym where I've had a booth and I just hand out flyers. You know, we've done, not here, but in the past at other places I've been, we've gone to college camp, but you're looking for the same guy almost every single time or gal every time. So I haven't had a ton of success indeed at the traditional sites. you know, I don't know, I mean, maybe we've got Perry Moore out here right now, help Brandon, you know, he does things a little different in terms of assessments and stuff and, but I've done things traditionally the same way you have, which is I like, I like creating a culture with our folks and our folks then, you know, it's the proximity thing, right? Like you get into their friend groups and their people and they see Johnny succeeding and they want to know what Johnny's doing and then They all want to do it until they find out what he does. But you know the deal, right? Once they go out, they're like, oh, wait a second. Never mind. Right. But either way, I actually just hired somebody and I was a big I was very like. I don't like the bandage of the plug in plays, to your point, and I think that grooming our own guys, our own cultures and the green guys is definitely the way to go and scale. But if you're missing a significant piece or even just finding somebody, like you said, that's just not happy or not being treated well, I don't disagree with that. I've never actively pursued them like that, but I think that's a good point. I mean, if you're just like, hey man, I'm just trying to have a conversation and see if you're happy. And if they say, yeah, dude, I'm super happy, well, then that company is doing their job.
Oh yeah, yeah. It's not a thirsty, angry, let's talk shit. It's purely like, hey, are you open to a conversation here? Our social media is fairly open, right? So you know what we're about. I see you follow me, I follow you. We kind of know about each other. If you want to have a conversation, let's have it. And like you said, at the end of the day, probably 8 out of 10 say, hey, I'm happy. I'm good. I got equity in the company. I got whatever. Some of them pound their chest a little bit like, hey, don't you try to recruit me? You know who I am? Check my resume. Cool, bro. Your resume is great. Love you. Hey, no worries. Good luck out there this season. And then you get 2 out of 10 that are like, I'm never not interested in having a conversation on opportunity. OK, well, What does that look like right that doesn't mean that you're for sure wanting to jump ship that just means that we're going to have, you know, a cup of coffee or, you know, I generally try to recruit them and have them come to the office here, and, you know, come to the conference room because we have a A large investment in our, our, our office location in Ohio and here specifically for that like recruiting piece. We got a 20 foot tall Cleveland mural in Cleveland that we had shot and put in there just to kind of like sit everybody down LeBron in it and a whole shebang. And, you know, can see he's got a nice conference room here so we try to like play on the pieces that most construction companies generally don't, you know, invest in that don't have, you know, it's a, we got a locker room with a couple pallets of shingles, and you know, a flat bar and a couple hammers. And they're like, I got like a plastic chair in the corner. All right, if that's where you're working, and you're good at it, maybe you like some of this other stuff and to feel a little bit more professional and where it's at. So, you know, awesome. If not, you know, it's same thing like, Hey, man, you know, thanks for coming in. Love you. You know, if you gained any value in what we talked about and how we prospect, how we do things, because I'm an open book. I bring them in and tell them, this is our playbook, homie, right? Love it, hate it. This is how we do it because this is what you're going to have to do if you come on, you know, on board here. So this is the play that you think that you could run these plays. And if they're like, you know, no, I'm good. I got a spot that feeds me leads all day, blah, blah, blah. Cool. Take my playbook, go back to your boss and tell him this is what we do. I don't, it doesn't matter. You know, it's not going to affect the longevity of our success on that by any means. I know a lot of guys, they try to keep their cards close.
Which is funny, if you've been in this industry any amount of time, it's like, there's very little that's proprietary, if anything. At this point, I mean, I can't think of anything where I've reinvented, or excuse me, invented any wheels. Maybe reinvented, maybe tweaked, but okay. I mean, to your point, I would just, cool dude, tell whoever, I don't care. I think the people that I see the most, like my mentors, even here locally, two of whom are the biggest, I mean, I wouldn't have sought them out if they weren't right. So like, and these guys could give a lot of the things I come up and get all spun up about, like, even litigious little, seemingly big legal stuff to me, I'll bring to them. They're like, Yeah, okay, whatever it is, give it to your attorney. Like, we don't have time to talk about like, what? Yeah, there's so dismissive of like, oh, they looked at, you know, Johnny took our playbook or proprietary pitch book or whatever. And he's like, Yeah, okay, man, like, Do you really want to spend time on that? You know, if you really, really feel some type of way, give it to your attorney, move on. We got stuff to build, you know, so I agree with you there. But talk about how you got here, man. I mean, we just kind of jumped right into obviously you do roofing. Obviously, you have these two offices and you do well. How'd you get here? How'd you find yourself? You didn't just plop yourself into offices and magically have this foothold you have and then all these nice murals and so on. So talk about what it took to get there.
Cool, man. Yeah. So I got I was a roofer right out of high school. So 2004 2004 and a half. I was a laborer on a crew of new construction roofers in Ohio and Cleveland up there. Two Lithuanian guys that knew about nine words of English. You know, bundle roof jack, hammer, right, go get that kind of thing. And I did that for about three months. Worst job I've ever had in my entire life. Absolutely. Anybody that's ever been a labor on a roofing crew is freaking terrible. Sweating your balls off, you know, drive out there, it's new construction. So we started at like 5 a.m. to try to like first daylight. We're up on the roof there to try to get in and out before it got to be too hot at one, you know, in the afternoon kind of thing. So that was nice. So I did a little bit of roofing right away and literally left that company, went to the interwebs to find my next opportunity in life and careers. And so I started Googling sales and marketing, which, you know, when you're 20 years old, 19 years old, is a wildly different thing than what you actually what it really is. Right. I thought I was going to go apply for a company to be like Matthew McConaughey in the movie. How to how to lose a guy in 10 days. Right. I'm going to go. There's going to be a pool table in the office and ping pong. And, you know, we're fresh out of the gym and we don't you know, we're jerking around with the guys coming up with a slogan for beer ads or whatever. Like, That was in my head who I was going to apply for at 19 years old with no college. And so I interviewed with a company called Global Marketing Enterprises. Spent a week prior to the interview process, googling everything I could about the company. It was a Fortune 100 marketing company, focusing on like AT&T, credit card processing, Visa, MasterCard, that kind of stuff like that. And so the interview is, you know, full suit, the whole shebang, you know, come in business professional for the interview. wearing my homecoming outfit from high school to my, you know, the interview, I look like an idiot. Walk in there, there's a younger guy, not significantly older than I am, in his probably late 20s, a guy named Don McConville, right? And he's sitting behind a giant executive desk. He's got a little credenza in the back with some award type stuff on it. And the front office smells like it's corporate. It looks every bit of how to lose a guy in 10 days. I'm there. And so I'm sitting there. It goes through the interview process, up, down, bad way, sideways. I'm drooling over just taking the job because I have it in my head what I thought I was applying for. Um, and, uh, he says, all right, cool. We're not, you know, we're not just taking everybody here. We'll let you know, give you a call back sometime around eight o'clock tonight. If we choose to move forward with a second round interview, it's a three interview process. So even more secured that I'm definitely in the, in the books for like a real big secure, like Holy cow type thing, right? Eight o'clock I get a text says, Hey man, you made it to the second round. We'd love to have you in. It's going to be a job shadow for four hours. Um, you know, same thing, business professional come in and meet wherever, whatever the day was. losing my mind, freaking out, like, I don't know how I made it through the first round. This is crazy. Go and sit down and jump in a dude, dude named Vince takes me out to go and direct market AT&T U-verse you, you know, a neighborhood 20 minutes or so from the office. So we walk out the building, we jump in his silver Pontiac Sunfire circa 1997 or so. And, you know, jump in the passenger seat here and he's 23, maybe, a couple years older than me, same deal. I'm like, what's going on? It's still oblivious to us. I'm still wearing a suit. He's wearing a suit. We're all just wearing suits. We look good. We jump in the car. It's worth, you know, $3,500. I'm like, what? Looking back, I cannot believe that I continued the rouge in my brain of all this, right? So we go out to the field. three foot of snow in Ohio, right in Cleveland in the middle of January. I'm in a pair of loafers, of course, in my suit. I had a winter jacket, thank God, on top of that. And in full suit and tie, him and I both, they give me a lanyard that says I'm with AT&T and we go out and knock on doors for 45 minutes. We sell two jobs that were cable internet, brought them over to AT&T, signed them up, did the whole thing, and our little baby brings you back to the office. Feet are soggy, soaking wet, frozen. I take that back. Right before we went back to the office, we stopped at the corner and had a snowball, a baseball competition. The stop sign's over there. He goes, you think you can hit that stop sign with a snowball? You hit that stop sign with a snowball, you can have the job. course, I play baseball. So sure, it's a soft science soap. I'm like, so you got the job? He's like, yeah, we don't have a job. That's Don's job to pick if you get the job. Right. So I'm already like, I get it. I don't got it. I don't know what's going on. I still haven't realized that I'm going to be going door to door as the job. I just thought that was part of what that was of the interview. We get back to the office, same thing, Don sits me down, he runs me through the whole rigmarole, up, down, corporate, you know, Fortune 100 clients, AT&T, AT&T can come in at any time, that's why you got to be in a suit at all times. They want to see that tie and, you know, all this, but the whole goal here is to build a team, come in, build a team, sell so much, show us that you could do it. We only hire managers in training. We aren't looking for salespeople, you know, all of the things on management size. hook, line and sinker, I'm there, right? Same thing, you'll get a message from Vince later, if we decide we're only taking two people from today's interviews, blah, blah, blah, right? Get the message, go and do it. Had success in that. So I had, obviously I worked in that office in Cleveland selling cable and internet for a while. I actually almost washed out of there in the initial round of that. So in the first three, four weeks, I was literally like, 12 hours from quitting completely, sales forever. And they sent me on a, the last ditch effort, I got sent to Columbus on a business trip to go sell in a bunch of apartment complexes by myself down there, which on their side of it was their way of nigging me out to say, you're either gonna figure it out while you're there or you're gonna quit. Either way, we don't care when you come back, you'll either be here or you won't be, right? And I sold like four a day while I was down there. You know, finally I'm like, okay, cool. I figured it out. MDU, like everybody in the whole apartment got signed up. We rocked and rolled. And from then on, man, it was just like, build a team, build a team, build a team. They moved me out. I did head a team in Detroit. Then I had a team here in Kansas City, got promoted to run the office in Kansas City back in 09. 08. And the office in Kansas City we built up down here, I was here for about eight months. And 08, 09, everything was crazy with real estate and everything else and the world's going to end and we're not going to end and nobody's got money and mortgages are all going to default. And I'm still a kid and a commission for that was the office made 100 bucks and the sales guy would make 100 bucks if you sold somebody a full phone, internet, and cable. Cable, phone, internet. So, went back, somebody that was AT&T and left and went to Time Warner or something, and then you could get them back. It was $114 commission. So, essentially, the office got the same amount of money per rep as the rep got. So, rep got one payment, office got a matching payment there. That's how it was. So, as the owner, you know, if I get 10 reps out, you know, I make $1,000 a day on a fee schedule like that. So, you know, goals have 40, 50, 60 reps and you get a slice of all the offices you promote kind of thing as an organization. So I got two offices in two different states, we're making, you know, 80 grand a year out of each office, when it's all said and done. And, you know, I'm 21 and a half years old, 22 years old right now. And it was like, well, you know, this isn't bad money for, you know, a young kid, I'm making six figures, and six figures back then was way better than it is these days. But it was, you know, constant turnover, 18 year old kids in and out, in and out, every once in a while, you get an old guy that comes in, you get them locked in, you know, same thing, like just normal recruiting funnel sales, garbage. And I get a phone call and he's from my stepdad who ran a construction company back in Ohio, doing commercial construction for Burlington Coke Factory, taking old like Walmarts, or not Walmart, but Kmarts, like marks and things that would go out of business. Burlington would buy them up, you'd go in and we'd refer out all the walls and we'd put new drop ceilings in and do a changeover of the shell of the building and turn it into a Burlington. And so same thing in 08, 09, they stopped building those. So they had a bunch of contracts of the year that they had built out all over the country to go do those with the general contractor that was doing them. And all of it got put on pause. So he calls me up, he goes, hey, so everything I was doing just got frozen, not doing anything anymore. I don't really know. I got a bunch of people that, you know, that have that I got staff. I don't really know what to do with them right now. A buddy of mine up here in Cleveland says that insurance companies, no matter what, with everybody defaulting on mortgages, and that doesn't matter because they got the slush fund over here where they have to put money in every year to pay claims with. Profitability is irrelevant. They have to spend this claim money regardless of whether or not the economy is in the crap or not. All we got to do is go find people that have shingles that are blown off their house and tell them that their insurance company has to pay for it, and they'll put on a new roof and the insurance will pay for it. 2009 deductibles were 250. All right, cool. It's a $200 deal. Every single claim had the ability to waive a deductible via pick a flashing piece part that you're like, oh, you don't need to do that. Cool. Your deductible is washed. He's like, but I don't, you know, old guy. So he's like, I don't have any way to go sell door to door or anything like that with these guys, but I got all the crews to build. So you go, you go build a team, you go sell it. I'll build it, do all that. We'll split everything down the middle. All right, cool, I'm getting out of here, right? What's the average construction projects like 10 grand ish, you know, commissions on that ends up 1000 1500 bucks a piece. Like my head I go, well, that sounds like about the same time investment as it is to sell this cable and internet only I got to get their social security number and likely a credit card on file. When I knock on their door right there first time I've ever met him, at least this way, it's slow played a little bit. And instead of 100 bucks, $1,000, way better commission. So I said, all right, we'll take the process that we've built over here at this company and how and who and what and where, four impulse factors, five steps to conversation, eight great work habits, all the stuff that goes into the system of selling here, we just insert the new product to it. And it should be super plug and play, really easy peasy. So packed all my shit. Actually, my wife currently, right, Megan lived with me down there. I had just met her. She worked for me in the sales office in Kansas City then, in O of 8. And I had only known her for like three months. So I said, honey, I paid the rent for the next six months, right through the end of the term. I said, it's paid. You don't got to get out, but I'm packing my shit. I'm going to leave you the bed, whatever you want. I'm not going to make the place unlivable, but I'm packing my shit and I'm going back to Ohio. I don't expect you to move. You got a kid. This was fun, but I'm going to go make money. And she's like, well, fuck that. I'm moving with you. I'm OK with that. I didn't even have that even in the thought process. I didn't even think it was a plausible possibility, you know. So we jumped to U-Haul, we hauled ass back there. And those days I was used to selling cable and internet in the rain, snow, sleet, didn't matter, seven days a week. It was like, job is 11 to seven every day. We're out banging doors, there's no in between. And so first day we get in, Monday I get out, and it's pouring freaking rain. And I didn't know any better. So I'd take my Buick, we go park it on the street, I hop out, I have no marketing material, I have no contracts, I have jack shit. I was told, go find people that had shingles missing, knock on their door and tell them their insurance might buy them a new roof. And I went out, knocked on a bunch of doors in the rain and sold three jobs. And I mean, the rest is history, man. From that point, that was that was it. So, you know, built that company with my stepdad up until 2014, 2015. Or my equity in the business of 5050 of that they had left the company three years prior to that and moved to South Carolina got the beach house you know had the life. I was right at the precipice of hiring a GM and. it being a self sustaining $15 million a year business. And up in Cleveland, and we got to a point where I said, I need my equity in writing, like, I love you, we're family, but family will take us so far. You guys have been exited the company, I don't have a lot of controls, I still have to run certain decisions and get some things, you know, co signed on. And I'm not down with it, right? If you're not here, this is what we're gonna do when we're gonna do how we're gonna do it. And you know, you're either going to sign over and say that I don't have to worry about walking in one day and have no job, or I'm going to have to go build this thing on my own. And I don't want to do that. I don't want to fight with you guys. I want to compete with you. I don't want to leave and have your staff want to leave with me. And now you don't have a company either, right? Like this is all just bad. And sure as shit, we crisscross applesauce that thing. And they were like, yeah, well, you know what, if that's the case, you can go. And I was like, Okay, like, it's your funeral kind of thing. You know what I mean? I had obviously coming up to that we knew that that was a possibility. So in the process of like, hey, we need to do, we're incorporated, we had everything, logos, polos, everything you could ever have, you know, to get a company going in 24 hours, printed contracts that were already, you know, shrink wrap sitting there waiting for the day in if and when it ever happened. And, um, You know, so, you know, they pulled the trigger. So now I don't I no longer feel bad. And, you know, we went in February 1st, 2015 and said, let's do the thing officially.
Oh, yeah, man. Well, I mean, that sucks, I guess. But how is how is that relationship now?
I didn't speak to them for three years, not one single time. So 15 to 19 and a half, I did everything I could do to steer clear of them. They were obviously still in business and suppliers, things we bought from the same suppliers. So there was some weird, like we had trips that we'd go on together, it would be at the same place, but it would be like, I'm over here, you guys stay over there kind of thing. And I reconciled all that in 2020 through all of what that was. So now it's more of like a joking thing. My office is actually about three quarters of a mile down the same street as their offices. So it's really fucking crazy. But real estate is what real estate is. I wasn't going to move somewhere else just because I was like, well, you know, in Cleveland, there's one major road that goes north and south. And there's one major road that goes east and west. And they're literally plopped right at the corner that I'm like, I'm not gonna move further out like I need to be able to go north, south, east and west. This is the best spot to do that. So, you know, real estate's cheapest here. It's what it's gonna be.
No, dude, I respect it, man. I just have a similar sort of, I mean, you know, you so you've been since 2015, right, 2020, reconciled. So I originally started this two businesses ago with a good friend of mine. Well, not anymore. But originally, my best friend, like my brother, right, somebody who I never had to have anything in writing, because it's my brother, dude, like, we had something to and we just never got around to signing it. And And to the point when I started being like, Hey, by the way, we need to get that. That's when things started getting, uh, I just knew. So this was actually supposed to be a second company to see what this insurance fuss was all about because the original was pure retail. That's all I had ever done was just, you know, I started at a company power home remodeling, uh, similar, like they were canvas sales and it was a one call close. That was it hammer and nail, like, You don't leave until they call the cops on you type stuff. We don't do that, but I'm just saying that's how it was. Same thing. Come in the office with a tie or don't come in at all. And and we yeah, that got pretty ugly and we still don't speak, actually. So but it hasn't been that amount of time. And he's also well, anyhow. So I understand what you're but family, real family. I can only imagine. I mean, so that's your stepdad. That was your mom. You speak to your mom or your stepdad three years.
Oh, yeah, it was wonderful. So come to find out the beauty of life, right? Things come full circle. So at the end of the circle here, we find out that they thought I was embezzling money. Because we had roughly $16,000 that they had missing through their forensic accountant who went through all our books to find it, which was like our petty cash that I had going into the fall, right? This was a fetish that happened in February. So December, what did I do in December? I bonused our sales team in cash. Hey guys, here's a rack. Here's a rack. Here's a rack. I didn't spend the cash. And so like, literally they said, Hey, this is what happened to whatever. And I'm like, you guys know, you could have just said something to me. I would have explained. It was very easy to explain. Like, I know exactly what you're talking about. Here was what that was. Do you have any other questions? And they're like, Well, that's not what they said. I'm like, well, I don't give a fuck what they said. This is exactly what happened. You asked me, I didn't stutter. This was exactly where that money went. I can account for every nickel of it like that. And I said, the whole reason we were trying to get shit in writing was so that we didn't have these conversations. It was point blank. You get this, I get this. This is what happens when we do this. Let's just do shit right, and then it's fine. So that was part of the reconciliation on the family side of that. But leaving there, I did leave with my best friend of 30 years. Uh, his name is TJ and he ran all my production at that company. So when he, I left, he came with me. Um, he, uh, he didn't get a choice. He got terminated, uh, as well as part of my deal apparently. Cause they did, they figured they couldn't trust him if I was gone kind of thing. So there's allegiance to me. They can never trust. So he's like, I'm sorry, but you got, you got to go to. So he came with me, he never missed a paycheck, you know, same thing day one, we were up and running, you know, within five days, we were on folding tables in an office space temporarily, had our official office building all the way fully open and operating within 30 days. And I fired him almost to the exact same anniversary date, last January. We moved out, we got fired on together on February 1, I fired him on January 23.
It wasn't an easy thing, so I'm sure that was a- Family, best friends, the whole shebang, man.
I feel for you, dog. I've done them both.
Business, man. Money makes people funny, as they say, but it is what it is. God, dude. It really, truly takes me back, but at the same token, it impresses me that you were able to get that type of resolve, you know, like, we don't have options. Well, you certainly do, I guess you could choose to just, you know, boohoo and think about it and not react and not take action, or you could just fucking go and get things done. And that's exactly same thing, man. Like, you know, I had 20 jobs on the books, and then it's, I'm not even gonna go to the ins and outs and doesn't matter. Like, I was the retail guy, I'm running this other company that was the baby, we started this and like trying to see what insurance is all about. But then behind my back, they're doing all this other stuff. And Long story short, we've got these 20 insurance jobs of which I know nothing about. I'm totally green to insurance, retail, and nothing's really moving on them. I'm not going to imply or insinuate that there was a purpose-driven sabotage there or anything, but what I can tell you is nothing was moving, and this was in my name. I'm like, Yeah, that's not going to work, man. So I just stopped doing anything for that. Took over every single one of those jobs. We got paid out on every single one of those jobs, learned very quickly what to do, fixed everything. We ended up doing every roof in that neighborhood because, you know, guys like us, I feel like when we lock our teeth into something, especially when there's a motive behind it of like, OK, now I'm going to show you, you know what I mean? We tend to get shit done, man. So I understand exactly. And now look at where you're at now. Where are you at now? I mean, talk about that. Two locations. You seem to be doing quite well. And so this is good for our listeners to hear, by the way.
Sure, man, we so we do OK. Right. I've been, you know, in roofing now for over 10 years, which those that have participated have seen companies like Storm Ventures Group come and go and Delmenico and some of the big guys like that, that's that have been around from the top to the bottom to the sideways. So, you know, I feel blessed that I get to be one of those guys that's been, you know, in the industry long enough to have ridden through a full market cycle, you know, when the world was crazy to when the world was easy peasy to, you know, right now is just sitting with my team talking about, you know, insurance carriers and how they're currently going back into like this insane crazy thing. Good news for you and me is I think that fully, that started August, September-ish last year and got worse as it kind of went into the wintertime. I think coming into the springtime here, the purse strings are gonna open back up. We have an election year coming up, right? So one of the biggest industries in the world that controls things is gonna be your PNC and your insurance casualty companies. And so if they continue on with tons of bad press, Florida just had a huge, thing that came out talking about how contractors that is normally the narrative is contractors are the big evil guy running claims, and comes to find out that, oh, actually, the contractors are not responsible for this, that they are purely actually helping people because the carriers are fraudulently denying and delaying claims that were legitimate. So if they paid them originally, we wouldn't have all the problems that are being blamed on the contractor.
So coming into the election- Is that what you're talking about? Like they embezzled all this money and then they basically just like, they did all this stuff that big pharma would typically do and essentially take the fine because the fine would have ended up saving them. I mean, almost a billion dollars in what they made by just disregarding and blatantly cheating their customers and denying claims, being fined, losing in court. But they're like, yeah, whatever. The fine's way less than what we make by being scumbags. Isn't that crazy? It's just insane.
When you take billions and billions and billions of dollars of claims, there's two things that you have to do if we automatically owe that money tomorrow. I'm the insurance company, right? I don't want to pay out $4 billion tomorrow. If I got to pay $4 billion, I want to stretch it out into three years. And so the way to do that is to get sued because I'm not paying the claim today, I'm going to pay it then, right? And same thing, I'm going to get a little fine, they're going to slap me on the wrist. But what I'm also going to get is $2 billion worth of claims that got denied or completely way underpaid that people don't want to fight them in court and they just take it on the chin and walk away. So, you know, do what you will with the information that's provided there. I'm not a legal person. I'm not suing insurance companies. This is just for informational purposes. Disclaimer at the bottom, you know, all the fun stuff. But yeah, so I think they coming into the springtime this year, I think we're going to get the purse strings loosened back up. They're going to pay the claims like they're supposed to with a little bit less, at least a little bit less pushback. You know, we as a company, I don't mind. I don't mind the hoops. I like the hoops, right? The claim hoops to get the claim approved. I like those because those mean that there's a barrier to entry to being successful in the industry. So the people that aren't willing to jump through three or four or five hoops, Cool. I'll take their jobs, right? They only went through the two hoops. I'll go jump through the other four of them. I'll hire staff to do it. We'll go scoop up that market share. But I just made a, it was funny. I got a re-inspection that was supposed to be today and it rained on it. for a claim that I was talking with a ladder assist guy on on camera for social media when my media guy was here talking about specifically, you know, the insurance carriers now are getting to the point where like the hoops used to be jumped through the hoop. Each hoop led to another hoop. Now the last hoop leads to, hey, I'm trying to pay this claim out. I know that we owe for it. You know, I really like to pay it. I'm going to send it up to my manager for approval, but I just want to let you know they're probably not going to approve it. So you talk to the person who's in charge of writing the supplement. They say, yes, I want to pay this all day. Let's do it. I agree. Right. You've done the work. And then the manager just goes, I'm not paying it. And you ask why? And they just go to me literally like we're stuck with what are we going to do on that? We're going to sue them over a ten thousand dollar roof, twelve thousand dollars worth of roofing. And so, you know, trying to figure out the balance to that process, it's like it's just it's an unfair, unfair game. So hopefully this year they go and they just start paying for more. We got we got less problems on that piece to it. But question being successful and all the companies to the offices are, I mean, we do dive run the gauntlet, right? Big office, run super loosey-goosey. Everybody does what they want. Drama in the office, cut off the head of the snake. When I fired TJ in January last year, I also fired $8 million worth of sales guys in revenue. We took a fully producing office in Cleveland, cut the heads off, ran it back down to a skeleton crew. I kept two guys there out of the 10, and then We hired a new office, ran with four or five sales guys as a group last year, did $8.5 million out of the Cleveland office last year by itself on a rebuild year. We just hired through the DMs and all the other company stuff, stole a good guy away from a competitor here to run as our sales manager now. We hired six people this week to run in for the spring season and train them up. Excited for the Cleveland office to get back to rocking and rolling. That office is slated this year with the storm that happened at the end of last year. There's some remnants here running through the winter. We're hoping that that'll do between 17 and 20 million this year in just Cleveland. Kansas City, we opened February of last year from the ground up, bought a 10,000 square foot building, had no intention in running out of offices anytime soon, but we have in eight months filled every one of the offices. So I think it's like the age old fish tank, right? You put a shark in the tank, it'll only get as big as the tank that it's in. So you buy a big building, you think it'll take me three to five years to fill it, no problem. And then you just keep writing checks for salaries and putting people in them and putting screens in them and building them out. But one of the biggest things that I think I've identified in business that has taken me all 15 years that I've been doing this roofing game thing to get through is Our job, you and me, Kenny, is to be Tony Stark. Our job is to go and put the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest, the hardest working of the hardest, the most ethical, baddest motherfuckers you can find, and assemble the team that can go do the work. It's so much easier. I love to be in the field and bang doors. A couple of calls ago, we were on a call and I was in the field with one of my guys. I like that. If I had to choose what I could do, dude, I would just go sell and be like, I'm shoulder to shoulder in the foxhole with you guys. Let's go do it. I like to do that. But my best use of time, obviously, same thing, we said it then, is that's not where it is. While I'm still the sales manager in the Kansas office, until I get the right guy there, it's gonna be, you know, it's one of the things I have no choice but to do for now. We've taken three swings at getting a proper sales manager here in Kansas City. And, you know, I've struck out all three times, but you know what, that fourth time, I only got to get the one out of four, right? We still got room to hit a donker out over center field. So, you know, fingers crossed when we get there and if it takes longer than it takes longer, but, you know, rolling rolling through man, the biggest thing for us is to just be hiring, training, hiring, training, hiring, training, hiring, training, creating content that makes more people see how we hire and train create more videos that show people what the culture is like why they would want to be there for the ideal person in the company that we're not today, but the company we want to be tomorrow, next week, next year, two years from now, that company is going to require so many different pieces and players than we have today, that we might find a person today that doesn't fit today, but they do fit that company over there. And we need to get better about identifying that that's that person. I don't need you yet, but I'm going to need you. So I'm going to put you in. I'm going to find a way to get you in now. And all that does is condense that time then. So you're like, OK, three years from now, I need that person, that person. OK, well, I got the person I needed three years from now, this one. What other pieces do I need from three years from now? Let's go get those other two pieces and turn three years from now into today. And, you know, the quicker I figured that out here, probably about eight months ago, when I had to rehire all new production staff and kind of tweak the way that we corporately manage our production process. It was like a game changer for me on how much I've been doing the work that's that I didn't shouldn't be doing all day every day to where now. like the way the company flows and, you know, I mean, our payroll is four times what it is, what it was. Right. You know, like we the salary cost now is like we've long blown out the cap. And so, you know, I have a six month runway here where it's like we're going to hurt really badly. in six months if we don't do shit right, because I'm not willing to go put my entire life on the credit card. A lot of guys are like, we'll just keep swiping it. I run a cash heavy company so that I don't need credit. I have credit, but if I am doing shit so badly that I'm just going to swipe the freaking credit card, I'm just burying myself under debt that I'll never be able to get out. I'll be the United States of America where we got a $4 trillion credit card payment. You're like, no shit, you're never going to get out from underneath that. You know what I mean? So for me, it's like, we're going to figure out the sales piece of that. So now it's like, well, that gets you thinking differently, right? So you're like, the salaries are this. I got to sell this. OK, well, now how do we sell that? Like, oh, shit, we better hire some more people, because the three people we got are not going to hire. So you're like, cool. So hire, hire, hire, hire. OK, now train, train, train. And The more that you do that, and then you turn that, and then you do that, you realize that the money flows faster, the money flows deeper. You're like, well, how the hell are we still making money? I keep spending more of it. The reality is, is that as long as you're doing everything proportional, your cash flow is still stable.
I read something the other day, and the guy was talking about how like there's all these old cliche like college is the only way to make money, you know, a career or be successful. Saving money is the only way to be to make money. It's the antithesis. It couldn't be any more true. Like you've got to spend money. You truly do have to spend money to make money. I mean, I'm in that same boat with you right now. I just started a new office in Delaware and I'm like, man, I got a payroll, I got an office there. They're not even set up yet to really, we're doing the hiring and training, but they've got to be trained. And then they've got to produce. And even the producing takes, what? I don't know. We're not going to get paid for a few months. You know that. Realistically, it's not going to happen. So you're going to eat shit for a few months. It just is what it is. It's part of the investment. We knew that. But doing it and feeling it, it's like, ah, man. It's the winter. We're already tight. To your point, we don't do anything on credit. We don't owe anybody anything. Same thing, but I see a lot of people who do do that. And I've also seen a lot of go out of business. I've worked for businesses that ran all their stuff on a net 30 or net 60 with their suppliers and like push it every time and didn't pay them. Couldn't get a job out that Tuesday. And it's like, are you serious, dude? Like, oh yeah, you owe us. Like we're not, we're not sending anything out until you pay us everything.
You know, there's a very big Midwest company that's stationed here in Kansas City that is wildly overextended. And so we are currently a lot of people are running away with their hair on fire. And, you know, so we're getting a screen a lot and pick and choose kind of what we want is it's, it's a big operation that's got a lot of pieces. And a lot of people aren't trained real well, but they're like, you know, the stories that were that are coming out of this, the same thing, I'm like, man, I can't believe people that were like, well known in the industry, big guys that were like, leveraging their company to that level, like, what? But, you know, like I said, I mean, my accountant, every time I talked to him, they turned it into like, hey, you know, you can go get credit, you could get terms, why are you why are you spending cash? You don't want to use some of this cash for other stuff. And I'm like, No, I don't. What? Why are you telling me to not pay my stuff when I have the money to pay it? Why wouldn't I just pay it, you know? And I get like invested and go make interest on a trust like I, yes, I get that. And that's where they want to go with that every time. But I'd rather on Friday at 4.30 in the PM. not owe a single person a dollar, then, you know, I'll be like, hey, 30 days from now, I owe this money, I'm still I could sleep tonight, because 28 days from now, I'm panicking that I got to write a $300,000 check rather than a $50,000 check three weeks ago.
Hey, bro, you and I are two birds with the same feather. That's really the only reason I ever started doing that was I was just like, letting them get that high, I was like, I don't like this. I'm just going to pay you every week. Most people don't do that. I was like, I don't give a shit, because I can't stand stroking checks for hundreds of thousands. I'm not doing it. I'll just pay you. I'd rather pay you 50, 60 Gs than 200, 300. You know what I mean? No, I'm good. I'm good on that. I'm sure strategy or cash flow or anything. My CFO is like, well, technically, it's the same. I'm like, not to me, bro. It's not the same to me. I don't like seeing that amount of money go in or out. This has been valuable, I hope, if you're listening to this, man, and hearing what he's saying, because this is somebody who's been through countless startups, as well as myself. he's talking about the real stuff that most people don't like talking about, you know, all this crap. And that's one of my favorite things to do is talk about the real, like, it is not, it's not fucking easy to do this, first of all, and you will lose sleep and you will spend money and you will, like to get successful requires a lot of jumping with both feet and hoping there's a, you remember to pack a parachute, you know what I mean? Like, hope so, whatever, we'll find out one way or the other, we're going to find out, but I can't tell you how many guys have started up under me, under Brandon, under you, and whatever, dude. The two mentors I have here locally are like, dude, who cares? You know what I mean? Because the barrier for entry, to your point, is so low to get going. Just to get going, like, OK, I've got to get a license. In Maryland, you take a test, an open book test. You've got a truck. I had a guy who just started a business that wasn't fit for here. two, two months, maybe of solar experience or roofing experience. Oh, you know, two years of solar experience. And now he's a business owner for roofing. And I want to be like, it doesn't matter, but like, you know what I mean? Like that's out there. That's out there. That guy's now going to people and looking them in the eye and saying like, you should do business with me for your roof because I've got all of two months of experience and know exactly how to take care of you. But you know what? I have no doubt that, uh, all of those folks will experience inevitably what we're talking about. They'll be the guys rolling on the net 30 or net 60 all the way up to the last day, or pushing in the next day and finding out the hard way that everything's shut down. Oh, by the way, insurance companies are not paying the way you think. You know what I mean? I know you think this is super easy right now, but it's not. We might make it look a little easier. We have the cash flow to loan you out a draw or you know what I mean? How are you going to do that if they don't pay you for 60 days? Or they do what you just said, because I've got one right now, 14 grand. They're like, yeah, sorry, it was a mistake. Sorry. Sorry. Like, yeah, sorry. I don't know. Sorry, we messed up. Sorry. Can't help you. Be the customer. I'm like, okay, you want to tell them that? You want to tell them that they owe us 14 grand? Good luck, you know. But anyhow, If there's nothing else, I would say the moral of this story is cash flow fucking kills, but it also allows you to sleep at night and take advantage of it. Actually, one thing I want to mention is what you just said, that big company in this current climate and everything that is important to state, which is situations like this, times like this, are opportunities for guys like me and you and other guys to do things the right way, or at least I'd like to think I do. I'm certainly not perfect, and I'm learning things, believe me, as I go. I've never scaled a company to this. Everything from this point forward is, I don't know about you, but for me, it's completely the unknown. I don't know. I'm doing it to educate myself. I've scaled three or four of these to five to seven, even 10, but I'm not ever successfully, and we will, we already are, but we already are. everywhere else I've ever been, it was all retail based. And that 10 to 20 mark, they start spending way more money for the same amount of leads, or those same leads rather cost way more money. And they just get themselves in trouble. Retail is a lot different. You're paying for all that stuff up front, and you're really hoping and praying that you sell. Or you get the leads, whereas insurance is the opposite. coming to collect a couple months later. But this is a great opportunity, man. To your point, you can make it through the winter and use this winter wisely, get better, hire, train. We're auditing every one of our systems. We brought in John to do that, really just to make sure we did it. We talked and talked and talked at EOS, and we're going to take a hour off each day, or what did we say? We're going to block off our mornings all winter. We're going to audit all of our systems. We're going to hire this guy. We're going to do this. And do you know how often we did that? Within two weeks, I was like, all right, John, come on. If nothing else, even if you just reinforce what we already know we need to do, that's money well spent. Because sometimes you just need somebody who's like, dude, you're paying me. And I'm going to be on your ass to do the things that I already know you don't want to do. But yes, you need to look at this workflow. Yeah, this, this is how it is now. But how's it going to be a 35 million? Can that person right there handle 35? Man, I love what you said about hiring in advance for that, because that's actually something that we're starting to do that I hadn't considered before. Like, yeah, that guy's great for that role right now. Can he sustain 35 million? No. Okay, well, who do you need to hire to make that happen? You know, and You get people that'll tell you the adverse is also true. Like, oh, you don't want to pay too many people. You know what I mean? You hear so much, dude, that's like, don't do that. Get all the sales and then hire all those people. And then there's like, oh, build the team for what you want, not what you have. Do the best for you. I mean, do you have any comment actually on that? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
One of my early mentors was a big purveyor of find the who to do the how. And so, yeah, man, I mean, point blank, like you said, it's build the team that's going to do the business the way you want to do it. Now, am I going to build a $200 million roofing company people's salaries today with, you know, $50 million in sales? No, it's crazy to think I'm going to add $150 million in sales, right? But to your situation at $7, $10, $12, $15, $20, you don't want to hire the $10 million pieces parts right there when the goal and plan for the year is $15, or $20, or next year is the $20, the year after that is $25. You're like, okay, well, that's within a person, one extra salary, that's within $30,000 difference between the guy that could do it and the right guy to do it. You bleed 30 grand. At the end of the day, 30 grand in salaries is two extra roofs in a year. You start tweaking shit to be like, okay, I'm going to make this decision, I have to go find 30 grand. My team makes fun of me all the time because my litmus is, have I ever done something dumber with that amount of money? And so whatever they bring to me, they got, uh, you know, like Matt's downstairs, shit was $13,000 for the training process. And I have historically trained everybody personally. Right. I get out of the thing. We stand in front of everybody. We tell everybody. And at the end of the day, I forget a bunch of shit because I've done it for so long that it's second nature to me. So I skip over all the granular, like intentional things that we have to go through with all the new guys. And I'm like, I need to start paying people that have like, that just spent the time to like break everything down to like the crumbs of what the training needs to be so that I can get properly well trained people. Because if I don't train them, somebody else is going to train them or nobody's going to train them. And if nobody trains them and they stay here, that's probably worse than if they left to go get trained somewhere else. And so a lot of that came into that salary piece. I'm still stuck in 2004. And so being in 2004, $50,000, $60,000 in salary is still a lot to me. But nowadays, your $50,000, $60,000 salary is an $85,000 guy. It's the same guy. It's just wrapping your head around the inflation piece. You know, and like sitting down with these guys who got like secretaries in the office making $69,000. I'm like, what? They answered the phone. What the fuck are we doing? You know, like, dude, that's like, that's your 40 couple of years ago. Like that's what it costs to get humans to come in here. You know, like good guys are like 120, 130. I'm like, good God. But that's that 30,000, $40,000 spread. You could go, you could, you go get somebody for 90. Yeah. But like the right one's 127. You're like, okay. well, let's get the right one at 127 because they're going to compound money for me. Whatever that looks like, the profit on 127 is at least 30 grand more than the one for 90. But one, you got to make sure it's the right hire and you train them right. As long as you do that every time, you'll never overhire. Companies overhire and overscale because they just slap asses in seats. You know, I need 22 new people. Okay, HR, go get me 22 new people, right? Are they the right 22 people? Did we only need 17 people that were the right people for the same money as the 22? And then you end up with 22 untrained, terrible people, and then the company is overscaled, and you have to lay everybody off.
I love it, man. That's actually got my wheels turning. Dude, we could probably talk until tomorrow. I didn't realize how long it's been. Did you see that? It's 2.30 right now. It's hilarious. We actually have a live stream. Right on the hour, baby. I want to make sure everybody knows where to find you, especially if you are listening to this and you're in the area, you're looking for employment, or you just want to see what Josh is up to. Where can they find you and your company's information at?
All right. All right. Yeah. And Facebook, Instagram, all the things I am at Josh Steinberger. Easy peasy. S t e i n b e r g e r. Next gen restorations to company. Social media should should bounce pieces apart as long as you follow Kenny, I'm sure that my my stuff's already pixelized you and sent it in your face anyway. So, you know, thanks for being a part of the part of the experience, man.
Yeah, man. I'm honored, actually, in all seriousness. I'm really looking forward to see where we're all headed here in the next few years, because it's not been easy recently. And I think, hopefully, it does turn your point. If it doesn't get worse, it's not going to get worse. It's only going up from here. But I appreciate you coming on, my friend. And we'll have you on again here soon. In fact, that's what we should do. We should catch up in like six months to eight months and just stay to the union, see where we're all at. I dig it. It'll be good though. Brother, thank you so much. Say hi to the family, man. And I look forward to getting you guys back on soon. Crush this quarter, crush next quarter, and we'll talk to you again soon. All right, brother. Thank you.
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