[00:00:00.000] - Brandon
Dude-a-cus. No, don't hay me. I'm haying first. Don't do that to me, you son of a... Bro, I got to tell you, I am very partial to this guy, our next guest, and he's been on once before, and then we've had just several professional conversations with this guy. I even said this to him. We hung up the call and I turned the recording off, and I just straight up just told him, I have met a lot of men, a lot of leaders in my life that there's just elements of them that you're like, yeah, that's cool. That's good strength. It's a good skillset. And I want to learn from part of that. Then there's like these individuals that you meet where there's just a more holistic recognition of, I would just call it in general, wisdom. The reason I use that word is it's not just book experience knowledge. Wisdom is different when it begins to translate into the way that you carry yourself, the personal brand that you're establishing, the reputation that precedes you, those leaders that are confident, competent, and consistent begin to move into a wisdom category for me. And honestly, dude, at the end of the day, Mark Springer, for me, he's just a wisdom-filled guy.
[00:01:21.100] - Brandon
His approach to his personal life, you don't have to agree with everything he does or doesn't do, but it's hard to look at the fruit of the way he manages himself and disagree with the outcomes.
[00:01:32.540] - Chris
Yeah, the other thing that I think I admire about Mark is his character. You talked about just the way he conducts himself. At one point in this conversation, it was pretty clear that he's carrying some frustration/disappointment in some things that he's dealing with right now. I think other personalities or people that we know might choose to behave a little bit differently dealing with the circumstances he's dealing with. I think I really admired... I think part of what I've observed in Mark is there's a level of restraint and discipline in how he manages his emotions around business. He's held a lot of really important leadership roles, not the least of which, now, post-restoration, he's advising different companies and on boards and making investments in different things. I think part of that wisdom you're talking about for me is he just is a great deal of self-control.
[00:02:31.600] - Brandon
Yeah, self-control is a great way.
[00:02:32.890] - Chris
And the way he shows up in conversations, which I really, really respect. He was one of the figures that caused me to start to rethink how many F-bombs and S-bombs I- It's true. I'm using it in a public setting.
[00:02:46.200] - Brandon
There you go, Mark.
[00:02:47.630] - Chris
Between he and Katie Smith.
[00:02:49.520] - Brandon
That's right.
[00:02:50.460] - Chris
I think they're cut from a similar cloth, and I respect it because it's like no one's ever going to go wrong by not saying F-bombs. Yeah.
[00:02:58.230] - Brandon
No, it's true. We got to tip our hat to Katie and to Mark both. For modeling that circumspect professional behavior.
[00:03:06.110] - Chris
I love it.
[00:03:06.730] - Brandon
It's to iterate. Let's put it that way.
[00:03:09.840] - Chris
But okay, so we have drawn out this introduction. Yes, sir. But so we're going to talk about accounting.
[00:03:15.080] - Brandon
We are, which sounds boring as hell.
[00:03:17.190] - Chris
But don't hang up. Don't switch to the next podcast.
[00:03:19.250] - Brandon
We were pretty confident there was a solid three listeners by the time we got to the end of the show. No, we dive into more this perspective of where does our head need to in terms of the relationship that we have as leaders and business owners to the financial competencies of the business. There's just a requirement for us to continue to educate ourselves and surround ourselves with people that can help us have the correct understanding and respect for the financial data within our organization. One of the things that we end up pointing to is the RIAs, accounting. I'm brain farty now, but just basically it's an analysis of some standardizing accounting practices.
[00:04:01.240] - Chris
It's the accounting standards. Chart of accounts.
[00:04:03.850] - Brandon
Which he played a huge influential role in helping establish. It's funny because when you go through it and look at it, it stands the testament of time. It's a valid way to look at the business. I think one of the things that we're challenged by in our industry, for instance, is we all are trying to attack the thing from a different perspective. What can make that difficult, or what some of the difficult things that come from that is it's hard to lean on each other. It's hard to get some peer accountability. It's hard to get consistency in the business when we all look at this with such varying degrees of experience and background. I think a good place to start, if you're learning, if you're growing in your financial competencies, is go to this free tool that's available for us that's based in our industry. It's very connected to what we do and how we do it. It was developed by leaders that have gone before us and that have been successful in varying ways with with the operations that they were leading and designing. It may not sound like the sexiest topic in the world, but it's actually really important.
[00:05:08.370] - Brandon
I think the way that we dig into some of the mindset and posture that we need to have is very relevant and it's bite-size. I think from there, if you're motivated, then you can start digging in to some of the more nuts and bolts.
[00:05:23.140] - Chris
I will just say before we dive into this accounting primer, an interesting conversation with Mark, did you ever get into his big elk that he got?
[00:05:29.770] - Brandon
Or his buck or whatever? We do. Yes, we did. Then the guy, a week later, sends another photo of the buck that he closed out the season with. I don't know where this guy is going, but Mark finds very large animals.
[00:05:41.540] - Chris
He must have a couple chest freezers in his basement. Yeah. I was also, Mark, if you're listening to this, we are going to have to have you back on the podcast because I want to hear the story of how you burnt your own house down for an advertising campaign at Day Sprung. More on that, folks.
[00:05:59.500] - Brandon
Yeah, I missed that of dialog. Hey, guys, before we get rocking and rolling here, real quick, you may be a first-time listener to the show. You may not fully understand what Chris and I do. Well, we run Floodlight Consulting Group, and we help restore Scalar businesses. We take that mission very seriously. It obviously leads to a lot of the stories and experiences that we share in the show. I know that for many of us, we're looking at 2025 and saying, All right, I am tired of being an on hold in an year. I'm tired of being on hold because the beginning of 2024 felt like a disaster, and we're ready to mash the gas pedal down and grow the business and focus on developing what's in front of us. Well, we'd love to be able to have a chance to partner with you on that endeavor. Floodlightgrp. Com. Take a look at things there. If you have any interest in a strategic partner to help you grow and scale your business going into 2025, Chris and I's team here at Floodlight Would love to dance with you.
[00:07:01.700] - Chris
Yeah. Well, you don't want to see me as a dancer, but we'll talk. We will talk for sure.
[00:07:07.680] - Brandon
We will kick some tires. All right, gang, let's get into this one. Wow.
[00:07:10.940] - Chris
How many of you have listened to the Head Hard Boots podcast? I can't tell you that react, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:07:21.860] - Brandon
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my Our arms look smaller than yours.
[00:07:31.340] - Chris
I'm noticing that, and I really appreciate it. I thought you did that on purpose.
[00:07:34.560] - Brandon
No, I don't. I didn't, and I am not happy with it. Hey, all, thanks so much for listening to the show. Hey, if you're not already following, please do so and ultimately share. The coolest currency that we have in terms of supporting this is share it with a friend, share it with somebody, a colleague, a peer, one of your downline team members. Let them be able to take advantage of the information you're already leveraging in your favor. And finally, guys, if you hear a show that really moves you, that really moves the needle, will you please leave us a review? Those five-star reviews help us a ton.
[00:08:08.590] - Chris
Right on. Listen, if you're trying to grow your business, you might consider checking out Floodlights' business opportunity audit It's free. We provided it no charge. It's actually what we use to assess new clients as they come in. It's a 110-point assessment for your business. We've now decided to give access to the general public for it. Go and take our business opportunity audit at floodlightgrp. Com. It's going to help you identify the biggest gaps and opportunities in your business right now. At the end, it'll assign you a health score to let you know exactly where your business stands right now. Go check it out, floodlightgrp. Com/audit, and take the Boa. It's a great way to get a pulse on your business.
[00:08:48.970] - Brandon
Mark, dude, I've been really excited to talk with you. Chris and I have been fired up about financial conversations in general, and you and I are eventually going to get in and talk about this ridiculously monster bull you just harvested that I'm extremely jealous about. So anyways, thanks, brother, for hanging out with us today.
[00:09:08.870] - Chris
Again, I have a feeling that that'll be the predominant topic that we drop it to.
[00:09:13.380] - Mark
I'm just writing a high still, right? So, yeah, it's all good. I think we know if we didn't have a lot of discipline, we'd probably just spend the whole time talking about pursuits in the outdoors and ultimately what that can even bring to the mindset that one needs to in their business and clarity of thought and the soul food that comes from that. But we probably had to talk a little business, too.
[00:09:38.220] - Brandon
Yeah, let's go business first. Let's talk accounting. My buddy here, Chris, he's We're building our business just like everybody listening. He is going to cut out at a certain point in the program today to take care of business and serve our client base. We'll just keep trucking Mark in the conversation. But this conversation has been several months in the making. We've been connecting off and on over the last year. We just really respect you. I think that's been made pretty clear in some of our exchanges together. One of the things that came up in those discussions was you were just referring to this RIA document that technically has been around for a long time. I think you said something around 2014, but it's basically RIA's Accounting and Financial Management Guidelines. You and I have just been, or the three of us have just been talking about some of these ongoing frustrations that not only as consultants, but as business owners, you being an advisor and having some of the key roles you've had, dude, we are missing the mark on understanding what the financials need to look like, how we manage them and how we leverage them in our favor.
[00:10:48.470] - Brandon
And we just thought, let's get into this topic and start dissecting this a little bit. Maybe a great place to start so that people can maybe get a comprehensive understanding about you and the way that you think about financials, because I think in and of itself, that will lend the credibility that we're looking for, why people should pay attention this morning and listen to some of the things that you present. So just give us from your view, your background, your experience, what have you experienced around this competency or lack thereof around financial management? Why is this conversation so important to you from your perspective?
[00:11:25.540] - Mark
It's a major dive into the deep end, Brandon. But first of all, thanks guys for inviting me back. I always find our conversations to be extremely relevant to what's happening in the property restoration industry. Right back at you as far as the respect, I really respect what you guys are doing in the industry, how you're trying to help organizations and coach them and guide them. I think that's a big stewardship in the industry, and I really appreciate how you guys are going about that. Kudos to floodlight and all your team. What I don't appreciate Jate, is you losing 95% of the audience by saying, We're going to talk about accounting.
[00:12:05.290] - Chris
I'm sure that everyone who did, they heard Elf, and they're like, Accounting. But the ones that are still here are 100% on board now.
[00:12:14.900] - Mark
Yeah, that's right. Well, so we had a couple. Actually, when RIA released this accounting guidelines, we had a session at the conference. I can't remember if it was the 2014 conference or 2015 conference when it was, but it was like the We've absolutely published RIA accounting guidelines. There was two people in the room that were like, Oh, we thought we were in the advanced drying technology room. We just got the wrong room on the map. But this is As we started to talk about this, I think the genesis of this conversation was the cost of doing business report.
[00:12:52.750] - Brandon
Yeah, that's right.
[00:12:53.150] - Mark
If anyone looks at the cost of doing business report, I know a lot of there's been thousands of downloads of that, I am so proud of the work that RIA did in recognizing how important this is for the industry. I am so proud of know-how. Know-how, just full disclosure. Little quick story on know how. 2020, RIA, I was the RIA President in the year that no one in the history of restoration would ever want to be the RIA President, right in the thick of COVID. It was nipping tough. I mean, it was like, is RIA going to survive? I mean, industry is in a different place today than it was in 2020. Advocacy work that has been really struck a nerve with the industry was just starting. In fact, this was even before a lot of the discussions around pricing and being able to invite Verisk and Xactware and Mike Fulton to the table to the discussions that we had about building custom prices and things that have really been transformational for the industry. This was before a lot of that happened. I remember myself and Christie Cohen, the RIE CEO, and Katie Smith, who was the President-Elect after me.
[00:14:08.090] - Mark
We would just have these grim weekly catch-up call on Friday mornings, and it was just like, Oh, boy, how do we make it through this? We'd had to cancel the convention, which was like, that's the kiss of death. Yeah, sure. Trade Association. We'd had to cancel it. We didn't know how we were going to make it through that. I fought tooth and nail against canceling the convention. I was like, We are not canceling this convention. This thing is going to pass. This whole COVID thing is going to pass. We're going to look foolish if we cancel. Guess who looked foolish?
[00:14:43.310] - Brandon
It played out a little different.
[00:14:45.960] - Mark
It didn't play out how I thought it was going to play out at all. We ended up having to do a virtual event. Getting sponsors for that was tough. We had this. I remember one of our weekly calls, Christie's like, Hey, so we have this company. I don't know if you guys have heard of them, They're called Knowhow, who wants to sponsor our event? I'm like, What? Someone's willing to sponsor us? I'd never heard of them before. Got to know Layton a little bit and actually talked to Layton about using Knowhow in my company. But he has three companies using Knowhow in the spring of '20. I think it just launched. I'm like, Leighton, I'm like, I have beta-tested so many industry platforms. I can't do another one right now. We didn't end up... I wish I would have moved forward with Knowhow in hindsight. But fast forward to today, Knowhow has 700 different locations using Knowhow. It's a game changer as far as, in my opinion, it's a game changer as to probably one of the greatest pain points that companies experience, how do I get my processes and my procedures to the people who are in the field so that we can instill confidence in our team and protect the time of our leaders who spend all that time picking up the phone, Hey, so How do I do?
[00:16:00.810] - Mark
Is it two foot or three foot for a flood cut? I mean, boom, it's all there. It's a very, very impactful platform. Know-how partnered with RIA now, four years later on this cost of doing business report. The cost of doing business report, in my view, is one of the most important things that the industry has had as far as a piece of research and data. It will really tell us what's happening. There's a lot of things we think we know about what's happening in the industry. What this report did is it told us in black and white, I got it sitting right here. What is it? It's like 75 pages, we have this data presenting to us about size of companies, profit margins, percentages of TPA work, commercial versus residential, reconstruction versus mitigation, all this stuff we thought we know. We I asked around, and if you're part of a group, I used to be a part of DKI, DKI would, how does to do this report? But you only have these companies that are supposedly elite companies. You don't really know, do I really have a broad base of information in the industry. What this cost of doing business report is, it told us with a valid set of data, what's happening in the industry.
[00:17:26.180] - Mark
Then what was great, and I think this was put together so professionally, it said, Here's what you should do with this data. As I looked at it, here's the thing, and I know that this is a really long-winded answer to your question, but how do we get to the accounting guidelines? But what was astonishing to me is this. It was this whole swath of companies that responded to the survey and took the time to fill out the whole cost of doing business survey, 52% over half of the companies reported that they were making net income of less than 10%. Wow. Now, here's what's significant to me about that. There's a lot of different frameworks that companies can use for planning and for understanding the health of their business. Some people are huge, like EOS, that's their bag. They just are EOS disciples. There's the CEO tools, another great one. There's the OKR methodology, a bunch of ones. The one that I found a ton of value in was the scaling up, Rockefeller Habits, Berne Harnish methodology. That was transformational in my business. Berne Harnish, I remember, says something in scaling up that just stuck with me, just resonated with me so deeply.
[00:18:48.190] - Mark
He said this, If you're not making 10% net operating income in your business, your business is on life support. I'm reading this cost of doing business report, and I'm saying, Wow, over half of the property restoration industry is on life support. Wow. Now, all the people that fell asleep when they heard we're going to talk about accounting, to be hooked up now. Yeah, come back. They could be enlivened in paying attention to say, Okay, life support. I usually tune out when I hear accounting or accounting guidelines or any of that stuff. But man, life support, you got my attention.
[00:19:24.380] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:19:25.440] - Mark
Because this means that your business is in jeopardy. If it's on life support, whatever that looks like, you are in jeopardy. I can say that there is a lot of unrest right now in the industry beyond what the information that we got out of this here was. That was at the end 2023 that wasn't too bad of a year. Oh, yeah. What are things going to look like? I mean, you guys tell me what you're seeing first, but what I'm seeing is there's a lot of businesses that are not in better shape in 2024 than in 2023.
[00:20:00.990] - Brandon
Yeah, agreed. Yeah. I think Chris and I have been commenting behind the scenes every month of, man, dude, the first six months of 2024 was not a very motivating year for most of the entities out there. Then you compound on top of that, the fact that we've spent the last six months hating each other, depending on which candidate in the President election that you are supporting or not supporting. And so I think all in all, this has just been a real ripe year for for business owners to feel frustrated, disgrundled, and probably burnt out. Man, you and I, and the three of us chatted about this before we got started is, look, we're business owners, too. We have our own entity that we're responsible for. Half the time we're talking about stuff on this show is because Chris and I are knees deep in the same problems, chaos, or things in our own business. I have just found two things happening this year, Mark. One is, as a business owner, I'm being down on myself when I realize how easy it is for me to get distracted by the tyranny of the urgent and lose sight of the fact that as one of the owners of Floedlight, one of my fundamentally core responsibilities is to continue to increase my competency around understanding the financials.
[00:21:20.030] - Brandon
Then in addition to that, learning how to proactively wield that knowledge to plan, to process, to check, to model what decisions were making in the business. And I hate saying that out loud, because in a lot of ways, our team is responsible for helping people do that inside their own organization. And I think what I'm recognizing is, and this is going to sound shitty, but I think what I'm recognizing is I often become comfortable comparing my competency to those around me. And let's be honest, this industry as a whole, statistically, I don't believe would be recognized as the most competent group financially in terms of how they're proactively managing their money. And so I think I get a false sense of security in my own competency. And I think what I've been wildly blasted in the face this year is, man, I got to increase my game. And if that's the fact, our industry needs to increase their game, man. I am really emotionally connected to this topic right now.
[00:22:18.770] - Chris
Yeah, it's super present for us. I want to just present one counter thought, I guess, to this low net. No, you're not. Yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to do it. Because I was thinking about that when I saw that data I, too, zeroed in on that. And one thing that we've seen in our book, and I think Brandon and I have experienced over the years of operating in this industry and running companies, is I think that possibly one reason for that low net is among the respondents, is that companies are pre-investing going into this year. That there's the low net as a result of growth initiatives, hiring more staff, building out a sales team. I mean, these are some trends that we've seen, in particular, some of our Our larger clients are 10 million and up clients. And so I wonder just how much of that low net that was reported was a result of free spending to facilitate growth. That didn't come. That didn't come. And I'm curious for your perspective on that, because, of course, that's something that all restores ultimately have to contend with at some point is, how do we grow?
[00:23:20.740] - Chris
And what should we expect the effect to be on our financials in a healthy company that's doubling down and making bold moves growth. I'll just be really curious on your perspective of how to manage that risk and how to think about from year to year, we have some clients that are anticipating. You know what? We were at 18 net last year. We're fairly happy with that. We realized when we hire this VP of sales, when we hire two more commercial salespeople, we're adding a lot of payroll there. Plus, we got to do this. Plus, we got to do that. We're probably going to be looking at a sub 10 net next year, and we're okay with that. I imagine that some people are having those conversations. So I'm going to let you guys wrestle through that. But I just thought So that might be a key thing to hit on as well.
[00:24:03.430] - Mark
So here'd be my response to that. First of all, may make some of my point, because if someone is making an investment, they're either making an investment in one of a couple of different areas. One area, they may be making an investment, may be in CapEx. If they're making a CapEx investment, that shouldn't be affecting them enough, because those are going to be fixed assets that are going to have, obviously, to, depending on how their tax planning is working, we're going to see that affect their net income in the same way as maybe an investment, what I think ultimately you referred to, Chris, and that was, if I'm investing in sales, if I'm investing in certain other areas of the infrastructure of the business, I'm seeing that. So I think we got to, again, define our terms as to, okay, what is our financial acumen to understand what the return on my investment is. Now, all of this goes back to, if I'm going to make an investment in business, how do I see a return on that investment and how does that investment play out over the course of the execution that I have started to implement for the strategic plan that dictated that I had an investment in sales or infrastructure or whatever to begin with?
[00:25:26.640] - Brandon
A hundred %, yeah.
[00:25:27.670] - Mark
This is really, I think the foundation institutional basis here is that it's very difficult to build a strategic plan that can actually have an execution focus if you don't have good financial data to begin with. Or if you don't have a plan that can use the data, how does the plan adjust as you go? I think one of the challenges certainly I've seen over time, and that is there are investments that restoration companies make that are their pursuit of a silver bullet. It's like, I want to find something I can do in my business. I want to buy a piece of equipment. I want to make the hire. I want to hire the salesperson. I want to hire the manager. I want to hire somebody that's going to be a game changer. I want to buy a piece of equipment that's going to be a game changer. I want to hire the consultant. I want to hire the software platform. It changes everything. It's devoid of a baseline plan that then utilizes those things as tools, but then measures their performance in a way that they can evaluate if they are successful or not. If they're not successful, they then know which direction the company is going to go.
[00:26:44.230] - Mark
If they are successful, how they leverage them further.
[00:26:47.450] - Brandon
This is one of the areas for me, one of the things in my business that I had such...
[00:26:53.740] - Mark
I mean, it was such a gift to me. I had a great CFO who came to me from a much larger My manager company, and he taught me so much about finance. He helped carry my conscience on two things. One is having an understanding of how we implement these proper financial gap-based, when I say gap, generally accepted accounting practices, is what that gap acronym stands for. How do we do this? How do we put this in place of our company? If we're talking Thinking about having a percentage of completion accounting methodology, if we're going to be able to look at a proper WIP process, working process in our organization that's going to tell us how we're doing in real-time in the business. How do we do that? Then second of all, why does it matter? What is the motivation for that? How does it help us operate this business better, more efficiently, and gain better income so that we make more money and ultimately the enterprise is worth more money. If the enterprise is worth more money, a lot of people right now, they just think about the enterprise being worth more money because they can sell their business for more money.
[00:28:10.200] - Mark
My mindset, having been someone who sold my business, it's much bigger than that. I want people to understand it's not just about the enterprise value if you go to sell. It's that if your business is exit ready, I say this to the people I work with all the time, exit ready business is a valuable business. A hundred %. Meaning that at that point, when your business evolves to that point, first of all, you have freedom. Freedom is the most valuable. That's more than any selling your company for top dollar and getting these great multiples people talk about and all this other stuff. Freedom is everything for you. Because now you have choices. Now you control your destiny. When you have a business that has attractive enterprise value, it attracts talent, which actually enhances your freedom. Not only do you now have financial freedom, you have a much more important freedom, and that's freedom of time. You will not attract talent into a business that does not have enterprise value because people want to be a part of it. They don't want to waste their time in it because what's in it for me? It's difficult to cross vision to people if that's what you have.
[00:29:17.350] - Mark
Those are the areas I think that when coming full circle to Chris's comment, I think number one, restorers have always made investment. I don't think the results, the 52% are an anomaly at all. I think we did this in 2022, if we did it in 2020, the numbers I saw in DKI of elite companies was under 10%. The majority of companies were under 10%.
[00:29:39.460] - Brandon
Exactly. I'm not going to use any names. We were just recently, let's call it privy to some information on a group that, again, high performers as a general group and conversations centered around getting above 10% in profit. This is not an anomaly by any stretch of the imagination.
[00:29:59.900] - Mark
No, it isn't. Again, a lot of people, I think, unfortunately, misunderstand industries. They may come from a construction background where net operating income or net income, there's a little bit of a difference there when we're talking about those two. But when they talk about net, they compare themselves to pass-through companies, which a lot of GC companies, construction companies, pass-through organizations. They may do a large construction company may do with the same amount of employees as a restoration company five or six times the volume. Because of that pass-through, they're not really looking at contribution margin in the business. I think it's even a problem that we see within the insurance carrier perspective. Insurance carriers compare restoration companies to construction companies, say, What are you guys complaining about? You guys make more money than construction companies. Well, yes, that's true. But if I'm a construction company that does $40 million a year and I'm just passing this stuff all through at 10%, I'm making $4 million of EBITDA. If I have a company with the same exact amount of complexity at $5 million, Same complexity, same number of employees, $5 million at 10%, I made $500,000. I can ask any one of my insurance carrier friends that pose this question, which would you rather have?
[00:31:28.160] - Mark
Same amount of complexity, same amount of employees would you rather make $500,000 or $4 million?
[00:31:33.870] - Brandon
100%, right.
[00:31:35.280] - Mark
There's a misunderstanding there. I can say this, with the exception, and Harnish points this out, too, in some of his stuff around his cash section of his methodology and scaling up in the Rockefeller habits, if it is a service-based business and it's under 10% net income, it's on life support because there is no investor who would ever make an investment in that business for that return.
[00:32:00.020] - Brandon
That's huge. It's far too much risk. Yeah, that's huge. Again, we're not trying to be patronizing or be dramatic, but just say that again. Because I think so many of us are operating our businesses off gut instincts, which is great. It got us here. It's the reason that we're not afraid of risk. It's the reason why we get into the trench and initiate these things and build platforms to invite other people to participate with. There's super value in that adapt and overcome mentality of most entrepreneurs. But at some point, though, our gut begins to mislead us and our ego begins to jump in and try to subconsciously save us from the impact of reality, and it can get scary. Say that again, Mark.
[00:32:39.580] - Mark
I think this. When we talk about risk, and the risk that an entrepreneur has to of or the investment they're making in their business. Here's how they have to back up. First of all, I think most restoration companies are going to feel somewhat satisfied if their business gets to 5 million in sales. They may aspire, be like, Yeah, I want to grow to 10 million. I want to be at 20. I want to have multiple location. But there's a certain point at which I think a lot of restorers hit that $5 million mark, and they're like, Okay, I'm there. This is what I wanted to get to. Do you think that's a fair assessment?
[00:33:17.180] - Brandon
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, because I think, statistically, if you even still look at the numbers, that's a big restoration company. It is.
[00:33:23.250] - Mark
Yeah. So they feel like they've arrived. If they're making 10%, and I know that there are some companies that are meant only companies is a whole separate issue. And I think those companies that are meant only five million dollar companies, that's a frightening business model. If you want to talk about moving, having your cheese moved at some point, there is going to be significant cheese moving in that business model. So let's take that group and move them aside and say, Okay, $5 million dollar business in a mid-market, they're making 10 %, clearly 52 %, over half of them that are that size are making 10% or less. Let's just say they're at 10 exactly because it's easy math. So they're making $500,000 net income, probably paying themselves a salary of somewhere, let's just say $150,000 salary. So they at that They don't even have this on their tax return. When everything passes through, they've got, let's just for the sake of keeping numbers easy, they've got $650,000. Now, it really is coming into their pocket in the business. Now, depending on their tax strategy, and I'm not going to get into tax strategy, but let's just say, like most restoration companies, they don't invest in their financial management and their accounting services.
[00:34:41.320] - Mark
Generally, a lot of restoration companies that I'm in to contact with underinvest in that area, and they'll hire the cheapest accountant they can find in their local market. Let's just make the assumption, again, I need you to make some assumptions as we walk through this, that they are not investing heavily there. They've got $650,000 worth of income. Well, what tax bracket does that put them in if they've got $650,000?
[00:35:08.530] - Brandon
It ain't the lowest.
[00:35:10.050] - Mark
It ain't the lowest. Let's just say that it's, depending on what state they're in, let's just say it's 40 %.
[00:35:14.940] - Brandon
Yeah, it's going to be close.
[00:35:16.030] - Mark
$4 million just rolled out the door to the IRRs, and your local state and local government. Now, our 650 is down to $400,000. We already paid ourselves $150,000 in salary, so we're down to $250,000. $250,000 doesn't quite sound as impressive as far as this is what I have for my business. Now, let's go back to the cost of doing business report. What we saw in the cost of doing business report is that restoreers right now are running about 82 days on their cash conversion cycle. That means if they have this business that is doing 5 million, they've got about three months of receivables receivables right now. Not quite, but three months of receivables in that business means that, roughly speaking, they've got about 1.25 million in receivables. Hied up in the business. If they're putting any money into the business in CapEx, they want to actually invest in the company and buy some new running equipment, some new vehicles.
[00:36:23.280] - Brandon
Liftify.
[00:36:24.280] - Chris
Com/bloodlight. You've heard Brandon and I talk a bunch of times about the importance of Google reviews. Maybe you even heard our episode with Zack Garrett, the CEO and founder. Recency, consistency, two of the most important things when it comes to maximizing the benefit from your Google reviews. Why not use an outside partner? Liftify is targeting 20 to 25 % conversion, right? So if you do a thousand jobs a year, you ought to be adding right now 200 to 250 reviews a year, every single year. If you're not doing that, you owe it to yourself to get a free demo from liftify. Com. See their system, see how it works, see how affordable it is. I promise you, you'll thank us. Liftify.
[00:37:06.430] - Brandon
Com/bloodlight. We spend a lot of money and a lot of attention trying to get that first call. And one of the things that we do once it happens is, sometimes we leave it to chance, right? Who picks up the phone? How do they respond? How do they walk that client into a relationship with us? Well, one of the benefits of partnering with a team like answerforce. Com is we can systemize that, we can make it more consistent. We can also have backup for when our teams need that help. Somebody goes on vacation, somebody's out sick. We get a storm search, we get cat event. All sorts of things can have an impact on how we receive that client. But the most important thing is they need to know that they've chosen the right team. And so answerforce. Com can support you, be a bolt on partner to help you consistently produce an awesome onboarding experience with that first call with your client. So answerforce. Com/bloodlight. That's great.
[00:38:00.080] - Chris
Cnr magazine, we're friends with all the folks at CNR. Michelle and her team, they do a great job of keeping their ear to the ground and reporting all the important information from our industry. You want to stay up on all the M&A activity and what the latest best practices are for selling your company successfully Hopefully, she's got that. Great articles about all the four quadrants of our business. Cnr is constantly pushing out great material and leveraging great writers and subject matter experts in our industry. It is the water-cooler of our industry. So If you're not subscribed, go to cnrmagazine. Com. Follow them on LinkedIn. Follow Michelle on LinkedIn. Trust us, if you're trying to stay on top of everything happening in the industry, your best destination is cnrmagazine. Com.
[00:38:43.510] - Brandon
You guys, many of you have already heard about Actionable Insights and the training and the technical expertise that they bring to the industry. But how many of you are already leveraging the Actionable Insights profile for Xactimate? That's the game changer. It's essentially an AI tool that's walking alongside of you as you write your estimate, bringing things to your attention that should be added, that could be considered. All of them items that increase our profitability, increase the effectiveness and the consistency of that scope, It can do anything from helping a new team member assimilate some estimating best practices. It also helps the grizzled vets add back that few % that we've just forgot over time. So actionableinsights, getinsights. Org org/ floodlight, and take a look at what the Actionable Insights Xactimate profile could be doing for you and your team. Dude, I love where you went. And just quick, seamless plug. I think that one of the reasons that you and I and Chris continue to have these parallel conversations is, and we've started to share with you, our consulting model is designed and built exactly around what you just talked about. Because what we have found is that when we invest time and energy in establishing that standing in that gap that you referred to, it also gets owners much more clear on what their time is worth.
[00:40:06.530] - Brandon
Because instead of us trying to find one % this year in the PnL and that netting 100 grand or whatever the number is, we're looking out and saying, yeah, but what activities and actions and focus should I be having? So I make seven to $10 million more in the next five years in terms of enterprise, what's going to happen when I exit? And I think you did a really awesome job of painting the reality and the picture of how important that is. Okay, so here's what's been happening because you and I have been grinding gears on this topic for a pretty long time already, and it's pretty 30,000 feet. Here's just one thing I just want to share as a living example of an experience I just had recently that I think may begin to tie some of this to the ground so that we can talk about what we do with this information boots on the ground. Was in a meeting with a fairly large team. They're probably north of 20 million, several locations. Very competent, young, aggressive crew. What they were doing ultimately was looking at the profitability at some of their locations.
[00:41:03.510] - Brandon
There was one that I would say was on life support to a certain extent. They were underperforming in terms of how they were capturing revenue. They were overspent. The costs were high. Part of the initial conversation then is, where do we cut costs? I think what ultimately came out of this, and this is what I want to point to, is the first thing that we saw, the problem, the symptom, was more expenses than revenue in terms of that relationship. We weren't making enough money or profit at that location. And so first instinct is I got to cut costs. Well, this is where the financial competency begins to step in. And this is why it's so important to turn financial competency into standards and unit economics in terms of what we're doing with the information on the ground. When we looked at their closing rate, meaning how good of a job are they doing when we get a call converting that into a job that moves into production and their cycle times, how long it was taking to create or produce a construction project, what the owner ultimately identified for themselves, because this individual is very competent and very connected to their data is, actually, our problem is we have the opportunities, we're not converting enough of them, and Then when we produce them, we're taking them too long to put them through the cycle.
[00:42:18.890] - Brandon
Therefore, we're choking off our own revenue. Because when we looked at the production model per project manager at that location, they weren't overhired. They didn't have too much. They actually had the perfect amount of project management bandwidth to hit that 1.5 million a year in production. Meaning this owner knew his economics well enough that he was able to push back on this broad stroke, we need to cut costs. And what he identified as they had a production problem, not a cost problem. Therefore, had he fired to cut that cost, he would have almost committed a bit of revenue suicide. It would have cut off his nose despite his face. My point in that story is that I don't think very many of us understand the economics of our business well enough to problem-solve an example like that well. And so we get paralyzed in the analysis, and we end up making no decision. Instead of making a decision based on the financial data, one that we know can be supported and substantiated. Does that story make sense how I'm trying to connect that to what we're talking about, Mark?
[00:43:25.560] - Mark
I think it really illustrates the crux of the problem for most businesses. Interestingly enough, if the two people who are left listening to this show, once they find out it's about accounting, actually take the time to go download the RIA accounting guidelines. It's not a quick read. It's a 56-page document. If they get that, they will find that all of this financial planning is anchored in strategic strategic planning. I think one of the biggest challenges in the industry today is that we have had an enormous amount of transactions happening. There's been a lot of acquisitions. As a result of all these acquisitions in a year where there is an industry-wide slowdown, there has been a lot of chaos. You hear about layoffs all over the industry. I'm not surprised because most of these acquisitions that are happening now are driven by, especially the private equity markets, even the bigger strategic companies or private equity-backed. Most of the folks who are running the private equity companies are numbers people. They've all got a performa for the business, and they've got a model that they want to see in the business. If there is a drawdown in the business, they want to immediately go in and cut costs.
[00:45:08.940] - Mark
Without really understanding the crux of how these businesses make money. I think exactly to your point, Brandon, there is a misunderstanding as to what the real profit drivers are in the business. If any business is simply trying to plug and play and use the PnL, for example, exclusively to run the business. They've got the tail wag and the dog. All the PnL is going to do is to validate your underlying thesis as to how you're going to make money. Everything that we do in strategic planning has to be proven. We have to be able to go out and say, Okay, for example, Chris gave the analogy earlier of these investments. There's a lot of investments, a lot of different things that I did in the business over the years that were flyers. They were things we didn't really know if it was going to work or not. We added service lines that no one else in the industry was adding. We tried BD approaches that no one else was doing. We tried a lot of different marketing techniques that no one else in the industry was doing. Back, I mean, this It was 25 years ago or so.
[00:46:32.670] - Mark
Again, one of the things that the CFO that I had that was so valuable that he taught me in was building a proof of concept, testing it and then scaling it. If we were going to add a new service line, we'd go in and build a business plan for it.
[00:46:53.550] - Brandon
To model it.
[00:46:54.160] - Mark
Then instead of going and doing it in the whole business, we did it in a location. And then we validated our results. Then we would expand it if it worked. And if it didn't work, we would make a decision as a leadership team, would we get this one wrong? And I tell my group sometimes, Guys, I think we got this one wrong, or I got it wrong. Sometimes they fight for it and say, No, these are the changes we want to make because we still believe this is where we think the underlying thesis isn't that. But that's really the discipline that a business has to have if it's going to build enterprise value. They have to have a proper planning approach to planning and to strategy to understand what is it that I'm trying to accomplish and how am I going to know if I'm getting the results that I think I can get. Now, if they don't have the financial measurement in place, they're never going to know. They're going to run this thing by gut feel, and they're going to ruin it. They're going to have something that doesn't add enterprise value. But when a business can do that, that's one of the areas that they can really build the most significant enterprise value.
[00:48:05.830] - Mark
Because the discipline in that business improves over time. As the business gets better, they can make decisions more quickly, and they can expand more quickly, and they can capitalize more quickly, and the team gets more in-depth. They build the muscles that enable it to really be a sensitive class company. That's where ultimately 80 people have... Eighty % of the value of a business is based on its intangible capital, not the trucks they got out in the warehouse. I mean, if they sell to most companies, they don't want to buy your warehouse anyway. They'll lease it from you, they're not going to buy it from you anyway. It's not going to be in the the swag that you're giving away. That's right. It's going to be in those areas of intangible capital. What are your people? What's the people capital in the business? Who are these people? How are they running the business? It's the processes, the capital intangible capital you have in the processes. How does this business run if you're not here? It comes into the social capital. What's the culture in this company? It comes into the customer capital. How are we seeing the community?
[00:49:11.620] - Mark
And why do people in the community want to work with us? That's the areas that build 80% on the value of the business. You can't know if that's working unless you have a way to measure that. That's, again, why these things matter in the business.
[00:49:27.510] - Brandon
I think you're spot on. It's interesting. One of the things we reference a lot is, look, the LOI is 99% of the time, and we're speaking, this is very general, we're not brokers. Loi, a lot of times, it's just a multiple on your profit. End of story. There's very little data that's been gathered up to that point. Everybody thinks this is going to work out and play nice. Then the due diligence period starts, and now all of a sudden, all the things that are wrong in your business because you wear 15 hats and you're the smartest person on the team. Now all of a sudden, all those scalable buckets begin to get looked at and identified failing and wanting. And now all of a sudden, the value of your business just gets chunked down, chunked down, chunked down. And that's that mirror, right, that you ultimately get faced with at the end, potentially. And I think what we're saying here is that when owners invest time and energy and increasing their financial competency, what it allows them to do is begin engineering their time span on the things that create the highest level of ROI for their organization.
[00:50:25.440] - Brandon
And so, for instance, one of the things that... And again, I don't know if you can relate to this, Mark, but I'm failing forward. I'm a work in process. I get better every year. And I also have annual reminders where I go, man, I just don't know half of what I thought I know. Because my vision gets bigger, I get exposed to smarter and more capable people, and it makes me smarter and want to drive for a better result. All that to be said, I think that when ultimately this year, for me, I had a new layer of epiphany where it was like, dude, my time is worth five grand an hour. It is because where I'm going and what I'm to build in terms of enterprise value in the platform that we're developing, that's where my time's got to go. It's got to be $5,000 an hour stuff in order for me to close that gap, as you reference between where we are today and where I need to be to hit my freedom point. And I think that once you get armed with that as an owner, which is on the back of understanding your financials, it now all of a sudden becomes real crystal clear which lane you should be in and how much easier it is for you to make a decision that, look, I'll take a half a point hair this year to hire a competent person to do that task because that is not a $5,000 an hour thing.
[00:51:35.750] - Brandon
And it's not what I should be prioritizing in my time spent. I think that's where the lack of financial connectivity shows up the most. Is that you watch owners burning themselves out, chasing the tyranny of the urgent, trying to be all hats, be all things to all people because they don't know any better. But when they're really dialed into the financials and they understand how to model and make decisions about what will happen in the future, man, does it get easier to say yes to the right things and a whole lot easier to say no to the wrong things? I don't know if that's an experience that you've had, if that's been an increasing experience as you've had these different changes. But that's where I'm at, mentally. I know that.
[00:52:18.520] - Mark
Remember, I had a discussion with my kids once at the inner table about the value of time. I think I referred this I'll resource you guys at one point. I certainly would recommend it to your audience. It's a book called Midas Managers by Rob Slee. He really gets in and unpackages this whole idea of how important the value of time is. Initially, someone in their organization may only have... Their time may only be worth $50 an hour, but they shouldn't be... Their time is only worth $50 an hour. You could not be working on $20 an hour Hire $20 an hour person for those activities. But as you build your skills, as you just described, you've got to be increasing your value to where your time is worth. If it's 50, then it's 75, and then it's 100, and then it's 250, and then 500, and so on. But the example that I know when I talk to my kids about this, they were just mind-blown. They said, If someone like Elon Musk was walking through the airport and there was a $100 bill laying on the floor. It would not be worth his time to bend over, to take up the $100 bill.
[00:53:40.910] - Mark
They're like, How could that be, dad? No way, no way. So you figure out, and I think actually this was quite a few years ago, I think it was Bill Gates in the analogy that his time was worth, and I can't remember what it is now, so I'm probably going to be off, but his was $75,000 an hour or $100,000 an hour. I mean, Elon Musk is probably a half a million dollars an hour or something, right? Yeah. But it gets down to where his time is worth thousands per minute, right? Actually, to the point where if you said, okay, it's going to take five seconds to bend over and pick up a $100 bill, his time is worth more than the time it would take to bend over and pick up that $100 bill. A hundred %. It's an extreme example, but the reality of it is that most owners... It was interesting, Brandon. I'll be interested for what your experience on this is, but I was recently speaking with a group of restores. When I asked the room, I would say that there was 150 to 200 restores in the room. I just pulled the audience and I said, How many of you in this audience have a strategic plan for 2024?
[00:54:54.770] - Mark
How many hands in the room do you think went up?
[00:54:57.070] - Brandon
Very few.
[00:54:57.950] - Mark
Three.
[00:54:58.850] - Brandon
Yolly.
[00:54:59.710] - Mark
Three Three entrepreneurs in a room, let's just say it's 150 people, went up. I asked the three that had a strategic plan. I said, Okay, be honest with me. How many of the three that have you had their hands up, how many of you have referred to that plan in the last 30 days?
[00:55:21.590] - Brandon
I knew that's where you were going. No hands? Zero.
[00:55:25.510] - Mark
No hands. Here is the reality, is that, number one, very few entrepreneurs plan. Number one. Number two, the few that do, don't have an execution mindset for that plan. If you are in the process, if our remaining three listeners here are listening in, if you are thinking about you're at the end of the year, you're at the end of 2024, resolve that you are going to do this because it's worth it. It literally is the difference between you when you're 60 years old, being able to look back and say, I used and I stewarded my time well, or I wasted it.
[00:56:11.590] - Brandon
Man, huge.
[00:56:12.720] - Mark
Resolve this. Resolve that 2025 is going to be different and start right now by doing this. Start by resolving number one, 2025 is a year that I am going to plan for success. I'm going to build a plan. I'm going to I have strategic thinking in my business, coupled with execution planning. Because you can't have one without the other. That's like if you took all the Verne Harnish scaling up, Rockefeller Habits, everything, you just boiled it down to the two basics. It's strategic thinking and execution planning. Here's what you can do. You can take the RIA document and you can see a framework in there for strategic thinking How you build a strategic plan is outlined right in that document. Then they tell you, not in esoteric terms that you can't understand because they're speaking to manufacturers or tech companies or biomedical companies or whatever else. No, this was written Why restores for restores? We have in this document, this 56-page document, a chart of accounts for a restoration company right there. We've got a balance sheet there, and we've got a sample work and process methodology It's all right there. But set a resolution to have strategic thinking in 2025 and execution planning.
[00:57:40.510] - Mark
Most people, as evidenced in my survey they did, the group of the restores, the 150 restores, you're going to not do good at that unless, and I promise any of the three listeners we have left that we're about to talk about Elk. But Brandon and I never talked about this. Brandon me on the show because of this. But I'm going to tell you this, you better then pick up your phone and you better hire Brandon or Chris or someone from floodlight to give you the guidance and the accountability to do that. Otherwise, you will think out, you'll say, Yeah, I think it would be way worth having a $10 million business. A business that's worth $10 million. Not a business that does $10 million in revenue, but a business that's worth $10 million. If you can build a business for $10 million, you will have financial freedom. If you plan properly. You can build a business. You don't even need to have that big of a company to have a $10 million valuation, but you have to have an excellent company.
[00:58:38.620] - Brandon
Yeah, so true.
[00:58:39.740] - Mark
But if you do that, if you think about this for a few minutes, you might sit down and jot down some notes, but you won't actually do it unless you have someone who will hold you accountable.
[00:58:48.510] - Brandon
Yeah, so true.
[00:58:49.940] - Mark
Setting mindset to accomplish that and then hire Brandon and Chris, or if it's not Brandon and Chris, hire someone. I think it's wise to hire someone like Brandon and Chris because they understand this industry, but hire someone who is going to cut down the Dane learning curve.
[00:59:08.060] - Brandon
Yeah, that's huge.
[00:59:09.160] - Mark
Who's going to call you up and say, Bro, don't buy that piece of equipment. It's outside of the plan. I understand it's new and shiny, but don't do that.
[00:59:18.760] - Brandon
Yeah, stick to the plan.
[00:59:19.790] - Mark
Bro, don't cancel your quarterly strategic planning meetings with your team. We've got it on the calendar. You're undermining your own credibility as a leader if you cancel this meeting because you don't feel like doing it, or you're not prepared, or you're not investing in yourself in the business.
[00:59:37.870] - Brandon
So huge.
[00:59:39.010] - Mark
But do that stuff. And I promise you, if you do that, you look back at the end of this time next year, if we're sitting down and you and I are talking about whatever hunting pursuit we have next year, and your audience is listening, I promise to the audience, they do that, your business will be worth much more than it's worth today.
[00:59:58.530] - Brandon
A hundred %. A hundred %. I think one of the things that you've never shied away from is it doesn't mean next year will be the easiest year you've ever had.
[01:00:06.580] - Mark
No.
[01:00:07.080] - Brandon
In fact, it will be the hardest year you ever had. It'll be single-handedly one of the hardest years you've ever had, mainly because it gets exhausting looking in the mirror and dealing with reality. But when we have reality, we can do something about it. I want to share something with you real quick because I think you did a great job of closing the loop on this piece, and we are going to talk about Elk before I let you go. But this is a saying, actually, I think this is some Buddhist saying. I am not saying it verbatim. It's something actually Wayne brought up that I've just been, golly, have I been wrestling with this all year, really? It goes something like this. In the beginning, rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains. At some point, rivers are no longer rivers and mountains are not mountains. But then finally, rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains. And so, hang in the pocket with me, listeners, because I know we're all blue collar chaps here, but this is what I'm taking away from that statement. We have moments in time where we're either being partnered with someone, we're in a training, we're in an event, where something becomes crystal clear to us and concrete treat.
[01:01:15.820] - Brandon
Meaning we have this epiphany that says, I do understand what has to happen in order for me to succeed, in order for me to toe the line, in order for us to win. And then we get caught up doing the mental gymnastics and creating gray and creating reasons why we can't do the thing, we can't hold the line, we can't be accountable. And then we realize at the end of the day, regardless of the mental gymnastics we're trying to put ourselves through, The win is a win. The data is the data. The systems are the systems. And I think ultimately what Mark and I are trying to encourage you all to do this year is stand up, look in the mirror, and make the determination that I'm not going to allow myself or our team to do the mental gymnastics. You know what needs to be done. Chap up, insert the discipline, and toe the line. Rivers are rivers, and mountains are mountains, and you know it, commit to it, and execute against that, and don't sell yourself short by giving yourself an excuse to change the direction. That's where I think we'd hang today on the financial piece.
[01:02:25.280] - Brandon
Guys, there's a lot of resources for you to lean into and go after to help yourself There's guys like our team, Mark and his sphere of influence is obviously an option. We've got plenty of teams that understand high-level accounting, fractional CFO partnerships that you can go after. There are lots of resources for I'm here with all of you. I think Mark gave you some low-hanging fruit to go after first. Just download this RIA document, go through it, spend a Saturday with a cup of coffee, and just go through it. Look at what it's telling you and leverage it in your favor going into in '25. And I want to excitedly give you high fives six months into the year because you can already see a measurable difference in the culture, in the numbers, and the level of excitement that you have for your own your own damn business. That would be an awesome thing for us to do in June. Okay, my friend, Mark, listen, you shared a picture with us of, I'm going to openly admit, one of the largest bull elk I've seen in my real sphere, not on a magazine cover. And then you immediately said, Yeah, I had my eyes on a slightly bigger prize, but this is what we're going to settle for.
[01:03:35.490] - Brandon
What in the heck, dude? How is that even possible? What were we looking at here? Was that a big old six by six or did you break seven?
[01:03:44.050] - Mark
Oh, it was this big six point. The area where I was hunting is up in Missouri Breaks, northeast Montana. Historically, it's been one of the greatest trophy areas for elk in the country. Unfortunately, For me, there's a lot of politics around game management, as you can imagine. A lot of different methodologies that people can use with game management. The area isn't what it once was. There were people pulling 400-inch elk out of there. My goal was to get a 350-inch elk, which there's only one or two pulled out of that district. But I put in for that tag for 16 or 17 years, something like that. Wow. I I wanted to be able to do that for a long time. I really wanted to get a 350 class bowl. It's a lot of work. I mean, it's a 900 square mile area. I put about 200 miles on my boots this year, which was awesome.
[01:04:44.250] - Brandon
Over 14 days, right? About two weeks, roughly.
[01:04:47.140] - Mark
Thirteen days, yeah. Fifteen days out there. My wife's really happy that I decided to settle for that bowl because I told her, I'd said, Honey, I don't want to miss Thanksgiving this year, but...
[01:04:58.840] - Brandon
This has been 16 years in the mix. This has been a long time coming.
[01:05:03.270] - Mark
No, he's a great bowl. I mean, he's a wonderful... I mean, it was funny because I took him into the taxidermist and they were like... I was like, Yeah, I was hoping for a 350-inch bowl and stuff. They're like, man, you're out of your mind. They're like, Most guys don't ever get an elk like this in their lifetime. I was like, Yeah, I know. But anyway, he's a cool bull with a lot of character. Heavy bull, which is nice. Here's the best part about Being a lifelong Montana, and I've had a chance to shoot grizzly bears in Alaska. I've had been on many trips to Alaska. I've hunted my whole life in Montana, shot mountain goats, lots of deer and elk and bears and antelope. I mean, everything that you can go out and spend time in the field pursuing, I've been able to do. When I was younger, it was about the trophy. It's really not anymore. I just so value and treasure just how blessed I am to be able to spend the time out there in one of the most beautiful areas of the world. I got to spend a bunch of time.
[01:06:13.130] - Mark
My brother came down with me for about The 15 days I was down there, about five of them. We got to spend a lot of time together out there. The other 10 days I got to spend with me, myself and I. In my thoughts, I got to do a lot of journaling. Spending time in solitude is one of the most important ways that I think we can get to know ourselves and who we are. We free our mind to... In that lack of stimulation, we can understand more about purpose and what's important. There was just... I did not have one bad day out there. I mean, I probably passed up 80 different bowls over those 15 days, which is more bowls than probably most guys get in their lifetime. I'm not complaining, and he was an awesome, awesome bowl, but it was such a wonderful time. I think we are so overstimulated as human beings We spend so much time comparing ourselves to things that are false narratives. We anchor our identities in things that are not lasting. Both some or meaningful. I think being able to spend the time that I did recenters all those things.
[01:07:39.630] - Mark
For that reason, I'm just so grateful that I have the time to do that.
[01:07:43.730] - Brandon
Yeah, I love that. It's interesting, Mark. I think that you just meet certain people in your lifetime where there's just... Sometimes it's hard to put your finger on it, but you just recognize a deep... I'm just going to use the word wisdom for probably maybe a lack of a different term to use. Here's what I mean by that. I think we run the risk of looking to our left and right. Let's say, for instance, the PE frenzy, the consolidation frenzy in our space. You hear the bar stories, the 10X, the 11X, these things that feel like a quick hit, a quick fix, a silver bullet. And there's several things from what you just shared with me that points me back to wisdom. And one is, I hear you say for 16 years, I was investing the points, gaining the points so that I could eventually go on this hunt. And I don't believe there's very many people around us in the current state of the economy or the world that can think 16 years into the future or do something that long, committed to this really almost unmeasurable result that they're headed for. And I think there's something really powerful in that because it's unique, I think, in the current ecosystem.
[01:08:55.600] - Brandon
I think the other thing that happened is 10 days of solitude I only had four days in the woods this year. One of the things that I recognized in that time frame is my ego had no place. It had no place because I was rooted in the now. I wasn't worried about yesterday, and I wasn't worried about tomorrow. I was looking, smelling, hearing. I was totally present in the moment. It's amazing how freed from your ego are you are when you're present in the moment. The fact that it's hard to do and it's scary, if we're honest. The fact that you spent 10 days in a space where you're leveraging discipline, you're saying no to the easy target, the path of least resistance, and you're disciplining yourself to stay in that trench and do the hard work of looking yourself in the mirror, removing your ego and being wholly present. To me, those are two examples of people that have some resemblance of real honest wisdom in their life, and that it's helping them make decisions and decide the value of their actions and what they do with their time. I think that we can get caught up in thinking about this story of the elk, and the elk is amazing, by the way.
[01:10:11.030] - Brandon
Maybe what we could do is share a picture somehow when we post on this because it is the thing's laying on the ground, and I believe you're standing up and you're holding the horn basically at head height.
[01:10:20.830] - Mark
I mean, this is a- Well, that's a little... I think I was standing 30 feet behind them.
[01:10:26.480] - Brandon
Okay.
[01:10:27.910] - Mark
No, I'm holding them up. I I mean, it's how this stuff goes. It's like the people who catch the fish and they put it like there.
[01:10:35.100] - Brandon
Hold it up.
[01:10:36.040] - Mark
I mean, it's a great elk for sure. And he's a big... Man, I tell you what, it's all fun and games, too. You got to get those things out of the woods.
[01:10:45.770] - Brandon
Oh, baby.
[01:10:47.020] - Mark
And I tell guys all day, they like it. I'm like, Man, I'll tell you this, back to the issue of discipline that we're talking about. Pay me now or pay me later. Because when you're out there and you're trying to get that thing out of there or you need that number of days, you are never going to regret the time that you spent preparing for that.
[01:11:07.990] - Brandon
Oh, man.
[01:11:08.700] - Mark
Because if you don't do that, you're going to fail. This is the thing, I think the full circle about this stuff, whether it's elk hunting or anything that we do, we have in our culture such a reference for leisure and entertainment and comfort. But I was talking to someone else about this. Here's the thing that's not awesome about being 46 now, is that my knees... So The average day is a 15 to 25-mile day of up and down these Missouri breaks. They're straight up, straight down, straight up, straight down. And man, at 46, my meniscus just does not handle the down part as awesome as my 46-year-old body did. It is just, man, just being sore in the joints. I enjoy the muscular soreness, but the joint soreness, that's just not awesome.
[01:12:13.150] - Brandon
No.
[01:12:14.260] - Mark
But it was cold. It got down to two below plus 25-mile-an-hour winds. It's snowing sideways. It's not comfortable. When you're carrying that thing out of there and you got 100 plus pounds on your and you're going four miles, mostly uphill, back to where you're going to, that's not awesome.
[01:12:35.420] - Brandon
Especially when you get a trip.
[01:12:36.300] - Mark
But you know what you remember? Is you remember that. Like I was talking about Alaska, when I think about the trips I had in Alaska, the things I have the best memories of are the times where you were pushed out of your comfort zone. There was massive uncertainty. You felt overwhelmed. You were experiencing a high level of discomfort. That's really when we feel alive, man. It's the same thing with your business. It's easy to go into the office and think about, Well, I'm going to schedule some time on the course. I'm not saying people shouldn't do That, right? I'm not saying you shouldn't golf or you shouldn't enjoy things. But what I'm saying is that it's not going to be comfortable to read 56 pages on accounting guidelines. But I promise anyone who can do that If you'll do that in that journey of getting outside your comfort zone and doing those things that are hard, you will find your greatest gains and you will have your greatest successes come through those times that that discomfort happens. It doesn't matter if it's an elk or if it's in your business. Man, invest the time because that's where you differentiate between the yoker and really doing something great.
[01:14:01.610] - Brandon
That is where we're going to close. Thanks, Mark. I appreciate you doing it.
[01:14:05.700] - Mark
Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for letting me talk about elk. I don't get to do that on a restoration podcast very often. Thanks for that. Appreciate you guys. Appreciate your guys's heart for the industry and try to do things the right way. Really appreciate what you guys do.
[01:14:24.910] - Brandon
Honored, man. Honored. Guys, thanks for hanging with us, all two of you that made it through the financial data. Mark's message is solid. All of us can use more of it. I hope you guys leverage this in your favor going into 2025. Thanks for hanging with us. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots.
[01:14:45.190] - Chris
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