Episode 449: Well Built with Chad Prinkey

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host.

On today's episode, we talk to Chad Prinkey.

He is the founder and CEO of Well Built Construction Consulting.

Now look, the reason I wanted to have Chad come on, even if you're not in the construction business, is some of the things that we talk about on here are universal for all businesses. And I also think that there's this alliteration in a way that you could do to where you're pulling some of the elements from construction and even having a business that's well-built, even if you're not actually building homes or doing contracting services for homes. And so we cover a lot of different things in this topic about, you know, what does it look like in that $300,000 to $1 million, but also $1 million to $3 million and $3 million and beyond. And I think you're going to see some elements that are very similar to the things that we've talked about on the podcast before.

Without further ado, here's my conversation with Chad.

Chad, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Thank you, Bradley. Appreciate you having me.

Excited to have you. Would love to start with background and origin story. I like hearing how people got to where they are today. So take us back however far you feel like is appropriate and bring us to present day.

So, uh, like everybody, I had a first job, and my very first job was, uh, I was a laborer for my brother's construction company, and in high school and in college, I was, you know, you know, dragging shingles up ladders and dropping them on roofs and mixing mortar for, you know, brick and block work projects and framing walls, you know, doing carpentry work for, you know, residential and light commercial use. And I learned that I was not good enough at any of those things to make a career of it. But I got to tell you, man, there were many days that I hated that job, but the lessons that I learned through it were invaluable. And one of the lessons that I definitely learned is the value of hard work. And so, I developed a passion for helping construction companies. But what I also learned is that I was very comfortable and adept at selling. Sales right after college. So, my first job after college was a sales job and I was very good at it. Then I was recruited by a sales training company, a B2B sales training company in 2008, which is a few years after I finished college. And, you know, had to go and eat what you kill and find all the business that I could find. So, I went from hourly pay as a construction worker into commission-only pay. And I've never not had commission-only pay ever since then. And so, I started building out my sales training business working with the only kinds of companies that I felt any kinship with, which were construction companies. And I found them to be approachable and my kind of people, no BS, straight to the truth. They could smell through BS a mile away, which I also loved and appreciated. And, you know, we were able to very quickly— I was able to very quickly build a book of business in that space. And then over the course of time, what happened, Bradley, is I was very good at helping them to grow their businesses. But when you grow your business, particularly a construction business, all kinds of other problems occur because growth brings, you know, good and bad issues along with it. And what I realized is people weren't hiring me to help them increase sales. They were hiring me to help them to build a better, healthier company and make more money. And it doesn't help if we double your sales and you make the same money. And so, from about 2012 to 2015, '16, I became an intense student of everything about running a construction business, operations, finance. You know, even the legal side of the business. Like, I just studied my butt off to try to understand how all the different levers work because these people were paying us, they were paying me, you know, for growth. And so, you know, figure sometime around '16, 2016, I had really built a very full-scope consulting business inside a sales training company, only focused on construction companies in the business that I was working at. Had clients that were in insurance and software and, you know, all those types of things. And fundamentally, our values no longer aligned, our goals no longer aligned. And in 2021, I decided to build out a real business focused exclusively on helping contractors from soup to nuts, you know, in their growth journey and their, you know, target for sale and exit and things along those lines. So I started WellBuilt in 2021. Today we have 14 people. We're spread across several states and, you know, things have been going really, really well.

Let me ask you, what is, what is one of the— maybe there's 3. Give me 1 to 3 of the biggest issues that you fundamentally see that the contractors running these construction companies the problems, the major problem that we can make a list of any business, insurance, software, construction companies, and we can make a list of 15 things of pains and problems that they feel. But if you had to summarize it down to 1 to 3, what would those 1 to 3 be? And the reason I ask this question is because for people listening to this, if you're not in that industry, what you're probably likely going to hear is some of the same fundamental problems that you face in your business today, too.

Yeah, I'll start with the one that I see with particularly with the smaller contractors, the contractors that are operating, you know, either in their first 5 years in business or they could be well established but still relatively small, you know, somewhere in the $1 to $10 million range, you know, kind of zone. I'll start with the most prevalent problem I see with that group. Is they're not making enough profit. They're struggling to balance growth and investment, and they're not sure which investments to make to increase profit. They're very good at chasing revenue growth, but they're not good at translating revenue growth into bottom-line profitability. And if you don't have bottom-line profitability, you cannot invest.

Tell me more about the growth and investments piece of it because we'll get into potentially a tool or concept with a tool that I believe in. And so, I'm curious how this applies and your thoughts on it. But talk to me more about the balancing of the growth. In the investment piece. And when you talk about investment, some people listening to this may eventually, maybe immediately thinking about like a Roth IRA, right? Investment. But what are you referring to as an investment?

Yeah, I'm talking about business investments, things that money you must spend in your business for your business to grow. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about investment. So, I appreciate the clarifier there. I'll give you a for instance, right? A story. So let's pretend you're a $5 million contractor. You've got 12 people, you know, working for you in your business. If that's you, the truth probably is that while you may not be out in the field performing the work, you've, you've crossed that hurdle. You're no longer the electrician or the plumber, you know, himself, but you are still the chief estimator, salesperson, and project manager as an example. You get this big opportunity that comes in the door and that's going to take you from $5 million to $8 million and you go after that job. Well, what does it take for you to go after that job? It's, you know, a month of your time in estimating. And so that takes you out of other aspects of the business while you're spending that month estimating the projects you already have, maybe suffering. Right. And, uh, so, so that occurs, then you win the job. Now who's going to run the job? You're going to run the job. Well, that time you spend running the job keeps you from estimating. And so you're not winning new work. And so you get stuck on this up and down cycle that I would bet you translates into other industries, but certainly is the construction industry in a nutshell. It's like when we're, when we're busy, we, we're not busy getting work. And when we're slow, we're busy getting work, but we're making no money.

Yeah.

And it's this, you know, sort of up and down wave and what they don't do because they're afraid and rightfully so. They should be afraid. You know, they should be concerned at least to an extent, but they're afraid to say, you know what, darn it, I need to hire a project manager. And not only do I need to hire the project manager, but I also need to train the project manager and I need to make sure that they understand, you know, the XYZ company way of doing things so that that project manager can succeed and I'm not essentially just doing their job for them on a daily basis, right? Once I hire them. But if they were to hire that project manager, once they finish the estimating on that project, they could hand it off. And instead of spending every waking moment on that project, they could spend 5 hours a week on that project overseeing the project manager and spend the remainder of their working week on the business and on estimating and things like that so that they could stack another project, keep that project manager busy into the future. And continue to add. And now all of a sudden they might say, hey, I got enough overhead space, I got enough cash here to add a little overhead. Maybe I need to hire a full-time estimator. And these are the types of growth investments that these companies are afraid to make. And when they do make, they can make wrong. And again, like I say, they are rightfully afraid. Yeah, but it doesn't change the fact you got to do it. All right.

So this leads me to a question that I didn't know if we would get to, but I think it's actually a really great time to be able to ask it. Dan, Jim Martell, in his book, he has this Buy Back Your Time, he has this concept called the replacement ladder. And he has this idea of like, this is kind of the order that you need to go through to begin to kind of replace yourself. So I've heard this in the construction industry called chucking a truck or something like that, right?

Yeah.

And so there's a guy, you know, a young kid has grown up and working for roofing companies, let's say. And he worked for a roofing company for a number of years. He's the main estimator. Sales guy goes out, he's gotta sell $1 million, $2 million worth of roofs in a year, and he gets mad and he goes, you know what? I can just go do this on my own.

Yeah.

He decides to go out. He's got some relationships with some of the subs that are actually gonna do the work, and he slaps up on the back of his Ford F-150, you know, so-and-so's Roofing Contracting. And so my question is for Chuck in the Truck Roofing, so to speak, you mentioned estimating, sales, and project management. I'm gonna add in one kind of above that. Which would be marketing, getting the leads to begin with. Okay, so, you know, so somebody is going to have to answer the daggum phone. All right. Somebody's got to answer the phone. Heck, somebody's got to make the phone ring. But let's just say you do good at that. All right. And you posting on TikTok.

I don't know.

I'm just making up stuff with this one to get the leads. Leads come in, you answer the phone. I'll be out there tomorrow. Take a look at your prop. Take a look at your roof. I go out there, give you an estimate for the roof. And then I'm going to sell the thing and then I got to manage the job. My question to you, Chad, is in what order in this perfect world, which doesn't exist, but it's good to know at what order does this person need to replace themselves?

The answer on this is so easy. I love the simplicity of the answer to this question. Whatever you're least good at. Hmm. That's the answer. Whatever you're least good at. And if you're wondering what you're least good at, probably just what you hate most. You know what I mean? It's the part, the part that you resist the most. So maybe it's going out and doing the estimate and selling the job and you can go hire an estimator salesperson. Or maybe it's the function of running the work, you know, like that kind of stuff. But owners should replace— if I always picture, it's funny, I had not, I've not heard the replacement ladder. I have this funny analogy that I use, which is, you know, it's a stack of hats. You know, and I just picture when I see, you know, the Chuck in a Truck, he's got, you know, 10 hats on his head and we got to take them off one by one by one until the only hat that's left is CEO. Right now, you don't get to just do that and snap your fingers and do that. But the transformation from a Chuck in a Truck business into a, you know, a going concern and a real business enterprise requires that you're wearing that CEO hat. And if you're wondering what order to take them off, It's what you're least good at, one at a time, because the person you're going to bring in, if they're a specialist in that area, chances are pretty darn good they're going to be better than you in that area. And that's it. That's the answer. It's that simple.

Yeah, that makes sense. I do get that. I think that does, you know, make it to where you kind of slough off because some of those guys just, they love to shake the hands, right? They love to shake the hand with the person and sell them. and then they think, oh gosh, now I gotta do, now I gotta do all the things, right? And so they can do it and manage it probably to a point. I, again, you and I were talking about before we hit, kind of hit record here about, you know, revenue in the construction industry, it can be a little bit of a false nomer, so to speak, because really the, the real thing that we need to be talking about is like what your gross profit is. Can you talk about how you help companies, whether you're a painter, whether you're an exterior remodeling company, you do decks, you do windows and doors, you do roofing, whatever you do, landscaping, for goodness sake, whatever it may be. How do you— do you go in with benchmarking to say, look, this is kind of the benchmarks of the gross profit we're looking for. We want to make 40%. We need to be at 50, you know, what, what does that generally kind of look like about how you consult with others?

So one of the key things to understand, leave, leave gross profit off to the side for a moment and, and ask yourself, I'm talking directly to the, to the entrepreneur here, uh, take, you know, focus first on what the market will bear. Focus first on what the market price is for this service. Because when you're really small, your gross margins are artificially inflated because, you know, you don't have a lot of direct or indirect costs, particularly indirect costs that you have to soak into your, you know, into your pricing strategy. So you might, particularly when you're small, you might have a gross profit of 50%, 60%, 70%, or something along those lines on revenue because you don't have a whole heck of a lot of direct costs. So understand what the market will bear. If a whole house full of windows in your market goes for $45,000 and you're like, well, heck, that would put me at an 80% GP, well, price it at $42,000 and win the work, right? Like, you know, don't, don't assume that you have to base your pricing purely off of your own gross profit. Pricing and costs are a different exercise. You definitely need to figure out a detailed cost estimate so that you have a clear picture for what it's truly going to cost you to do this job. But what you should price it at should have, you know, kind of two balancing points. One, what the market will bear. Which is your primary driver? And two, is it at least over X benchmark? Getting back to your question about benchmarking. Yeah. And so as you grow, your gross margins will tend to decrease as you add different resources and trucks and tools and equipment and, you know, more bodies personally that you've got to have in field management oversight because you're not going to be everywhere at one time. And so fast forward 10 years and you've solidified and, you know, you've got thousands of jobs to point to, then you should be able to know this is where my gross profit margin ought to be as a percentage of work. Once you have a firmly established expectation for like, this is the barrier, then your mission should be, how do I dial it up? How do I ramp gross profit on every single job, every single time? Buy a little better, run your labor a little better, right? You know, manage things a little tighter, get off the job a little faster, prevent rework and coming back and, you know, obviously prevent safety incidents because nothing is more costly, you know, both from a, from a financial and human standpoint than safety incidents. And you're able to run a business that consistently brings home projects at or better than the estimated gross margin, now you're cooking. And you said it, Bradley, I couldn't agree with you more. You know, you, you can't pay a bill with revenue. You can't. There's no— you cannot pay a bill with revenue. You can only pay a bill with profit. And, you know, your gross profits are the only thing that you really have at the end of the day. So making sure that you have that all the way dialed in is essential.

At what point, I guess I'll ask it revenue-wise, but that is really also difficult because there's a, depending on the business that it is, you have an average job value, we'll say, right? So, you know, maybe a painting company has an average job value, interior painting company has an average job value of $5,000 and a, you know, an exterior window company has an average job value of $30,000. So, you know, that, this could, that could vary very greatly. But I'm going to ask, it seems like Chuck in a Truck, they just, they got to go sell stuff at the beginning. Just go sell. Just go sell, shake hands, get the business, breathe life into the business. Right. And then they get it to, you know, some amount of revenue, $1 million, $1.5 million to top line, you know, gross profits. I don't know, half that. Just, I'm making up numbers basically. At what point does it switch that if you really want to scale, and I'm just going to use $10 million. Okay. We're going to, we may talk briefly about your levels of, I tend to think about businesses of $300,000 to $1 million. That's like a group. And then $1 million to $3 million is another group. And then it's $3 million to $10 million and then $10 million to $30 million. Okay. That's kind of my way of thinking about it. I'll get your ranges past there. But if you're wanting to scale to $10 million, it feels like that there gets to a point that the number of jobs you are doing in a year to get to $10 million, depending on your average job value, that the business at its core becomes less about your ability to get leads, less about your ability to even get sales reps and manage the sales reps. And I'm not saying that that's easy, but that can be done and it can be trained. It can be coached. It becomes more about operational efficiency. You know, can we, can we, price the job at 45% and actually make 45% on the job or pretty dang close.

That's it.

Can we, can we air traffic control, you know, in Atlanta, you know, this, this truck is leaving here, is going to go see this person, then he's going to go see this job and this PM is going to go over here and they're not, this PM is not crisscrossing the entire state or, you know, 2 hours to go check on these jobs. That's not very efficient. So, the job that the complexity of the business becomes operational efficiency. It's what my feeling is. What are your thoughts?

I completely agree. I, you know, I call it operational excellence in the book. So, I wrote a book. It's called Well Built. And in the book, one of the things I talk about is operational excellence being just kind of a prerequisite for growth. If, you know, there's a certain amount of growth that you got to do to be viable. Operational excellence is not a prerequisite to viability. And when you're talking about that difference between, you know, $300,000 and $1 million, right? Like, that's all about viability. And I couldn't agree more. It's like you're just—

I like that. I actually really like that word. I'm going to totally steal that. I like— I had not used that language. I really like good language. I don't mean to interrupt you. That's actually really great. I love that. I think you're so right about that word.

And so, so I don't need to be worried about operational excellence while I'm trying to be viable. Once I've passed the point of viability and viability is really about like the business is making money, we are, we have cash to invest. I'm not taking every penny out of the business as the owner because I don't need that much right now. We're viable. That's, you're past that point of viability. And that threshold is different for everybody, right? You got, you got two boats and two houses and all that kind of stuff. Viability might not happen until you have net profits over a million, right?

You get it.

There's like that point. When is your business viable? All right. Past viability. Now it does become about operational excellence, but not for the reason you think. It's not about, though this is a nice byproduct that we get the ability to ramp up our gross profits by, you know, consistently delivering, selling at 45% and delivering at 45%. But it's all about reputation because operational excellence has the beautiful counterpart, which is that it makes customers really happy when things are done on time, when things are done at standard and you don't have to come back and redo it. When they— right. When you are where you're supposed to be, when you're supposed to be there. Why? Because you run your trains on time, man. Right. Like, you know, like all that kind of stuff, because beyond pure viability, the next thing that's going to determine whether you're going to live or die is whether your reputation for excellence precedes you. And if it does, you will accidentally grow. Your clients, people will spread you just by word of mouth from that $1 million up over the $3 million, right? So, you know, $300,000 to $1 million, viability. $1 million to $3 million, now we're into operational excellence, but it's all about reputational growth. Now, because, and here's the thing, you can do that next stage of growth with like one great guy overseeing ops, right? You got Al. Al's amazing, right? We can't, you know, if something happened to Al, we wouldn't know what the hell we would do. But, but we based the whole business and you, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong at that phase of, of operational excellence being all about Al. However, in your next stage of growth, and this is where I'll call it scale, right? Which is beyond, you know, reputational word-of-mouth growth. But now you're scaling a business. Now operational excellence has to not be about Al. It has to be about the XYZ Co. way, the Acme Company way, right? And it's got to be process and system driven. So that when the opportunities come for you to grow from $6 million to $8 million to $12 million to $15 million, that you can say to yourself, you know, as long as I find somebody that's got, who's a right fit for the position, who's got the right knowledge coming in, that they're, you know, that they're a suit, that they're a fit for the role, I can teach them our methodology and I can plug them into our processes and they can execute. Now, now you're cooking with gas. Now, now, now your business can truly fly and you need that for every position in your business. And again, in what order? I would say in the order that as an owner, you're not going to oversee directly. You know, the further you are away from it, the more it needs to be system and process driven.

You don't actually know how aligned you and I are. Okay, so maybe you and I need to connect offline and be able to chat about this. I think What I hope that people are hearing here is that this notion, okay, that is not necessarily wrong. And I like to— somebody told me one day, well, it's true. It's not the truth is that I want my business to be, it's all about the team. It's all about the team. It's all about the team. It's all about the team. The problem is you do not want a people-dependent business.

Right.

Because if Al leaves, you are screwed.

Yep.

You're screwed.

Okay.

And so in one of my own examples, 2016, I hired my very first EA. Now, she was full-time. I didn't need a full-time EA at the time. I was just following the direction of my executive coach at the time. And so I didn't have anything. I didn't have anything documented. I mean, we started the process of doing that.

And we actually built a really good process. And she was with me for 11 months.

And that 11 months we were cooking and she got an opportunity that was— I wasn't going to match it. I mean, it was basically double her income.

And I remember sitting at my desk as she walked out and I thought, and there goes all that intellectual property I just spent all this 11 months on. And the thought of doing it all again, Chad, was just overwhelming to where I was like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that.

And I had been, you know, at that point in my own journey, I was in the process of like actually leaning into, I'm going to create systems and processes. And so actually we were doing it. And the one thing I forgot, I was like, I wasn't documenting anything she was doing.

Like, I didn't have any.

So I didn't have anything to hand over to the next person and say, hey, We're going to pick up where she left off right now. That is— and I'd love your thoughts on this. It's not to say this is one thing that I think that people get wrong is they say, I want to McDonaldize my business. Well, your business isn't McDonald's. Okay. And so this is the part where it's like two things can be true at the same time. I want systems and processes, and I do want Al in the business to run them. And if Al leaves, Oh, that is going to be tough, but at least we've got systems and processes that the next person can come in and be able to take. So, it's got to really kind of be both. That's what I believe. What are your thoughts?

Yes. So, I think great systems and processes put you in a position that if Al leaves, you're not sunk. If you don't have systems and processes, you're desperate. And inevitably what happens in these businesses that are in this early phase of growth, or small, you know, they're small and they're trying to become midsize, is the owner is going to have to step in and play that role. And that what that translates into for the owner is all kinds of things in their, you know, in their, in their personal lives. I mean, you know, divorce rate among entrepreneurs is very high for a reason. You know, there's, there's a lot of mess that kind of comes along with that stuff. Right. So you've got to be I think, I think you want to hire amazing people. You want to attract the best and you want to be able to put the best into your systems and processes and have them thrive. And frankly, you want the best to make your systems and processes better for the next guy. And, and so people keeping great— it is all about the team, all about the team, all about the team. As long as you have the systems and processes so that you're not overly dependent on that group. You do want both. You absolutely want both things. You got to be able to attract and retain the best, but you can't be so dependent on finding people who already know perfect when they come to you because that it becomes virtually impossible to grow your business.

I really think I were huge basketball family. And, um, you know, for people listening to the podcast know I'm an Auburn guy, and so we're in the middle of March Madness. And but I think about someone like John Calipari. I mean, he's obviously been able to take Arkansas now to the Sweet 16, but look at all those years where he was like, it was all about the Jimmies and the Joes. And he just had 5-star after 5-star after 5-star at Kentucky, and, uh, they were one-and-dones. Okay. And we've been— I've been to Kentucky and I've seen how many first-rounders. It's unbelievable how many they into the NBA, but they struggled really to be able to come together cohesively and be able to have like really understand, get the X's and O's in a way to where they built team culture and chemistry to be able to kind of make deep runs. I mean, they did obviously one year with Anthony Davis years ago, whereas if you look about the teams that tend to in the tournament go deep, they're older teams that have been together for a period of time. They obviously have talent. We're not saying talent doesn't matter in our teams in business. The people you have matter, but so does the system. I've actually seen some breakdown of the film of like Connecticut. Now, I personally don't like Dan Hurley, but I mean, I've seen like how some of how complicated some of their sets are that they ran and how advanced it is. And it's like, oh my goodness. Wow. Yeah, they have great talent, but they're not getting Duke talent. They're not getting some of these guys that are, you know, like Cooper Flagg. I mean, yeah, they got great talent, but oh my goodness gracious, this stuff is really hard to guard. And I think that there's this balance in business of like, no, you're not going to be able to go get D people, having great systems and processes and just be able to scale to $10 million. It's just not— you got to have good people and you got to have systems and processes.

All right.

I'm curious how pre-transfer portal Bradley, free transfer for— all I'll say is that, you know, I'll transition over to football for a moment, that, you know, excellent systems attract excellent players. Yeah. And good, good. Your reputation for excellence, which remember that your reputation for excellence and consistent excellence, not just like Depends on the team you get. Yeah. You know, no matter who you're working with at XYZ Company, it's top-notch players. You never get a C-team. They're always A-team guys. If you have that kind of reputation, which is based on, you know, operational excellence, you will attract people who fancy themselves, who think of themselves as those guys. And it self-perpetuates. I've worked with companies that Bradley, when I started working with them, they had 300 people, that today they have 400 or I'm sorry, 4,000 people, 4,500, you know, that kind of stuff that happens because they were just the winning team, plain and simple. It's like if you want to play on the winning team, we're right here. And you know what? They pay a little less than the rest of the market. All right. They don't have to pay the top people. People understand what it is that, you know, and again, that, yeah, this is what it's like to to play on the best team. And if you want your company to rise to that level, it does have to be predicated on operational excellence, which can't be hinged on just one guy.

Chad, tell people about, about your book, the work that you do. People want to connect with you personally and also find out a little bit more about your company and what you guys do. Where would you point them to?

Yeah, so I wrote a book. It's called Well Built. It's how the top 2% of construction contractors deliver superior value, profits, and excellence. It's really a reflection on the over 200 contractors that I had worked with up to the time that I wrote the book. Now it's like coming up on 300. But, you know, in an examination of what the very top performing contractors were doing that were the common threads, kind of like a a mini version of Good to Great, if anybody's familiar with that book. And, you know, kind of examining these companies that beat the averages dramatically and what were they doing. And so, what I did was I pulled that into a kind of a set of systems that I was watching them put in place and that I was also fortunate enough to learn and be able to put in place in some of these businesses to create that kind of top-performing Output. If you want that book, it's on Amazon. I don't know where the heck else they sell it, but that's the place that everybody seems to go. And so, again, Well Built. And the name of my company is Well Built Consulting. So, you can go to wellbuiltconsulting.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn, Chad Prinke, P-R-I-N-K-E-Y, which is a last name that virtually nobody else has because I think it's made up. And so, it should be an easy one for you. And, you know, I also have a podcast. It's designed for contractors. It's all about, you know, people who are creating positive change in the construction industry. It's called the Morning Huddle Construction Show and another podcast called the Well Built Podcast that I do, which is basically like stories and case studies from our clients.

Awesome. Chad, it's been great having you on, my man. Enjoyed connecting and chatting with you today. I mean, obviously so many key takeaways that I would have that are similar in the vein and thought process. I really do love your thought of like, hey, get rid of the things that you're not good at. And I think for most of us, regardless of the business, we can think about like, these are the things I absolutely really hate doing. You know, I just hate doing the bookkeeping.

And then get that off of your plate as soon as possible.

You're not paid to— you're not paid to do the bookkeeping. You're paid to look at the— be able to see the financials and make decisions.

Yeah, I was just going to say now, just because you offload it doesn't mean you're allowed to not understand it.

Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, the actual reconciling, reconciling of the bank statements and the credit card statements and, you know, putting it in the right account in your QuickBooks is not a good use of your time at all. But being able to then understand them and read them and see the optics behind them, I think, is obviously— as just an example. So that was a big takeaway for me. Chad, enjoyed having you on.

Thanks, Bradley.

A big shout out to our podcast sponsors: Coach P Consulting, Autopilot Recruiting, Club Capital, and Today App Pro. Look, if you want to really be able to scale your insurance agency, how about maybe you learn from someone who wrote 1,100 life policies last year and over a million dollars in life and health premium That's right. David Petersen himself has done that. Go to coachpconsulting.com, coachpconsulting.com, and see how he can help you. Well, maybe even one day if you'd like to be able to scale to that level, but also just to be able to simplify your life and office sales systems. And then if you want to be able to qualify for some higher level incentives, you know, the ones that you really want to be able to qualify for, David can help you to be able to get there. CoachP Consulting.com.

Let him know you heard about him on the Above the Business podcast.

One of the things I didn't talk to Chad about, but it's so important, is your cash management system. Having— being able to manage your financials. But Chad also mentioned it earlier where I was talking about like, those are the things Club Capital can help take off of you so you don't have to do that, but they can help you to learn and get some of the insights so you can make better decisions. You heard Chad say, hey, but you got to be able to understand them. Well, Club Capital can not only help you to do all the bookkeeping behind the scenes, but they can also help you to be able to understand them, even if you feel like you don't currently. Go to club.capital. I love tech, but if you are an insurance agency owner, Today App Pro can absolutely help you to simplify your tech stack. Go to todayapppro.com, todayapppro.com. Obviously on this episode with Chad, we talked a ton about team and how important team is, and also how important your systems and your processes are in the business. Well, if you want to be able to kind of grow in 2025, we just ran the quarterly for our members, and there were so many people that had celebrated wins of adding people in first quarter, and they used Autopilot Recruiting to do just that. Or if you're wanting to be able to scale more going into the latter part of the year, then they can help you to do that with your team. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. Autopilot Recruiting. Com. All right, everyone. Hey, if you like some of the stuff that I talk about, go to my website, blueprintos.com. Register for one of my live upcoming workshops. I love to be able to see you there, help you move from being the rainmaker of your business to become the architect of your business and actually create a business that will run and grow without you. How about a million-dollar-plus business that runs and grows without you? I'd love to be able to give you the models and frameworks to be able to do that. Go to blueprintos.com, blueprintos.com. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well and go be great.