6. Growing A Building Company With Robert Carroll

This is Professional Builder Secrets, the number one podcast to help you grow your building company safely and securely, brought to you by the association of Professional Builders. Join us every week as we talk to industry experts and your fellow professional builders on everything you need to know to generate more leads, more sales, and higher margins while improving the building experience for your clients.

Hello and welcome to the Professional Builder Secrets podcast, a podcast by the association of Professional Builders for building company owners, general managers, VPs, and emerging leaders. Here we discuss all things running a professional building company from sales, processes, financials, operations, and marketing. Hello and welcome. Today I'm joined by Robert Carroll from Carroll Construction. Robert is the owner of Carroll's Attraction. And you are based in Louisiana, is that correct?

That's right. That's right.

Well, welcome, Robert. Thank you for being here. Let's start off with a little bit about you and Carroll Construction. Tell us a little bit about us.

Well, first off, thank you for having us on today and I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed time with APB so far, so I'm looking forward to a few more years growing the company. A little bit about our company. We're a scattered site custom construction company located in a rural area of Louisiana. We're just outside of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana metropolitan market in a small parish. We've got about 20,000 residents so far, and so we work in a fairly large area between east and West Feliciana, Louisiana, as well as the northern parts of East Baton Rouge. We are a company of about 2 million average revenue a year, and currently we have four for employees in addition to myself.

Did you choose this path, Robert? Did it come to you naturally? How did you get started in the industry? Looking back?

Well, looking back, actually, it was one of the things that sort of just happened. I never grew up thinking I was going to be a builder. I was in a career that I didn't like. I was actually adjusting life claims and looking at death certificates every day. We had this national catastrophic event that was nationally known, and that was the Hurricane Katrina. And at the time, it just devastated the entire southeast region of Louisiana, including Baton Rouge. And as a part of that, the company I was working for ceased to exist. And so it was at that point, it was sink or swim, right? So you had to find a new career. And my family, they had always done construction. And so I kind of made a bargain with my father. I said, hey, you still want some bragging rights? Nobody's ever graduated from college. You interested in sending me if you pay for it, I don't have a job, but I'll go and get a degree. And so hopped in as construction management for lsu. And apparently that was his clue to jump in and say, hey, would you like to join the company? And the rest is sort of history from there. Fast forward. That was back in Katrina's course was in 2005. It was 2007. Whenever I ultimately was approached by my father to come into the company, 2009, I was set to graduate. And at that point he's saying, hey, it's a wasteland. As y' all recall, it was a global recession that was coming in. I simply told him this. I said, look, I'm not looking to make a killing. I'm just looking to make a living at that point. It's just something to do. My wife has got a couple of habits that I liked it. I think they're fairly healthy. She likes to have a roof over her head, she likes to eat meals and she likes to be clothed. As long as I can keep that going will do pretty good.

That's quite interesting because I remember I was in Canada in 2008 when the recession hit and it literally wiped out markets. Tell me a little bit about what was it like starting out. Did success just hit you at the time? Did it take some time to get there? What were some of those struggles and obstacles that you had to overcome?

Well, I mean, obviously coming into the industry, this is an older industry. Typically your average builder in Louisiana is 55 plus. That just tends to be just through some of the obstacles to get me. And we don't have a large production. We have companies around Louisiana or we didn't at the time. So the majority were small single family builders. Three or five a year would be what their average construction volume would be. And what ended up happening over the time is people would typically retire out of industry and then get into the industry, the construction. Well, I was young at that time and coming into it. And so it was. That was probably the biggest struggle is because you're asking someone to entrust you with their life savings to build their home. And thankfully, because it's a family company, I was able to have the backing and have some of that support coming in. So it provided the extra but small town bootstrap company that we didn't have the marketing structure, we didn't have the sales process. We had what was typical. We're going to build a house, we're going to make it pretty, we're going to do it at a good price and we're going to have the same message as everybody else. And so there was really nothing unique about it. And so combine that with the global economy, I would say that scrappiness is really what got us through. I was just explaining to somebody today, I forget who I was talking to one of my customers. And we were just talking about one of the situations that happened back then. We were actually going and approaching banks to fix up homes that other builders had gone bankrupt on. And then we went and got our real estate license so that we could jump in and then sell the house for the bank afterwards. So we solved the problem for them and that got us into the renovation side of work. And so whereas before I came into the company, we were more of a spec builder where we would put a couple of products down and occasionally you'd get a semi custom that you can do for a client on their land, but mostly spec, put the products down. And because of the change in the global economy, we saw the writing on the wall, we were not going to be able to compete with the big builders, so we had to find a new model. And that's when we started doing the scattered site custom along with the renovations. And putting those two products together helped us to get something that would generate cash flow and, and turn around what was not a great looking situation and managed to. Thankfully we've generated a positive income every year or so we thought until we started looking into what the actual costs to run the company were, started quantifying some of these things and realizing we had a job.

Well, let's talk about the numbers and let's talk about some of the classical mistakes that building company makes. What was some of the, I guess, insights and aha moments that you must have had that you were going on this journey. You must have discovered some things here that you were like, oh, wow, I could have done this differently, I guess. And so tell me a little bit about the mistakes that you might have made to date and how did you overcome that?

So a lot of what happened is you don't know what you don't know. Right. There's four stages of learning is one of the things we talk about in our local company. There are unconscious incompetence, you don't know what you don't know. That's where we were. And then you move into conscious incompetence where you learn exactly how much you absolutely have no idea what you're doing. And then you hopefully move on from there to conscious competence. And the goal is to ultimately get to unconscious competence, which many people refer to as expertise at the time we were sort of just figuring things out, it's not Jeff Bezos but one of these large startup companies and they say that start innovating and building a company and scaling the company is sort of like jumping, jumping out of a plane and building the parachute on the way down. That was our story. So some of the early mistakes that we made was really not leveraging technology that was there to differentiate ourselves. But we started in and tried so early thing that we thought we could tell that the clients needed more information, more clarity, more transparency. And so I in my infinite wisdom started saying, okay, well I know Google's got these free sites. And so we started creating a website for every client and cobbled together the Google Calendar to create a password protected schedule, Google Sheets so we could show them their allowances, Google Photos so we can show them daily photo updates of the job. And it was great. I was so excited about this and, and I'm sitting in a meeting for the NHP that I was serving as a delegate at the time and another builder looks at me and says, man, you really need to go see this company. Because I'm telling about it, I'm like, and I'm excited. This is what we're doing for the cl. You need to go do this. And I go and I find this company co construct that's doing everything that I'm doing at a fraction of the time that it was going to take. And at that point we were starting to really understand that perhaps utilize my time for something a little bit more efficient, a little bit more effective. So that was the first big jump that we took. And because we are early adopter and no one else in the area was doing it, we were able to jump right in and learn in an area where there was plenty of room for mistakes and we made lots of them. Especially right on with trying to onboard your subcontractors and figure out what they were interested in, how they were going to interact. And anybody who's ever tried to onboard a project management software understands exactly. The biggest lift is you can have the greatest system in the world, but if nobody uses it, does it really matter and you're just creating work for yourself. So I would say that ultimately out of all of that, we realized that we needed to spread our reach and not be afraid to invest in the company rather with additional funds, you know, have a capital outlay instead of simply trying to bootstrap everything that you do and make everything work out because you can do it and it sounds great and makes a great story. But you're going to take a whole lot more time to do it this way than if you'll just find the right pressure points, the right technology, the right pieces that you can cobble together. And also once you get that, make sure that you know your cost when it comes down to it, because we really didn't know our cost. We were typical of many common builders that were going on and that are still going through the pricing changes that are happening right now. I know that Russ and Sky talk a lot about people who are going to realize at the end of this year, whenever the bills come due, they're going to start to recognize real quick what the company actually cost. And many builders don't find out until January 1st when their CPA tells them this is how much you didn't make this year or you did make. And they never know. They don't do monthly reporting or KPIs or try to measure these specific metrics.

It sounds like there was a lot of awareness that builders typically need to have. And you said a really classical sentence here which is you don't know what you don't know. Let's talk a little bit about that path to awareness and that path to transformation because it sounds like you've had to transform your business as well. From what I'm gathering here. You mentioned that you had to be scrappy to survive. I guess just after the recession as well. How did you transform the business to what it's like today? You talked about little bit about awareness and numbers and you talked about co construct as well. So there was a little bit of automation there in that industry. So did you start adopting to those methods?

So I wish I could say it was a straight line and that we just woke up one day and had this amazing epiphany and this was it. But it wasn't. If there was one book that I could recommend if anybody's considering getting into self employment. There's a book and I forget the name of the author but it's called Boss Life. And if you look it up, it's a great story about this cabinet or furniture maker. They make executive desks and he goes through the year of an Entrepreneur and it talks about the ups and the downs and he monitors the cash flow. I read that book and it was just one of these things that I said. You identify, you recognize. Okay, that's exactly what I'm going through. And it's a fun book and it helps you to really get into. I think the biggest thing that it pointed out to me was he gets about three quarters to the year and the sales are tanking and he can't figure out what's going on. Why aren't the phones ringing? He's talking to his employees about how do they, what's going to look like in the next month. And the next thing you know, he realizes that he's got his advertisement set up improperly and it's being spent by his non target clients before noon. And none of decision makers were making that decision. And it was a small tweak and suddenly the phones, he made the tweak and the phone start ringing. And it was that awareness of it's such a small thing. And so that got me on a path of reading and just devouring content. Of course, E Myth Revisited. That's classic literature that, that gets everybody where they need to be. Emma Shinned I actually wrote a book on construction accounting that was just transformative. It talked about setting up the chart of accounts and really understanding the numbers. And then of course I start getting these emails from the association of Professional Builders and they're sending me these spreadsheets and I'm looking at them like, okay, this is good stuff. And this was back probably in 2015 or 16 when I started getting these. I get one and I download it. I do like a lot of us, okay, that's really good. But I'm not ready to buy. Get another one. Get about the third or fourth one and they're giving this content away. And they're educating me about interruption marketing the whole time that they're doing this and I'm not their client. And so I jump into the monthly portal and it just is an extension of that devouring, getting as much information as I can possibly get because there are people who have figured this stuff out and that's kind of where it comes down to is not trying to do everything on your own. That was the appeal to me whenever I joined with the association of Professional Builders is there are some templated information and yes, I can adapt that to my process, to my company. But I don't mean to start from scratch. That's what a small entrepreneur always. I think that's the biggest mistake they make is they try to just reinvent the wheel that's already been invented under times you just have to find the resources.

Right. So tell me a little bit about the journey with the association of Professional Builders. You started to get some emails, some content and you started applying this. How did that relationship blossom?

So I mentioned that they were, they were educating me about the process. I had heard about email campaigns, drip campaigns and things like this. And so sometimes the best way that I learn is hands on and to just kind of immerse myself in. It was a, it was a safe zone for me. Okay, I'll go ahead and give you my email. And then I start getting the content and I see how these emails are structured, how long they are. So I'm learning from it. And then I saw them doing it. Well, we all have clicked on the emails and received an email that takes you 45 minutes to read. And like this is crazy to watch how they broke it down into small pieces. I was just intrigued. So I called up Andy Scara and we scheduled a just a consultation. I told him about our business and he presented. At the time, we weren't ready to jump into a full mentorship. And so it was a. They had a product to where we could go month to month and just get access to the training. So I got access to the training, learned about the work in progress, accounting adjustments, learned about the KPIs. You know, I admitted to Andy one time, you know, he would show me a spreadsheet, I'd take a screenshot. I started, still not learning my lesson, trying to build all of this on my own. And so I'd go back and I make this KPI dashboard. I had a pretty solid dashboard that was in there. And he laughed, he probably laughed about it now and probably remembers the conversation. The great thing was is they allowed me to grow my company beyond the point that it was from a small startup. Because reality is, you know what it takes finances in order to do a business. And that smaller companies like myself, at the beginning, you may just have to start by cobbling together the pieces of the stuff. So we entered, I did the training, I learned everything, I did the testing and started implementing in my company. And I stayed with that until we got to the point where revenue started growing. And then they started through their training and the drip campaigns started really focusing. We would do a periodic consultation on profit margin and I was realizing, okay, wait a minute, how much are we actually making? And we realized it wasn't very much whenever you accounted for all the costs of running the business. And that's the one thing in the E myth is that it tells the story of somebody who is going from just a job to actually running a business. And that was appealing to me and I saw a lot of that in the process with apb.

So looking at where you are today, what do you love about running a Building company. And also what keeps you up at night if anything does.

Oh, I could probably give you a much longer list right now about what keeps me up at night in this economy for the reason I got into construction. I mentioned I wasn't in it, but once I got into it, I realized that I was made for it. I heard something one time, somebody told me, they said, if you can do anything else besides running your own business, go and do that. But if you, if you go and try to work for other people and find that it just doesn't work for you, then you need to be self employed. And that's what it was to me. I had a certain set of values that that came across and it was very difficult for me to work under somebody else's value set. And so whenever I came into the company, I really took the lead from day one. Debt. My father was ready to retire, he was backing out. And so he pretty much gave me free reign to reshape and create the company however I wanted. So I had a unique opportunity from day one to just jump in and let it be a playground. Try this. Oh, that broke. Don't do that. Try this. That worked. I tried this. I didn't sleep for three weeks after that mistake. And reiterating through that. So it's freedom to shape something, to build and to be creative within the company itself and also do something you can be proud of at the end of the day because it matters. I love the fact that many of my former clients as a custom builder, we're friends on Facebook, I'm watching their kids grow up. And the cool thing is, is whenever I see their Christmas cards, when I see all the images of their kids playing, the background is something that our company created for them. And I recognize it's amazing. You scroll through that feed and you see, I don't even see the kids, I don't see the parents. I know the house. I remember the struggles we did on that home. And so it's the war and the pain, but also it's that reward at the end of the day that I'm going to put something on this earth that's going to last for generations. And it's not just going to help this family, it's going to help the next family and the one one after that. And so I better do a good job. And because I'm self employed, I'm in full control of that. I can change this. And so. And it's also, it pays well to be in construction.

Fair enough.

We'll get Back to it. But, you know, to be able to be paid well and to do what you found that you love, it's a great package.

And what keeps you up at night right now? Like, if you had to sum up, obviously, you see, you have a lot of different things that keeps you up, but if you had to sum up the. The recurring thought or the one thing that you tend to go, I got to really focus on this in the morning when I wake up. What is that?

Unintended consequences. I think that probably be the best way to summarize all of them. The unintended consequences. Right now, the economy is. The world, the world's nuts. I mean, we just. I actually purchased the balance of the company in 2020. I'd been a 50% owner since 2011. So January 1, 2020, I become full owner of the company. March. There's this strange virus that's starting to spread around the world. I was like, really? So we go through. And then they shut down the world, and then the supply chain goes through chaos, but we become a essential service. So everybody is moving and saying, okay, let's build. Let's get a project going. Let's. Let's move ahead. Then you move into 2021, and the supply chain really grinds to a halt. The ports are clogged. At the meantime, the lumber is going through the roof. I mean, it was insane. I remember in November, we were looking at lumber futures at 780 per thousand. And I'm looking at the clients and saying, look, it's bad now, but let's just keep going forward because it can't get worse than this. And all bets were off whenever it hit 1500 and then ultimately 1700 per thousand board feet before it started dropping back down. And you just wonder what's going on. So I mentioned unintended consequences. We immediately jumped in, and we were proactive. We could see what was on the horizon. And so we made a lumber agreement. Okay. And this is just one example of decisions we made. And we said, okay, we're gonna. We're gonna adjust everything right before we start constructing the home. We'll sign a contract with that. And we made a deal with our clients. We will not. We will only pass on any increased cost of lumber after we start the construction. That's cost. We're not gonna add margin or anything. And that way, we're not trying to profiteer off of this. We're really just trying to deal with a crazy situation at the same time. If it goes down, we'll give you A credit of that cost. And so it was kind of a win win in both scenarios. So everything's going great. We had some clients that got a little bit of a credit. We got some clients that had a lot of bit of overage depending on where they hit. I've got one client right now that is probably going to see a $20,000 credit. Unintended consequences. We signed these agreements eight months ago. I had one contract that the lumber escalated $23,000 during the construction. And so the client was in large part, they were responsible for that cost. That was just our agreement. As we get through the construction, we hit it at just the right time as well. And that when I say right time, I mean the wrong time. Everything escalated during that. And so we saw an additional $20,000 of cost that had to be absorbed on a contract that was already signed. And one of our core values is if we set it, that's what you get. And so the client didn't see a dime of that escalation. But you look back and you think, how could you predict any of that? And so you just try to, you try to stay on it. Those are the things. You wake up the next morning and you think, did I think this through all the way? Have I protected myself? Have I protected my client? Have we come to the best agreement that could work for everybody? And sometimes you nail it, sometimes you don't. And you just try to get up the next day and craft a better agreement and move ahead.

That's really insightful. And I don't think I've ever heard anyone call it unintended consequences before. But I think we all stay up at night thinking about things that occur on a day to day basis, whether it's life happenings or work happenings. But it's a really strong label when you, when you call it that. So tell me a little bit about your company today. Obviously it's grown in size. I'm assuming it's grown in people. What does that look like now? And also what are you focusing on now? Moving towards the new frontier, you know, and the new future ahead of you. What, what are some of the things that you're looking at to grow the company?

So we have actually we've, we've grown our margins. That's been the largest thing that has taken place. And of course that's allowed us to take on additional manpower. So we're, we started out, it was my mother, my father and myself hired our first employee about three years ago to come in and really just help out with some administration. It just turned out she was an absolute genius with numbers and liked them. And so she became an estimator. And then we realized we need somebody to clean these lots because our clients expect that. So we hired on a young man to come in and start cleaning. And now our job sites are spotless. It's again, it's this value enhancement. It's not just growing margins, but it's also providing better value. At the end of the day. We just hired on our fourth employee and she's coming in and she will soon learn estimates since we've grown a purchasing department. And as a result of all of this, I think this is actually a key point, especially for people who are wondering what it looks like to grow a business. It's not always in gross revenue. We're probably at the end of the day, we're probably only about $600,000 higher in revenue now than when we started four years ago. But our margins are such now that they compensate and they pay for the additional value that we provide to pay for the services. And that was a real focus point that we had to get and understand because at one point we were offering a lot of services, but we went to the end of the year, we had a negative profit and it's because it cost so much in order to do this. So with that being said, what we're focusing on today is really the production, the supply side of things. We've got a great sales program which documented and it's solid and it speaks value to our clients. We have an interior designer who is part of our package and, and she goes and provides hands on service with everybody. We've got all these mechanisms in the office that can allow us to get out. But what really needs to take place now is we need to expand the capacity so that we can grow the revenue ultimately and take on additional projects. Currently we do 7 to 10 custom scattered site projects a year ranging in value from 400,000 to $800,000. Okay, we're very happy with that price range right there of where we'd like to be. But we'd like to be doing somewhere around 20 to 30 new customs in this region annually. And to do that we're going to have to learn how to, how to train up these production managers. Because anybody who's ever hired anyone knows that it's one thing to hire somebody, it's another thing to train them and then it's another thing to adapt them into the culture of your company and so that you can trust to send them out and that they're going to make the decisions. And of course, they're never going to be you. And so as an owner, sometimes you have to take that chokehold off and say, you know what 80% accomplished the way that I would do it can be good as long as I don't abdicate my responsibility and I am providing the oversight. Learning to be a better employer is definitely going to be one of those positions. It's an adventure every day especially, you start bringing in new personalities and they're all different, but we're very blessed. Everybody that we've brought into the company has just. They've just locked in. And I know there's a lot of people that can't say that maybe that's conservative nature, very slow to hire. But whenever they come in, we use the same process. Let's try to repel the wrong person so that we can attract the right person. Let's be very honest and upfront. And then whenever they come in, they have no illusions about what it's like to work in a small business. Now we can start working on the important things.

Let's talk a little bit about what struggles builders face today in the industry. And you've talked a little bit about some of the challenges obviously you're facing with the current times. But as new builder, tell me a little bit about what are some of those challenges outside of logistical unintended consequences, what are new builders or builders that have been in this game for too long that need change, what kind of struggles do they face to overcome and obstacles they need to overcome?

Honestly understanding the value proposition that right there, if there were one thing, and how to craft something that is unique in the face of everyone else that's out there. If everybody builds a quality home at a great price, which is the signs around drive down. We're building dreams, right? Every builder sign that you see out there, if there's nothing that makes you unique, then the only thing that people can compare you on is cost. And it's been the norm in the construction industry for too long. And it's a race to the bottom is ultimately what it is. Who can build the cheapest product possible. It's how we ended up not knocking production companies. I mean, they have a product that meets the need of a particular clientele. But so many small businesses try to compete on that model, it just doesn't work. You can't scale the way these guys are. You don't have the capital backing the way these guys have. And so you have to get creative and find unique ways to offer something that nobody else is offering. The fact that we are a design build company in a rural area, whenever we started out, we were kind of that same picture. But we have then taken to the online web space. I said about four years ago, I want to own the space in my rural parish. If I don't own anything else, I want to own the web space. Whenever somebody says in Clinton, Louisiana, I want to know who the builder is, I want Carroll Construction to come up number one every time. And then when they go to that website, I want them to find so much content and quality information that it's a no brainer. Why wouldn't we use Carroll Construction? Nobody else is going to provide this information. Nobody else is going to help us through this. I'm operating in, we refer to it in Chuck in a truck territory. A builder, the pickup truck. It is, I guess, a model and that's great, but it's, it lacks the professionalism that I think that this industry deserves. These houses are not the same homes that our fathers and our grandfathers built. They're complex systems. They've got interactions that it's rapidly changing. So you have to have a support structure and that's a huge challenge. Something as simple as a website posting their best practices. Okay, so for every product that you put into your home, are you going to go and read their website and their best practices and go through? Well, maybe, maybe you've got the time to do that. But if you're running a business, do you really. So you're going to have to surround yourself with people who understand and who can guide through that and cut through the clutter. Because I tell you, just about a year and a half ago we had a best practice at showed up and the client held us our feet to the fire on it. This was something that can change in an outside environment that you don't have control on. Back to the unintended consequences and maybe it changed last week, but it's on the website now and you're being held to a standard that you didn't realize you would be held accountable to. If you can communicate value and you can communicate expertise, when it comes down to your company, you're not going to be in competition with the person who says, oh well, I can do it for less, they're not going to go to that person. But you have to figure out how do you get to that point? Because if you don't, you're going to be steady chasing bids, you're going to be Chasing you're going to. We don't bid work anymore. We quote work. It was a challenge to get to paid quotes. Even once we got to that, it started eliminating a lot of the people that were simply looking for, look, we just had a hurricane. Right now, every builder is getting calls from people, say their insurance company told them they needed three bids. Like, wow, you know, sure, I've got nothing else to do. It's insane. But that's the expectation that's set out by a professional industry. So I want to be concise on that. But I would say that the value proposition, just circling back to this, it really does. If you can figure out how to communicate the value, what makes you unique to your particular product and your industry and your local market, then you're good. All the other people can't provide what you do. You've got to niche.

All right, well, tell me a little bit about perspective on yourself and also builders. What advice would you give a younger version of yourself looking back at your illustrious journey and career? And would it be the same advice you'd give either new or veteran builders out there?

That's a tough one. If I were definitely to my younger self would have been. I have to go back to what I said earlier. Don't try to reinvent everything. Find the resources, find the people, get involved and put yourself with people who are building their business the way that you want to emulate. And if you can't find the people in your local market, go outside your market, travel, go meet people, get involved with professional associations and find a way to get yourself in the same room with the people that are doing the thing that you aspire to. And for an older builder, I would have to look at it and say, stop doing things the same way that you've always done it, because that's the way you've always done it. And this is going to sound harsh and it's going to sound. And I don't intend for it because I say it with all care and concern. If you're not passionate about the industry, then it's time to retire or go and do anything. You owe it to yourself to do something other than be in the construction industry if you're not passionate about it, but if you're passionate about this, if you love what you do, then put in that extra effort because the payoff is infinite. It is exponential. I do not sweat the same things that I did when I first started with the company. I do not. Gosh, I remember those early days and they were tough. It's tough to be the new kid on the block and everything that you have is critiqued because you have not established that expertise. So the faster that you can establish yourself as an expert and truly be an expert and get that education, everything else is, it falls into line. The education aspect of construction of any professional industry is it cannot be understated.

What do you think the construction industry in the US is evolving to? What is it moving to now? I mean it's obviously changed so much, but where is it going?

There's definitely, okay, so production builders are going to move into the semi custom space. That space is going to disappear from the market because it's too easy to scale that particular process. And production companies are much better at scaling things than we are, we don't think in that term. So that's bad. For people who I think were in this model of buying a few lots a year and building a spec home and going, you're going to find that I think market share is going to shrink. It's going to get less and less. But for people who niche and set apart themselves from the rest of the market, I think there's always going to be opportunity. I mean Apple was crazy, right? Whenever they came on and they were going to offer a $400 phone, nobody's ever going to pay for that. But then they made it so unique and so different that they were able to grow the company and scale. Now in their particular that became a production model, but it was a high end production product. So I don't imagine that custom companies, because of just the complexity of the product, with every single option available out there in the world, I don't imagine that it's going to turn into this huge scale. But I think there's always going to be a place for the custom builder to be able to set in. I hope I'm right because I'm hanging my hat on it. But I've seen across the U.S. let me qualify this, LA is a very unique market. We had never had production builders in our market and suddenly Hurricane Katrina changed that. And so I immediately started looking around the country to see, okay, well what does this look like everywhere else? Because there are markets all over the US they're just filled. They might have six production companies in the same market and yet in every one of those markets you can find top quality professional doing top quality work. It's the reason why there's companies like Rolex, people want quality. It's the reason why there's a market for the MacBook versus the PC. It's a reason why there are any highly customized. I mean, there are companies that sell custom office pens for $200 a piece inlaid with. Well, there's a market for that because people want to do it. You just have to understand the market realities of that. I hear a lot of people talking about things like 3D printing and all this. And matter of fact, I think just in Austin, Texas, they just announced they're going to do a large. I think it's 100 lot development of all 3D printed homes. I think it's novel, but I think that the challenge is going to be, and what's going to be the detriment of that is whenever people go to remodel those homes, like, wait, this was 3D printed. I just want to move that switch. And then suddenly the renovation costs go from what they are now and triple. Because now you've got to bring in a structural engineer to evaluate the integrity of that. I think modularization, there's a place for that. Panel built systems, I think that that can definitely have a place again within the production community. Probably not so much within the custom. And I just don't see there being a cultural shift with the exception that maybe custom gets pushed a little bit further into the higher price range as the people who are able to purchase this and they're able to have an exclusive product, maybe it's a smaller pool of people, but they'll always be there. There's always going to need somebody to fill that market.

Well, my final question for you today. It's been a really insightful interview with so much different thought processes going through. But what does success look like to you today? Looking back on your journey? And it has really been a journey for you through some really unintended consequences as well. But what does success look like to you today?

For those of you don't know, you get a chance to look at the questions before these interviews. I got to that one and I really had to stop and think about it because that's changed over the years. When I first started, I remember telling my wife, you know, I've made it. Whenever we can build a house that's big enough that I can fit a lazy boy in, that was success for me at the time starting out. And as a matter of fact, we're getting ready to break ground. So I got to make new success goals. We're going to be building the house hopefully over the next few months. I would say that really it's evolved into a phrase, iou, inwards, outwards, and upwards inwards. Success for me is if I can stay at peace inside myself as I go through running a custom business and growing and learning to be a better employer and all of these ups and downs and the waking up at 2am because you remembered an unintended consequences outward success is remembering for me, remembering that it's not about just my business, my company. Whenever we started, I first started building, I had my daughter who is 11 now. She was born. Well, now we have four kids. Your interests are divided and it's very easy as a self employed individual to focus in on the company and to get lost in it. I've seen too many families apart and so for me to navigate self employment and still protect the integrity of my family, that means something and provide for them and to keep that perspective and upwards of course is just humility because with success, with growth, if you're so focused on the goals and you're knocking them out the park and you're going, it's real easy to think that you've done great at just awesome things. But to remembering that as great of a company as we build and as hard as we press, I couldn't have done any of this if it were not for my creator. So I have to maintain that and that helps to keep a really solid perspective of humility. And so inwards, outwards and upwards would be success for me. If I can make it through this life and this career and maintain that perspective, I feel like I've made it.

Do you feel you've hit that balance as well, Robert? A lot of builders work late at night, work weekends. Do you feel like you're getting a better handle of balance?

Is there such a thing as tripolar?

Maybe?

I mean, I don't think anybody holds all three of those and spends those plates at the same time. Obviously they're dropping. But that's part of the humility side of things, is recognizing that you're human. And gosh, Stephen Covey in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, he talks about that balance. It's this great, like I hear it, Zig Ziglar talked about it, I hear it. It's like this great holy grail of work life balance. But the reality is that how do you maintain a work life balance whenever, gosh, I mean, let's just. I don't need to get super serious here at the end. But you know, there are people dying of COVID I've lost count right now of the memorial services we've gone to. You don't have Work life balance in that you stop what you're doing and you go and you comfort the family. Whatever it means for the business, it means for the business. And whenever things are going great and your kids are happy and they're running and doing things that they don't need as much attention, you're focusing on the business. And whenever you realize you've been working to the bone because you're so passionate about what you do or because your fear of unintended consequences has got the better of you, then you rebalance and realize, maybe I should be getting into the gym and and start working. So I would say that no, I'm definitely not having all of those together. But the focus for me in that, I think is not necessarily balance, but rebalance. Every day, wake up, rebalance. Where do I need to be today? Wake up the next day and don't assume it's the same as yesterday. Rebalance, and you just wake up every morning and you rebalance and shift your attention and then be okay with that. And that does not meld well with my A personality. I like the boxes. I like everything going in the box. Nothing overflows. The boxes are full. This is the segment of life. And maybe that's a male thing, maybe, maybe not. But in that inwards, outwards and upwards. It helps me to realize that it doesn't always look the way that I thought it would look. But that's okay. I can rebalance.

Rebalance is a really good way and a good emphasis of focusing on where you're going. This has been a really insightful interview. I've truly enjoyed asking these questions, getting to know a little bit about your insights as well. Robin, I want to thank you for your time for our listeners as well. Really appreciate you tuning in. I know you're in the midst of a weather condition out there, so really appreciate you making the time for us as well. And I look forward to having you back on our podcast in the future.

Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed talking with you and getting to know you as well, and I look forward to hearing more out of Yale's podcast. It's been really great.

Awesome.

Thank you for listening. Remember to subscribe to Professional Builder Secrets on your favorite podcast platform and leave a review. To learn more about how the systems at the association of Professional Builders can help you grow your building company, visit associationofprofessionalbuilders.com See you next time.