Scott Cleator Reflects on Building Lumos Electric from the Ground Up

6 years is not a long time in the grand scale of life, but it's amazing how much you can accomplish in six years when you put your head down and you're focused your journey about assessing your pricing strategy, implementing a pricing strategy that more favorably recognized the value you guys bring to the market and maybe what that process looked like and the outcome that you achieved with that as well. Good day and welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. I am your host, Bob Govreau. I'm excited to have you here today and really excited to share a story of one of the clients that I've had the pleasure of working with for quite a few years now and watched him continue to grow and succeed and have hopefully been a positive support and influence along the way, which I know that he would be grateful to share. But just before we jump in, I want to remind you that this is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success for mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. This episode is going to be called Power and Growth. Scott Kleider on building a leading Electrical Contracting Business and navigating Growth Challenges Just before I hop in, I want to give a quick intro to Scott here and I know he's going to share his story, but Scott is the owner and co founder of Lumos Electric, a leading electrical contracting business based in Ottawa. Since co founding Lumos in 2018, Scott has been instrumental in shaping the company's core values of delivering high quality customer service and fostering employee growth. A proud father of one daughter, Willow, and another on the way. Coming in just a few weeks, Scott balances his professional endeavors with fulfilling family life. In his leisure time, he enjoys fishing, boating, golf, hockey and cottaging. With his wife, Lauren, Scott has been a member of the Wealthy Entrepreneur program, has worked with every facet of our business, is a standup guy, and I couldn't be more excited to share a little bit more about Scott and what he's accomplished over the last few years since he started his business. So without further ado, I'm excited to welcome my friend Scott Cler to the show. All right, Scott, well, I'm so excited to have you in here and listen before I turn it over to you and get you to share a little bit about yourself and your story and part of your journey, I just want to say, you know, you're one of those people that I've had the opportunity to work with. I'm going to say for five plus years now, it's been a little bit of time and you know, I'm just proud of everything that you've done. You know, you're just one of those guys, first off, easiest guy anybody would ever want to talk to, super high integrity, work hard, implement and appreciate the journey and the experience. So I just want to say that right up front, think the world to you, my friend, and so grateful to have you join me on podcast today.

Thank you. Holy. I don't know about all that, but I'll take it. I'll take it.

Exactly. So. So let's talk about your journey. You're in Ottawa, you've got a fantastic business. Maybe share a little bit of how well, tell everybody a little bit about yourself and then, and then walk us through what that journey has looked like from sort of start to where you guys are at now.

Yeah, so I'm originally from Bracebridge, actually in Muskoka, and I moved to Ottawa in 2010 just after finishing a pre apprenticeship program in, in North Bay at Canadore College, which was a great program, super hands on and learned a lot there and really let me hit the ground running with my apprenticeship. And actually before that I was at Madison University for ironically, business administration. And I've never told you this story, but I had an accounting midterm and it didn't go well. And that was the moment that I realized this is not for me. And I made the switch. I made the switch to the trades and never looked back and worked for another company for eight years. I did my whole apprenticeship with one company, stayed on after I was licensed, and there I met a guy named Rob and he sort of mentored me the entire time. And we both worked for the company. And as most aspiring entrepreneurs are, they said, hey, we might be able to do this, maybe better and even worse, maybe cheaper, so we can get more work. And we started Lumos Electric in 2018. So yeah, it's been a journey since then.

And then, so 2018, so you've got a few years under your belt. And so we actually must have connected fairly early on with you guys getting rolling with this. But so share 2018 to 2024, what that journey has maybe looked like and maybe some of the wins, some of the challenges that you faced from day one.

Yeah, so it started out, the two of us, Rob and I, and just sort of went at it, you know, picked up jobs, had some existing people that we could talk to and, and did some work and just sort of went in, let's do this and see where it goes. We made some mistakes. One is we paid ourselves Back right away for what we lent to the company. So, you know, out of the gates, cash flow was a. Was tough, but we managed and, and we, we made some adjustments and turned that around. But I feel like we were delivering a high quality product and service for what we were doing. And I just knew something wasn't, wasn't clicking, it wasn't going as I thought it should. So I ended up finding a business coach and we were with them for several years, three, four years. And that's where I met Liam. One of your, one of your teammates, you know, staff. And what that did for me was really help us solidify what we were doing. What was the right thing, the way we were going about it was proper, just solidified that we were on the right track, but the numbers didn't add up. Figuratively and literally. You know, we're doing all this work, we're trying hard, we're delivering top quality service, but it's. Where's all the money? Where. Why are we struggling so much? And we tried to make some adjustments, but then we met somebody named Bob. Smile. I call him Smiling Bob. And it changed. It changed everything. And we sort of worked hard at it. We, we really, we've made some mistakes still after that, and I've really tried. We. We've made progress. And then step back, made progress, fallen back again. But fast forwarding to kind of 2024, where a lot of change. A lot of 20, 2024 has been a year, but all for some, some hard reasons and then other really, really good reasons. And I think we're, we're at a really good spot where we're ready to kind of take it to the next level. And I say that with confidence now versus before, not really knowing if it was going to be the right decision. So I'm really happy with that.

Yeah, that's. That's awesome, dude. And you know what? Six years, Six years is not a long time in the grand scale of, of life. But it's amazing how much you can accomplish in six years when you put your head down and you're focused. Just wanted to maybe touch on one thing. I know you had, you'd mentioned that you had a business coach who we worked with as well at the time and maybe walk us through one, the idea of why you hired a coach and then maybe some of the benefits that you received from working with a business coach. Because I know a lot of people are hesitant. They're like, no, we've. We'll figure this out. No, it's too Expensive and, and, and stuff like that. What was really the rationale for you and how did you feel that that really turned out as a return on investment?

Yeah. So it was one of these things where I knew what I knew about electrical. Right. I can put the tool belt on, I can do the work, I can wire anything. And I always knew that I wanted to run my own business. It was just some, something inside of me said, I want to, I want to do this. And then you start the company and you realize that there's a lot more to business than. Here's your quote, here's an invoice, works done, do the work, move on. There is a lot to it. There's communication, there's marketing, there's systems that I never even thought about ever.

And then throw people in.

Exactly, exactly. People are a big part of business and it's one of the most challenging and you need people. Right. And yeah, the business coaching really helped guide me in that, that kind of path to say, here's what we need to do, here's what we're missing. Let's. Let's try these things. And it really helped get the foundation of the company kind of, kind of rolling. So I was thankful for that time that we were with, with business coaching, especially when I was focused for contractors. That was the benefit of it. Right. It was talking my language. It wasn't big corporations. It wasn't that. It was, it was what I needed to hear. And I've been told when I was growing up, I was a super coachable person, I guess you could say.

I would agree with that. I would agree with that.

Yeah. I just, I didn't know. I knew where I wanted to get to, but I didn't necessarily know how. So I figured, why not take a risk there? Only there's probably no negative to coaching. Right. Like what, what's the worst you could lose? Right. You're investing this money into your company. It's investing in yourself, it's investing ideas and your employees. So I definitely saw the value in it and that's why we did it.

Yeah. And I usually, you know, it's one of those things if, if you're looking for the greatest return on investment, I would say there's a hierarchy one. It's always going to be in yourself investing in the next version of you. You see super wealthy people and successful people that they've had a failure in their business, they've gone bankrupt maybe, but man, can they ever rebuild that faster the second time and go from zero to, to Something really quickly because of all the personal learning and, and investment in themselves that they have, which is, I think, a really great life lesson. And then number two, I usually say, is the golden goose, you know, we have to continue to focus on the business because the business is really what's going to drive the success in, in all other facets of life. So definitely appreciate that. And you know what, for those of you who are out there listening, business coaching is something where you want to find somebody who's done something or can help you do something that you couldn't do yourself or get there faster.

Right.

Like the idea of business coaching is you go somewhere where they're like, okay, you want all your systems, here's your systems, you want your accountability, here's your accountability. You want your finances, here's your finances. Hiring people. So you want to find a coach that helps solve the current problem that you have and maybe even helps define the path of, of achieving what it is that you're looking for as well. So, Scott, love that, that insight as well. There was one particular time where we, we worked fairly closely together and I know it was right around when we were, when you were working with the business coach as well. And, and it's something that it comes up all the time and people are super hesitant towards it. And that's when it comes to, to pricing. And one of the challenges is in business, especially when we first start out, like you mentioned. Right. Hey, we even thought we could do it cheaper, which is a great entry level model to business to capture interest. But then you start hiring employees and building a team and getting apprentices, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh man, profitability is a little bit tighter. Can you talk a little bit or maybe share a little bit of your journey about assessing your pricing strategy, implementing a pricing strategy that more favorably recognized the value you guys bring to the market and maybe what that, what that process looked like and the outcome that you achieved with that as well.

Yeah. And so, yeah, in 20, early on in, let's say, I think 2019, you and I chatted and said something's got to change. And I'm not sure if it was you who worded it like this, but what's the number one thing a business can do without spending any money trying to hire somebody else or completely change your business? And it was raise your prices. Right.

Like that's most profitable, most impactful to your bottom line. Absolutely.

Yep. Yeah. And so we, I was not in favor of just jacking a price. I said I, I don't like that. I don't want to show up and be like, hey, contractor, here's our price. Now, yesterday it was this, and now it's 30% more. Right? Like, I was in favor of just sort of turning the dial up and seeing the response to it. And so I wrote down a number here. I looked it up last night, and between the first little tweak we made was our revenue is up 4%, which for a small company is, Is not that much, at least in my view, compared to the other numbers, our cost of goods sold was down 20%, so we spent a lot less money on materials and our net profit quadrupled. So that is a direct. You can see what a pricing change does. Even if it's small and you start running, you do more efficient things. I make it sound like you just change the price and your net profit's going to skyrocket. But you, you mix in a small pricing change with a little more efficient way of doing things, and you, you can see huge improvement. And then from there we just sort of ran with it.

So tell me a little bit, and this is definitely for those listening who have gone through or looking at this as an experience, right? Because, you know, right now we're heading into the fall of 2024. The economy is struggling at best. It's slowed rate down. Interest rates are still high, although they're coming down. Another interest rate reduction announcement at the time of this recording, which is great, but businesses are tighter and, you know, we're just maybe more conscious of everything that's going on. So in times like this, it becomes difficult to make decisions like pricing strategy, because, you know, everybody is very, very price sensitive right now. But they were also at the time that you went through this pricing change as well. So talk a little bit, if you wouldn't mind, about, you know, the responses of clients when you did increase that price, because I think this is something that a lot of business owners, and, you know, I'm guilty as charged, we get very conscious of what's the response going to be? What's the reaction going to be? It's going to all be negative. We shouldn't make this change. Can you walk us through what that looked like, Scott?

Yeah. And the way I would put it is you have to believe in what you're delivering, the service or product, and to justify these changes, if you're running a business that is notably not performing as it should and you go raise your prices, you may have a negative response from people, but what we had developed was a high quality service based business that people would call back. We have a list of 10 or 12 contractors who call us almost exclusively for work. And that's been consistent over the entire time we've had the business. So nobody really. There was no, there was not much response to us raising the prices because on one hand we were underpricing by a lot when we first started, which was just hurting us. And then as we raised it, you know what, our value, we, we gained value as we went on because we continued to deliver the service or adapt and find different products to use that people loved. And so the response was, yeah, almost zero. The contractors were still happy and still are happy to this day. Homeowner only knows your price the day that they ask for an estimate. But we didn't lose, we barely lost any work based on that either. So it didn't have a negative impact. All it was was a positive impact on our business. And Rob and I got to kind of get a glimpse of what we were actually the company was worth at that time just to raise our prices and understand that people still wanted to use us no matter what.

Yeah. And I think Alex Hormozi in his $100 million offers does a, does justice to the idea of pricing strategy and the idea that, you know, you can raise your prices up to the point that people still feel like they're paying you less than what they're receiving in exchange. And you know, I think that is well represented in what you're. You're saying you guys bring so much value to the market in how you deliver that because you demonstrate that and that's how you guys just live and breathe, that when you increase your prices, people were still feeling like, you know, start the car. We're still getting a really good deal here from, from Scott and team because of the value you guys offer in exchange. So kudos to you guys for that and also congrats on making that decision to, to make those price increases. And we constantly need to reevaluate that as well. But man, it's a tough thing to get over because you're going. The fear of the unknown entering into their pricing increases. You go, man, that could be really scary.

So, yeah, yeah, you're expecting a phone call over the next couple of weeks. You send your first invoice out and expecting this blaring phone call from somebody saying, what is this? Like, what have you, what did you do? But when you, when you break it down and honest, like especially in an hourly based business, like for for wages? Not wages, but just an hourly rate and whatnot. Like little changes can go a long way when you look at it over a year. You just have to remember you're not just like affecting one person. Like, it's not like just one person's going to go, what happened? It's just sort of a consistent momentum over the year that really helps, helps the business for sure.

And I, you know, the other thing that we have to keep in mind is that there are sort of market levels that do exist, right, that times like this people are maybe looking get more price sensitive, they're going to get multiple quotes and whatnot. What Scott has created in his business is a lot of relationships where people won't likely be price shopping because they know that they can rely on the business. They're going to show up, they're going to deliver, it's going to be high quality and you're going to get what you pay for. But other people who are considering price increases, we do have to be aware of what the market is charging. We can then make a conscious choice whether we want to be a premium or a discounted service. And I would always err on the side of premium. Like Scott said, you know, part of the reason he was so successful with his price increases was that, you know, they were able to do even, maybe even less work for more money, which meant they could focus on the business and the development, the relationships and the delivery even more so because they weren't jam packing their schedule with low cost offers. So, you know, there's lots to consider when you go into this. But you know, from the mindset of a business owner thinking what is the resistance going to be from our clients on this? We have to test it. And I, you know, even from personal experience, Scott, for, for me, I know we do an annual price increase. We evaluate everybody, we tend to try and get in, you know, 3 to 5% sort of increase over the year. Part of that is that my staffing requirements, they're demanding 3 to 5%, probably higher on that. And, and so we have to keep up with that if we want to have good people and we want to continue to deliver a top quality outcome. So we need to consider that now from the number of clients that we have, there's always a very small portion that become price sensitive the moment that we issue any sort of price increase. And in our experience the last couple years, there's been a handful of people each year that goes, you know, what we're going to, we're going to Consider other options. And they're usually back within three months and coming back and going, okay, we see now what the market was giving. You guys are giving more. We want to come back. And we welcome them back with open arms. And, you know, they're not. Everybody is going to look at a price increase the exact same way. But you know, for the most part, if you're delivering that value like Lumos is, then you're going to have a successful outcome and you're going to potentially even quadruple your bottom line. I love that. That's a fantastic outcome.

Yeah. And as you say, like, if you, if you've increased prices over the last couple of years, even on our account, I have no idea. Because listen, what it is, what it is, right? Like, it becomes. I view it as, as like a. What's a fixed expense to me, basically, it's part of running the business. Part of that is one thing I would say is we started out from this. I didn't want to get a call in 10 years from CRA saying, Let me see your books. Because I'm going, that is not my, remember my accounting midterm. I don't want that to be the case. So, so give me a bookkeeper, give me an accountant, and I will pay them as long. And as I learned, they have to be the, the right one. Right there. There are some out there that may not always keep things up to date or give you the info you need. And, and it's super important to have the correct, the correct things, so.

For sure, absolutely. Yeah. There's definitely power in, in having trust in your numbers and, and having confidence in who you're working with.

For sure.

You know, you don't want to. If you're paying for something, again, the value that you're receiving, you want to pay for something so that you don't have to worry about it. You know, that it's being done right. So. Well, thank you for that as well. So thinking of this, you guys have a successful electrical contracting business in the Ottawa region continuing to grow. Can you identify maybe a few factors of what has contributed to your ongoing success as a business, as an entrepreneur in Canada, as a tradesperson as well. What has maybe been a few of the factors that have contributed to your levels of success?

Yeah. So number one, it's. It's having the right team in place. We've been through a lot in the last, over the six years with different people, different personnel, but having a core group of people that you know you can rely on and trust and are willing to learn and all that for us, a small company, that is the business, right? Like, without that, the business doesn't run. I can't. I learned earlier this year, I can't run on the tools all week long accomplishing jobs and then come and try and do all, all the accounting book, the financial side of it, making sure everything is as it should be and making sure that the future is set. It's just not possible, at least for me, with my values personally. And so people is number one, personnel, employees, and we've been lucky enough to, I'm going to say, build three from the ground up. Excellent employees that we have right now. All of them started pretty much with us from the start and have grown and we've tried to insert a couple different pieces. And I'm not saying we're never going to hire somebody who has experience or whatever, but the winning formula for us has been from day one, the ground up kind of employee. And then second, to use a technical term of yours, would be strategic alliances. That's super important. That is the lifeline of our company, at least in the revenue standpoint, is our contractors that we work with. If you can gain the trust of, in our case, general contractors, and they don't want to call anyone else and they believe in what you deliver, it's perfect. Because even in the slow times, like they still have projects going on, you're not solely relying on finding the homeowner that wants pot lights in their kitchen or anything like that. It's super important to have that consistent work that you don't necessarily have to go look for, but that's a direct reflection of the services that we deliver. Right. They could go find one of the thousand contractors, electrical contractors in Ottawa, but they choose us and continue to. So that's been. That's been a huge part and then just sort of buying into what we're delivering. So kind of a thing that has changed recently is that we've gotten into the insurance. I'll call it the insurance game. So we work with a restoration company who gets calls and they'll send out POS and whatnot for work. And that's been a big mental shift for me, at least in our values of the company, because we have two sides of the company now. On one hand, you're taking the clients that have worked super hard for years to save up for their dream kitchen or their dream basement or some other renovation or. And you want to help them bring their dream to life. Right. Like that's what they've been working so hard for, which we've done for a long time, and now you're taking people who have lived through like a nightmare, a fire, a flood, and we get to help them rebuild back from that and kind of get their life back on the ground. So I've been super happy with that and kind of the team understanding how important that is, that if you look at it that way, like it doesn't matter what the job is, dream kitchen or a flooded basement, we want to deliver the same quality of service and level of, level of quality.

You know, it's interesting too. And I know, you know, when we think of our vision and what we're trying to accomplish, like our true purpose is empowering entrepreneurs to have the right financial information, to make informed decisions. Because you guys really are the ones who are changing the lives of people and, you know, you're just reinforcing that where essentially you're bringing joy to families one way or another. One, you're bringing them back to having a safe, secure home where, you know, they can, they have their shelter and their, you know, peace and, and safe space. And then the other is bringing joy to them on, you know, being able to advance their life and, and do things with, maybe with a little extra layer of luxury or whatever that looks like for them. But the joy that, you know, you guys, as electrical contractors are able to bring to those lives is the reason that I do what I do right, because the more people that you can help, the more I feel like we've made a contribution to making a global change. So, you know, sometimes you forget about that and, you know, I love hearing your reflection of the customer side of things to go, this is the impact we're able to have on, on each other's lives and, and for you guys, on your customers. Is that something that you talk about with your team? You know, when you think of a purpose and, you know, a direction from an organization standpoint, like, I know I've been in Ottawa, we haven't even been able to connect when I've been in Ottawa, but I've, I've seen your trucks driving around in Ottawa. You know, the branding looks awesome, but you, do you talk, do you talk to your team about them? Not only does the brand look good and be something that, you know, is visually stimulating, and obviously you guys are a cutting edge sort of electrical contracting company, but do you ever have those conversations about the purpose of what you guys are trying to create and the impact that you can have in the lives of those that you Serve. Is that something that comes up very often?

Yeah. And I've shared that last kind of thing that I said about the dream jobs and the kind of nightmare jobs with them. And yeah, we talk about it often, and I'm not going to lie, sometimes it's because jobs are not fun and you got to kind of bring them up and say, hey, I know this sucks. Trust me, this isn't great. But we are doing this because of X, Y or Z. Right. Like, this is why we're doing it. And we need to kind of focus on that. Not every job is going to be perfect, and we just sort of have to. We got to get this done and with the same level of quality we give everybody else. Right. And. And they get it. And as I said, we have an excellent team. And with the. With the strategic alliances, big word for me. It's. I rely a lot on those partnerships and the relationships that I've built. They're a client of yours? So, like, the insurance job stuff was sort of presented to me from my friends at True North Mechanical, James and Joey. They've been. They're one of your clients now. That's much belief I had in. In your team because they said, you have to go here.

Well, thank you, sir. Yes, I appreciate that.

So they've done their two partners. They're both around my age, and they've done a tremendous job of launching their company in the last couple of years. And so we really have fed off of each other and what we can offer. So we do a lot of, like, generator work and whatnot. And it's been a good way to kind of attack a certain niche of the market together as like, here's what we can offer you. It's not, go find this person, go find that person on your own. It's here's a full package that we can offer and go from there. So it's great to have that kind of connection with people and. Yeah, it's been great.

Yeah. And you know what, it's interesting, especially again, times like this where. Where people are maybe a little bit more reluctant to hand over their money for different projects. You know, you think of ways that you can continue to grow your business and continuing to build relationships with other people who are serving a similar market with a strategic partnership or a strategic alliance, like, what a huge opportunity there is right now, especially in the contractor space. And I say especially in the contractor space because. And I would say this in the accounting space, too. Not all contractors or accountants are created equal. You know, there's definitely contractors out there who don't show up when they're supposed to. Their jobs are overrun with pricing at the end. Or you're, you're maybe having to pay more than, than what you're getting for like over budget overtime. People aren't there, accounts are the same. You're paying for something. You're maybe not getting the expertise that you thought you were, but what a great opportunity to find another partner who delivers the same sort of exceptional quality to you that's already got a reputation that you can join forces with and combine your energy to marketing all of your joint clients. Like, what a, what a, an amazing way to grow your business. So congrats for jumping in and building that out. I think as businesses are heading into the latter end of 2024, consider strategic partnerships and alliances. There's so much opportunity there to be had and, and people. Contractors are looking for other partners in the contractor space to be able to go after bigger jobs and bring value to the market. So love that, Scott, for you as well. And maybe we'll just leave, leave this on. One note wondering if you have any advice for any other maybe let's say electrical contractors. What advice would you give another electrical contractor back in 2018 when you were starting out that maybe you would. If, if it was you then, what would you want to tell yourself now?

You know what, it's funny. My, I'm in my wife's office.

Don't say run. Because we all know that there's been moments too along this journey that we would all say that. So eliminating that as the piece of advice.

Yeah, yeah. You know what, it's funny. So I'm sitting in my wife's office this morning and she's got this little calendar on her desk for. It's got these little phrases on it for the day. And I just happen to flip it over today to the, to today's date. It says I'm doing my best every day regardless of whether I achieve something big or small. Today I'm creating the life that I want. Success does not happen overnight. And I kind of flipped it over.

And I went, whoa, that hits home.

Yeah, yeah, that's what it's been, is I tried to force, I tried to force success early on, success early on, depending on how you want to look at it. And that wasn't exactly the right way to go about doing it. There's been this sort of mentality of I deserve this or it should be this way because I think I have worked hard once. You kind of let that go. And you, you really get to it and put the work in and put your head down and get to it. It'll happen, It'll happen. If you believe in what you're doing, it's the way. There's going to be challenging times. There's been multiple times over the years where we didn't pay ourselves for an extended period of time because we had, we had made the mistakes and stepped back a bit. And that was something that I was going to kind of say is that the reason I find it so important to know where you're at is because mistakes three years ago even like can affect you a long time. Like if you, if you miscopulate, if you underprice for an extended period of time and then you make that change and you're wondering why you still have not a lot of cash flow or whatever. It's because you're paying for those, those times when you weren't in the right spot. And it's super satisfying when you do make the change to see you kind of call your way back up. And you've all, you've certainly seen it over the years. I've called and we've had some pretty tough conversations where I'm going, I don't know what's next, I don't know what we're going to do. And then all of a sudden it kind of, it feels like everything is right and then you don't know what's next. There's been, I was just say that this, this year sort of mentioned it earlier. The last 14 months has been the wildest, honestly the wildest time of, of business and person personally. So like a year ago we, if I can share it for A second, like 14 months ago we, our number one guy who had trained for, for five years decided that he wanted to go move on, but move on to something different in terms of the type of projects that we couldn't offer. High rises, big commercial, that just wasn't our gig and we weren't going to go down that road because that wasn't us. We hired somebody shortly after because I figured that's the only solution and that didn't work out. So I put, I put the tools on and got to work 40 plus hours, it felt like on the tools, just trying to make sure the business stayed up in that time. On the personal note, on the personal side of things, my wife had two back to back miscarriages. And then the new year came and so that was, that was tough. And then we made a lot of profit that year, in the last year, because I was on the tools for so much and that was going right to the bottom line. And I said, hey, this isn't, this isn't so bad. This is, you know, this is great.

I've got rewarded for this.

Yeah, yeah. But then you went, well, wait, the rest of the business is kind of going by the wayside. We need to really keep our, our flow of work going because we would do all the work and then it would be kind of slow. But then we decided to go down the route of seeing what we could do to hire the guy back our a player that had left us because it wasn't necessarily because of the company or there was some sort of ill blood between us all or something. It was just solely that he wanted a different experience. And one of the most satisfying things that happened this year was that I was able to convince him to come back and really sort of sell him on. This is what we're doing. This is where we're going. And he said the company that he was with didn't have the same contractor base that we had. So when times are slow, it was very slow, Whereas we had a good base of people that could keep us busy throughout the year. And so we got him back and started to kind of run with that. Part of the entire thing was that we decided between Rob and I that I was going to buy him out and he was going to stay on with the company. So at this time, the ink is barely dry on that whole deal. And now I'm. My firstborn daughter went to school yesterday for the first time and we've got a second one coming in five weeks. And life is, you know, life is wild. And so if, if anything, you know, if I've learned anything this year, it's business ownership is wild. Aside from what happened to my wife twice last year, I wouldn't change any of it because we were better for it. We every time in the past that we've had a setback, we've learned from it and gained from it. And so the guy leaving, yeah, it sucked. It was kind of tough there for a bit, but we learned how to really narrow down how to operate and do things and then said, here's how we've changed. Here's how we can continue better together. And now it shows. We're running at full capacity and things are going great. So it's been good.

Well, first off, thank you for sharing that story because I feel like we've all gone through those waterfall of ups and downs and challenges and, and good days. You know, I just had a post social on social this past week, actually, that actually talked about that, where it's like, oh, I'm having the best day of my life. I'm really succeeding. Oh, my goodness, I'm going to go bankrupt. And, you know, like, the multiple times that we have those roller coaster emotions as entrepreneurs is so tough. And Scott, you sharing that, I think maybe resonates with a few people who are probably going through that right now as well and know that they're not alone in that. And, you know, the idea, and you talked about this earlier too, is, you know, it is a two step forward, one step back sort of situation. As we're building this out, we're going to have missteps. Things are going to be challenging, but it's how we deal with those challenges and those obstacles that really builds character and, and really builds value for us as an, as an entrepreneur in the long haul. So appreciate you sharing that story. Thank you, sir, for joining me today and telling us all about yourself and Lumos Electric and all the wonderful things that you guys are doing. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on here.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great. I'm glad we can connect.

Absolutely. So for those listening, this is the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. I've been joined by Scott Kleider of Lumos Electric out of Ottawa. If there's been anything that you've liked in this podcast, drop a comment, drop a note. We'd love to see your feedback, make sure you like the podcast. We want to make sure that the next episode that comes out the following week, that you'll get access to and you'll be notified. We are on a mission to empower entrepreneurs with positive information to change the world, and we're doing that together. If there's someone that you feel would resonate with some of the things that Scott talked about today or some of the things that I talked about today, please, please feel free to share this episode with them. We're trying to maximize our impact and connect with those who need a little bit of extra support along the way as well. Once again, this has been the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast. I'm your host, Bob Govreau. It's been an absolute pleasure to see you. I look forward to connecting again next week. Feel free to reach out if there's anything that we can do to support you, and hopefully you have a fantastic afternoon.