Alex Forbes from Lane 17 Cabinet Co, Part 1

Business brain, episode 559 for Wednesday, June 19th, which is Juneteenth, National Wristwatch Day, National Martini Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and indeed welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take an idea or six, we dissect them, discuss them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains collectively every single time we get together for an episode. And here today in Durham, New Hampshire, with some flaky Internet, it seems maybe, I don't know. I'm Dave Hamilton. I do know that.

Yes. And I'm out here still on the west coast. I'm Shannon Jean. We'll see how long this lasts, whether Dave's and Dave, all the knobs and the smart stuff is in Dave's studio. So without him, we're kind of. Kind of messed up. Yeah. Yeah. But hey, if you're watching live stream, you see there's three boxes with three heads in it this week. And we're joined by Alex forbes from Lane 17. Is it Lane 17? Cabinets, cabinetry. What is it?

It's Lane 17 Cabinet Company for short. Yep.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So, Alex, I met Alex on X. God, has it only been like four or five months ago? Maybe.

I don't know how, but I think it's only been five or six months, max.

Yeah. But we've probably exchanged a few thousand messages back and forth in, in our group that we hang out with. So, Alex, I'm, I'm thrilled to have you here today. I want to learn more about you, your, your business, your, you know, what you have going on. So give us some background on. Go back a little further than lane 17. What's your entrepreneurial journey? How did you get there? You know, did you always. Were you always in business? Did you work for somebody else? Give us the rundown.

I think, like going way back. I, you know, I grew up in a family of small business owners, so moms and dad's side, grandparents. Like, nobody had a regular W2 job. They always supplied those W2 jobs. And, you know, I kind of grew up in that environment. You know, my dad's side of the family, they had Forbes Brick. It was a brick and tile distribution business that started back in the 60s. My, you know, grandpa, my mom's side, general contractor, he, I think he was a master electrician, all that. So I was, I was exposed to that without really knowing what it meant growing up. So I think that rolled into the typical, you know, I did the lawn mowing business. I did, you know, pressure washing. I did all that Kind of stuff in high school. Never really had a real job. Got to college and graduated with a business degree in finance and had my first real dose of the real world, which was a corporate job out of school. And I did that for a year. And I was a commercial real estate brokerage. And it was, I mean, it's what you think. I was 22 years old, baby face, trying to get six, seven figure deals. That's not happening. So it was 100 cold calls a week for a year. And I just like, I'm like, something's got to change here. So I kind of resorted back to what I was brought up seeing, which was, I'm going to start a business. I want to figure out how to do that.

That's cool.

Yeah. If you're gonna, if you're gonna put the work in you, it might as well be for you.

Yeah. Well, so, and so what led to lane 17 was that in the summers between school, you know, hobby, free time after this miserable job that I have, I was always tinkering with stuff. I like working with my hands. I like building things. I gravitated towards woodworking. So the name Lane 17 comes from a real place kind of in central Maine. My family has a couple of cabins on a lake up there. And they, my uncles have. They each have two different cabins. There's. They have a wood shop overlooking a lake. I went to a summer camp up there for like two months where I was exposed to like shop class for the first time because my high school had cut that by the time I was in school.

Yep.

And you know, so lane 17 is a real place. It's fire lane 17, which are like the inlets to the lakes that the city refers to them as fire lanes.

That's.

And our, our cabins are on fire lane 17. So that's kind of where I learned the craft and I was exposed to it and I love doing that stuff. So when I was miserable at my job, I figured, how do I go? I'm very much a. I'm gonna dive in head first. There was no business plan. There was no perfect, you know, perfect, you know, analysis of how this is going to work. It's just, I'm gonna quit my job. I got a table saw, I got some other stuff. I crammed them into a one car garage at my mom's house where I was living at the time at like 23. And I started making cutting boards and just figure out how to sell those to people. And that's like, that's just really how I dip my toes in the water. But there was no turning back because I had quit my job. So, yeah, I was fully in at that point.

That's cool.

I love it.

There's just. It's like there's no choice, right? Once you take that, you burn the boats and. Okay. And I think I saw you what. So you get into woodworking. What led you to cabinets? I saw some pictures of you, like, hacking up big slabs of all kinds of. I mean, did you just try a bunch of different things and eventually got into the cabinet business? It looks I'm a terrible finished. Well, I'm just not a finished cabinet anything. I can't do every hammer.

You're good with a framing hammer.

Framing hammer, yeah. Yeah. So that leap into that craftsman part of it, how did that happen?

So, like, like I said, I started with cutting boards that morphed into like small pieces of residential furniture, custom dining tables, things that. That's where like real furniture making. That's where I. I'm huge on attention to detail and like, and how things work and down to the nitty grit stuff that nobody would ever even, you know, would see from a customer's perspective, I'd still really care about. So my attention to detail was kind of developed during learning how to make, I guess, fine furniture to an extent. And after a few years of doing that, that, that naturally, you know, the cutting board thing, it's like, I think I sold five grand in my first six months. Like, there was no way I was going to survive doing this. You know, some local restaurants that needed 30 or 40 cheese boards or something for appetizers, and I got a laser engraver for 15 grand that, you know, I didn't have the money for it. Financed it, sold, sold the jobs later, paid for it ultimately, but. And then those restaurants, they, you know, go figure guys or people sit at tables. So then every restaurant needed 20 to 50 tabletops made, by the way. They have, you know, 40ft of bar tops going in. And all of a sudden we were getting six figure commercial furniture pack. And it morphed. Furniture is a weird thing where it became like I needed equal parts production and equal parts craftsmanship. And that's. That's like a very difficult thing to scale, especially from a. You know, access to labor has been very tough, skilled labor lately. So right around 2020, like, you know, coincidentally, Covid was kind of like the best thing that ever happened to our business because that's. That's when we realized we needed to get away from furniture, which was a difficult Business to scale through other people. Like my business partner and I were great, but we were very limited with just the two of us. Like, I mean literally, I think April or May of 2020, you know, the world kind of shut down for those couple months. And then all of a sudden everybody was stuck in their house. They weren't traveling, everybody was renovating, interest rates were low. It was like in hindsight, the perfect breeding ground for us to pivot into custom cabinetry. While all the big manufacturers had 20, 30 week lead times, we could kind of sneak in with 12 week lead times because we didn't have this big book of business with cabinetry yet. And it's kind of similar to how I started with cutting boards. It's just like we, we had some of the equipment already, but we just dove in. And I think the first kitchen project I ever accepted was 40 or $50,000 kitchen that we had no business doing. But we killed ourselves to make sure it was like it was right and it was perfect on site. And we just cut our teeth for a couple years that way until we really learned about flow and operations and lean manufacturing and engineering and real like production systems and I think. So that was 2020. I think by the end of 2020 we had cut out furniture. We totally transitioned the business. We were Lane 17 Design Company before we switched to Lane 17 Cabinet Company. Slight little rebrand. I deleted everything off social media that used to be furniture. And I guess I had this to back up a little bit. I had this aha moment that really solidified it for me, you know, four or five years ago was that I was, you know, $3,000 pre 2020preventions before like all the inflation and material costs, it was tough to sell like a three or $4,000 custom dining room table at least. I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, so it's. We don't have the budgets like you have out in northern California and terrible. Anyway, so people were dogging me on price for like three or four thousand dollar table, handcrafted, totally custom made. And, and behind me, you know, I'm in their dining room, behind me in their kitchen. They had. Had spent at least 30 grand on custom cabinets. And I was already pretty well connected with interior designers and even the homeowners that we kind of attracted. And I'm like, I, you know, we're kind of, we're talking to the right people here, but we're selling them the wrong product. And I think we need to be selling the things behind me and how do we make that happen? That's, that's kind of what led to this rabbit hole of figuring it out.

All right, so this is fascinating to me because I've seen this in some businesses that I've had where you, I don't want to say by dumb luck for you, I'll say it for me for sure that, you know, by dumb luck, you find yourself in a scenario where the market leads you some change in the market, some market evolution, macro evolution, you know, for you it was Covid. I've had that with a business. I had it just when sort of the Internet was getting started, things like that, where the market leads you down a path where you can have short term success. And what you did with that was used it to cash flow yourself to long term success. Right. You, you completely revamped you, you did those first cabinets probably more by hand than you would ever want to admit. Right, right, right. And you just like sweated through it in inefficient ways, but got it done and learned a ton about what you would want to do the next time and then started to systematize based on that with the, with the opportunity that the market gave you. So you, you took advantage of it without putting the systems in place first, figured out that there was a long term business opportunity and, and then, and then actually built that business sort of alongside your handmade cabinets. Because it's what we do currently kind of thing is. Am I getting that right? Is that right?

Yeah. And I think, you know, unless you, you come with all this experience of operating a certain business and you, you know, once you get to the point, all these guys that roll up businesses and they just, they have that system and they, I think those guys also had to start somewhere. And I think the reality of seizing an opportunity is exactly what you described. And it's not pretty and it's a grind and, and it could take months or years. And I think it's easy to show that highlight reel on Twitter or X or whatever, social media, but because like, you know, you couldn't possibly tell, you know, display to everybody really what it took to get to that point. And, and we're very much still in a grind phase because, you know, we're a young, growing business. But just to go from we don't do something to we do something and employ people to do it, that is a huge step. And a lot of stuff goes wrong and a lot of things break and you make a lot of mistakes, but that's how you learn.

Absolutely. No, so I, I'm. Thank you. For A, telling that story and B, sort of re. Articulating it there. Because I. You're right. No one. No one sees that story. It's not the sexy story that gets told on social media. No one would read it if it was out there. I mean, we've all tried. At least Shannon and I.

People are in love with the end state of entrepreneurship, not the daily, daily grind.

They don't want to hear that it was dumb luck. And then I took that opportunity to grind it out for five years or 10 years or, you know, whatever it is. And the grind it out. When you say that, people are like, oh, that sounds great. Like they. They think they understand, but even when I'm saying it now, and I. I literally did it. Right. Just like you did. Just like Shannon has. I don't have a memory. Like our memory is. Is. Is intentionally fallible. I. Do you have kids?

Yeah, for only one. And she's only 15 months.

Okay, just. Would you get.

Would you consider having another one?

Yeah.

Okay. The only reason you considered having another one is because you don't remember what it was like those first few weeks with a baby at home. Right. I mean, like, this happens to our memories, that sort of grind. The. The terrible parts of the grind are not the parts that we like. Our visceral memories of those go away. I'll never forget the first night at home with our second child. And I said to my wife, I was like, oh, my God, how did we let ourselves get here? Yeah. This is crazy. We hated this the first time. Like, how did we do this? It's like we forgot. And I'd be like, we didn't have a video camera. Or maybe we did, I don't know. But I'm like, we gotta videotape this and play this back for ourselves.

Yeah.

You know, we didn't.

Obviously your business is the same way.

It's the same way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because even if you remember what. What you thought about it, you still don't remember how you felt.

Like that visceral memory is gone.

I get what you're saying.

Yeah. And it's good. That keeps you.

Yeah, it's good.

But it's hard to tell the story.

Yeah. But you know, and nobody wants. People don't want to hear it.

No.

The post. You. That I like, talk about doing stuff on X and you're explaining all that. And even, like, people that I. My coaching clients, I always talk about it. I'm like, look it. The only difference is that, you know, I have more gray Hair than you. I did it all. And it makes you sound smarter because you're telling it in reverse. But the grind you go through every single day, and you're just like, we have no choice. We can't make any money doing tables. So looking around, you know, the foresight to look around and say, hey, you know, so, okay, so, but I want to get. So you get to this point, you decide to make cabinets. You, I would imagine you have to make some pretty significant investments to get the right equipment. What. What comes first?

Are you.

Are you just doing everything manually and then slowly acquiring stuff, or you do you go all in, get a big loan? Tell me. Walk us through that part.

So I think when we made the decision, we had been doing furniture for like four years, so, so lane 17, it's only eight years old. So we're pretty much at this point split 50%. The first half of our life has been furniture, and now the last four years has been only cabinets. So right at that midpoint when we made the switch, we had enough equipment that was enough of an overlap to just start. Like, we had. We had CNC equipment. We, you know, we had all the basic stuff you need to get it made, but it was extremely manual. And the difference, you know, furniture, even in, let's say there's, you know, I guess 50 tables and 50 table bases. To a restaurant, that's only a hundred things. 100 parts that come together. Your average, I would even say a modest kitchen is anywhere from 4 to 500 parts that need to get drilled, edge, banded, you know, assembled. There might be 150 of them might need to get finished, whether through painted, you know, the drawer boxes need to get finished, all that stuff. So it's the. The sheer volume of components moving through the system was. We had no idea that that was even going to be like a thing to that extent. And we didn't know how to manage it. So.

Yeah.

So to answer your question, though, we. We get going, we basically had enough to feel confident or, you know, stupid enough to accept our first $50,000 kitchen. And then, like, we knew enough to be dangerous. We quickly realized with what we had, we had to make a change, you know, the business from just grinding furniture out for so many years, like we were struggling cash flow wise. And this is all so, you know, Dave, you talk about luck, and I think that. I think a lot of it is, you know, what's the saying? It's not timing the market, it's time in the market. And I think it's just Being present.

Yeah.

In the game of whatever you're doing. Because. So we had, I had 100 grand worth of equipment that almost became completely irrelevant the second we decided to do cabinetry. And this. Keep in mind, this was right at Covid too. So like the whole world shut down. Nobody was really spending money for those. You know, that spring, early summer, right. I found a guy locally who was a. He has a tree trimming, tree cutting business. He milled up, you know, he gets endless supply of trees. He milled up like live edge slabs and things on the side. We had a ton of equipment to process like big hunks of wood and planers and clamps and saws and all this stuff because we were making a lot of tables. And I sold it all to him. I like, I compiled it, got photos, sold everything to him for 80 grand.

Nice.

And he just. In like in two weeks, it was gone. And that, that will, that would never happen. That's like a. Once that's got. I. I think it was a get out of jail free card for the time that we were. What we were trying to do and trying to. How we were trying to pivot. So anyway, we sold all that. I. I use that to get some more cabinet related equipment that allowed us to process things a little bit better. And you know, it's like we were, we accepted that job. We were, you know, in 12 weeks we had to deliver the machinery that we needed. Got there like four weeks later. And we just had to figure out how to, to put it together. We got to tell you how like chaotic it was. We got that kitchen, I think a month or two after that kitchen, a developer contacted me locally. They were building a like 100, 100 unit multifamily locally here. And they wanted. Typically they're getting cabinets from China and like super cheap. They spend a few grand on cabinets for the entire unit. It's very low budget. But the, the developer, you know, wanted to spend good money on some sort of statement piece and they opted to spend anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred bucks on like a nice white oak kind of furniture style vanity for the bathrooms. We later learned that that never happens. But we all of a sudden we got, we went from our first kitchen at 50 to this developer had a hundred thousand dollar vanity order for us. And we didn't even like, we didn't even have CAD software to like make this thing to design and make it yet. So we accepted the job, got a down payment, bought a $30,000 engineering software to like really do real Cabinetry production and then made the vanities deliver them and like, figured out how to bring the whole thing together later. It was. It was a whirlwind of a year.

All right, so I want to ask this question here, because it's one thing to start a business. It's, you know, and grind it out and you start making some money. And of course, money doesn't just, like, for anybody who hasn't done this yet, it doesn't just come in nice steady waves with a steady increase. You know, you get these peaks and valleys, right. You get, you know, piles of money and then. And then you, you know, nothing for months and then piles again. If you're lucky, right. You know, all those things. And if you do it right. I don't mean to say that everything relies on luck. I just mean, you know, that sometimes you time things and it's. It's fortuitous. Right. You know, but. But you're smart about it and all those things. But making those big capital investments is difficult initially. At least once you've done a couple of them and you realize, oh, I. I've made these decisions the right way. They have paid off. You know, maybe not all of them have paid off, but, you know, you got your get out of jail free card, being able to sell that stuff off, those kinds of things.

How.

How was it like making that investment in the cabinet software at that point? It was like. Was that something that you hemmed and hot over? Did you just know, no, we've got to do this and we're going to it and we're going to make it back?

I think so, like, to the first few years of the business. I had some cash to start the business, so we were very pretty light on debt, if anything.

Okay.

Kind of the second phase to push into cabinetry was almost everything had the business had to grow through debt. I financed. You know, we probably have. I don't know. I'm looking out in the shop right now. We probably have half a million or so in equipment. I would say 250 or 300 of it is, you know, on equipment leases or equipment loans. And I think Shannon and I have either we've either talked about this or maybe connected on this early on. This concept of just like when your back's against the wall and you have no option but to push forward, you. It almost becomes easier to think about those things and take those leaps of faith.

Yep.

And it's funny because at the time, I think we maybe had one employee. I didn't have any Kids yet. I didn't. I don't even own a house yet. We were like just kind of looking for. So I still really had no real adult obligations quite yet. And I, but I had enough, I think self awareness and insight into maybe how I think I would feel once I had those responsibilities that in my mind maybe this just is justification. But it was like it's now or never.

Yeah.

It's like either I'm going to do this now, I'm going to finance, you know, 100, 200 grand worth of equipment. We're going to expand the business, we're going to hire people. I don't know how to do this right now, but we're going to commit. And so I have no choice but to figure out how to do it and push forward. Because I think like every entrepreneur you're most are driven by fear of, I call it like ultimate failure where you totally throw in the towel.

Yeah.

And it motivates you to just keep going and solve the next problem.

Yeah. Well, it's that we call it bullheaded persistence here. Right. Like it's, it's. I, I like that we always say don't make, make fear based decisions. It was something a guest years ago said to us and stuck with us. But there is that fear of ultimate failure that's different. Right. Because it's like, well, I can fail at these little things, but I'll, I'll always find a way to keep it going. And that is huge. Yeah.

And I think that we need a new word I was talking about the other day because it's consistency even despite all this, I don't know where it's going to go. But it's also persistence. So I'm going to call it persistency. That's going to be. And we're, you know, you have, you're keeping it going and not planning.

You know, that's the bullheaded persistence we've been talking about for years.

You just go, go and all figure it out. And, and this is what I tell, I try to tell so many people is like less planning, more action.

Well, I'm not exactly sure where you just cut us off, Shannon, because through the magic of audio editing, we have ended Wednesday's episode or we are about to end Wednesday's episode. But we're not ending this. This is, has been an amazing thing with Alex and I am eager to keep going.

Same. I, I love the, you know, we've, we've kind of focused on these fundamental structure, how we did this, all this kind of stuff. And so we're going to now roll into the part two, which will be more about systems and improvements, lean manufacturing, all this kind of stuff which I'm eager to share with everyone. And that will be on our Friday at.

Yeah, so hopefully we didn't. Hopefully our conversation about the grinding it out didn't make everybody just leave because that stuff, for some reason in our human brains gets super boring. It's valuable. And the stuff we're going to talk about on Friday is actually some of the fun stuff.

So we will make sure you join us.

Yeah, we'll see you there. Feedback at BusinessBrain show if you've got your story to tell, let us know if you have any questions about alex or us. BusinessBrain show that's the place to find us. And yeah, we'll see you Friday for the rest. Business Brain, episode 560 for Casual Friday, June 21, National Day of the Gong 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome back to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, we dissect them, we analyze them, we use them to tune our business brains every single time we get together here in Durham, New Hampshire, where I don't own a gong. Can you believe that? I'm Dave Hamilton.

I'm out here at the west coast. And I don't know who won either.

Yeah.

But I'm a drummer.

You'd think, like, I'm a drummer who grew up in the 80s.

Yeah.

Everybody that I like revere. Not everybody, but most everybody had gongs. Because, like. Yeah.

I'm surprised.

I know. Yeah.

Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. So I'm excited to continue our discussion with Alex Forbes from Lane17 Cabinets. And we're just, I'm, you know, we're just starting to roll into, you know, we've made it this far. We take a, we can take a bit of a breath. And now we're going to start building systems to get to the next level. And so it's super valuable to follow along with Alex's journey is, you know, he pivoted and back against the wall. I had no choice, had to do these things. And now we're a little more organized and now we can build out some systems and start some output thinking, which I think is great.

Yeah, no, it's, it's been a fun interview so far and I think you're going to love the rest of it. Listen, you're here. So listen to the. Listen to this. Now you don't have to hear them in order. I think there's There's a. There's not too much continuity, but. But go back and after you listen to today's, Go back and listen to Wednesdays if you haven't. Because there's some great stuff in Wednesdays, too. So.

Absolutely.

All right, well, without. Without further ado, here we go.

Now, in this. I want to ask you about this stage. I feel like you've kind of got the stage now where you're thinking, all right, I can. I can think. I can take a breath a bit now. We need these systems. And I know you're embracing some, you know, lean manufacturing and 2% improvements or whatever. Talk about, well. Well, two parts. What it feels like to leave the shop floor and be in your office. Because I think that's a difficult thing for. For people. It's difficult for me to look out and see everybody, like, physically working and going, shouldn't I be out there? And then the second part is talk about the systems that you are starting to work on now.

When we. A few years ago, when we transitioned to cabinets, it's funny, like, I probably made every piece of furniture the first half of the business, and I have never actually made one of our cabinets that we've sold in the last four years. So at first, though, to your point, like, it felt very foreign, and it felt especially. I have a business partner, he has 20% of the business. I think at the time, we had one or two employees. Like, I was. If we had four people, I was a quarter of our entire workforce. And like, here I was in the office kind of messing around, even though I was doing things, but it didn't feel that way. It felt like I was missing out or whatever. So that. I think that lasted maybe, you know, five or six months until I realized the kind of value that I could add being removed from that. And I. I think there's that lull time. And it's no different when you hire somebody new. There's kind of a lull in productivity when you have to train somebody new. When it was me, I was kind of like, I was kind of training myself to be the, you know, the next version of the leader within the business. So. So I haven't been in the shop floor for a long time now. Like, I'll do everything to avoid going back to the shop floor. It's.

Well, they might probably don't want you there, right? They.

You'd mess everything up.

Yeah, you make sure.

I think at this point, almost all the equipment in the shop, I don't even know how to turn on and I don't want to know how to turn it on.

You, you, you don't. The day that you find out, it's bad. If, if you, if I were you, the day that I found out is the day I would start micromanaging people again. It's like, I don't want to do that. Like, it's better when I don't.

That's a natural tendency for sure to do that.

Especially as an independent entrepreneur. You're like, oh, I can figure this out. Yeah, yeah.

So we did that and so now we have, you know, we're about, we're looking for our 10th person. So it'll be the first, this includes my business partner and I. So it'll be the first time sometime in the next month that we will have cracked, you know, double digits and total people under one roof. And the. Just point your finger and say, go do work. Like that doesn't work anymore. So we need, you know, the lean thing. We needed to hang our hat on something. We, you know, this business is new. This, every single thing is, has been a kind of product of my brain over the years. And we needed to develop a real culture. We decided to hang our hat on this lean mentality, which are two second improvements, Shannon. Not 2% improvements. I guess they're similar.

Two second. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's just, it's, it's continuous improvement and it's meant to just incrementally improve things kind of forever. Less fatigue. You should be able to enjoy your job more. It's all about adding value to the customer. And sometimes the customer is that, you know, you're the guy next to you downstream in the process, not actually the end user. Sometimes it's you the next day doing a different process that you need to, you know, work on something you had worked the day prior. And so we, we hung our hat on that. That comes through the rabbit hole of SOPs and creating standards and standard work and creating flow in the shop. And all of a sudden how do we create the things? Yep, that was at the Paul Akers 2 second lean. That's a lot of. I'll put a link in the woodworkers.

Put a link in the show notes. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

That can apply to a lot of other businesses too. It's really a mentality, not like a system. It's, it's almost a lifestyle. But the, we're now in the process of real delegation. So there's now multiple people in the office to where my business partner was doing all the Engineering and shop drawings. He's stepping out of that role. We have two others. We hired a designer to do design and then ultimately sales. And we're, we're starting to, you know, that lull is like so there's a huge spike in payroll with little to no change to productivity. And because of how technical we are as a business, it might be that way for 90 days before they're really running and gunning. It's like, how do you pay for that? And the answer is I don't know. It's like we're going to just keep selling and we're going to keep figuring it out. And the system side of it is like, I think is the last thing to unlock to really make this thing a sustainable, you know, well oiled machine to an extent.

Yeah. And I commend you for realizing that. And, and also this, this mindset or framework of we're just going to figure it out. That that's, it's just a huge part of the mentality that carries you through so much of this stuff that you're cycle. I don't know man, but I, I, you, you have to just keep moving and taking action and sure you'll make mistakes. We always say, you know, mistakes are tuition, one of my favorite lines. And that's how you build something great. You're not afraid to get out there, figure it out, make those mistakes. But also you're smart enough to embrace best practices. This just, you know, two second lean thing. Great. You got to do that. I know you've hired a coach recently. That's, what's the name of the coach? John. What's his last name?

John Cipher.

Cipher.

Cipher.

He's written a book called Output Thinking and in, you know, I think that's, you know, reaching out to help. Whether you're reading the books or hiring these guys to come out, it's just the next evolution of your business. And I think it's a testament to success that you actually have time to think that way.

I think it's also I realized because I, I tried a business coach, he was more like a, you know, fractional cfo. It's how he branded on, on Twitter. I won't say his name, but used him for I think four months. It was like 10 grand. It was, I got no value from it. The guy just, and it was really nothing against him. He just couldn't. He just didn't possibly know enough about our business and he was coaching in a way that like you needed to. Where John is great because John Is like his concepts apply to business as a whole. It doesn't really matter if you're a cabinet shop. He did video rental, which is totally obsolete now. Like right there's all these. So he's really good at articulating that and because even though I'm not in the shop, I'm very much still in the business. And it's hard to have that kind of visibility from business as a whole. Almost as like a game. And somebody like John Shannon, I'm sure yourself with your coaching, you kind of provide that insight and that visibility and I think that. But I think you need to be as an entrepreneur, you need to be in a certain phase of your journey to be open and willing to even hear that those concepts. I think if you approached me four years ago when I was still making tables, I wouldn't, you would have been speaking Spanish to me. I wouldn't have even known, you know, what you're talking about. So it's kind of like catching people in the right phase.

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good point. And okay, and so last question really for me is I met you up through X and you're, you know, building up there doing talk. Talk about that and the, the value that you're getting out of it. Beyond, I'll prompt you, but I know you would say this anyway. Beyond just building your brand and followers. Talk about that part of your, you know, the last six months.

I think the, the brand and the followers is purely a byproduct of the process of being on X. So I got on there because, you know, Dave, like we were mentioning earlier that the, the grinding phase, the process of, of kind of season opportunity and going through what it takes to get somewhere is not a pretty process. And as a result of that and I think everybody's human. Like there's no outlet for that either. Like, where do I go? My, you know, my wife can only listen to the same problems every single day. And I love her, but she's just like, you know, she, she asked me how my, how my day was cautiously. And so of course, and I also don't want to bring home all the problems. So like I'd rather bring problems to the other people that can relate to those problems. And I, and I had been on X for a couple of years. I found SMB kind of community, little pocket. And that's ultimately how we did the, the growth madness thing in the group. But all of a sudden I started posting about some of the challenges of the day to day grind. And you know, it almost became this therapeutic process for me because I got enough engagement back of other people either going through it at the same exact time I was. People who had gone through it and could offer some advice or somebody that was maybe before that was like, hey, I think I'm going to be there in like six months. Like, how'd you navigate this thing and that? So there's. It all of a sudden became this, this breeding ground for connection for, you know, people just doing something similar, even if it was a totally different business. And that connection is just purely what has kept me coming back. And the viral hits are fun but you know, I, I like just the, the, you know, providing more value and frankly not even trying to do anything, just post about, you know, what's going on in my world and you know, who else has something similar to relate to.

Yeah, that's awesome. And, and that's it for me. We, we that collaboration and meeting other people that are going. Either going through what you have, what you've already gone through to help out or you're helping them out. It's. It's a big deal. It's a huge resource, I think for sure, buddy. Using it in a positive way. I'm not a huge fan of social media for all the negatives that come of it, but this is certainly a positive. So. Dude, that's great.

I think X is, is probably one of the last places that you can share stuff like that before because everything else is a highlight reel. Right. So X, even though it's changed a bit, it's still about the most authentic place you could be right now.

That's a good point.

I, I think it's great it. And I want to derail us, but I, I think there's plenty of stuff on X that is completely inauthentic. However, for sure. And I think that's true of all social media. I think you can, if you craft your. Whatever it is, you're following your environment on any given platform, you can find value.

Well, that's what I learned from you, Dave.

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying.

I ignored it forever.

Yeah.

And he was like, you're doing it wrong. You know, you just have to. And I was like, really? And then once I started messing around with it late last year, I was like, oh, he's right. I mean it's super valuable.

Yeah. You just gotta ignore.

Yeah.

The noise because it get. It is built to attract you with the things that you hate.

Yeah.

Right. And, and you gotta just like not give into that at all. And that will eventually fine tune it. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's. I love it. I love it. Well, Alex, thank you so much for hanging out with us. You know, someday I'll have you do my kitchen and, you know, we'll build some cabinets in California and, you know, follow along. We'll put Alex's X handle in the show notes. And coming up to business brain, follow along as we meet some, you know, awesome entrepreneurs. Follow along with all of us. So thank you for coming again, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. A ton of fun.

Absolutely. It was a pleasure to meet you and thanks for, you know, answering all our crazy questions. I love. Sure. We love digging into this stuff, as you can probably tell. So, yeah, it's great.

I could talk all. Talk all day about this.

Thanks for hanging out. Folks. Folks, if you have any questions for us, of course you can find us on X, you can find us on Facebook, you can find us on LinkedIn and you can email us feedbackusinessbrain show. In fact, just go to businessbrain show. That's gonna be the best place to find us. We'll see you there. Have a fantastic weekend and we'll see you next week.