Jarrett Companies COO Mike Wood | The $1M Mistake That Made His Team Stronger (Podcast 600)

You know, I was kind of an arrogant shit to think that I was the man over here, you know, doing all these things, but I was causing problems. To think that I wasn't part of any of the problems that were happening was arrogant, and I didn't want to hear it in the back of my head. That was the biggest one for me. You know, it changed my entire life in so many ways. I was spending, working about 90 hours a week. I basically got hit, ran into a wall, and I looked around. I didn't know what to do. Everything was fixed. We downsized the biggest one that was causing the problem. Everything was moving great. And now that it was smaller, it was calm. All the problems that we were having were kind of fixed. But I was sitting in my office just staring at my fish tank, didn't know what to do. The noise in my head was screaming at me. I was literally more miserable at that point than I'd ever been in my life. I was making more money. My wife was able to stay home. Kids are happy and healthy. I had a great job. And I was more miserable at that point than I'd been at any point in my life. I told my boss at one point that I was going to quiet my mind by any means necessary, and I didn't know what that meant.

All right, our guest today is Mike Wood. Mike is a conscious awareness professional and the creator of a program called Learn to Love Being You program. But today we're actually going to talk about his 10+ years of being the COO of Jarrett Companies, which is a 7-company group that he has helped scale from $2 million to over $100 million. He's got some incredible insights related to leadership, his ability to put systems in place, never blame the people when there's problems or balls being dropped. And after rebuilding his own life from the inside out, he's dedicated himself to helping others and also bringing these leadership skills into the companies that he runs. As the COO of Jarrett Companies, he's led hundreds of high-stakes, emotionally charged conversations We're gonna talk about that. He also goes into really working with this kind of no-nonsense approach to personal transformation and growing people, but also being able to show up grounded in his role as CEO of a very complex company. He blends spiritual insight, grounded psychology, and a goofy sense of humor to help people open up or relax and finally breathe. And you're gonna love this, this episode. So we'll see you on the inside. Again, today we have Mike Wood. Who is the COO of the Jarrett Companies. We'll see you on the inside. So, Mike, welcome to the Second in Command podcast.

Appreciate you having me.

Yeah, looking forward to this. You're down in Nashville right now. I'm up in Vancouver, Canada. I love the ability to leverage technology and connect with each other. I wish I was there in person, but nice to, to meet you and be able to put a face to a name. I want to dive in a little bit about some of your story. And there's one fun fact there for everybody. You and I have a very similar trajectory. You joined the, the Jarrett Group when it was only $2 million in revenue, and you've grown to over $100 million in revenue. And that was my exact story from those exact numbers, $2 million to $106 million with 1-800-GOT-JUNK back in the day. So clearly it was the same, right? Every, every single business was exactly the same. What are, what are some of the distinct changes that you saw at different sizes of the company. Can you walk us through some of those? Like, go back to what it was like being a second in command, um, and in a very small entrepreneurial company, how have you had to change? How has the company changed? How does your day-to-day— spend some time on that with us.

Yeah. So I, I really appreciate you having me on your show and, and to answer your question, it, you know, It, it was an evolution of, you know, when I showed up, I knew how to do the job as an estimator and a project manager. And as we were scaling and growing, the— I was constantly replacing myself. Um, and that was one of the biggest lessons that I learned through, uh, the growth, because we ended up building 7 different companies. Um, and every time we were growing one facet of the company, It was a repeatable process. Like, we constantly had to find a replacement for that guy so he could do more. The most valuable guy in the group needs to be able to sell and be the face of, of, uh, each, each division, because each one of the 7 companies that we have, they run independently of each other. The, the accounting and, uh, it hadn't been, uh, parts of our business They all function as one. Everything flows through one, but other than that, everything is its own profit center. Everything is operating and functioning as its own independent company. Um, obviously we leverage our clients against each other and everything, but yeah, that was one of the bigger issues that we had. And, you know, the next biggest thing was just me learning how to actually be a—

what was the issue? Was it the shared services and how to manage it that way? Or what was that? What was that issue?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just growing a team and building systems. Right. So the, the, the big issues that we were having is just, you know, you're growing that fast. There's mistakes going to happen. And so very early on, uh, we started putting systems in place. It's almost like a double check. We, we basically had meetings 5 days a week from 6 o'clock in the morning till, till 9 o'clock., in, in the morning. And, and so we were stuck in this room, but we created, uh, well, we used Smartsheets at the time, and now we've kind of moved on from that, but we basically address every job that we had going on at least once a week with the managers. And we would put— we write down all their tasks and, and hold each one of them accountable so nobody can get sideways, because next week we would look at it again. And so we started putting systems in place that were double checks on on everything in the building because we were making mistakes. Every time we, we made a mistake, we, we ended up putting another system in place. And after 5 or 6 years of doing that, you know, we had a well-oiled machine and adding more divisions and more companies to it. Um, it was just a matter of finding the right people at that point. That was, that was, uh, that was a good place to be.

You mentioned something about constantly replacing yourself. In the earlier days, were you ever worried about, well, if I hire somebody to do everything I'm doing, what am I going to do? Like, was that ever anything you had to work through that either a little bit of imposter syndrome or just wondering what the heck is my job going to be if I delegate it to everybody else?

Yeah, it's like you've, it's like you've done this before. 100%. That's a big problem. And it was even a bigger problem because I didn't necessarily have a lot of that myself, although I did have a little bit of noise in the back of my head. Um, but most everybody that I was trying to get to replace themselves, we ran into that problem. All right, um, everybody's worried that if I allow somebody to do what I'm doing, you're gonna just let them do my job and run me out of here. So we had to build trust with people, make them feel safe, um, show them— not just, uh, tell them what to do, but show them the benefits of this and how it's going to move forward if we do this. But yeah, absolutely. I 100% had imposter syndrome and I got to see it in a lot of other folks along the way.

It's interesting because the entrepreneur tends to be much better at delegating everything except genius. And then I think the COO tends to be pretty darn good at it pretty early. But it is some of those earlier stage managers that tend to struggle with that. Sometimes they seem to almost like hold on to responsibility to to build something out, and that almost becomes political. Did you ever have to deal with any politics inside the org, or were you able to keep that fairly clean considering you were running, you know, the 7 distinct businesses?

Yeah, there's been some, but, you know, we filtered through it pretty quick because one of the things that, you know, the boss, Jason Jarrett, was very good at is relationship building. And so whenever there was an issue, I mean, it would be 7 people in the room talking about it. And, and it taught me very early on that that is a very intelligent way to solve a problem and keep the division. You can't go to this side over here and start having a conversation because if it makes it back over here, we're all going to go right back in that conference room and I'll talk about it. So people really quickly learned that you couldn't just have a conversation. And if somebody was carrying on negative negativity and, and and trying to create division or politics in the office, then they didn't exist. They moved on pretty quick.

Yeah, they get pushed out of that culture pretty quickly. Was he— was Jason pretty good at handling conflict, or did he try to defer that? Often I find some of the more entrepreneurial, newer entrepreneurs tend to struggle with conflict situations. They like to avoid it. Sometimes they're trying to be liked, maybe. And they often either avoid it or they want someone to handle it for them. Was he good at handling that stuff or did he deflect some of that to you?

So, he definitely— we worked through it together early on. And so, we both had different approaches. I was very calm, analytical. I could get excited too. But he would be like a firecracker. He would explode. And so we, we had to find a balance, um, between exploding and being too calm and nice. Um, and ultimately, I— he'll— he probably agree that, that I won that war. Um, but it took, it took a long time. Once the company started making money and we were financially stable, then his, his ability to pop quick would leave. And by that time, I got really good at having an honest conversation with people. And once I showed Jason, like, look, I don't have to get mad, but I'm going to let them know really quick, like, hey, this is the problem. I care about you, you've done a good job up to this point, but you got these things going on here, and if you can't fix those things, you can't be here anymore. And just having those really harsh, honest conversations, um, kind of swung the pendulum to where I was able to have most of those conversations. And they were very uncomfortable at first, but after a while you get used to being honest with people because you'd rather— I'd rather be super honest with somebody and have that conversation than blow up, get mad, and fire somebody and regret it. And they're like, hey, I didn't even know that you were mad at me. And You know, they're—

how often were the, how often were the conflict discussions or the issues that you were addressing, how often did they get to the, you know, if you can't fix this, you can't stay here versus, you know, here's something we're struggling with, let's work through it. Like, how often was it more of that come-to-Jesus style meeting?

You know, in the beginning we were working it out because neither one of us had done it at the level we were doing. So I will say the first 2 or 3 years it was this battle of we'd let some things go before we had the balls to actually have a real conversation, and then we would get mad and have a conversation. Um, but somewhere 5, 6 years into it, it's just— it is just immediately there's— because lag time is, is a big issue. If you let an issue go on for too long, it creates more animosity, more, more scared people in the room. And what I've learned just personally, and I think we all agree here at Jared at this point, like if, if you're having a problem with an employee, there is no time to waste. Like, this week you need to sit them down and have that conversation. Within days you need to have a conversation. Because if, if somebody's doing something that's on a scale of 1 to 10, uh, a 6, and that 6 will eventually get you fired over 6 months' time, like, let's not wait until 2 months and now we're all pissed off when we can handle it this week. And, and get everybody back on board. So part of the growth process, we, we've gotten very good at having those conversations, uh, early.

All right, if you're the COO of a company that does at least $2 million or greater in revenue, or you're the CEO of a company and you're in the United States or Canada, if you would like a copy of my book The Second in Command for free, go to cooalliance.com/free. Free book. That's cooalliance.com/freebook, and I will mail you a copy for free. I will even cover the shipping. Jump on that one today. I like that you actually addressed the having them early as well. I think in my, I launched a course a few years ago called Invest in Your Leaders, and it's the 12 core management and leadership skills that everybody needs to be good at. And one of the modules is conflict management. And I talk about racing to the conflict, that you need to address it quickly. But I always like to have a diffusing period before I race to it. Like, you know, if I'm pissed off or I'm upset or something's really struggled, I need to get my energy level down a little bit to then race to the conflict. How do you get your energy level under control, or how do you control some of the EQ going into that, you know, emotionally charged conversation? And then when you're in it with the other individual, how do you bring them back and center them as well. Do you have any things that you say, ways that you approach it?

Absolutely. So, I've been teaching a leadership course for the last couple of years that we developed for our younger leaders, and we talk about this specifically. And one of the things that we try to do is we— you got to create safety, right? If I come into an employee and I'm just pissed and I'm giving all these things about what is going on, they're going to immediately feel defensive and they're going to have a hard time hearing anything I got to say after that. They're going to put up their, their dukes. So I like to create a safe environment by sitting down like, hey, hey Jimmy, you know, I care about you, you do a great job, ABC, and you create space. And, and that helps in that environment when you first go in there. But if you live that way as a businessman and you actually ask your employees, you know, how they're doing, you actually know what's going on in their lives, it helps those conversations become even better. Because when you do engage with them in a difficult conversation, they know that you actually care.

Yeah.

So it's not a false, like, I care about you now when we're having a hard time. Um, but yeah, that softens it up.

You really do give a shit.

Yeah, absolutely. And so then the second part of it is when, when we're trying to get to something and it can get back and forth, um, we try to address the feelings of what's happening. Because when you identify the feelings, everybody's able to say, well, look, man, when you're doing A, B, and C, you're making me feel this way. And now all of a sudden you're, you're disarming everything. Everybody's— and then they'll tell you how they feel, and you could get a full dialogue of a conversation going on. And it's, it's actually— it can be beautiful sometimes.

Oh, it's almost like you co-wrote my course for me because I talk about when you— I feel, I need, how do you feel? And I get those feelings out there and there's really nowhere to go when you drop them in. But I also really like that you started with the whole safety and security. And if you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that's the second tier. The first one is just base pay and making sure that they can afford to pay for their life. The second one is feeling like safe and secure. And it's kind of like addressing conflict with our kids. Right. If one of our kids does something wrong, we're like, hey, I love you. You're amazing. And you can't do this like this anymore. This is how it's making—

right.

So, yeah. Do you ever tie leading people back to, like, living as an adult in relationships? Or do you have— do you frame— do you frame leadership in other ways at all that help you?

Yeah. So the way that I I tried to get folks to, you know, work on themselves and create that safety within themselves. You know, I've been working really hard on that myself. Somewhere about 7 years ago in the middle of this thing, I started working on myself. Our company was going on a downward bit of a spiral there, having a really hard time. And so I dove in 80 hours a week and through that process, Once I got done and we moved people around and we put double checks on some of these things that were costing us money, contract reviews, and, and some pretty powerful, uh, points that, that we fixed, it took about 6 months of just crazy time. I got to the end of it, I realized how many of the mistakes I made personally to, uh, create those problems. And so to answer your question, one of the biggest things that I I did is I, I read Jocko's book on taking extreme ownership, and I implemented it into all facets of my life, um, into a personal— but the business part of it, um, and just helping folks understand that if you're constantly thinking negative thoughts, fearful thoughts, your body literally goes into a chemical state where you're producing cortisol You go into the default mode network and we lose our intelligence, right? So as a leader, if I, if I get excited and pissed off, I'm going into the default mode network. I'm becoming dumber. And now I'm trying to address and solve problems at half capacity and I'm not very effective. So, and I realized I was doing a lot of that. I realized I was going to meetings and I was answering all the questions, although half the crew could have answered those questions. So I started shutting up. Yeah. Um, I started working on a lot of things on myself that really ultimately took the company that we were at and it, it allowed it to flourish and allowed it to grow because these young leaders were now able to speak and it made them feel emboldened and part of the team and part of the creation because I got out of the way. Um, there was a lot of, uh, taking ownership of my own egoic problems and, and, and through that process That's what I try to teach in my leadership courses now is to work on ourselves. You know, to be a true leader and to be able to do, you have to be able to project safety onto your team. And you also have to be able to use the full capacity of your brainpower. And in order to do that, you have to be able to stay in a calm, safe space internally. And it's not easy to do, but there's simple manual tools to do it. And you can take it further and actually go back and heal things. And obviously, I'm not telling our team to go heal, but definitely got to get calm.

Well, in some ways, maybe that is growth in the right time and in the right place for them. When you're going through some personal development, sometimes some childhood traumas or traumas that are flaring up at work. I think often I've always felt like we're 15-year-olds trapped in adult bodies. You know, I'm still my 15-year-old little kid. You're your 15-year-old Mike Wood. At the end of the day, we're still struggling with some of that same shit that we then bring into the boardroom or into meetings. And I like that you are examining your contribution to the issues, but you're also working on your growth as well as, you know, leading others, right? Versus just pointing the fingers at them. You mentioned in the growth of the $2 million to $100 million that there were some mistakes along the way. I mean, That's, you know, obvious. Every company has them. I did an event in Austria to a group of CEOs about 6 months ago, and at one point I kind of broke up in some tears. I was doing a fireside chat and I decided to do the entire 90-minute presentation about failure, and I never talked about one thing I did well.

It was really hard.

It was fucking hard, man. I had a lot of examples, but it was hard to get that raw and that real. But I think that is where some of the growth comes from, right? And I think when we— Yeah. So what was a good failure that you had, you know, in your time as COO? And what was the big lessons or the big ahas from that for you?

Just to— I mean, the big aha was, you know, that I, you know, I was kind of an arrogant shit to think that I was, you know, yeah, I was the man over here. You know, doing all these things, but I, I was causing problems. To think that I wasn't part of any of the problems that were happening was, was arrogant. And, and I didn't want to hear it in the back of my head. And honestly, that, that was the biggest one for me. You know, it changed my entire life in so many ways.

And was it that one book that really gave you the big aha moment?

No, no, man. I, I had a full spiritual awakening. I I, I spent, you know, I was telling you that story. I was spending, working about 90 hours a week on, uh, on the company, right? I, I basically got hit, ran into a wall, and I, I looked around. I didn't know what to do. Everything was fixed. We downsized the biggest one that was causing the problem. Everything was moving great. And now it was smaller. It was, it was calm, right? And we were We were doing business with just quality, high-quality customers. We had down cut our, our field staff in half, and they were the top guys. So everything started running really smooth after we got done. Contracts were getting double, triple reviews, double, triple reviews. Like, so all the problems that we were having were kind of fixed, but I was sitting in my office just staring at my fish tank, didn't know what to do. And I, I, I— the noise in my head was screaming at me. Like, I was literally more miserable at that point than I'd ever been in my life. I was making more money. My wife was able to stay home. Uh, kids are happy and healthy. I had a great job and I was more miserable at that point than I'd been at any point in my life. And I turned that focus. I realized that how many of those problems were mine and that noise in my head. I told my boss at one point that I was going to quiet my mind by any means necessary. And I didn't know what that meant. But I did mean it. I just didn't know what it entailed. And I just turned my focus inward. And when I did, it was just—

What was the noise in your head? What were you saying to yourself or what were you hearing?

Oh man, I was unworthy. I was stupid. So I learned how to read past the second grade, uh, at 25 years old. I have a rare form of dyslexia and I just basically scrambled through school. They just pushed me on. Nobody diagnosed me because they didn't at that time. They didn't know anything about dyslexia. At least a rare few did know about it. And, uh, and it wasn't that I couldn't read, because with every, uh, curse there's a blessing, right? So I, I could do math in my head when I was 3 years old. Basic division and problem-solving skills is really what I think my, my true gift is. But when, when you're a little kid and, and you feel less than because you can't read like the other ones, then you're embarrassed to read it out loud, it leaves old negative core beliefs that just sing their song. Every time there's a problem, they're singing and they get louder and louder, especially in stressful situations. And that's the stuff that makes us respond instead of— or react quickly and in a negative way versus thinking and responding in an intelligent way. And so as I dove through all of that stuff, um, it It culminated in me creating a program to help others because I, I literally just changed the entire structure of my life and how I lived. Everything that was inside started to get cleaned out. It was like having a spring cleaning. And through that process, it completely affected everything at the company. Everything changed in a positive way. We started attracting better employees. Everything started to move in a, in a different way. And I truly believe that a healthy leader is going to You know, have a much better chance of driving a healthy company.

I love that, that, that level of introspection. I mean, I heard a couple things. One, one is that every time we point a finger at somebody, there's 3 fingers pointing back at us. And it takes a lot of courage to examine our contribution to the issues. But the other one was that, that you learn to not speak up as quickly and to let the people in the room speak. I, you know, I've always said the leader needs to speak last. Um, and our job is to grow their confidence and their skills, and we can't grow either if we're giving them every answer, if we're speaking all the time. How did you learn to shut up and to, to not speak? Was there— did you sit on your hands? Did you force, force yourself to ask people what they thought? Like, was there anything you— or did you just get real cognizant of it and work at it?

Yeah, I got real cognizant of it, and I don't remember the exact moment, the exact lesson that I learned, but Cameron, I, I dissected everything. Identities, that was another big one. Removing the identity of being a COO, right? It sounds like a crazy thing, but you can remove that in a matter of seconds, and somebody could walk in 10 minutes later and say, hey Mike, you know, I'm pissed off you did this, this, this, this, and this. Well, 8 years ago, I would have been fighting mad, want to run him out of the building, maybe beat him up in the parking lot.

Sure.

Now they they come in and do that, I'm like, all right, man, slow down, slow down. Help, help me understand what you're saying here. Like, I, I'm not taking any offense, and I'm having zero physical reaction because my subconscious mind isn't reacting to defend myself. Now, in my personal life, it's even had an even bigger effect with my wife. You know, I'm not a husband, I'm not a, I'm not a father, I'm not, I'm not a grandfather. I'm so much more than all those things, including a COO. And And so now removing those threats where my subconscious mind doesn't have to defend all that, it just makes it so much easier to do like you did on that, uh, on that, uh, that speech that you gave, because there's nothing to defend. It gets very easy to open up and be honest and truthful about whatever is going inside and whatever failures, because it's an opportunity to learn, right? We All those things are an opportunity to learn if you take it the right way, or you can defend it and get mad and whatever, and you'd be stuck in the same spot. But you start realizing that every failure, you move forward and get better. It's like, holy moly, I can't wait for the next failure.

This is going to be great.

Like, I'm going to get to learn again.

It's kind of like what husbands are being told when our wives are talking is don't try to solve the problem. Just listen to them. And at the end they go, well, thank you for just listening. Sometimes our team needs the same thing, right? Somebody just to listen and to care and to hear them out. So I'm curious, one of the things that I've always said about COOs is our job is to make the CEO iconic, right? Our job is to make the entrepreneur look good, which means we are often in the shadows, right? We're often not the face of the company. I think you said that, you know, your wins are the company's wins, but your losses are yours alone.

Absolutely.

How do you work through that and own that? And how do you, rationalize being okay with that? Is that an ego thing that you've just worked on? Is it a skill set you had to develop? And do you really mean that or do you struggle with that?

No, because it opens it up and it creates safety. I can give you a great example of this. So, we built a fire protection company. I've never been in the fire protection industry. I don't know. I can't hang a sprinkler head, right? Now we're running this company and we, about 3 years in, we flood a high-rise building. It ends up being a million-dollar claim. And if we continue to do that, we'll be out of business. We won't be able to get insured. So we got this big problem on our hands and it's up to me to solve this problem, right? And, and Jason's involved, but I'm taking the charge here to, to, to solve this. And so I knew going into that meeting that I needed to take 100% ownership of that problem. So I walked into that meeting and I was like, all right, how do I do this? All right, well, simple. All right, guys, we've been here for 3 years. Before we get started here, I want you guys to know that I'm— that this flood is my fault. And they're kind of scoffing at me and laughing at me. And I said, no, guys, how many, how many times you guys been trained in the last 3 years? And they all looked around, said, no, we've not been trained on anything. I said, how many shutoffs are in the, in your trucks that could have prevented this flood? Well, none. I said, those are both my fault, right? We could have put implemented training and we could have made sure that you had the tools you needed to prevent this. And those are my fault. And immediately the guys around the room start going, Mike, that wasn't your fault. I could have done A, B, and C. And then it just went around the room and it was one of the most beautiful moments where everybody started taking ownership. So to go back to your question, because it's a little off point, but when I started having those wins, we created success out of that. That's what made it so easy for me to continue to do that and to own my own stuff is because it— I started to see how amazing it was when I took all the pressure off of everybody. It made it easier to— I couldn't wait for the next opportunity for for something like that.

Michael Gerber years ago wrote a book called The E-Myth Revisited, and he talked about that people don't fail, systems fail. And I think it was very much, you know, that mindset that you went into because you've talked a little bit about that, that when something went wrong, you would look for a system to figure out or systems to take care of making mistakes. Was that a kind of mantra that you operated with? And, and how did you approach putting systems in place? I had a CEO that I coached years ago one-on-one for couple of years and one day he said that they'd put 82 SOPs in place. I'm like, dude, you probably wasted your time on 72 of them. Like, how did you know what to really spend time systemizing and what to let just run as it on its own?

Well, what I, what I've, what I understood, and I kind of started this at a, at a, I was a construction manager of a company before I came to Jarrett. It was a, uh, uh, an engineering firm and that managed paving programs. And for Davidson County, I was over the, the paving program for Davidson County. And I put this system in place because they, they were dropping balls left and right. And so basically what I, I come up with this idea in my head and I carried it to Jarrett. And basically what I did is I hired a very super OCD girl to work with me, and she's the opposite of me, right? I'm this guy that can't read, not find details. So this girl's taking care of my contract. She's, she's putting everything in a spreadsheet for me, and if anybody gets out of whack on that spreadsheet, I get an email, right? And so you're right, do you need to create 80-something, um, uh, procedures? Probably not. But what I would say everybody needs is a double check on everything, two separate systems running on, on the same thing. Like, if I got a project manager that's running a job and they got to do all these things to get a job completed, well, I've got a project coordinator that is my right hand that doesn't work for them. They, they're working alongside them as an equal, and their job is to make sure everything gets done properly. And if it doesn't, then I get notified, because I can't get involved in everything that's going on when we're we're running this at a certain level. And so what I would argue is, regardless of how many SOPs you have and how many different systems you have, there just needs to be a double check on everybody. That's, that's my philosophy that I run on, is we have a double check on everybody in the building. Because, you know, I did it before. I get to work every morning at 5:45, and for about 6 months when we went through that problem, I went to a job, a $16 million construction job for the, uh, MTSU here in, uh, in Murfreesboro, and it was 10 minutes from my house. I was— because nobody was watching, I was showing up to work barely at 6 o'clock. But when I had to drive 45 minutes and everybody was going to be there, I was 15, 20 minutes early every day, like, like clockwork. When nobody's watching, it's, it's, it's, it's the hardest thing for an owner to do is to show up every day on time because nobody's watching that owner. The owner could sleep in and nobody could say anything. And so I think that's human nature. And when we put these double checks on everything and hold everybody accountable, uh, with just transparency is all it is, then, uh, then I think those systems, they work. So whenever we come into a problem, we just put that double check system in, into effect, and it, it typically solves, solves the problem, solves everything.

I'm curious how, in terms of building out these 7 different companies, how did you orbit the kind of giant hairball? How did you avoid getting sucked into all of the details that could have been, or all the meetings? Like, how did you focus your time and decide what to spend time on when there was so many potential moving parts?

So we, like I said, I was in meetings 5 days a week from 6 o'clock in the morning till 9 o'clock. So we would stagger meetings depending on some companies, like especially fire, because they had so many different divisions, they would be spread out through the week, but it would be 45 minutes to an hour meetings. And so we would just go through them. And after those meetings, I would basically trust them. Well, we got to find the right leaders to lead and get out of their way. Right. We're going to hold everybody accountable in these meetings. We're going to make sure the client is being taken care of in these meetings. But after that, you know, like, do your thing, baby. Like, here's the plan, let's go. We trust you, you know, run hard. And as long as you got the right leader and, and you incentivize them— and that's one thing I got to give Jason credit for, um, the, the owner here, um, is, is that he's had no problem sharing the profits with folks. We would incentivize folks the leaders, the true leaders, the earners, they would get profit share agreements. And when you got somebody who's a good employee that's going to run and you incentivize him, man, you don't— you got— now you got another owner here, and, and they're going to run hard. And as long as you have that guy putting all the double checks in place and letting him run and having an open door where he can come to you and he's not hiding things, the thing will— it it'll virtually take care of itself to some, to some extent.

Were these 7 companies truly like separate, separate, separate companies, or were they just more separate products but to the similar customer base?

Similar customer base. So like, yeah, so we got, we started with a grading and underground utility company, which was the mothership, and then we added paving concrete. So we're paving roads. Parking lots, patch paving, and concrete was kind of like a utility tool to go with them. And then from there we built a fire suppression because it was all the same clients. Fire suppression added to it and then get— so we kept leveraging those clients and now we've got into the fire suppression business is phenomenal because it's life safety. Everybody, everybody wants it. And so we built a massive service division. We, we're doing all facets of it, tenant and contract, but what my passion was, was the service department. So we ended up selling our, our fire protection company to a PE firm, and, uh, we, uh, since then we have started a, uh, a service department that has HVAC electrical and plumbing. And now those are all taking off.

And yeah, those are all very different companies for sure. I mean, when you explain the high level of each of the products, those are, those are pretty darn different. You mentioned that you're constantly, you know, translating between vision and operations, like you've got to think like the CEO but execute like the team. How do you, how do you do that? How do you stay on the same page with the CEO and then communicate that vision to the team? And then how do you, how do you make sure the CEO is up to speed with what you guys are working on and how you're making the vision come true?

So, you know, Jason and I have become pretty good friends over the years and we've built a really good trust. So I know where my boundaries are. I know what I need to take to him. I know when I can make a decision and I really need to get him involved. And I know, uh, when I can handle it, and he doesn't ever need to know about it, right? We could just work through it. And because at the end of the day, he's, he's getting to the point where he'd like to not do this anymore. It's kind of miserable, and it's been miserable for him because he's, he's a stress ball. Um, so yeah, so I, I try to balance that out. Um, but in order to communicate that, you know, I, I— we've got 7 companies and we've got 7 leaders of these companies. And one of the best ways I can communicate where we're going, what we're doing, is just to have a really solid relationship with all of them and the next level below that as well. But, you know, just building those relationships, having a conversation, trying to push them for growth, trying to, trying to help them facilitate where we're going and, and, and have that, uh that take over the world mentality with, you know, within reason, not trying to run yourself into the ground either. But we want to continue to grow and, and make money.

Yeah, I like it. I want you to think back to, to when you were a little younger, you know, you're 21 or 22 years old, you're just starting out in your career. I imagine you still had some of that childhood wounding of the really rough ADD that you had, or dyslexia, I'm sorry, that you had. What advice would you give the younger you that you know to be true today, but you wish you'd known when you were a little bit younger?

Man, I would, I would tell them, you know, show up early, stay late, you know, learn how to do your boss's job, you know, become so valuable, try whatever your boss is doing, just pay attention and try to take something from them. You know, oh, you're doing that? Oh, I got you. I got you. I'll stay a little later and I'll do that, or get it done in your normal day. And before long, your boss is gonna look to you when there's an opportunity and you're gonna get an opportunity. Um, and, and that would've been the, the first thing that I said, but then, you know, my younger 20-year-old self probably couldn't have handled some of the other advice I give him cuz I was still mentally not okay to handle some of it.

Right?

Like, I probably wouldn't, but that one, we were retarded at 21.

Yes.

Yes, I was for sure. I was dealing with so much internal pain that I couldn't have processed most of the information that I would give to my younger self.

Now I need to ask you what's something that you're working on. I don't know if this is a passion project or something you're also doing to make money, but you've got kind of down here that you're the founder of Learn to Love Being You. And I want to ask a little bit about that. What is that all about, learning to love being you? And how have you learned to love being you in your journey as an adult and as a leader?

Man, it's changed everything for me. And it's kind of a passion project, but it's like, I don't ever want to quit working. I love to continue to do this, but what I want to do in the next chapter of my life is help people. And so The journey that I went on, I turned it into a 10-week program. And the first 3 weeks are basically a manual— learning how to take manual control over your thoughts and learning how to bring yourself down to zero to where you have full capacity of your brain and not be just drug around by our thoughts and emotions. And then once we, once we get through that, then we really— the, the main 3 things are removing identities like we spoke about earlier, just going through that process. And because it's such a liberating, freeing thing, the first time I did that, I removed a Titans fan and politics from my— I won't tell you what side of the fence I was on, but I, I would, I would just obsessively want to talk politics all day long. And I, going through this process, I removed in one day. And all of a sudden, I wasn't arguing anymore. I turned off the news, and my life just got so much better. And when— whenever one party would say something, it didn't physically— I didn't have a response to argue and get mad anymore. I just was able to just relax and be. Um, removing identities is a— is a— a super powerful, uh, thing for anybody to do.

You know, that's— that's very European, by the way. I've been in 80 countries in the last 5 years. I'm heading off tonight to the UK, and I'll be in 3 countries in the next 4 weeks. The Europeans talk about politics as if they're passionately engaged in talking about a football game, like a soccer game as well. And as soon as they've told their buddy that they're an idiot and their opinion's stupid and here's my opinion, then they're like, all right, we're done. Let's go for beer together. Like they stay good friends. Like, yeah, they're just passionately engaged in stuff, but they're not so oppositionally defiant that the other person can't be their friend. And I think we need more of that. We need to be able to, to debate and discuss. But I like that you were able to then, you know, divorce yourself from it as well.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it was liberating. The next part of that, that program is just forgiveness. And then the part, the reason I, I truly created this program is because I developed a writing program to go back to those childhood memories, reframing with love, compassion, and forgiveness, and they stop haunting us. So the noise in my head that used to tell me I was stupid or dumb or not as smart as everybody else, it stopped. And it took me a couple years to really get through all of that. And then I found so many more that were haunting me as well, not the obvious ones that you would think. And as I got those out of the way, it's like this started to naturally get quiet. So I didn't have to just use the manual tools to calm myself down. It started to get naturally quiet on its own. Doesn't mean I don't have thoughts anymore, but it, it just changed every aspect of my life. Work was probably one of the major ones, but my relationship with my wife and kids, um, just became more present. Um, I would have never said this 5 years ago, but the most valuable thing that we can give anybody is our presence. Yeah. And to be actually be present and not waiting to talk and hear somebody out and whatever. It enriches all the relationships that I have with people, and I couldn't have done that. And I'd like to be able to continue to share that with other people. And that's what that program is about.

Thank you. I love that you were also able to quiet the noise in your own head, even if it wasn't getting you to want to talk. Whatever that chatter was, was removing you from staying present. And you seem— Yeah. You know, very, very grounded. Well, Mike Wood, the COO of Jarrett Companies, thanks so much for sharing with us today on the Second Command Podcast. Super appreciative of the time and the wisdom you shared today.

Yeah, appreciate you too. Thank you.

All right, man. Thank you very much.

All right.