Adopting AI in the Flooring Industry with Bradley Millner | AI Automation Podcast

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the NeuroBytes podcast. Today we have Bradley Miller with us. He's— he and I, we've been friends for like, what, 5 years plus? Met down in Laguna Beach at a conference. He's the CEO and owner of Big Bob. It's a large flooring company. So they— so you have like all sorts of outlets across the US that sells flooring products to consumers. And He's here today to talk to us about how he's going through the digital and AI transformation with his company. Was that— did I sum it up right?

Yeah, we're getting there. We're on the right track. It's a franchise system. I'm a franchisee, so I'm not the— I don't own the whole system. I own my particular franchise itself.

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. And then, and so you come from a very traditional sort of industry where you're selling different types of flooring products to consumers. What got, you know, what made you think about shifting or implementing AI?

Well, I'm— I've always been into technology, so always try to be on the cutting edge as far as our industry goes and looking outside of our industry and seeing what other, other people are doing. So in the last year and a half really that for us AI really started to come aboard as far as things that are out there and things that are possibilities for us to be able to do. Like for instance, I just, I had a conversation last week with somebody that they've got a product that they're bringing to market where, so when we do blueprints, for instance, so for if we got a commercial project, a hospital or something like that, you upload the the digital blueprint, and we would have to click on all the corners and to do a takeoff of the how much material we need for all the different rooms. Um, the new technologies that are coming out are you upload them and it actually does it all for you. You don't, you don't have to click on anything. You don't have to do any of that stuff. It, it actually lays it all out and tells you exactly what you need. And I see them when the conversation that I have with them, they're going to get better and better to where Then you upload the data sheets as all the materials and what rooms that they go in because the architect has already laid all that out. And it'll actually give you all the material list of everything that you need. So for us, that's like hours and hours and hours of time saving. So anything that we can do to save time is beneficial to us. You know, we can turn out, produce more quotes more quickly and probably bid projects that we weren't going to be able to get to. Because we were too busy. We only have a finite resource in people, so you can only bid so much, so many projects, right? So this, this will expand us to be able to, to bid more projects.

Right. So you've been using it to write like RFPs or, or, uh, bid proposals using AI.

Right. That's, that's, that's what's, that's what's coming for, for us. So we're in the, in the research process for that to be able to put it all into where it'll actually build the quote for you and everything. So I wanna be on the front side of that, not the backside of that. I wanna be—

Okay.

The implementer, the person doing it. I mean, we'll have to double check in the beginning, you know, to be able to put, put, put it into place, build the proposals, and then we'll probably go in and do it manually just to make sure that everything is coming out right. But once you get comfortable with it, we can spit those things out real, really, really quickly. So, and we're, we're also using it like the stuff that we've done with you, conversational. AI so that we can talk to our customers anytime, you know, 24/7, whenever they wanna have a conversation with us, we can use AI to talk, to have a conversation with them, with them as we've trained it in our language, you know, so it speaks like it's us, not, not like it's a robot, you know, and that's the things that's getting better and better.

Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So just for people, you know, who are listening here, Brad is actually one of our clients, and we built an appointment-setting bot for his flooring company. Essentially, you know, you can text their toll-free number any time of the day, and then the AI will converse with you, answer any product-related questions you have, and then set you up in your appointment and then get you—

That's the real interesting thing is to be able to train them. Which I found really interesting. I just, when I first started looking at that, I was thinking, okay, well, all this data is out there, all the information is out there. So this, you know, it's in the ether and this brain of whatever the, you know, the AI is, is gonna be able to do all this stuff. But it's not necessarily that way. It's that you can upload all of your information and everything that you have and any business owner or any company They have a lot of information. Once you really start looking at it, you don't realize how much stuff that you have, you know, until you start going through it and you're like, oh my goodness, I have a lot of data here. And it could even be old training that we've done with our team or stuff that we've produced for the general public, for, you know, our consumers. All that stuff, you can upload it and then let it kind of let the AI go through and filter it all out to be able to have a conversation. And you can train it. What I thought was really, really interesting is being able to train it to talk like a person instead of talking like a robot, like we were saying.

Right, right. Absolutely. Yep, yep. And then as you're, you know, like, what I guess, like, you know, a lot of business owners, they don't even know where to start with AI. Like, what, you know, and what made you think like this was like a valuable investment? And then how did you make that decision to investigate like know, what's possible with AI and then to make, you know, make the investment into this technology?

You know, for me, it's being, it's getting outside of my box and getting outside of the industry. And this is how we met is I was in a mastermind group. So going to those mastermind groups, I meet people that are in totally different industries and people that are in tech and people that are in social media and people that are in digital marketing, people that are all kinds of industries. And being able to see how other people are using AI and any kind of technology in their businesses that are not in, not from my industry, it's really what opened my eyes to that stuff because I was like, oh my goodness, there's a lot of really, really cool stuff out there. And I would highly recommend that to anybody. Join something to where you are outside of your comfort zone and outside of your industry because people have a tendency to pigeonhole themselves in a, in a, whatever industry that they're in. And I can go to any one of my industry meetings and I know everything that they're, that they're doing there. I, I teach a lot of those classes. I can go and I can— I'm the guy that's up in the front. But when you go to other things outside of your box, it really opens your eyes. And that's, that's how, that's how I came about it. And that's how I came about even, even like HighLevel. That's how, um, Kasim is the one that introduced me to HighLevel. And I'm, I'm like, this is great, you know. So it's, it's just It's educating yourself and letting other people help you.

Right, right. Speaking of HighLevel, are you— so you've obviously white-labeled that. And then do you have one different account for each of your flooring companies? Like, how are you structuring it?

Right, right. We have a sub-account for each of our divisions. And what we're doing right now, because we're in the beginning stages of this too, this was 4th quarter of last year when we actually started putting it into place. So our— we've got the white label system all done, and by 2nd quarter of this year, we'll actually launch and go out to it. I've got a beta group that's ready to go and start testing, but I want to have all my ducks in a row and all of our testing done internally first. So we're— that's what we're doing right now, and it's, it's, it's really, really cool because it's, it, it's going to get rid of at least 5 different pieces of software for us. You know, all the, you know, things that, things that we've used in the past, Podium, ClickFunnels, you know, our CRM tool, all those now combined into one thing. So, so much, so much better. But it's, it is a massive program though. So it's a, it's definitely a learning curve, but it's, but it's easy. You know, it is very functional and very intuitive. So it's easy to do. It's just, it does so much.

Yeah, I guess that brings me to my next question. It does so much. What are you specifically using it for? Because it does like 100 different things, not exactly.

So the CRM was the start. So our customer relationship management tool to be able to have, and it switched it, we're switching from an industry-specific product over to to the high-level product and to be able to track all of our customer interactions and to automate some of that. So that's another part of almost like AI, but it's just the automation stuff where it stays in touch with them instead of us having to manually do it. Everything that we've done has been a manual process in the past. Our industry as a whole is pretty not tech savvy. So even the software companies that are out there for the industry, are years behind, I feel. Um, one of, one of our main ones, our, our ERP system, so our accounting system, um, they got bought out by a large company. So they've— they're rolling out something. It's gonna take like 2 years for them though to roll out. And I, I believe by the time they roll it out in 2 years, they're gonna— they're still gonna be 10 years behind, you know. So it's one of those things. So I wanna, I wanna do business with people like HighLevel, which are on the cutting edge, and they're always They're always coming out with new stuff.

Right. Investing and coming up with new stuff. Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then I'm just curious how you're reselling it because you and I had a conversation before. You're also going to resell it to other flooring companies as well. So are you customizing that for—

So we have a— if you're not— some people probably aren't familiar with HighLevel, but it has a snapshot. So the snapshot is basically the process of how you, how you go through your workflow, how you do your, do your business. So we're, we've set all that stuff up. That's the testing part that we're doing right now to make sure everything works correctly the way that, the way that we want it. And then we could take that and resell that to people in our industry. And instead of having it be 100% customized, which we could customize it for every, every, every other flooring dealer. But I think most people are probably like me where if somebody brought something to me and it was already done, right? Boom, you can plug and play. And this is what it does and this is how it interacts with your team and this is how it interacts with your customer or your client, then it's much, much easier. So from a selling standpoint, excuse me, from a selling standpoint, I think that's the way that, that's the progression for us.

Yeah, yeah. Let's dive in a little deeper into that. Like, let's say specifically for the flooring industry, right? What kind of things would people be looking for and how did you like customize those snapshots?

So ours is the workflow. So from the time— so from— I'll use the retail side of our business for this, right? So retail is business to customer. So the consumer for a house or a condo or whatever, not commercial, like I was talking earlier, like about hospitals and stuff like that, that's a whole different type of deal. So the retail side of our business would be we're advertising however we're advertising, whether it's digital or whether it's television or whether it's traditional newspaper or whatever we're driving, we're trying to swing the door, right? We're trying to get people to come into the store. So it's that interaction from as soon as they've made contact with us. That's the good thing about HighLevel too, whether it's a phone call, Or whether it's an email or whether it's a web chat, it all gets— it goes right into HighLevel. So you can create, turn them into a lead right away. So if they call, for instance, they're in conversations, we convert it to a lead. We've got their phone number, we've got their name, we've got the recorded phone call of them calling the store. And now we start building that, building that out. So now we have a workflow of we have to get them into our facility. To pick materials, they have to look at the look at the product, right? So they come in store to look at the product. So the salesperson walks through that. We call it peeling the onion, figuring out what they want. But all that information goes in there, and then we have another step where we have to go to their we have to go to their home because we have to measure it physically measure to be able to build the the estimate properly. We can't just say, oh, your house is approximately this big. We have to know exactly what it is because. Every house is different, right? Even if even if two neighbors have the exact same house, yeah. What's in that house could be different. They might have existing tile in one room, and this they might have vinyl in in the room in the neighbor's house. You know, so it's different when we're tearing it out. So that's our our step by step as to where they're at in the process. And then there's only three ways that we can deliver product. We either install it, customer either picks it up themselves.

And they do it.

Or we deliver it to them. So there's only 3 ways. So that's our steps of going through. We get them in the pipeline, we get them into the facility, we do a measurement on it, a proposal, and that's typically when we write the order is right there in the house. The estimator's on site, they measure it, they just change the quantities, and then we go to the delivery process. And then the last thing is follow-up, and that's that's a big thing that flooring dealers do not do is follow-up. They they're not making the phone calls. They're not sending text messages. They're not sending emails after the project is done. They're not asking for referrals, which we can do automatically right through high level. They're not asking for reviews, which we can do automatically through high level. They're not asking for after-sales service, like cleaning products or maintenance products, any of that type of stuff. Most of us are not doing that. So we can automate all that within HighLevel.

I see. I see. So it's building out that workflow of like, this customer, like adding tags, or I don't know how you're doing it, to say like, this customer ordered this and then they want Delivery where they want to pick up. And then, and then so just having that whole system in place where everything is, is on it.

And it reminds them, like, if they're getting a will call, so they're picking up at our facility, it will alert them, hey, you have product, you need to come pick it up. When would you like to schedule your pickup? Because in the past we would just, we would have the material sitting there for them, we package it up, And we just wait, you know, until they, until they come get it. And then it's just, it could be there for months. Yeah. Because some, sometimes people will impulse buy something and then they just wait to come get it, but we really want to get it moved out of our system into their, into their home where they can store it in their garage or store it wherever they want to store it. I want to get it out of mine because then we don't run into damage or loss or, uh, you know, missing a couple boxes of tile gets taken off of a pallet for some reason and then they don't have enough. And then it's a discontinued product by the time they're putting it in, and then they, and then they don't have enough, and I can't get more, you know. So it's, it's, it's making us way more efficient.

Got it. Got it. That makes so much more sense. So, as you're, you know, like, what made you going, taking the conversation from high level back to AI here? When you're looking at your, you know, overall processes, how did you figure out, like, which areas could be improved with AI? As, like, you know, you're the strategy guy. And then so how did you look at which areas you were going to do with your business in terms of AI from a high strategy level perspective?

We were looking at kind of the low-hanging fruit. So the things that are easily implemented, I mean, like everybody's used ChatGPT, you know, even when I first started with that, like going in, going way back to them and, you know, helping me write emails and helping me write documents for my team and, you know, helping me explain things better. I call it word vomit where I would just type random stuff in there, getting it out of my brain onto a piece of paper, but letting it kind of rewrite stuff. So that was the first step, right? But now we're looking at, there's so many things like we're, I've got Cheat Layer open on my computer right now that's got all of these different, like, social media stuff, things that where it can produce things. Um, it's just a matter of being open-minded, I think.

Yeah. And then—

I'm not necessarily going, hey, I would love to have an AI for this. I'm not at that point yet. I'm seeing what's out there and then saying, how can we take that and put it into our business? It's spending the time and it can be a rabbit hole. I mean, you could spend days, hours and hours and hours looking at stuff. But it's being able to research and find stuff that's already available. Um, that's not things that you have to develop, you know, that you can take and tweak and put it in, put it into your business.

So, right. So just talking to different business owners in different niches, um, joining masterminds and then figuring out what's out there. And then you're thinking about like, oh, maybe this would look, uh, be great in my business too.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah.

And that's, and like I said, you mentioned the mastermind again, and I said that earlier. I'm in, I'm in 2 different mastermind groups that are just awesome. I mean, I can't emphasize that enough to people to get outside of that zone that you're always in, because we have a tendency to put ourselves in this box, you know, and really open your eyes to what's what's out there and what other people are doing, there's some really, really cool stuff, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you were talking, so in the beginning of this conversation, you were talking about building a proposal system using AI. Can you talk about like how you envision that to be done? Like, is it a custom app? Is it a no-code app? Or is it just, you know, a GPT?

It's actually, it's actually a company that's actually built— they're building this out. That was my conversation with them. They built out the part that'll do the estimates and the room by room.

Yeah.

So now their next level, they've already done it for— so like, I'm in the trades, I'm in flooring. They've done it for plumbing already where they can import— they import the blueprint, it imports the schedule sheets, and it actually tells the plumber all the parts and pieces that they need to order. Oh wow. Yeah, they don't have to go through and manually figure all that stuff out. So flooring is one of the ones that's on their list. They're not there yet, but we've committed to them to go ahead and test the actual takeoff engine of it to be able to put the blueprints in there so we can just figure out the quantities quickly like that. And then the next step will be, okay, now, so that would be, it'll figure out all the quantities, but then you have to manually Tie that together with pricing and everything. So there, that's when they get to the to the to that to our product category, then that's going to be really cool. But like I said, they already did it with plumbing. He was showing me a plumbing deal where they just scanned it all in, and it within like thirty seconds, it spit out a parts list. I was like, this takes hours and hours and hours for somebody to do on a major project. You know, it's. Pretty cool, you know?

Isn't it crazy how far technology has come?

Stuff that I would've never thought, you know? I remember years ago I said, I mean, this is 8, 9, maybe 10 years ago. I said, I was like, wouldn't it be really cool to have a device that, like, for us, that we could just set in the middle of a room and it would, like, scan the whole room and create, like, a 3D image, a model? Of the room.

Now it can.

And it can. That's stuff that's out there. You know, it started with cameras being able to go 360, and you could take pictures of the room, but now you can actually create a digital image of the room. And then the next step for me would be that, then how do you put product on it? You could say, hey, I want to— this whole wall needs to be tile. You would just say, put tile on that wall, and it would boom, it would put the tile on there. And you could even impose We have it with our on our website. We have this where where people can upload a picture of their home, of whatever room, whatever space they're doing, and then they select the product that they want from us, and it puts that product in their in their house so they can see what that product looks like in their home. We we have that now. I mean, five years ago, you would have never thought that that would have been something that that was out there. And I think from a consumer base, people are getting more and more comfortable using that type of technology too. So we have that in our, in our showrooms as well. We have a, um, through one of our, through one of our memberships, we have a proprietary product, um, where customers can bring it, they can from their phone, they can upload it right to a big screen that we have, and they can take all of our products that we have in there and do it right in the showroom too. So we can They can actually physically look at the product and then look at it in their home because they've already taken pictures of their home before they came into the showroom.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I remember when I bought my first home, well, the one I'm living in right now, the builder was like, okay, show me all these small samples of tiles, backsplashes, cabinet colors, floor colors. And I was like, wouldn't it be great if I can just see what that looks like instead of Taking this like small square and then like using my imagination to imagine what it would look like. That's, that's really tough. Like, I'm like, I'm committing hundreds and thousands of dollars to this house and I don't even know how it's going to turn out to look like.

It's difficult because traditionally, like carpet samples, for instance, they'll have one big piece and then you turn it over and it's got all the colors on the back and then sometimes they're like this big. We try to make them so that they're bigger and bigger, but they're they're tiny. You really can't you really can't see much. But if you if you pull that into a screen and show it into into a home, and when you're building a new house, you already have the blueprints. You have all that stuff, you know. So you could you you could go to the model homes, take pictures of the model homes, and then change all the the you know because if you have all the standard floor plans for somebody, now you can show them what it looks like. Right, right in front of them. And the— and I told you our, our ERP company got bought out, and they got bought out by a software company that they also do the cabinets. And, and the, the 2020 software is the cabinet, so it's, it's the, the visual part of it for doing cabinets as well. So these companies are consolidating now for like all home interiors from a software standpoint. So I see that being a big You know, a boom for all of us.

Sure, sure, sure, sure, sure. I just thought of a question back into the high level. I mean, you have the selling portion, do you? And the installation portion, do you also have a maintenance portion? So do you have an automation set up for people who were like, I wasn't happy with the way that, you know, this floor was installed or something like that as well?

So like, like service, like customer service to go back in and Repairs or fixes or any of that stuff. Right now we have that in another piece of software, but we will eventually migrate that into HighLevel too. So that's in our scheduling system that's outside of— and we use monday.com a lot for a lot of stuff because it's so— I was a spreadsheet guy, so I was always building whether it was Google Sheets or or Excel. We had spreadsheets for everything and we've migrated most of that to anything that we don't have software for. We just created our own stuff within monday.com because it's so versatile and easy to use and create dashboards. So it's visual. So like with our service stuff, we know we can look at it visually. We were just like, I was just in a meeting yesterday. We were looking at that stuff. So we've got graphical representations of how many services that we have to go back on. What types of services that they are, so I could see eventually where AI would be able to mine that stuff for me and kind of like I said pick the low hanging fruit and say you need to train on this. You're having reach, you're having to go back and restretch carpet because guys aren't stretching it properly. So it costs a lot of money to go do that stuff, but we maintain that forever. We do that for our customers like we do free stuff for. For the life that you have it. Like, a lot of people have like a 1-year or 2-year warranty on things, on labor. Ours is lifetime. If, if anything that we did, if there's a problem with it because, because of something that we did, we'll just come back and fix it, you know. We'll take care of that to create, you know, good, uh, relations with our customers and repeat, repeat referral business. But I can see that becoming more, more automated and even reminding people like that they need to Like carpet, for instance, every 12 to 18 months they need to have it cleaned. We don't do, we don't do professional cleaning, but I could see developing a relationship with a qualified cleaner and being able to say, hey, it's time to clean your carpet. Per your warranty, you need to, you need to maintain, you know, every 12 to 18 months. Talk to them about the, the benefits of having hot water extraction or whatever. And they could have a schedule link that would go right to somebody else that maybe we would have a referral or affiliate program with them or something. You know, I can see that happening really, really well. Wow.

Wow. Wow. So you're going to build like basically your own custom extensions to your HighLevel and then you're not going to tell people it's HighLevel, you know?

No, no, it's just ours is FloorWise. We've private labeled it as FloorWise. So that's our consulting side of our business. So it'll be floorwise.app is our So we have fourwise.com as our company and then fourwise.app will be the— is the— we're going through the process with the Google Play Store and Apple Store right now to actually have it labeled and be able to download it.

Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Awesome.

Instead of the HighLevel lead connector, it'll be our private—

Yeah. Your private.

Yeah.

Got it. So a couple of questions here, not about the app, but Just about, you know, you've got what I want to say, like 50 people working for you. Am I right?

85. Yeah, between 75 and 85 depending on the season.

And yeah, they got a lot of— you got a really big team and a lot of them are— it's in a very traditional industry, flooring. So you are very open-minded to trying AI and getting on the latest tech. How do you motivate your team to also be on that same page or get them to start?

I've surrounded myself with what I believe are world-class quality people. And we have a lot of team members that have been with us a long time, like 20+ years. We had 3 people retire last year that have been with me until retirement. Like 3 guys literally retired. You know, it's the first time I've ever had that where I've had multiple people retire in one year. But they were all 20-plus years that they had been with the company. So all of our main people have been with us a long time. And one of the things I've always told people from the beginning is there's only one thing consistent about our business, and that's change. I am willing to change anything. And I'm also willing to— and I use this as an analogy in our executive meeting. We were talking about it this week. I said, you know, with change, I would come in and say— this is back in the day— I would come in and say, I need— we need to move that display 2 feet. I think it would look better over here.

So we move it.

And I go, I also— so that's change. But I also keep in mind that I might walk in 2 days from now and go, you know what, I was wrong.

I'll make—

I made a mistake. Let's move it back. It was better over there. So the only thing consistent about our business is change, and we're always evolving, and we're always looking for newer, better ways to do stuff and more efficient ways to do things. I'm not a status quo guy, and, and I think my, my team, we built that into our structure and our culture to where everybody's— just because we've always done it one way doesn't mean that's the best or the right way to do it. That's just the way we've done it. It's— there can be a— always be on the lookout for better, more efficient, more productive ways to do anything within our business. So that's just building the right team, I think, from my standpoint.

Absolutely, absolutely, building the right team. But I think as you're— we move forward into the future, you're going to realize some of your team members will be replaced by AI in the coming years, right?

I just had this conversation yesterday and I was saying, you know, us being in the trades, I don't see any of our tradespeople aren't going to be— the people that are actually performing the work aren't going to be replaced by computers and AI. But there's definitely going to be more efficiencies from a back office standpoint, you know?

Yes, for sure.

I could see a time like from accounting systems and things like that. That's where I'm super excited about stuff that to be able to have AI match invoices and be able to really communicate with our Our manufacturers with their product catalogs, which we're already doing that with product catalogs and putting them onto our website. But being able to where then it's just one person managing all of this stuff instead of actually doing the steps. You have to be more of a manager or a liaison or looking to make sure that everything was done the way that it needed to be done, but not physically doing it. So you might have 3 people physically doing it. Now you just got one person managing. You know, and that person might be a higher level person. They may, they might make 1.5 times as much as what your other 3 people made, but you got rid of 3. Now you're down to 1 and you're paying 1.5 instead of 3, you know?

Yeah.

So, yeah.

Yeah. I wanna explore that a little further with you. So how would you manage that as a leader? How would you manage that conversation to get rid of the 3 people, hire 1 person who is much, um, can manage the AI systems?

I think it'll go through attrition more than anything. I really do. For us, I don't see it being an overnight thing where it's like, oh, we've got this new software. I don't need 3 people, you know.

Right.

I think it's going to be, we're going to start implementing things, even though it's fast and furious on the— there's so much out there. I think the implementation process of a lot of this stuff is slower than— is actually slower than it's being developed. You know, the development side of stuff is fast. But the implementation side of it is slow and it has to be, you know, really to make sure that you're not screwing up your business and that people are properly trained.

Right, right, right, right, right. For sure, for sure. So I kind of see this ladder with the steps that you're taking. Like, first we built an appointment setting AI bot for you and then next you You know, you went out and you found software that could help people visualize a room and to see the flooring choices that is needed there and how much it would cost and how much you had to order, etc. And then the third step, you're now looking at the back office and seeing how you can tie invoices together with AI so that, you know, the whole thing is on automation. You can start replacing some of your back office.

Yeah, I think that's going to be huge for Everybody. And what happens, like, like, we're, we're a little bit— there's, there's definitely bigger companies than us, but there's a— most of them are a lot smaller, smaller than we are. So with those technologies, I can see the smaller companies, it's the, it's the owner or the, that typically wears all these hats, right? So it's not necessarily that they're getting— they're not even going to get rid of people because it's them, you know.

It's just going to free up more of their time.

They're just freeing up time to be able to run their business or build their business instead of physically entering invoices and physically doing data entry. Now they have the ability to sell more or build more or make their business better.

Sure. I just got something in my eye here. So speaking of that, most operators, especially in these local spaces, they tend to just stay as a solopreneur where they have 1 or 2 trade people helping them. You actually grew it into a pretty fair-sized business. I call it something that into my eye here. So what was the mindset shift that got you there? And then what changes did you have to make in terms of structuring your corporation to get to—

It was big and it was giving up control. And letting people, but this was just goes back to just employment stuff, letting people training them and letting people do their job and not doing the job for them. You know, because it started, it was just me. It was me. I was the only, I was the only person. And then as you start adding people, you have to train them and you have to be willing to let them fail and let them succeed as is a. Is a big thing. And they, as long as the outcome is where you want it to be, the process of getting there, you know, we have our systems and everything, but the process of getting there, they make, they might make a decision a little differently than I would. But as long as the outcome is what we want, I don't care. So I had to, I had to get to that point because I wasn't that guy. I was that, and that was just a maturity thing. I was, I was the guy that was like, I'm the only one that knows how to do it. Right. And once you figure out that you're not the only one that knows how to do it, that other people can actually do it as good or better than you can, then that's when you can build and scale and grow and be more successful.

That is such a big problem that I see literally every entrepreneur, um, get stuck in. So how did you, like, was it more of a mindset shift or was it just a lot of documentation so you can kind of get what's in your brain out on paper?

For me, it was a mind— it was a mindset. It was changing how I operated internally within my brain and how I interacted with my team as I was building the team. The documentation has come way later. I mean, we're deep into documenting stuff right now. We call them— some people call them SOPs. We call them working procedures. But we use Monday.com for that where we have Every position in the company, and then we have all of the tasks that somebody does, and then whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, you know, however or whenever it's needed. And then we detail how to do the task. And what what we do with our team is we we have them build it. The person that's doing that job, they build it, and somebody else has to approve it. But they build it because we tell them build it like. You're not here tomorrow, and I have to sit down and do your job. Okay, I knew how to do your job ten years ago, but I haven't done it. I haven't done it in ten years. So I need a detailed list of how to sit down and do it. Or if I hired somebody off the street, if they were computer savvy, they could actually work their way through it with screenshots and videos and be able to. Now they wouldn't be as efficient. They probably wouldn't get everything done, but at least it's documented on on on how to. What the processes are, and the crazy thing is when you do that in your business and you make people line out all the stuff that they do, then you'll start looking at people and going, holy crap! This guy has way too much stuff on their plate, or this person has nothing on their plate. You know, if they only put five things down, really, that's all you do. Then they'll start coming up with, oh no, I do this, I do this, I do this, I do. Okay, well, document all of it, all of it. So, but to go back, for me building the team, it was a mind shift set first of all. And then documentation came later. If I was doing it again, I would document from the beginning, but we just didn't.

Sure, sure. A couple questions here. So I think a lot of people, the reason that they are so scared of giving up control is because they're scared of getting fucked over. Like if someone steals your stuff and copies your business model and just runs with it. Because they have all of your information, so they feel that they have to protect that information. I mean, how did you structure your business in a way so that you give people enough freedom, but you're also not getting, you know—

You know, and I've had people, I've had that. I've had people leave and they usually go to a competitor. I've had people go and start their own businesses and compete against me. And, and, and, and in the beginning, I was, I was really upset, hurt, pissed, you know, hurt, uh, all the, about all those emotions and feelings. But now I'm like, okay, hey, if, if you're gonna do it, go ahead, go do it. They've all failed. None of them have ever, they, they, they, they, they've cost me money because they, but over time they end up failing. And, and we've had people that leave. They go spend a few years doing what they think they want to do, and then they they try to come back because it's comfort, and we have we have everything in place. They think that they know their position, but they don't know the entire company, right? So, and I've had it from from techs, from installers leave, go start their own business, try to compete against me, but they don't know the business. They know how to install, but they don't know the selling side of it. They don't know the business side of it. And then I've had Salespeople leave that went and tried to start their own business, but they don't know the installation side. They don't know the back office functionality of it, you know. So they're just, they're thinking that they can go as a solopreneur and that they're gonna go hire 5 or 6, 7 people and then they're gonna, you know, compete with us right off. And you'd have to be well funded first of all. But yeah, that's just something that you have to deal with. Um, um, from like, I'm in, I'm in Arizona, my business is there in Arizona. It's a right-to-work state. So it's not like I can hold them to like, we have non-competes, we put all that stuff in there. But if I ever sued somebody for it, I would lose because it's a right-to-work state. They have, they have the, they can go start whatever they want. They can't steal something that's proprietary. But we really don't have that much stuff that's, that's proprietary. It's things that are out there that we're using, like Like high level, they couldn't. They could go buy it, you know, if they wanted to resell it. Yeah, it's not my software, you know. It's not like they're gonna come take something that I've built and recode it, recode it for themselves, or use it for themselves, or whatever. But yeah, you just gotta be know that your business is successful for a reason, and when people leave, people leave. And and if they they take their stuff with you. I just keep moving forward. I don't have time to deal with that.

That's a great mindset, great mindset to be in. So as we wrap up here, my last question for you would be, what do you think is the key to your success? So many people have come and failed and they say entrepreneurship, there's like 9 out of 10 or probably 95% of businesses, small businesses fail. So You know, I guess like if you could give one piece of, one or more pieces of advice to entrepreneurs, um, what would you say that would be?

Is to number one, be open, open to what's out there. And you don't know everything. People have a tendency to think that they know everything and you don't. There's, you have to let yourself learn from other people. And that's what will really make you successful is being able to take what other people— I always say I've never invented anything. I've just taken the best ideas from the people around me and implemented them better than they did. So if you can learn from other people and be a better implementer, you'll be able to grow. And like when I started, I started in 1993. I mean, I was a kid, you know, I was young. And the company that I had worked— I wasn't in the flooring business. I was in the turf care. So like we sold products to golf courses and Home Depot, you know, and Kmart back then into the garden centers and stuff like that. And the company that I worked at was public and I had stock in this company and they went bankrupt. So I still have the stock certificate in a frame in my office in Yuma. And I said, I'll never work for anybody again. I'll just work for myself. So that's how I ended up in the floor. I bought a little tiny floor covering store from a lady, and that's how I started. But it everything I did was I learned from other people because I didn't know the industry at all. So I had to learn from people that knew the industry. So I learned from reps starting, and then I learned from other dealers starting, and then I learned from people that have been around for a long time. And then as you build your business, I'm now I'm learning. Like stuff like just having conversations with you and talking about chatbots and stuff like that. I'm like, okay, that's something that I can take and I can implement, you know, not something that I had on, had on my radar at that time. But then it's like, oh, hey, yeah, let's do that, you know. So learning from other people and implementing better than others, I think is the best thing that I could, advice that I could give to any entrepreneur.

So huge. So huge. Doing more and then just like reading about it. I think so much. Yeah, yeah, I think that would be—

Like, I read a lot. Um, I don't read a lot, I listen a lot. I like— I love audiobooks, but I love to— and if I listen to an audiobook that I really like, then I buy the book and then I'll reread it, and then you really, really learn from it. But, but learning from people, you know, and having relationships with people, because then it's just like, yeah, I can— I could call you or I could text you, and if I have a question So much easier to have somebody that knows their whatever it is that they're a professional at. Somebody can ask me about flooring, I can give you the answers like that. Whereas if you had to go out and try to read a book on it or research it online, is the information that you're getting correct or is it bad information? So it's interpersonal relationships are key. Networking.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Brandon, and sharing all your, all your wisdom here with everyone.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.