Running into the Fire

All right, let's talk about the one that's. That's really passionate for you, the Maddie Farr Foundation. Tell us the story behind that, Mr. Farr.

I lost my daughter two and a half years ago. She fought her whole life. She had a very rare disease, White Sutton syndrome. And it was so rare, we didn't even have a diagnosis until she was 6. And there wasn't a name until she was 8. And she passed away before she was 10. So through that, you know, I had a hole in my heart that I felt like we could do more to help others that were in the same situation. And, you know, it's not just hard on the kids. It's hard on families. You know, a lot of families are all in. They didn't have the means, maybe, that we had to help support that little girl. And we wanted to be able to do things to help contribute to children with special needs in their.

So what does it look like? How does somebody get involved with. Because first things first. What's the web address for Maddie Far Foundation? So. Because I want to donate. Okay, you guys are on my channel. Yeah.

So. Maddiefarfoundation.org it took over a year to get the 501 3C, which was kind of an uphill battle dealing with the government and whatnot, and just something I wasn't really used to. We kind of. We've done two golf tournaments. Now we're starting scholarship. One thing I did with my daughter was swimming every Friday. She could never swim after eight years of swim school, but she loved it, and it was more of a safety thing. So we're starting a swim scholarship program, too, for special needs that we're hopefully going to be launching soon.

That is. That is. So first off, super sorry. Like, man, I couldn't imagine going through that. But I noticed this about you guys. Like, you turn these things that are. They're awful situations into something that is really pretty amazing.

From everything. You know, it's, It's. It's.

You can.

You can deal with it head on. It's kind of one thing that we both specialize in with. You call it running to the Fire. You can deal with everything head on, or you can let it sit on the sidelines and it builds up.

I think I just found the title of the podcast, Running into the Fire. Great title for this podcast. And it applies so much to our world. Right? Like, especially as entrepreneurs, you're doing it in this. How you give back and how you keep taking these things that are challenges and obstacles in our lives and flipping them upside down and turning them into opportunities. But even in our business, we got to run the fire every day. A homeowner that's upset, a person working for us that may not have done what we needed them to do that day. The opportunity presents itself and we get a storm or something like that, we're constantly feel a little bit like firefighter. Right. I think that's a great way of really kind of putting what we do together. I got a couple more questions. First off, and I'm going to say this, and they didn't ask me to do this, but I'm going to do. Anybody listening to this podcast, I want you to go to maddiefarfoundation.org and I don't care what you donate, just donate something. This is the opportunity that we have. We get one shot at this life. Let's do the right thing whenever we have the opportunity. And I think special needs kids, that is a great way to give back. I think that's something that was actually like in the Bible, least the last and lonely. Serve the poor, serve the underserved, serve the ones that are having the biggest difficulties in life. And you guys are doing a great job of that. Surf instructor like that. Like, what in the world, like, is that like a job like you? That's a job.

It was. It was actually. Yeah. So. So I remember I'm over here on the east coast of Florida and Cocoa beach, essentially. And basically. And so, yeah, so I actually had a friend who had a surf school. A lot of the hotels will have surf schools behind them. And what I noticed is, like, they said, hey, would you help us out with some surf lessons? We got a lot of kids today, but, yeah, sure. And so that's how I kind of started. I was working for someone else.

And what.

What I found is that they were calling me directly for me to teach their kids how to surf. And the craziest thing. And I was 23 years old at the time, and there was a single mom, and she had three kids, and she said, I want to go to Costa Rica and I want to take my kids to Costa Rica. And you speak a little bit of Spanish and you're great with them in the water. I'll pay your way. Would you come with me? I said, absolutely. So we go there, and then the first day, we found the perfect beach, because a lot of Florida is just long sand, but here you had to find certain spots and bays and coves and stuff. Found the surface spot, perfect spot. And then we actually got stuck in the road there. So the next day we wanted to go back to that spot we stopped. And then the place that we stopped at happened to be a surf camp. He was looking for a surf instructor, asking, what are you doing with this mom and her three kids in Costa Rica? And so I actually got a chance to live down there for a while and came back and opened up my own surf school in Cocoa Beach. Bartender. That night, it was a really good life, but it was extremely seasonal. Even though it is Florida, it's warm all the time. You have the summers and you had spring break time. Outside of that, kids had tennis and soccer and things like that that they were, you know, would take up their weekends and stuff. So I really enjoyed. And I met my wife. You know, I was 29 at the time, and so that's when I got into roofing. And that was nine years ago.

Hold on a second. You met your wife at surf school?

Actually, she was in town. She was in town for a surf contest. And that's kind of how we had met.

Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. You caught the right wave.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. So here we are, we just had our first daughter. She's 10 weeks old as pretty cool.

So, funny story. The only place I've ever surfed in my life was in Costa Rica in a place called Tamarindo. I don't know if you ever heard it. Okay, so now we were staying at this really swanky resort, and everybody had gone to do surf school the day before, and everybody went out and. And they weren't doing it the next day, but I was golfing the day and I'm gonna. Golf's going to be priority for me. So I'm trying to figure out how to go surfing, and there's a couple other guys that missed out. And, like, there's a wall between the resort and the beach. And once you go outside that, it's like, Katie, bar the door. It's a public area. There's everything and every one that you can imagine out there. People selling beads and blankets and massages. And there's a dude talking about surf, surfing. I went, hey, I want to go surfing. He goes, well, meet me at 7am we got you. All right, sounds great. Did no more checking than that. So 7am I walk out. Sure enough, he pulls up. He pulls up and like this just beat up, just terrible Mitsubishi Montero with some surfboards on top of it, opens his door, smoke comes boiling out of it. I'm like, whoa, this might. This might not be A good trip. The other two look at me and they're like, man, this is gonna be great. And he took us out. We had an amazing day. It was a lot of fun. But that's my, my surf story and I'm not very good at it. Like, that's just for whatever reason, surfing is not my jam, but I have a lot of respect for it. One last thing. Like Florida, right? I, I, we have lots of customers in Florida. I love Florida. I've been there many times. I'm kind of a west coast guy. Like a Clearwater beach and that kind of area. Like, I like that area. But Florida has a reputation. Are you familiar with this reputation that Florida has? Florida?

You mean like the Florida man on the news?

Yeah, like Florida man. What I would like to end our podcast with today. This is the only thing prepped and I. And when I say prepped, I. As I looked at Winter Park, Florida, where you're located, two things came to mind. Gotta talk about Florida man. And have you seen the movie Stolen Identity? Okay, you gotta go watch Stolen Identity. The gal that steals the identity is from Winter Park, Florida. Everything starts coming up Winter Park, Florida. So Florida man. What's your best Florida man story? You gotta have one, right? Like you're in contracting. There's gotta be something crazy that's happened.

Something that we dealt with in house.

Like. Yeah, well, maybe not one of your employees, but maybe a customer. Maybe something like. I got all I got, Jim.

We're all pretty, we're all pretty normal here, dude.

So, so everybody that's listening, if you've never heard of this before, go to Twitter or any other, like Google search and put in your birthday and then follow it with Florida man. So the date Florida man. You'll be shocked at what comes up on the stories with Florida man. So I thought you guys might have a story. No stories far.

There's been a lot of. Any one in particular? One that's standing out? Not really. I mean, you know, there's always the naked guys running around on the streets.

There was one in the back of my screen there about 20 seconds ago. If you. That's all it is, man. We're desensitized.

Just part of everyday, everyday business. All right, last thing. Promise. I'm a contractor. I'm trying to figure it out. I've been at it, maybe I'm just starting or maybe I've been at it a while and I haven't been able to break those barriers. Going from the six figure to seven or seven figures to Eight. What were some of the biggest challenges and what would you give as advice to overcome those that you wish you would have done sooner in your business?

Letting some things go or delegating to others? I was one who would have somebody do something, and I would do it behind them a lot, you know, so, you know, you think nobody can do it as good as you, but you realize Even if it's 90% of what you thought it was going to be, it's better than you're able to get to more things. You know, you're able to get onto something else. So you got to trust people to do their job. You got to put faith in your employees and make sure you got good ones. It's really getting good people has been our story. We've just gotten good people. We attract them. We seem to just continue to get good people.

What do you attribute to attracting those good people?

Well, our turnover is almost zero. So when we have them, they don't, you know, they don't leave.

That's.

That's one thing.

Why don't they leave? Everybody else has such a problem with keeping people. There's no loyalty in our industry.

Kind of something to add here, and it's kind of a shout out to Brian Forrest. So, you know, being as being in the contractor side, you know, generally we feel that, like, distributors are here to serve us and manufacturing is here to serve us. But a little thing like Brian Farrell go in and, you know, get a $350 food truck and have it delivered to our distributor's office. Hey, guys, lunch is on us. So when the distributor hears about an estimator or a really good sales guy who's unhappy with his position, that's where it comes. And same thing in manufacturing. When they get an opportunity and you're like, hey, we really want your systems plus more, you know, whatever it is, they're naturally. They're attracted to us. So it's the. I don't know if you can see it on the shirt, but it says beef are contracting, building relationships. And I think Brian Farr has lived that through and through. And a lot of it's when no one's looking, and it's little things like that. No one knows that he gets a food truck every three months to the distributor.

But I see one thing, too, is we become true friends with them. You mentioned earlier about being friends with your markers. It's everybody that we work with and every. Every vendor relationship. We're loyal until somebody gives us a reason not to be or we got to check them. We're not. We're not price shopping five people and picking the lowest bid. We're riding with somebody for long term. And through that long term, you grow and build good relationships.