Episode #793 - How To Build A 9-Figure Business Empire with Stephen Scoggins

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Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

How big was your construction company and what area did it spread into? Was it residential? How did that evolve? I'm sure you started project and kind of it out, right?

Yeah, I mean it was started with a trash pile on a residential construction site where I built my scaffolding and went to work, did my first four or five houses by myself. So I started in the residential new construction category. That briefly led into remodeling, that later led into commercial. So by the time I actually exited and retired from the business this last year, we had our best year, had been just under nine figures and we had also been in commercial about probably about 40%, 60% residential. And that was kind of like the, the general breakdown. We operated in multiple states, we had 400 plus team members. When you factor in some of the 1099 help and stuff that we had across multiple states, it was a pretty sizable organization for a high school dropout.

You know, in the grand scheme of things, absolutely amazing. Now how did that, that, was that by design or did you just have a grab a tiger by the tail and business came in and you know, you're just, you're just growing and growing, you know, at this state, you know, from state to state to project to project. How did you, what was your thinking as you're going through that growth?

Well, I'll tell you what, I think this happens for a lot of entrepreneurs. When you first get started, the first five or 10 years, you're very tactical, like what needs to happen today to get a paycheck tomorrow. And I think a lot of businesses start off that way. Is it marketing, is it sales, is it activity? What is it? Somewhere along the way, if you, if you start to have enough pain in your business, you move from tactical thinking to strategical thinking.

Right.

So about midway through the game plan, I realized that I had to learn how to read a balance sheet and a P and L and an income statement. And when I could learn to read those things, all of a sudden now I could see what was actually going on in the business. Once I knew what was actually going on in the business, now I could actually laser focus on areas that needed improvements, whether that was me, the team or beyond. So I think it's the natural trajectory of any business to start at a tactical level. And then as you're growing in success and pain points. You will either become a strategical thinker and grow, or you'll stay a tactical thinker and stay stagnant. It will happen that way. I say all that to say that when I exited the business this last year, I never thought it was going to be as big as it. Big as it got. That was not the overall intention. My intention first, first and foremost was to feed myself and get some shelter. So I knocked that out. Then it was to get out of debt. Then it was to start to go to maybe. Maybe go on a vacation once a year. Right. So there was a lot of personal goals that were driving business goals. And then somewhere along the lines, I discovered that I wanted to create a legacy that outlived me, just like Steve did with me. So I started teaching my team. I was joking around with people all the time. They asked me what. What led to the success of the construction company. I say it's because it was construction company and on the surface, but it was actually a personal development company underneath. So we would have team meetings where we're talking about the books we're reading. We'd have keynote. We'd bring keynote speakers in, I'd send people to seminars, we would host seminars. That aspect of continually trying to grow your team from the inside out organically grows your business from the outside, you know, so that goes from a tactical strategical. And now you've got total team alignment. And now this is how this, this is how the business actually grew to the state in which it was before I exited. I say all that to say that I didn't plan it, I just. I just went after it. I got after it on a consistent basis and. And good things happened with a lot of pain along the way.

That comes back to one of my principles, which is you focus on growth and then the problem areas will reveal, you know, the next problem you need to fix is going to show up, you know, and don't worry about the problems you're going to be fixing two, three years from now. Fix the one that's going to be the biggest annoyance, you know, for the next month and hold you back from, you know, the next. And pain in construction has, as I remember, has a lot to do with missing deadlines, not having supplies, not having personnel or personnel. Disappointing. You are people not, you know, supervisory people not paying attention to you and not doing it. I use you'll. You'll. I think you'll find this funny. I used to carry around again. North side of Atlanta. We're building houses. I got so tired of arguing with the subs when I come back and they'd done something totally different than what I, you know, we had.

Yeah.

Design, planned, drawn. I just got to where, you know, and then there's a big debate. It's better like this. You know, it's better, you know, and then you, you gotta debate it and then find out. So I got to the point where I just carried around a 10 pound sledge and a chainsaw in my truck and if I could just break it.

Loose and start over.

If I showed, if I showed up and they built a, you know, a big monstrosity either out of mace or any out of wood, I'd either take out the 10 pound sledge and just. I wouldn't say a word. I'd just knock it out and say, do it like I told you the last time or I'd go in there and cut it out with a chainsaw. Because, you know.

Yeah.

You know, I got tired of the debates. But their pain comes up very quickly because you have deadlines in construction and you know, you have inspectors coming in that is going to make sure you hit the right things. What kind of pain that you run into as a young guy that you can remember the earliest type pain things that you had to run into and deal with that. Cause you know, that caused you to grow. You know, get serious. I'm going to grow, I'm going to get better. Or you know, this, you know, I don't want to deal with this the rest of my life.

Yeah. I think the greatest mistake I ever made in building a business was trying to build a business without building myself. I say all that to say that about four or five, six years in, I started hiring on staff that has cfo, CEO, these different acronyms behind their name. Now these people I was bringing in intensified my insecurity because they were qualified to be in those roles. But yet as the founder, the quote unquote CEO, I wasn't trained how to do any of that stuff. Right, Right. So you, you find yourself shooting down really great ideas, mistreating really good people because of insecurities or because of. You don't want to let them know. You don't. You don't know what you don't know. Right. One thing I would say to any CEO founder is I would rather you or inspire you or invite you to go ahead and admit where you struggle to your management team and let your management team backfill in those areas and hire as such. So if you know you're not really good with the, the, the Excel spreadsheets and the details. Hire someone it is that you can trust and is reliable. I had so many things around my business outside of the things that you already mentioned, the construction, field supplies and subcontractors and all that. Because that's, that's true for all businesses. So much of my struggles in business dealt with me being in my own way.

Really? Really? Yep.

Not being prepared, not taking enough time to make an important decision. So being in a rush, not letting someone go when they really needed to be let go, not hiring someone of higher caliber and, and keeping and holding on to somebody that they with for. Well, he's been with me for 10 years. Right. You know, because you don't want. But the reality is, is the, the company is a lot like a child. A baby, if you will. If you don't feed the baby the right nutrient nutrients, the baby is not going to last.

Yeah.

Your business is the same way. So getting accustomed to making the hard decisions that you must make as a founder and a CEO on a consistent basis, but making them in wisdom is vital to any business success. Which is why I say a lot of my problems were self induced, self, self inflicted gunshots, if you will.

Yeah, right.

You know, how I handled my team, how I handled my finances. I was really good with clients and customers. I could sell like nobody's business. I could create the deals and get all that stuff going. But you still have to fulfill the obligation if you're gonna have a successful company. Yeah. And if your team is not ready to fulfillment and you're leading them poorly in the fulfillment cycle, then you're gonna get yourself into trouble. So those are like probably the big ones for me. Yeah.

It's like you have to have two things. That's why the ability to say no is so important in leadership in the sense that everybody's got a great idea and once you get going and get popular, people will, business will line up. So you have these opportunities, but you've got to evaluate. If you're in charge, you've got to evaluate. Do we have the capacity to execute? You know, now we've got an idea, now we got a new project. Possibly. You know, I use the example of like when Coca Cola had the opportunity to move into communists, you know, into China, you know, billions of people, you know, great, the door opened. If they did not have the management team in place to be able to move over there, they could have taken advantage of that opportunity. They could have said they would.

Sure.

But it takes years to get those people in place. And so that was the sign of good management, that they could open that door and they could move in. And so that's why it's really instructive what you were doing with building your management team and doing all these extra things and leadership development thing because whether you knew it or not, you were creating the groundwork for future growth. But I hear that you sold that business or you got out of that business, which I can understand because construction is a morning, noon and night, relentless. You can't get away from a thing.

As I remember, especially when it gets that size. Yeah, for sure.

And so the thing is that I can understand you. There's only a period of time that you can be a professional athlete and there's only so many times see the average, you know, On a Fortune 500 company, the average term of a CEO is five years because it's intensive pressure cooker type thing. And so.

Well, and the reality is the business is going to need new levels of talent. So I'll tell you this much. One of my choices of why I chose to exit this last year and when I exited, I actually transitioned to my existing management team plus a new CEO. So I brought a CEO in that I knew very well, very established, very, very, very gifted in his, in, in that role. And I merged him with our internal team and as a result we have a very, a very nice plan that they're, that they're executing on already, which is great. But one of the primary choices of me deciding when to exit or when to retire from that particular business came down to a couple of key questions. Do I really love this? Right. Do I love this type of business? Am I really the most qualified to take it from nine figures to beyond? Okay, so a qualification aspects. Do I have the desire to do what's necessary to go to nine figures and beyond? And when I began to answer those questions, I began to discover that I had a very competent executive management team that missed. It was just missing a couple pieces. So I brought those pieces in. I didn't love the. I love the construction issue for what it did for me and the avenue pregraded for me. But it's not something that I enjoy managing now. I can, you know, invest in real estate and things of that nature. More of at a passive level, which is a lot more fulfilling to me because I still understand it in the business. Right. Thirdly, I have a passion and desire to basically take that 8 out of 10 businesses fail thing and turn it on its head. Yeah, I want to go in and I've done this a few times. I'll take a five or six figure entrepreneur, someone who's very early stage, someone I refer to as the everyday entrepreneur and I will pour into them just as Steve Meyrick did to me to help them create an eight figure, you know, business and beyond. And I have more excitement around that. I can make a bigger impact myself personally around that than anything else. Which is why I chose to do it. On the flip side I also realized because of the I wasn't as crazy about the business. I didn't realize while I could push it to nine figures and beyond, I didn't really have the desire to like really grit after it. I was doing a disservice to my team.

Right.

I think a lot of founders and CEOs will will stay on too long because it was their baby and they own it. You know, that kind of thing. And they'll end up running it into the ground or running it towards what I recall a declining factor because the reality is they don't. They're not really passionate about it.

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Isn't it amazing how the growth of a company is directly related to the passion of the leader? It's amazing. And that passion starts to fade. The growth it. It affects everything. It's amazing isn't it? You can't hide it.

100 if you're and here's the key point for anyone listening that owns a business. If you're apathetic about your business.

Yeah.

Find someone else to remember. Entrepreneurs, true entrepreneurs deal in extremes.

Yeah.

They're either all in or they're all out. They're. They very seldom can bridge the gap between both. And I don't want to discourage entrepreneurs who are trying to find the balance between their family and their and their lifestyle. What I would say is if you're not willing to go ahead and put calendar time with your family already in your calendar. Now, don't anticipate you're going to do it 20 years from now after you made a bazillion dollars.

Yeah.

By that time, the window has passed for you to actually connect with your family. In this new season that I'm going into now, which is, you know, I'm going to be building another business because that's what I do. I can't help myself and, you know, but now it's about what I want to do. So five, six hours a day I'm working and now I've got time with the family as an early stage entrepreneurs with an average business of 12 hours a day.

I think I'm interested in your thought on this. I believe the answer to the balance thing for an entrepreneur is that you work to the point where you have the opportunity to. Where when things come up in your life, like with your kids, you know, they, you know, they're in a sports thing and now they, you know, they're going to the nationals or their, you know, competition and like for that period of time, you're all in with your, that child, you know, for right now, I'm all in on that child, you know, keep the other things going. I'm not going to be there forever. I'm not, you know, as. But to be able to go all in as you choose and still, you know, still set things up to where it's not dependent on you running, you know, you reach that point, but where it's like a farmer when it's, when it's harvest time and the crops are ready, the hay's ready and the rains are coming, you better, you know, you better be able to go around, you know, 24 hours around the clock and get that hay in the barn, otherwise the whole year is wasted. And that kind of thing, you know, for a short blips, you're all in on whatever needs to be your attention, but you're not locked. You know, the thing is, when we get started, we're locked into that thing and you can't break free. But it's important to realize, you know, if you build a team, you do the things you're talking about and you get to where you can delegate and you can trust your people, then you can pull out for short periods of time and go all in on a family project or, you know, something with your, your spouse or your community, your church.

There's a major difference, major difference in going on an extended vacation and then choosing a half in half. Out lifestyle. A couple things. First of all, with your entrepreneurs, I would say for those of you who think if it's up to me or if it's, if it's to be, it's up to me, you are not building, you are not building a scalable business. A business can only be scaled as if it could be ran without you being there.

Right?

Okay. Long term, we can scale a business. The other thing too, on the family aspect, I heard this and it changed how I looked at the family dynamic. So I think this is important. Most business owners, sales teams, people that work in a business are more than happy to go the extra mile for their customers. They'll pick up the phone, they would never ignore them, they'll send the extra email, they'll write the handwritten card, they'll remember the birthdays, they'll, you know, give them a bonus when they buy something. This, that or the other thing. This, this comment changed my life as it relates to the family. I had a good friend of mine, he had built a. Not, he had built a, at the time, a nine figure business. He had gone through his fourth divorce, he had numerous children, and he said it finally dawned on him that the thing that he was missing was he never treated his family as if they were customers.

Ah.

So think about this. If your family is your customer, when your son's about to start his first grade, you know, write him a handwritten card, pay attention to his football games, pay attention to the birthdays, pay attention to the date nights. You know what I'm saying? So it's. For some reason we. One of the things is, and this is, I don't. This is a man thing. It's a man thing for me because it's something I had to break free from. I felt like that if I wasn't providing well, I wasn't doing well with my family. Okay. What I've discovered more than anything else is they need safety and security, sure, but they care more about the quality time than they do about the stuff and the trips. They would rather go hop in a car and go to a local beach or the local mountains and have a getaway weekend that doesn't really cost much of anything in the grand scheme of things than a trip to Maui.

Yeah, right.

I'm going to invite every entrepreneur, every business owner, every C suite professional listening to this podcast, watching the podcast to today, start to treat their family as if they're customers, as if you value their business, you value their time value, they've. You value them. And if you'll do that when you need them to show up. When you, when you're going to go through a, an extended season for 18 months, where you're going to be and you can sit down, say, hey guys, I got this big thing over here. This is what it could mean for us. It's an 18 month commitment. I'm going to go balls to the wall for this for 18 months. This is my game plan. They're going to be like, yeah, dad, let's go. Go get it, dad.

Right.

Right. It's a whole lot different than dad's not around again, where's. You know. And you have absent father syndrome. So. And I'm sure that happens in, in male and still male and female environment. I'm just, that's my frame of reference as a man is Right. Decide to treat your family as if they're customers and you'd be surprised at how much more initiative or inspiration you will get in building your thing. Because now you have the team buy in, you have the family buy in and you got your vision.

Yeah.

And now you're unified and now you can get after it. Yeah.

Because it's a matter of a cut. The difference with a customer and looking at them as a customer is customers can leave, they go somewhere else. And yeah. If you take the family for granted, like they're always going to be here. Why? Yeah, it's like going to. You can leave through. Huh.

You can leave too.

Right. And the thing is, you know, when, when things are. It's like people who live in New York City never go see to the Empire State Building or go to the Statue of Liberty because like, what's it going to leave? We can do it next year, we can do it the year after that. Then they never go see it. And that's kind of the way people treat their family. You know, I was like, well, it's easy to push them back. And how did you get going in other businesses? You know, know, because you're running like a maniac in your construction business. Seems like you were. You know, you're doing a lot of outside training and, and support and expansion. All of us. You know. Now you're looking glutton for pun, Steve. You're a glutton for punishment, it sounds like.

Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely a builder by nature. You know, it's funny, started with construction. That led into real estate investments. That's kind of a, a silo. Right. It's a, a lateral move. And then that in that real estate investment, I could actually use some of my services from other business. So it's kind of a horror. Almost like a horizontal integration. I stumbled my way into speaking and things of that nature. At a happenstance event with one of the Dave Ramsey's events. A speaker had just left. I was working with an immersion coach at the time. He's like, dude, you'd be a great speaker. I'm like, I'm a construction guy. I know nothing about speaking. He goes, well, there's already somebody pretty famous that started in construction and then had a massive business or massive movement. I'm like, yeah, who's that? Yeah, his name's Jesus. I'm like, oh, yeah. So like, all right, I can deal with that. So, long story short is I think there's a natural evolution of doing what you need to do to ultimately get to a place. You get to do what you want to do. I discovered through the process of building business that I enjoy building people within the business. They gave me the skill sets to now to build people outside of the businesses. So that's that natural evolution for me. I know it's not normal. A lot of folks will go from whatever their, their business niche is into segments vertical and horizontal integration, which still makes a lot of sense. I integrated them differently and more of an undertone with the personal development piece. So, you know, I went from construction to real estate, real estate to personal development, personal development to thought leadership, thought leadership to events and events all the way back to personal development. So it's a full circle for me.

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