#36: Sam Bluntzer, Owner | Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter

On this episode of In The Thick of It, Scott sits down with Sam Bluntzer, owner of Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter in Fort Worth, Texas. Sam shares his unique path to entrepreneurship, from growing up in the small town of New Braunfels, Texas to becoming a Marine Corps fighter pilot and eventually taking over a gutter business just two weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Sam discusses the challenges of rapidly modernizing the company's systems, managing supply chain disruptions, and keeping crews motivated during uncertain times. He emphasizes the importance of having standard operating procedures in place so the business can run smoothly without relying too heavily on the owner.

New and aspiring business owners will gain valuable insights from Sam's experiences with proactive communication, taking ownership of mistakes, and continuously seeking ways to improve the business.

About Sam:
Sam Bluntzer is a Texas A&M University alumnus from New Braunfels, Texas. After college, he joined the marines and went on to become a F-18 fighter pilot, serving tours in Japan, Iraq, and other deployments over an 11-year career. Following his time in marines, Sam used his operational experience to transition into the oil and gas industry in Fort Worth, Texas. Today, Sam owns and operates Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter, a successful rain gutter installation company servicing customers throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

About Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter:
Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter is your trusted partner for seamless rain gutter installation in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. With over 19 years of dedicated service and thousands of completed installations, Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter treats each customer's home as if it were their own, delivering top-notch gutter solutions regardless of the project's size.

To learn more, visit blueribbonraingutter.com

Creators & Guests

Host

Scott Hollrah

Founder & CEO of Venn Technology

Guest

Sam Bluntzer

Owner of Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter

What is In The Thick of It?

Join Scott Hollrah, founder of Venn Technology, as he takes you "In the Thick of It" with the real stories of founders who are actively navigating the challenges and triumphs of running their businesses. This podcast goes beyond the typical entrepreneurial success stories and delves into the messy, gritty, and sometimes chaotic world of building and growing a company. Get inspired, learn from the experiences of others, and gain insights into what it truly means to be in the thick of the entrepreneurial journey.

Jump on it right away if you have this feeling in your chest.

I don't want to address this problem.

That is the reason to address.

Go right at it.

You gotta attack that the minute you start feeling that, that.

Oh, God.

I don't want to do this.

I don't want to make this phone call, man.

Slap yourself in the face, make the phone call, and just get it over with.

And that's usually not as bad as you think it's gonna be.

Welcome to In The Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

Whether or not you've gone out on your own as an entrepreneur, today's guest will inspire you

to consider what it's like to buy an existing business instead of starting from scratch.

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Sam Bluntzer,

owner of Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter in Fort Worth, Texas.

Sam shares his journey from growing up in small town Texas

to serving as a Marine Corps fighter pilot before eventually buying a rain

gutter business just two weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

In this episode, we dive into the challenges of those early days, including quickly

modernizing systems, dealing with supply chain issues, and keeping employees motivated.

He discusses the importance of having standard operating procedures

so the business can function without relying on the owner.

Throughout, you'll learn from Sam's emphasis on proactive communication,

taking ownership of mistakes, and constantly looking for ways to improve the business.

All right, well, joining us in the studio today is Sam Bluntzer.

Thanks so much for making the drive over from Weatherford.

It's good to finally meet you in person.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

Yeah.

All right, well, we always start off in the beginning.

So where'd you grow up?

New Braunfels, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, I grew up in New Braunfels back in the day.

It's grown quite a bit in the last few years as they expanded I 35, and it was quite

a small town at the time, but it's really grown up and really grown very nicely.

They've done a good job down there.

That whole area, I mean, from Austin to San Antonio and everything off

to the east and west and that hill country is just blown up.

It really has.

I mean, I.

I don't know that I knew anybody growing up whose parents worked in Austin or San Antonio.

Everybody just worked in New Braunfels.

But now, you know, with the I 35 expanded and vehicles being more comfortable,

and you can have your hot coffee and your podcast,

and people don't mind the drive and there's a lot of commuters out of New Braunfels now.

Yeah, it's basically a suburb.

It really is.

Yeah.

It's crazy how that works.

So I been to New Braunfels a number of times and floated the river.

What was growing up like in New Braunfels?

It was fantastic.

I mean, it was a great place to grow up.

And, you know, we'd go to Schlitterbahn.

There was those great summers in there where you're not quite old enough to have a job,

but you're old enough for your mom to drop you off for the day.

And that was fun.

We'd have a season pass and just go to Schlitterbahn and we'd play games.

We had.

We'd invent our own games and run around like it was our own wild frontier out there.

And we knew all the drain holes and all the different rides that were.

All the change and the bills that would fall out of people's pockets would go to,

you know, so we would go down the rides and then dump out

of our tube and swim to the bottom and search around and find cash and change.

And it was, oh, let's go get some ice cream, you know, so it was fun.

We had a great time, and, of course, we'd float the river.

And, you know, back then, Green hall has always been a thing,

but green itself was really not really well developed.

But it's beautiful now, and there's so many great restaurants.

Downtown was super quiet.

There was nothing down there.

And then they.

They really kind of expanded.

That infilled with some great businesses and restaurants and stores and stuff like that.

So it's really come along.

It's a great town.

It's almost unrecognizable when I get down there these days.

In fact, I was in Austin this last weekend, and it's just a.

It's a very different place than it was 10, 15, 20 years ago.

Yeah, it really is.

Austin's changed a bunch as well.

I was born there.

My parents moved there after college and were there

briefly and then moved to New Braunfels and so.

But, yeah, Austin was always kind of a smallish town,

and it's certainly not anymore, but, yeah.

What's your family like?

Brothers?

Sisters?

Yeah.

So my mom still lives in New Braunfels, and my dad passed away when?

Right at the end of my junior year in high school.

And my mom remarried a few years later to just a fantastic guy.

It's been a huge blessing to our family.

He's a really great guy.

And they've been married.

Gosh, it's been over 20 years now, and so they live in new Bronfels.

I've got a little brother who I live vicariously through.

He's got.

He's done some awesome stuff.

He actually, he was an allstate football player and got a full ride to Berkeley, California.

Berkeley.

So, small town kid, conservative family.

Shows up out in.

Out in Berkeley, and was a five year letterman there, and I had a great career.

And then he ended up.

He's worked some of the new Bronfels, but really spent a lot of time out west.

He's a fly fishing guide out in Wyoming, lives in crested Butte now.

Works for a hotel group.

So he's got a good gig.

He's done a great job.

Real proud of him.

That sounds awesome.

Yeah, it's good.

All right, so, oldest of two.

Yeah.

Were you athletic as well?

I did, yeah.

I played football and some basketball and some baseball, all that kind of standard stuff.

I was the smallest of the group.

My dad played at Baylor.

My grandfather played for LSU and the Chicago Bears.

And then my brother is considerably larger than I am.

He's a big guy, and so I was kind of the small one, but, yeah,

played all the high school sports and.

And really loved it, but never really had a whole lot of significant opportunities after that.

You're not a small guy, though.

Yeah, yeah.

My brother, I think he's about six three, probably 230.

My dad was 6465, kind of in that 240 range.

So, yeah, they're big guys, man.

All right.

What kind of work did mom and dad do growing up?

My dad was a small town attorney, kind of did a little bit of everything.

You know, he went to.

He grew up in Cuero, down in kind of southeast Texas, and didn't grow up with much,

but was able to get a football scholarship to Baylor.

And so he went to Baylor, and my mom.

My mom's from San Antonio,

and she comes from a family of attorneys, and so it was kind of interesting.

My dad was a biology major when he went to Baylor, and then near kind

of the second half of their time at Baylor, met each other,

and my dad changed his major to, I think, polly sci and eventually went to law school.

So that's a big jump.

It was a big job, biology to law, big jump.

I think coming from kind of a very small town, Cuero, you know, a couple

thousand people, and not from a lot of means, and then you end up at this

school, and you meet this woman that you fall in love with and there's

probably a lot of pressure unintended to what am I going to do with this

degree?

But, you know, law school is sitting there, and I can do that.

And her dad's a lawyer, her brother, my.

My uncle's a lawyer, and so that sounds like a good plan.

Let's do that.

So there was some influence there, I think so.

Probably not forceful, but just probably internal influence.

Yeah, sure, a little bit, but, yeah, he was a small town attorney,

kind of did a little bit of everything, and was real involved in the community.

We used to go to, like, the Lions Club, Thursday lunch.

I used to take me out of school.

We go to Lions Club and Rotary Club, and, of course, worst fest down there in New Braunfels,

and he was a member of the worst Fest association, which was a lot of fun.

And that's a great event for new Braunfels, for people who may not be familiar.

It's not wo r s t.

It's w u r s t, like a Bratwurst.

Right?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

And there's.

That thing's grown as well.

I mean, it was always a big deal, but I think now, over the ten day deal,

I want to say they're exceeding well over two or 300,000 people coming into that thing.

It is massive.

And they've.

They've expanded the worst fest grounds, and it's beautiful,

and they've done a really nice job with that as well.

But it is a huge event for ten days in new Braunfels.

I think it's probably the biggest October fest in Texas, I assume.

Yeah, as far as I know.

Good german town.

Great german town.

A lot of good german influence, not just in the kind of the architecture

and the way the towns run, but we always had real strict teachers.

The public schools were really good, very strict teachers.

You know, we had.

We had some.

Some fraus and some heirs that were still hanging around.

Old math teachers, german math teachers, you know, that were.

Ran a good, tight shop over there.

So it was a really.

It was a great school.

We had a german newspaper there until 1972.

You're kidding me.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's.

The influence is pretty thick there.

Do you speak any German?

I don't.

No.

I should.

I wish I did, but, no, I really don't.

So my family is german, and my grandfather was born in America,

but his parents were first generation.

They were immigrants, and so he grew up in a german speaking home,

and he could speak it, but he never did.

And that didn't pass down.

Same here.

I know.

Missed opportunity, though.

What was school like for you?

You know, it was.

I never loved it.

I wasn't super into it, but I kind of look back and it wasn't terribly hard,

but I don't know that I really applied myself, dedicated.

It was easy enough to get through and kind of have all A's and some B's, you know,

that sort of thing.

Not to say that I'm smart, I just don't think it was that hard, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, in a lot of ways.

I know we'll probably get into college, too.

A lot of ways.

It was that way there, too.

And I just.

I don't know.

I never really got into it.

Here's where I think it was.

The things that I really loved doing, man, I was happy to do that and totally into it.

You know, I loved that stuff.

But the subjects that I didn't love, I had a hard time really applying myself.

It wasn't until later in life, which I'm sure we'll get to where I really found, like, oh,

this is what.

When I really found something I enjoy, and the stakes are high

that I can really dedicate myself to something and kind of that.

That growing process was great, but I'm sure we'll get into some of that later.

I think that's human nature.

Like, we tend to apply ourselves more diligently

to the things that we enjoy than the things that we don't.

Yeah.

If it's something we don't enjoy, it's something we just have to get through and.

Yeah.

And the effort is.

Yeah, completely.

I talked to my kids about this.

My son's extremely dedicated to physical fitness and all of his football and wrestling

and all this stuff, but, you know, with school, he does a good job and not quite as much.

And I tell him, hey, real discipline is when it's something you don't want to do.

It's easy to do the stuff you love to do,

but when it is, when it doesn't, that's when it really.

You got to step it up.

So if you've got that to soak in, I need.

I need your wisdom.

I need your words.

I need whatever it is, because I got three of my own that we gotta.

We gotta work on.

That's it.

All right.

So you mentioned college.

You went to school at Texas A and M.

I did.

We've had a number of aggies on the podcast.

Talk to us about your college experience.

You were in the corps of cadets?

I was, yeah, sure was.

So my dad passed right near the end of my junior year, last week of school, my junior year.

That's like a, I mean, that's a pivotal time in your life.

It was.

It was.

And he, he was 42 and was diagnosed with lymphoma at 38.

Perfectly healthy guy, too.

I don't think I ever really appreciated at the time how rare that is,

you know, I mean, like I said, very, very healthy guy.

And so we kind of, as a family, went through like a four year battle of cancer.

And he spent some time, MD Anderson there in Houston and went into remission

and then back out and back and forth and then finally passed, unfortunately.

So it was a tough four years, but it was a huge change for our family.

And I think at the time, I was always just thought I would go to college.

I never really thought otherwise.

And I was trying to figure out, I don't want to burden my mom with

paying for school and all these sorts of things.

And at the same time, I grew up going to summer camp down at Laity Lodge down near Kerrville,

and one of my best friends that is still a best friend,

he grew up, his father was a marine and retired as a lieutenant general a few years ago.

And he was a year older than I was.

And we had grown up going to summer camp every summer.

And I love this guy.

Still do.

And he was saying, hey, Im going to a and m.

My dad went there and Im going to go on an ROTC scholarship.

No idea what this is.

Id never even considered this, you know,

going into the Marine Corps or the military in general.

And so he said, yeah, I mean, you just apply and, man, if they like you, they'll pay

for all your school and then you owe them like four years in the Marine Corps after that.

And I thought, well, okay, I mean, that sounds pretty exciting.

Like, I have no idea what I want to do, but they pay for school and I've never

even thought about going into the military, but I guess I could do that.

Sure.

So I applied and got this scholarship and then went to A and M and went in the core.

So that was kind of the beginning of my, my college experience,

how I got there, my game plan starting out, at least.

And what did you study?

So I started out, I was an accounting major,

which was, I look back at that and I kind of laugh about it.

I had no, I didn't even know that I knew what accounting was.

I never, I can't remember a time when I sat down with an adult and they said,

here's some various college majors that you could choose from.

What would you like to do?

And, you know, if you choose this, this is probably a likely path for your career, etcetera.

So I think I just picked it because I knew that was somebody that has

an actual job and they can make a living, you know, down the road.

I didn't really even think much more about it than that.

So I was an accounting major for a year and a half.

I could do the accounting, but I still didn't quite grasp, why are we doing this?

You know what I mean?

It was.

I just didn't quite have the maturity for it, I don't think.

And then I thought, well, you know, forget this.

I'm going to go do something.

I want to do what I want to do.

I'm going to be a forestry major.

So as a forestry major, wow, that's a.

It was a big change.

College of Business to, I guess, College of Agriculture.

Yeah, or College of geosciences or something like that.

I mean, this is.

There's not a lot of thought being.

Going into this at this point in time.

And so I did that, I think, for a semester, maybe two, and I thought, why?

Then I started thinking, what am I going to do with this?

This is.

I have no idea.

I mean, I was really lost in this sense.

And then finally, at this point,

the Marine Corps was kind of like, hey, look, you know, the clock's ticking.

Your hours and the time we need you to graduate are not adding up quite well,

so we need you to.

You got to do something.

So I went over to kind of the geosciences, just general

kind of earth sciences type program, and finished with that.

And sure enough, I loved it.

I mean, I loved it and it was great.

It was great.

My grades tremendously improved and I really enjoyed it.

And this whole time, of course, I know I'm going into the Marine Corps,

so I'm not super concerned about what this is.

And at that point, I was just trying to get a degree.

You just needed to graduate.

I did, you know, and it was a valuable lesson because I, like we talked

about a little earlier, later on in life, I really, I learned how to apply myself.

And I kind of look back at that time and go, man, college was great for a lot of reasons.

I learned plenty.

But I could have applied myself to something that was an actual skill down the road.

And some people say, just go get a degree.

It'll be fine.

You'll figure it out.

And that's true, I think, to a certain extent.

But, man, don't waste that time, you know, do a deep dive into what it is that you

enjoy, that you're good at, and then realize that that doesn't necessarily put

you down some pigeonhole, that this is what you have to do when you get out, but

you have something that's a real skill, that's something that you can grow on

later.

So, you know, if I had to do it over again, I don't know that I could have hacked engineering,

but, you know, maybe engineering or maybe construction science,

something like that would have been, you know, a really nice, nice deal.

But anyway, that's kind of the way it worked out, and it's what it is.

So you said something that I think is really important in there,

and that is that it's okay to not know what you want to do.

And just because your degree is in this doesn't mean that you can't go and do other things.

There's.

There's certainly some exceptions.

If you want to be a doctor, you definitely need to go down the,

you know, the biology, pre med, kind of a track.

And I would say if you want to be an engineer and architect,

like, you really do need to be in that.

And certainly there's some other professions, but generally speaking,

if you've got a degree, got a well rounded education,

and you can turn that into a lot of things, even if the work isn't in your field of study.

I think that's so true.

You know, every job has different aspects of that job.

So if you're not sure if I'll be able to think of a good example,

but in this lane, within this broader context, if you're good at that thing

and you have some experience there, these other things will come as well.

So be good at one thing, and then as you get older and more experience,

it'll broaden out from there.

So, wholeheartedly agree.

All right, well, there's one aspect of your college experience

that was very different from all but four other people on campus.

And so you were a fighting Texas Aggie, Yale leader.

I was.

I sure was.

And so talk to us about that experience.

It was great.

I never.

I never really had considered it as even an option or thought

that I would even be able to do or consider something like that.

It's kind of funny, you know, the end of your sophomore year, or I think it's spring in

the sophomore year, you know, they go, the corps of cadets does their own internal election,

and they elect who they're going to put up to run for Yale leader.

And it's 14 nights in a row.

And during the week, it's like bars in College Station that you go to.

And then on the weekends, Friday and Saturday night,

you go like Waco or close to Houston or something like that.

And there's pick some bar out in the middle of nowhere,

and all the sophomores that are interested show up.

Not everybody there is trying to be a yell leader,

but everybody just wants to participate as a class.

And it's really.

It's a lot of fun.

I think when I first showed up, I don't think I was even interested

in being a Yale leader or thought this was even something.

But then over the course of two weeks, it was kind of like,

well, yeah, I guess, sure, I'll throw my hat in the ring.

And so, yeah, it came on the backside of that was put up as part

of the core cadets block, you know, to run for yell leader.

So I did.

It was interesting.

I look back at that, I don't.

You had run like a full campaign,

and you had flyers with your picture on it, which makes me very uncomfortable.

I think about that now.

Like, if I had to do that now, I'd be very uncomfortable putting myself out there as like,

I'm the best.

Let's do this.

You know, so it was kind of strange, but I remember having.

I had friends helping and, you know, the girls that I knew that were,

like, going to jump on the campaign, and they're much more organized.

Man, I had no idea what I was doing.

I was so disorganized and just barely hanging on.

But somehow we got through, and it came out the backside.

So, yeah, it worked out.

It was a lot of fun.

Well, you got your picture on flyers all over campus.

You got to go and speak at sororities and fraternities

and different student organizations to try to build a base.

And I worked on a number of yell leader and student

body president campaigns when I was in school.

And, man, it's late nights, but it's a ton of fun, too.

Oh, man.

At least it was for me.

I wasn't the one running, so a little bit different experience.

But.

And for listeners who may not know, like, this is a really, really big deal, like, this isn't.

This isn't something that just anybody gets to do.

And even just to get the core nomination is a huge feat in and of itself.

And it amazes me that when you started that two week period, you didn't go into it

with the mindset of I'm all in Gung ho, I want to do this, and it's a major time commitment.

The campaign is a major time commitment.

But if you get elected, man, you're at every sporting event,

you're traveling all over the place.

You got to be a student, too.

I mean, it's almost like a student athlete.

You've got two jobs.

It's a major commitment.

Yeah, it really is.

And kind of like taking that ROTC scholarship.

I mean, I gave that about ten minutes of thought, maybe at the most,

and just thought, yeah, this is good, let's do it.

You know, and the whole yell eater thing.

Yeah, I'm sure I didn't think at all about what I was getting myself into, but, you know,

it looked fun.

And this.

Let's do it.

Yeah, you can overthink things,

but if there's an opportunity in front of you, just take it and it's going to work out.

It's going to work out just fine.

I feel like it's been a long time, so it's hard to remember

exactly my mentality at the time, but I think that was probably.

It was like, yeah, why not?

It's sitting here, let's do it.

It should be fun, and we'll deal with whatever comes down the pike here later.

Yeah, out of curiosity, we'll get into your working career here in a minute.

But knowing other Yale leaders, people I've talked to, that was a.

That was a life changing thing for them.

It completely changed the trajectory of their life post college.

Are you in that same category or do you think you would probably

kind of be similar to where you're at right now had you not done that?

You know, I think for me, leaving school and going straight into the Marine Corps,

nobody cares where you went to school or what you did.

So I don't know that it was a huge change in terms of my career path.

I think it probably opened up just a lot of relationships,

getting to know people and kind of just having a broader view

of our school and where everybody's from and just kind of how it all works.

So, yeah, I think it helped there.

And I still am great friends with a lot of those guys and think very fondly

of not just the guys that I was yell leaders with, but as previous and after.

And so it's a nice little fraternity to be a part of, and that's nice.

You know, having that, being surrounded by that and having that group

that you can always reach out to and be a part of is comforting.

That's really nice.

And having that little fraternity, but for me, from a career standpoint

and kind of making my way through, like a lot of people in Texas, say,

in your twenties through early thirties, not a huge effect because I was gone a lot of that.

So, all right.

You didn't give a whole lot of thought as to where you were going to go to college.

You didn't really think about the military.

And you made that decision very, very quickly.

When you got into the Marines, you went the aviation route.

And if I remember correctly,

that was something that you hadn't really planned on a whole lot in advance.

How did that come about?

I mean, there's only a certain number of flight slots.

Yeah.

So how did that play out for you?

Well, so it's interesting.

I, so was my senior year, the Marine Corps was,

had found themselves short on aviators and said, hey, if you can pass a flight physical.

And this written exam, this thing was from like the 1960s.

I mean, it was still the same exam they kept giving everybody,

if not that complicated, if you can do this and plastic flights physical,

we'll guarantee you that you can go to flight school.

Got a slot at flight school and the only catch is you owe us eight years

after you finish flight school, which is about a three year process.

So you're, you know, you're going from kind of a four year commitment

in the Marine Corps to about eleven years once again.

I mean, I look back at this and I laugh.

Not a lot of thought given to.

I was like, so you're saying I can just go fly airplanes?

Why not?

Sounds great.

Sure.

I mean, that sounds super.

And I never sat in the cockpit of an airplane, you know, but I thought, yeah,

I just literally had never thought, and I don't know if it was just a lack of confidence.

As a young man, I don't know that I ever even considered that this would be

something that they would let me do, you know, or that I could achieve.

But, yeah, passed the flight physical,

passed a written exam and got my slot and was off and running from there.

So.

And so did you go to Pensacola from there or.

Yeah, so, so the first thing all marine officers do is we go to the basic school,

which is a six month school for platoon leaders learning how to be an officer.

It's heavy on the kind of infantry side.

So, you know, the Marines have a saying, every Mariner rifleman.

So this is your six month training that you're a commissioned second lieutenant.

At the time.

You don't really know anything after that.

You still don't know a lot, but you know, quite a bit more.

This is kind of how the Marine Corps works.

It's a physical test, six month physical test as well.

That's pretty challenging.

It's a long time.

Six months is a long time kind of day in, day out.

So there's a grind to it.

Certainly.

Whats interesting is the Marine Corps does whats called a quality spread.

So I had I think roughly, well, lets just make the math easy.

If you have 300 people in your class, the number one guy, the number 101

and the number 201 are the first three people that get to pick what job that they want.

So you could work really hard and be the 20th person in your class.

But you may be getting some last picks on the various jobs post, post debate.

Now.

You're kidding me.

Because what they found was, you know, the top 50 guys are going to be,

want to be infantry officers and then all the highest ranking graduates are all

in the infantry and then the lowest ranking ones are all picking other types of jobs.

And so they want to spread that quality across the various

MOS or military occupational specialties.

So, so yeah, they do a really, so it's hard to slash impossible

to try to pick your fate as to what job that you want to do in the Marine Corps.

So that really turned out to be kind of a nice thing on the aviation.

The only people that have guaranteed jobs after the basic school are aviators at that point.

So you go through that whole six month kind of knowing what youre going to do,

which is nice as well, lets you kind of just focus on not as much trying to game the system

from a grid, not to say that people do that, but from a grade standpoint.

But just, im just going to soak up as much knowledge as I can in this

six month process because its probably stuff im going to need down the road.

And sure enough it does.

Yeah.

So from there I went to Pensacola.

You do a thing called API aviation primary indoctrination

that's down there I think in the last six weeks, but the pipeline was backed up.

So I think I was in Pensacola for three months.

So the first six weeks of that I had nothing to do.

And it was, I pinched myself.

I was like, so I'm getting paid.

I think I was getting paid like $26,000 a year.

I had nothing except a truck and like a box of stuff, you know, so I mean $26,000, it's great.

We're doing great.

I have no job and I'm getting paid.

And it was a blast.

And I showed up kind of in the springtime, early summer in Pensacola, Florida.

It was a lot of time on the beach.

Oh, man, it was fantastic.

Yeah, I'd wake up, work out, go fishing on the coast or up in some

of the creeks up there, and then hang around in the afternoon.

We'd go to the beach, go out, find friends, go out that night.

It was a lot of fun.

But then API started, and it was time to get it on.

APIs.

A lot of classroom work, aerodynamics, weather,

some basics, navigation, stuff like that, and then a lot of swimming.

So a lot of time.

A lot of time in the pool as they're trying to build you up

to be a good survival type swimmer, which growing up in New Braunfels was.

You know, I spent a ton of time in the river swimming

to the bottom of these things and just all over the place.

And, of course, the tube chute and slitter bond and looking for change.

Yeah, I mean, this was, it was really pretty easy, and I kind of enjoyed that.

So that was the first time I had ever realized there were people that didn't know how to swim,

really, and people from generally up north, you know, that don't swim quite as much as we do.

And I was shocked by that.

But they do a great job of getting everybody up to par.

So from there, went to Corpus Christi, Texas, and started flying there in the t 34,

which was the old prop trainer.

And then from there, I moved about 45 minutes down the road

to Kingsville, where you start jet training.

So coming out of corpus, you can either go to,

like, c 130 cargo planes or jets or helicopters.

So I really wanted to fly jets and thankfully was able to do that, moved to Kingsville,

and then spent another year in Kingsville, and that's finally get your wings there, so.

And that was in.

Was that 2003, I guess.

Yeah.

And then from there, I moved to.

Where did I go?

San Diego, California.

And I got, coming out of Kingsville, selected f 18s.

Then they take you out to San Diego and you spend about a year out there flying f.

That's kind of just all the basics of how to fly this thing and basic weapons,

basic navigation.

Before you leave Kingsville, you have to land on an aircraft carrier during the day.

And then at the end of your training in San Diego,

you've got to land on an aircraft carrier and f 18 now both daytime and nighttime.

So that's kind of the final culmination in graduation from there.

And then you're a winged aviator.

And then they moved me out to Beaufort, South Carolina, and there's a Marine Corps

air station out there in Beaufort, and that was my first real squadron that I was in.

Do you remember that first night landing?

I do.

Was that terrifying, exhilarating both at the same time?

It's more terrifying looking back at it.

I think at the time I was so intent on failure was not an option.

And when you're young like that and you're so dedicated to getting through this, I knew

that I had to be at my very best in every aspect to get myself through this successfully.

And there's so much, I guess, pride in doing well once you're in this group that just.

You'd almost rather die than fail or embarrass yourself.

And so I don't think I was really scared at all because I

was more scared about failing than I was dying at the time.

But now that I'm an older, older Catholic, I probably should have been scared.

That was actually a frightening thing.

Yeah, that was.

But, yeah, that was a great.

The daytime's a blast because you could see everything and you have all of your senses

working to, you know, if you're going to die, you're going to know it, versus nice.

Pretty scary because you may die instantaneously.

You have no idea.

You're flying into the water and you don't even know.

Or into the back of the ship or something like that.

So it's a little.

Yeah, it's pretty spooky.

Pretty spooky out there, but exhilarating.

And that was kind of really, when I showed up at flight school,

was the first time where I've got something.

Okay.

This is what they're teaching me is absolutely applicable.

It really goes back to the basic school.

This stuff is applicable to the thing that I'm going to be doing pretty soon in real life.

And there's a lot of physical aspects to moving around.

You know, it just sounds basic, but I found that if I'm

doing something physically, I can learn it so much better.

And even if that's sitting down and reading

about something that I'm going to have to do physically.

And that was a huge transformation for me.

I mean, I was night and day from kind of my study habits and my discipline

levels in college to where now I have this thing that I'm going to be applying,

and my life depends on it, and other people's lives depend on it, and I cannot fail this.

And it was a total transformation in my life.

And looking back at how hard I was able to kind

of dedicate myself at that time, and it really.

It felt good.

I was like, okay, this is what that looks like do this.

Pure dedication to a task.

And that was a huge change for me.

That was really good between basic moving around for different aspects of flight school.

It's been several years.

You're in South Carolina, where all, did you deploy from there?

Yeah.

So we, let's see, I showed up in South Carolina,

joined my first squadron thinking I knew something.

But, you know, you get there and you realize, no,

I really, really don't know much here at all.

But they squadron kind of puts you through their own training evolution, builds you up

to where the fellow squadron mates would be willing to actually fly into combat with you.

Our first deployment, though was about, was it nine months, eleven months later.

And we went to Japan, actually.

So we flew.

They sent you from the east coast to Japan.

Yeah.

This is a hard one to understand.

I still can't quite understand it, but so when we signed an agreement, a treaty, a

protective green, I'm sure exactly what the word is with Taiwan back, I think it

was 79 in that there was an agreement that says, hey, were going to have a certain

amount of american forces in the region to give the ability to protect the

Taiwanese.

And so the army in the air force spent the money and the investment

to actually permanently station people over there.

And for whatever reason, ive never really quite understood it.

The Marine Corps said were going to do a little of that, but then were also just

going to for the next 30, 40 years, just deploy people back and forth to fill in

the gaps, put them on boats and, yeah, so boats flying around and then for us, we

were going to be land based in Iwakuni, Japan, which is a marine Corps air station

there.

And you get there and you travel around and you go to Okinawa and other bases and other

countries and do some kind of area training with other countries and that sort of stuff.

But, yeah, so we went over there for six months and it's a blast, man.

I mean, it's really fun because not that you want to leave your family

by any means, but you don't have a choice.

You're going.

So lets make the best of this.

And so its a bunch of buddies in the squadron and you get over there and you kind

of live in a dormitory and you really do the same thing youre

doing back in the United States, which is wake up, train, study, fly.

But then when the days over, theres nothing to do.

Right.

So what are we going to do?

Like, yeah, lets all get a bunch of meat.

Were just going to barbecue in the middle of the dorm.

Well grab some beer and everybody just hang out.

And so its kind of turns into like a six month, almost frat party style deal.

I mean, its just, but it's a ton of fun.

It was a really good time.

And then we're traveling around on the weekends.

You jump on the train, go to Hiroshima or Tokyo or we rent cars and go off into the Japan.

So beautiful.

And there's so much open country out there that people don't realize it's a small country,

but everybody's very condensed into the cities.

And when you kind of head over to the, I guess the west side of the island,

it's really pretty sparsely populated and it's absolutely gorgeous.

And there's all these really cool little towns and fun places

to eat and we just go explore on the weekends and that sort of stuff.

So it was a great experience, made some great friends, solidify a lot of great friendships.

And we go down to Okinawa.

We spent a month in Korea, which was fantastic.

Thats a great country as well, and a lot of fun.

So I did that.

That was a six month deployment.

Then I came back and this wouldve been in, lets see, zero five,

early zero five, summer of zero five.

Yeah.

And of course, Iraq's raging at this point in time and they

needed people to go over there to fill staff positions.

And so I get back from Japan, I want to say it was in June.

And then I immediately got orders to report down to CENTCOM in Tampa in what had been August,

I think.

So I was home for maybe six weeks, eight weeks, something like that.

And were you married at this point?

Yes.

And so I went down to Tampa and I got down there and they put you up in an apartment.

And I was working for what was called the Joint Interagency Coordination group.

This was kind of one of these staffs that this was early on in the war,

and they were trying to figure out, we've got to democratize Iraq.

We have to teach these people the rule of law.

We have to teach them how to farm all sorts of these kind of western skills.

At the time, I think we thought we could do that pretty successfully.

So there was a staff set up that had military people in it, but it also had kind

of liaisons to various governmental organizations and non governmental organizations as well,

things like USAID and United States Department of Agriculture and stuff like that.

And so I was going to sit in Tampa and I was on this staff,

and I don't really know what my job was part of.

It was like to, you know, I had to go a couple nights a week I just stay

up all night and receive reports back from Iraq

from these different groups that we had out there and things like that.

And I was like, man, this is terrible.

I mean, it was really, and it was kind of, in the year you're stuck back in this dark office,

you're a trained fighter pilot, and they've got you reading messages in the middle

of the night, not, not having you in the cockpit where they've invested countless dollars.

Yeah, it was rough.

I mean, because, yeah, I wanted to be flying.

I wanted to be doing something, not this, and just go back to my kind of sad apartment

in the afternoon when I wasn't working, and I'd go back up to Centcom.

Yeah.

And really, their answer, they just didn't have people to fill all these spots.

So, yeah, you're a trained fighter pilot, but we need to make this happen.

This is what we're going to do.

And so you're going to go do this.

And I think I got a couple weeks into this thing, and there was

a civilian, an SES civilian that was in charge of our group.

And I went to him and I said, is there anything I can do?

Do you need me somewhere else?

And I know we have all these people that we're communicating with, part of this group in Iraq.

I'd really like to go there and see this whole thing go down and just tell me what I can do.

So he said, well, we've got an army major.

I was a first lieutenant at the time.

So we've got an army.

No, I take that back.

I was a young captain.

And so we have this army major.

He's been over there for six months, and he's done with his time,

and he's the liaison to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI liaison over there.

And if you want that job, I'll send you to Baghdad and you can do that.

And I said, yes, that sounds excellent.

I will do that.

So.

So this is on the ground.

This isn't in a jet.

This is.

That's right.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So I.

I flew, man.

I want to say it was less than a week later and was in, ended up in Baghdad.

And I show up.

You'd only been back from Japan for a few months, but you'd also not really been home.

Hadn't been home much at all.

Your wife is back in South Carolina.

Yeah.

And you've gone to Tampa.

Yeah, to Baghdad.

That's a lot.

A lot.

And in all the training in between there, there's a month in Yuma Arizona,

a month in El central California, a month.

You know, there's a lot building up to that flying deployment.

There's a lot of other little training evolutions that you have to go through.

It is.

It is pretty intensive.

It's very difficult on the families.

And, you know, at the time, if you remember back what a big deal this whole Iraq thing was,

it couldn't be ignored.

I mean, what we were.

It seemed okay, especially just being younger.

Didn't have any kids at the time.

It was important.

So it was.

I guess looking back, it was.

It seemed okay, but it was pretty intensive.

Went over there to Baghdad and they put me in like this big kind of building.

It was an old republican guard kind of barracks House with.

I was like 35 FBI agents and some ATF guys, and we had some DEA guys as well.

And there was one guy that was the head FBI guy, pretty senior, senior dude.

He was in charge of everybody.

And I don't really know that they really had a well formulated plan as to what all that.

We just know we need this.

And to a certain extent, you do.

You know, you've got all the military members that are there all fall under the uniform code

of military justice, but there's so many civilians there, too.

Everything from Department of State to ngo,

non governmental organization people, you name it, they don't fall under that.

So inevitably there's going to be some justice needed

out there that these people don't fall under.

And so the FBI is there for part of that.

What we ended up doing a lot of was that you'd have an army or marine unit would go

roll up some bad guys and then they'd search them and they'd find in their notebook

or some pocket litter a phone number or a contact back in the United States, right?

And then they, how does this guy have this?

And we need to investigate this.

So they'd call the FBI guys in, and then as the military advisor, I would transport them to

whatever city it was in Iraq and we'd go find these people and try to figure out what it is.

So then the Iraq FBI guys that were there could then cut leads back

to the United States to go figure out why this guy has this information.

And then inevitably, there'd be bad guys that would claim they were american citizens.

Some of them would have documentation proving that,

passports or birth certificates and that sort of stuff.

Some did not, but had a pretty legitimate story.

It was like, man, this guy may actually be a United States citizen.

He was raised here in Iraq and he's fighting for the bad guys.

But he's born and spent first five years of his life in America, so he's going to be

afforded some different, different rights and due process than the regular bad guys would.

Are they not, though, committing treason?

Yeah, you know, and so, yeah, I mean, where it went from there, I don't really know.

But there was a lot of, we're going to go to this guy's house in Mosul,

and the FBI guys are going to go in, and he claims that his passport is

in the left hand drawer in his kitchen, and we got to go find this thing.

But you show up in Mosul, and it's not like a handful of FBI guys can just ride out into town.

So my job is kind of, all right, we're going to get a helicopter, we're going to fly to Mosul.

Here's how we're going to get there.

And then when we get there, we need to find an army unit that controls that neighborhood,

and then we've got to talk to them about getting a ride and an escort out

to the hood out there to try to figure this whole thing out.

So it was really fascinating.

I mean, it was absolutely fascinating.

I mean, saw a bunch of different cities.

We went to a bunch of different prisons.

It was fascinating to get that very intimate insight into the FBI, which really,

most people, you have to be in the FBI if you want to see what happens in the FBI,

just to try to kind of get a profile of what are these guys like?

And I've always been interested in that.

What makes somebody good at this thing or want to do this thing?

What do these people have in common?

That sort of thing.

It was fascinating to kind of have this little.

Little peek into the whole.

Into the FBI thing.

So it was a lot of, it was a great deal.

And then I got back, I think that was a six month deal, got back.

And I think, and this was when the whole iraqi civil war was going down.

And it was pretty intense, but a great experience.

Really learned a lot in a kind of a once in a lifetime deal.

Did you end up getting back in the cockpit at some point?

I did.

Well, so it's interesting.

So I came back.

All the guys that had done that thing before I did that had gone off on these staffs,

they had all come back in the six months preceding that.

So all the squadrons were pretty full in Beaufort.

And they said, hey, if you want to go over to Marine Corps recruit depot Parris island,

which is also there in Beaufort, you can go over there for a year and work at.

I was in like the support battalion.

So all the active duty Marines on that base that are the cooks, the guys that supply all

the ammunition, the guys that supply all the uniforms for the recruits, I mean, it's.

You can imagine, you know, there's pretty intensive support

for all these recruits coming and going as we're training all those guys.

So I went over there, worked there.

I was the operations officer for the support battalion and then

became a company commander of one of the sub companies in the battalion and did that.

It was great.

I mean, I wanted to be flying,

but I kind of understood that it's just the world we're in right now.

You don't get to just pick and choose and it's not your traditional

pre 911 path through the Marine Corps.

So I spent some time over there at the recruit depot, which was also very good as well

from a Marine officer standpoint, just kind of the administrative,

you know, so it's not you and your airplane anymore.

There's a lot of five or 600 Marines in that battalion

that all have their own individual problems.

There's good ones, there's bad ones, and getting to know them and kind

of dealing through all of that was pretty administrative,

which was not necessarily something that I wanted to be doing, but.

But it was important and eye opening and a good experience

from kind of a Marine Corps officer maturity standpoint.

And then when that was done, I went back to a squadron for another two and a half years

and we did another deployment to Japan on that deal as well, which was also a lot of fun.

But I was older at this point, had kids, so it was a little bit like, oh,

why are we over here doing this?

But once again, you got to make the best of that stuff and saw a lot

of neat stuff and did a lot of great flying and it was fun.

But then when that thing came to an end,

I came back and I knew it was kind of time to be done with the Marine Corps for me.

And that was coming up on eleven years, which was my commitment.

Eight years after flight school that was coming up and I

had started to make the decision it was time to move on.

So that was early 2010s.

Yeah, that would have been 2010.

And I left the Marine Corps in summer of eleven was my last time.

As your time was winding down in the Marine Corps,

did you have a clear sense of what you wanted to do next?

I had a feeling and I was pretty sure I wanted to move back to Texas,

but I wasn't totally committed to that.

But I thought I'm going to go start there and see if I can find out what I wanted to do.

This was right when kind of the big shale revolution was going on and oil and gas was hot.

It started to make sense to me because the Marine Corps, even in an aviation group,

is a lot of equipment and it's a lot of men and it's trying to get the equipment to work for

our purposes and to get all of the people to make it work and make it all this stuff happen.

So it's just this big choreographed thing that has

humans touching it, which is always complicated.

Got complicated machines and trying to solve whatever problem we are.

And oil and gas is very much that way,

particularly on the oil and gas service side of the business.

So I kind of started making sense and it seemed adventurous too,

which it is kind of a lot of austere places, which always excited me.

And just the whole exploratory aspects of oil and gas, which is super exciting.

I loved it.

I've always liked machines.

I felt like I was good from a, my experience

in the Marine Corps really prepared me from a machines and people standpoint.

I can do this.

So probably a year and a half before I left the Marine Corps, I started taking vacation time.

I'd fly back to Texas, I'd reach out to people that I knew that I

were mentors or mentors of mentors and that sort of thing.

And I just would set up a three or four day run through all the main cities

and I'd reach out to them say, can I buy you lunch or breakfast

or a beer at the end of work or whatever the case is, I just want some advice.

I'm not looking for a job, but I would just like some advice.

And I've told a lot of other marines getting out that to me that's the trick.

I don't want to call it a trick, but when you're calling somebody asking for a job

or like you really need something from them, you may not get as warm of a response.

But if you just say, can I buy you breakfast?

I'd like to get some advice from you.

Everybody wants to help.

And what I found was I come back and maybe have three or four of those

and from that would spawn like twelve different things.

People would be like, I dont really have that anything here

for you on that, but heres some advice.

And you know what?

Ive got a buddy in Houston.

He works for this place and he owns this company and they man,

but you should talk to this guy.

Go to Houston and talk to him.

So id jump in my little row car and fly down 290 or whatever and go to Houston,

try to find that guy and sit down and really that thing blossomed

to the point where you end up having multiple opportunities.

People want to help.

You have to kind of ask for it and show that you're interested.

I try to tell my kids this.

Speaking of kids, hey, if you go to your teacher and tell them, I would like your help

on this, or I would really like to learn more on this, man, they are going to help you.

That's what they want to do.

But you have to ask, you have to make yourself available for that.

And so that really of all that, I ended up taking a job with Quicksilver Resources,

which was an oil and gas company based out of Fort Worth thats no longer,

but ended up working for them for a couple of years.

And they were really nice enough to,

to me, it was the best learning opportunity of the ones that I had.

They told me were going to kind of make this spot

for you because we really want you to be here but cant pay you much.

So it wasnt the highest paying offer that I had, but it was,

it was the one that I felt like was going to expose me to the most stuff.

I want to camp on that for just a second.

Thats such an important thing for people that are coming out of college

and theyre looking for that first job or maybe theyre changing jobs.

Money is important, right.

Life is a lot easier when you can pay your bills.

But, man, if you can find that opportunity where you can learn and its going

to be that springboard for you to go on and do something else down the road, thats worth way

more than whatever incremental pay youre going to get for some short amount of time.

Preston, I always think about it as bands of pay.

If youre me and lets say youre leaving the Marine Corps and somebody offers you $80,000,

but then somebody else offers you 240,000, we do need to look at that other one.

Maybe its not quite, but the difference between 80,090 5000, that is not enough to make it.

That should just be in your mind.

That is an even pay, which is the better opportunity for me

to learn and grow because I can parlay that into more later.

Thats the advice I give to, I think guys that are getting out and if they call and I say,

dont think about this money that much, I mean,

if theres some wildly better deal that pay wise, okay, maybe you should consider that.

But at the end of the day, think about it in bands of pay and as long as youre in,

do you have two opportunities that are in the same band?

Man, it's the same example, $15,000.

It's not going to make a difference in your life right now.

I've never thought about that concept of bands, but that's,

man, I think that's a great way to look at it.

I'm not going to get this story exactly right, but there's a famous story

about Warren Buffett where I don't know if he was just getting out of school or what,

but he makes a phone call and somebody offers him the job and he said, great, I'll take it.

I'll pack up the car and I'll move down and I'll be there next week or whatever it was.

He didn't even ask what the compensation was, but he knew that that was going

to be the place where he was going to learn so much and the money was just an afterthought.

It was.

I'm sure whatever it is, it'll be sufficient for me to live,

but it's going to set me up for what I want to do long term.

That is spot on, particularly your younger years.

I mean, that is go get as much experience as you can.

Don't worry about the money.

Make sure your personal finance is under control and you won't have to.

If youre staying under control from a personal finance standpoint,

that $15,000 will not matter even in your lifestyle at the time.

It really wont make a difference that the experience

and the opportunities is what you need to be seeking.

I want to go backwards for just a second.

Coming out of the Marine Corps, having been an aviator, most people,

I say most, I think a lot of people are thinking

about the airlines or flying cargo for FedEx or DHL or something like that.

Was that in your thought process at all or did you just know that that wasn't

for you and you needed to be doing something outside of aviation?

Yeah.

Yes and no.

I think this was 2011, so post 2008 crash and things

in the aviation business weren't quite as good as they are now.

Yeah, they've made huge improvements on pilot pay and those sorts of things,

so it wasn't quite as good of a deal.

At the same time, I never really considered it very seriously and I dont know why.

Ive got a ton of buddies in airlines right now, as you can imagine.

And its great.

I mean, its a, its an awesome job.

I think for me I still had a little bit of, I dont know,

adventure in there that I wanted to kind of go see if I could cut my teeth a little bit.

And dont get me wrong, theres been some times where im like,

oh, maybe I shouldve gone and flown for the airlines.

You know what I mean?

It doesnt always go well like you think.

And there were plenty of times where I was like, oh, man, what did I do?

But ultimately, now im really glad the way its worked out, the way it has.

Quicksilver was the name of the company youre at in Fort Worth?

Yeah.

And you said you werent there for all that long.

Yeah, it was a couple of years, almost a couple of years.

I think this was right after the big gas boom right here around Fort Worth.

And they had been going gangbusters for at that point, what,

three or four years to drilling wells and building all the surface equipment.

And it was kind of starting to slow down.

It was on the backside of that.

And I think they were really wanting, they said, hey,

we're going to put you down in our field office down in Glen Rose.

We need some quality control, like in our process.

We don't have any processes.

We should be going 100 miles an hour, so we need to build some processes.

And they particularly having a lot of problems with their saltwater disposal wells.

And so that was kind of project one.

They had had a spill or some saltwater had gotten loose and out on the ground,

a bunch of it, and they didn't know it for a series of days.

Just a lot of kind of stuff was a little bit unhinged.

They were this great company, fantastic company.

They were doing a great job, but it was just a lot.

So if you take aviation maintenance, which of course, I was a pilot,

but every pilot has collateral duties within a squadron.

So I had been a power alliance officer, eventually the quality assurance officer as well.

So youre helping run these pretty robust maintenance requirements that the DoD puts on us.

And so I think taking some of that and then applying it

to the oil field was at least what I pitched them on.

I think they bought it.

It was great, man.

I went down there and just spent a ton of time out in the field and just taking on projects,

building some constraints and kind of procedures around.

Here's how we're going to do this.

We don't have to be running at 100 miles an hour anymore.

It's not really the requirement.

We now need to be thinking about this as a manufacturing process

that's going to be going on for years.

And how do we optimize these wells and minimize mistakes and downtime and all this stuff?

And there's preventative maintenance that goes into that.

There's checks and making sure we've got a good handle on this whole thing.

But to do that, we have to make procedures.

One thing I learned in the Marine Corps was, as you can imagine,

the DoD and the government in general, they'll throw procedures down

that are unusable and that people can't really comply with.

And the more you do that, the more it builds a culture of ignoring certain things.

They told me I have to do this.

It's impossible to execute, so therefore we're not going to do it.

It only destroys the kind of the upper, the person or the group that's putting it down.

It destroys their credibility.

So I felt like, and I always saw that and it was super obvious to me.

So it was nice to be able, I think, to take some of that experience and then take it

to the oil field and go, look, we need to put something around this,

but it's got to be usable and the people have to understand why.

They have to understand they can do this and there's good reasons for it.

If it's too arduous, they're not going to do it.

As much as you think that you can supervise everybody, what they're doing out in the field,

spread over 200 square mile, it's not going to happen.

You have to build things so that when that pumper is out there in his truck by himself

on that location, this is a doable thing that he can actually accomplish and wants to do it.

And so that was kind of the mindset going into a lot of that stuff that we created there.

You set a very key word in there, and that was the why we need to do this way.

Were you able to get the why through,

or do you think people just focused on the what it's hard to do?

Particularly you have like field personnel out there

and they want to go out and do their job and they.

And they want to just go home afterwards.

Right.

And that's fine.

I totally understand.

That was different.

That was an adjustment from the Marine Corps, which is a 24 hours lifestyle.

It's long hours on the weekends.

If you're going to go to somebody's house and barbecue, it's with your fellow marines.

I mean, it is a all encompassing lifestyle.

And what I learned when I got there was that's not the way everybody looks at their job.

This guy, he's going to work 40 hours this week, he's going to do a great job on his 40 hours.

But when the 40 hours up, he wants to go home.

So we need to tell him why.

And we want him to understand that what's important is what.

Here's what we're going to do, and I'm going to make

this so that this is not something you hate doing.

We're going to supervise that and follow up.

Hopefully the why trickles in.

But in a lot of cases it's very important.

But sometimes if things are really, really hard to do, the why comes in really important.

But if you make it doable, people will do it.

Because most people want to do a good job at their job and they take pride in their work.

If they respect you and there's good leadership and you're there working alongside

of them and you're showing them that you care and we care as a company,

I'm not just going to throw you out there to do crappy work.

I'm going to get in there with you and we're going to make all this happen.

I don't know if that makes sense or if I answered your question.

Quite right.

Right.

It probably applies to different types of people in different

industries and how important the why is or how key it is.

I should say it's always important.

But how hard do you have to get that across?

I don't know.

Real quick, another thing I think we may have missed somewhere in this journey.

You went and got an MBA?

I did, yeah.

Were you still in the Marine Corps when you were working on that?

Did.

The last semester I was out of the Marine Corps.

I did an executive program through the University of South Carolina.

It was, let's see, the last year and a half of my Marine Corps time.

Part of that was on a deployment to Japan.

They made an exception for me, which was very nice.

It was brutal because a lot of my classes were coming

at like two or three in the morning in Japan.

And so it was tough.

It was tough.

You're streaming a class halfway around the world at 02:00 in the morning.

Yeah.

Because the program was, and this was, they were pretty early money on this whole streaming.

They were pretty cutting edge and were real proud of the fact

that they were one of the first schools to really do this.

So it was usually a couple nights a week in Beaufort, South Carolina, at USC Beaufort.

And then youd go down there and stream class and then one weekend

a month youd have to go to Columbia and sit in person for the weekend.

And it was really good.

Opportunity.

It was funny because I had to take accounting again,

which I already had at least an inkling understanding of.

But this time I was like, oh, okay, I'm now a mature adult.

I can see why this is important, and it's not near as painful as it was.

And I can now kind of soak this in.

And of course, I had made that transition from being this kid who didn't understand

anything really about the world or why any of this was important to then going to the basic

school and flight school to where I would learn to apply myself and learn something.

So the NBA was great and it was kind of a re acclimation back into society.

I didnt really know what I wanted to do, but I made a lot

of good friends and it was great to what do you do for a living?

And then what does that entail?

What do you do during the day?

And you kind of start to learn some.

Okay, yeah, that sounds interesting.

Maybe ill kind of look into that stuff.

So that was, it was a great, great experience for me.

Not just to get the technical business aspects,

but to have a pre launch into back into civilian life.

Having known a lot of people that have gone through an MBA program,

it's not just the education, it's not just the degree that you get to stick on the wall when

you're done, but so oftentimes the network that you build out of that is really important.

And so did that have a significant impact on you and your career post school?

Not too much.

I mean, most being out there, most everybody were a lot of up in Greenville, Greenville,

South Carolina, which has a bunch of big company headquarters up there, Charlotte.

People came out of Charlotte, Charleston, Savannah, mostly east coasters that were into stuff.

So when I moved back to Texas, I stayed in touch with some of the people

I made really good friends with, but not necessarily from a networking standpoint

in terms of finding a job when I was back in the real world.

So going kind of back to where we left off, you're in the Yule field,

oil field services for a few years.

What ended up getting you onto the next thing?

Steven?

I was working for Quicksilver.

Tell me if you want to go back.

I'll go through this fairly quickly.

One of my jobs, I started signing invoices for some of the service companies.

One of them was our flowback company, which is once a well is drilled,

all of the fracking fluid and all of that initial rush of fluid and sand all comes

to the surface and see if a third party come in and they bring in

pressure control type equipment that's sacrificial in nature.

So all that coming out is really strong and it's pretty abusive on the equipment,

so they're paid well for that.

I started signing the invoices.

I was like, these guys are making it killing.

I mean, I'm just kind of doing the back of the napkin math, like,

what does all this cost and how many people they have?

This is good business.

Well, one of the guys that I had met when I was looking for a job

leaving the Marine Corps that somebody had, I was sitting in Austin talking

to a couple of guys and they said, you ought to call our friend in Houston.

Great guy.

You'll really like him.

He owns an oil field service company and you ought to go talk to us.

I did.

Nothing came of that from a job standpoint,

but we made friends and I stayed in touch with him.

And so I called him and I said, I think we should start a flowback company

and let's do nest this within your other businesses that you have.

Ill run it and ill give you a business plan.

And he said, lets do it.

Lets take a look.

So built a business plan, took it to him and he said, yeah, ill fund this thing.

And so he did.

We got that business put together and then, well, its probably a year and a half later,

a private equity group out

of Houston came to him and wanted to buy all of his other companies.

They didnt really want ours.

It was kind of still young, really hadn't quite gotten to

scaled size where private equity would be interested.

But Jim, this guy, man, he's fantastic guy, just a total character.

And he was, you know, he's an older guy and he was like, I'm putting every chip I've got.

And so he basically told those guys, if you want these companies,

you got to pay everything that I own.

And they wanted his other stuff bad enough.

They're like, all right, we'll go ahead and do it.

I argued against it to the best of my ability because I,

we still got a lot of growth here that we can tap out of this thing.

We're not quite there yet.

I don't think it's ready to sell.

And I lost that argument and I understand why.

So we packaged all that up and sold it to some guys in Houston.

And I worked there for a couple of years and it was good.

I mean, it was, to go through that private equity transaction was super eye opening,

great experience, learned a ton going through that and then working with them afterwards.

There's a good group but kind of understanding what makes them tick and what

they want and how that can be different than what the founder wants.

Nobody's right or wrong in it.

Everybody's just got different motivations and different outcomes that they're trying to seek.

It's not always money.

Most of the time it is.

But of course, a founder and a private equity guy typically are going to have a different

idea of how to get there, how to get the most money out of that thing.

And so there's some, some heads getting banged together

on that sort of thing, but thats the way that stuff goes.

But it was fascinating to watch.

It was all worked with a lot of great people on that.

So that was fun.

So you really were a founder of this other company.

So your current business that we will get to here in a minute, you had done this before.

Yeah.

I would tell you though, probably the way I just told that story makes it sound like,

man, I was really, really out in front of this thing and really kicking

some butt and had this all under control, and that's probably not the case.

I mean, really and truly, Jim was very experienced entrepreneur and had a really wonderful

back office at a CFO who was just as top notch as you can find.

And so I thought I knew a lot.

I had enough to come up with the idea and come up with a business

plan and figure out how we needed to do it and all that stuff.

But I look back like, if I hadn't had all of the help

from his people and him himself, I mean, there's no way.

Jeff, you got a lot of infrastructure that you were able to plug into.

We just walked right into infrastructure that I didn't appreciate the time,

how important that is and how hard that stuff is to set up.

I learned that later.

But, yeah, I mean, it's like, it's pretty easy.

I mean, this guy gives me a bunch of money, we just go buy the equipment.

I could buy the equipment and I could hire the guys,

and I could go out and we could do the sales and get the people and all that stuff.

I mean, all that back office stuff, I really, I knew it was good,

but, man, I didn't appreciate how hard that is until way later.

That stuff's difficult.

That's really the hardest part in a lot of ways,

because it takes up so much time and a lot of, it's tedious,

and it's not the thing you need to be doing to make money, but you have to do it.

And you strike me as a doer.

Yeah, you just want to go out and do and.

Yeah, okay.

That stuff that has to happen in the background, somebody else figured that out.

Yeah, invoicing.

Let's.

We'll worry about that later.

No, no, no.

You got to worry about that now.

You gotta get the invoices out.

But I hate that stuff.

But you don't get any money in the door unless you invoice

and then you gotta go collect it and all these different things that can be total pain.

But the stuff I don't really enjoy doing.

Was it a big letdown when he said, hey, yeah, I'm selling this off?

It was, it was.

But I was also thankful for being in the spot that I was in.

I was super grateful and I looked up to him a lot.

Still do.

It was his money that he put up.

I mean, I put a little bit in, but the mass, bulk of it was his.

I mean, so who am I to sit here and go, I'm going to make my pitch, my argument,

but ultimately he's the one who holds the hammer.

I got to respect that.

And so once again, it's kind of, what are you going to do?

Okay, here's another opportunity, another unique thing that is happening to me.

Where would I have thought two years ago I would get to see the ins and outs

of a private equity transaction that I'm involved in?

That's huge, and that's a really neat deal financially, for me.

Was it the very best deal?

Had we put it off two or three years, maybe it would have been a lot better.

Hopefully.

Maybe.

Maybe not too.

Man, it's what it is.

What am I going to do?

Let's take it and let's run with it and we'll just

take this opportunity the best we can with it.

That was kind of my thought on it.

What came after that?

Yeah, so I worked for them, signed a deal with those guys, worked for them for a couple

of years, and that came to a conclusion and then kind of came back to Fort Worth.

I was in Fort Worth the whole time, but of course,

Houston a lot in West Texas, North Dakota and that sort of stuff.

It was on the road a bunch.

To make a long story short, I was introduced to a gentleman who out of Austin,

who owned a oil field, electrical and automation company based out of Fort Worth.

And he was in Austin.

They had had some problems and kind of needed an overhaul.

Call it a turnaround ish, if you will.

And so I went to work there and it was great.

And we kind of got that to a point, man.

That's a whole nother podcast.

That'll be part two.

Yeah, that's a whole other podcast.

But I'll just say this, I think we got it to the very best point that it could

under a lot of very interesting circumstances,

and it kind of got to like, you know, I think my jobs done here.

I was on the road with that as much or more than I had been.

And man, I was, I wasn't sure I could keep doing that.

It was a lot, you know, if I had to be in a La Quinta in Odessa again

for a week, I don't know if I was going to make it.

You know, it was, it was just getting really difficult.

So I kind of had some time after that to kind of sit back

for three or four months and go, really, what do I want to do?

Do I want to just go get another oilfield job, which are great, or do I finally have

the personal confidence and feel like I have the experience to have my own company?

And I'd given a lot of thought about do I want to do a startup of some kind, which I don't

know what that's going to be, or do I just want to go buy an existing business that's good.

And I had been reading a lot about that and kind of the opportunities there,

and I thought, that's what I'm going to do.

So I went back out, kind of like I did when I was leaving the Marine Corps

and just started reaching out to people that I knew.

I'm not looking for anything from you.

Just want to buy you lunch and seek some advice and a lot of the questions asked you.

Hey, have you heard of any companies for sale?

I think I had figured out at this point that I'm a widget guy.

In this sense.

I don't really care what it is.

I like being in business and running a business, but doesnt have to be sexy.

In fact, less sexy is better.

I kind of like that.

I like to do the stuff that nobody else wants to do,

and I just want a good business that I can improve on run.

Well, thats mine that we can do something with.

And so, yeah, so thats what I did.

Just started asking around was part of the mindset of buying an existing business.

That whole, I dont want to have to set up the back office.

I want something thats got some infrastructure that has at least some

process and procedure in place, and I just want to go in and pour the gas

on the fire that theyve already started preston yeah, I think so.

I think that was it.

And I think it was at a time where I got to need something now.

Im ready now.

And im not sure that I want to go through all that that takes

right now when I have a feeling that theres some other opportunities

out there that are good cash flowing businesses right now.

Youve got the greatest generation retiring and theyve got all these awesome businesses

out there that are nobody's looking at because they're, it's, it seems boring.

And that's really what I was looking for.

Yeah.

If I could just find something that is a good cash flowing business,

I don't really care what it is, but if it fits me and it fits where I am in my life right now

and there's a place that I feel like I can make it better, man, that sounds great.

So let's do that.

And you found, I found blue ribbon rain gutter, which if you would have asked me if I

was going to be in the rain gutter business, I would have told you I can't imagine that.

But through my surf, man, and it was a lot.

And there was a manufacturing company out of Arlington

that I put an offer in on and thought that was going to work.

And it was kind of back and forth and through that there was a guy

brokering that deal and when it didn't go through,

he was like, you know, I've got this, I've got this rain gutter business.

And he said, you would be really surprised at this thing.

It is a really good business.

This guy wants to retire and it's for sale.

And at this point I was like, well, you might as well take a look at it.

So I went through all the due diligence and I was like, I was shocked.

I was like, this is a really good business.

And what was great about it was this guy was running a very good business,

but it was, nothing had changed for 20 years.

I mean, everything was very paper heavy.

I mean, they were going through a ream of paper a day,

like printing out work orders and schedules and it was like cork boards all

around the office and things pinned on the wall and all this stuff.

And he did a great job and it worked for him.

So great.

Nothing wrong with that at all.

But I think we can streamline this and get this to something that is more workable.

And so the goal was kind of, can we run this off a laptop

and how can we take all of this data?

There's a lot of information coming in, lots of homeowners.

We've got work for a lot of roofing companies we've got a lot of inventory,

we've got a lot of colors and different sizes of gutters and people wanting to change this.

And you just got a constant flow of information, and it was all coming in on one cell phone.

Single point of failure for the whole business.

Wow.

And when I first bought it, and I hired a fantastic guy,

that is one of the greatest blessings that I found.

He was our old maintenance control officer back

at my reserve squadron when I left active duty.

As a side note, I stayed on with an f 18 squadron in Fort Worth.

The cowboys there, VMFA 112.

And he was a maintenance officer for us.

Incredible dude.

I mean, just fantastic.

And it just so happened he was looking for kind of a gig at that time.

I bought this company.

I said, please come work for me.

I really need some help with everything that we're doing.

So he came over trying to think where I was going with that.

Oh, yeah.

But if, like, if I was going to go out of town for the weekend,

or I'd have to, like, hand him the phone, and now he's got the phone.

My mind is spinning with all that can go wrong here.

Oh, my gosh.

It was rough.

And we closed on this the end of February 2020.

We were two weeks out of COVID before COVID really hit.

And the only way, if it's after hours and you're not at the office,

if somebody calls and says,

that's one of your big roofing customers, hey, what's the story on tomorrow for this?

Its all back at the office, man.

I have no idea.

And what?

Well do 50, 60 houses a week?

Sometimes I cant keep it all straight.

What are we doing on this address?

No idea.

So, Eric, my right hand man, hes fantastic, great process driven guy.

Retired chief warrant officer in the Marine Corps.

Just solid.

And really, I give him a lot of credit.

He really helped.

And we kind of work together to take all of this and develop kind of a system on a laptop.

And we changed our communication to where?

Basic stuff.

We've got office phones now, and we've got the texting rights going to texting software.

So office manager gets it, Eric gets it.

I get it.

As we're all sitting there on our computers and we kind of basic stuff, nothing super

mind blowing by any means, but stuff to where we finally got this thing really streamlined.

And now we can kind of focus on KPI's and we can focus on sales,

and we can focus on and just standardization of how were going to put gutters on houses with

various things like that its not a complicated business, but I like that.

I like going out and doing sales.

I like having our guys come in in the morning.

Weve got all our trucks come in, I see them all and we load them up

with all this material and they go out and theyre accomplishing something.

Gutters are a pain in the butt.

Nobody likes gutters.

Nobody likes them on their house.

Its a necessary thing.

And we can go out and we can do a good job with very good communication.

We return phone calls, we show up on time, we do a good job.

If there's a mistake or something the customer doesn't like, we show back up and we fix it.

Really not a big deal.

It's really basic kind of blocking and tackling type of stuff.

But I mean, we get people calling afterwards and like,

that was the best home services experience I've ever had.

That was so easy.

Thank you so much.

And it's like, oh, man, that's it.

I'm good like that.

That makes me feel great.

We're doing something for people and I like that.

What you just described there is so rare in this kind of space.

Don't take offense to this, but like, I think that the industry in general,

it has kind of a bad connotation.

And so if you were to encourage other people in construction and home services

to make the industry better,

what's the number one thing you would tell that owner of that construction company to do?

Return phone calls.

It's that simple.

It is, but it's hard.

And it's hard because most of the time the owner operator is out doing stuff, right.

Most gutter companies, the guy that owns it's up on a ladder and he's got his hands full,

right?

So his phone rings all day and he's got to get his stuff done.

And then it's 536.

He's getting home.

Kids tackle him, dinner's ready.

There's so much information flow.

If you're any size at all, man, it's address, homeowner.

There's this guy's phone number, all this stuff.

Like there will be days where we're on a huge construction commercial job over in plano right

now, and I've had to spend some time over there with our crews and I'll be five or 6 hours.

Get over there early in the morning and I'll try to get out of there by 01:00 and it's like,

man, my whole morning I've got Eric back at the office,

office manager, people recovering this, but man, it starts to build up and it's hard.

So what I would say is like, yes, you got to find a way that keeps you organized.

And then as much as you don't want to because probably a good number

of those are going to be a real pain in the butt, right?

Somebody's got a complaint, you got to just don't be emotional about it.

Just take it.

All right.

We're going to make some mistakes.

I cannot promise you we're going to be perfect.

I can promise you we will come back and do our best to make it perfect.

I used to get offended.

People would call and you could already tell that they.

Because you're a contractor, they think somehow you're screwing me.

Right.

And I used to get me kind of wound up a little bit and now I realize it's like, no,

it's not me.

It's just that that's how they feel.

They've had some bad experiences.

Don't get emotional.

Just let them complain.

And then, okay, how can we address this problem and that sort of thing?

I don't know if that answers your question.

And I think that the extension that I take away from that, it's okay.

Return phone calls.

But you have to set yourself up to be able to return the phone calls.

You got to have the system.

You got to have.

I'm going to keep coming back this word infrastructure.

You got to have the processes in place that allow you to do those things.

And if you're a one man guy in a truck like that just doesn't exist.

It's very hard to do.

Driving around how somebody calls and you can't take a note.

It's difficult.

So if you can set up that process to where you have the ability now to communicate,

man, you are better than 90% of companies out there right there.

So I think that's really key.

And then admit mistakes.

We screw stuff up.

We're really hard on and we've got our whole system set up from an inventory and kind

of morning procedure standpoint to where each crew knows.

Our gold standard is that you will be at the first house at 730 to eight.

We say 730 days.

We're covering the whole metroplex.

Traffic can do some wild stuff but we are going to be there between

730 and 08:00 so then now they have to back their morning up to show up

to pick up their material from our warehouse and that's up to them.

The crew lead manages that.

He knows we need to be out of here by then, that sort of thing.

But when we'll make a mistake or relate or something gets scheduled wrong or whatever,

just call and tell them, hey, we blew this, I'm really sorry, can we try this again?

And that sort of stuff.

And people are pretty understanding if you're

the one calling them versus them having to call you.

I was going to say much like you were talking about earlier when you were working through

your network and it was, would you be willing just to sit down and give me some advice?

Most people are willing to do that.

And I think most people, if you're upfront with them and you're

proactive in your communication, they're pretty understanding.

I think that's right.

Most people, not all, but most, yeah,

there are plenty of exceptions, but yeah, no, most everybody is.

If they can tell when you're doing your best and they realize

that mistakes are going to happen, but you just have to own it.

Don't get wrapped up on it, man.

Things happen.

It's not that big of a deal.

Just communicate it.

You know, bad news doesn't get better with time.

I think that's so true, man.

Just jump on it right away.

If you have this feeling in your chest, I don't want to address this problem.

That is the reason to address it.

Go right at it.

You got to attack that the minute you start feeling that,

that, oh, God, I don't want to do this.

I don't want to make this phone call, man.

Slap yourself in the face, make the phone call and just get it over with.

And its usually not as bad as you think its going to be.

Trey, its so interesting you say that.

And I was actually thinking a minute ago about a situation early in my business where

we had a project that wasnt going great and some of it was on the client.

A lot of it was on us.

And about a week before we were scheduled to go live, it was becoming very,

very apparent that we were not going to make it.

And I was worried sick.

I called the partner that brought us into the deal

ahead of time just to say, hey, here's what's going on.

And they were actually much more understanding than I expected them to be.

And then when I get on the phone with the client, like, I'm expecting it to go incredibly,

incredibly poorly, and he says, oh, I knew we weren't going to go live next week.

It's probably two, three weeks later and maybe even after that.

And we got to get our stuff together and it's okay.

I was blown away.

I was blown away by their grace, but I was also blown away by the fact that

I had made it into a much bigger deal in my mind than it was for them.

But it's also because I've got high expectations of myself.

And if I said I'm going to do this and I didn't do it,

then that creates a lot of problems for me.

But generally speaking,

people are pretty understanding when you proactively communicate, even when it's bad news.

I agree.

I feel like I go through that almost every day where it's like I'm going to let,

this isn't going to work the way we wanted.

That person wanted.

You communicate it and it's not a big deal.

You know, rain's our biggest, one of the things that kills our schedule the most,

you know, so I used to in the very beginning of this,

I'm really sorry it's going to rain tomorrow and we're not going to be able to.

And they'd be like, yeah, I mean, there's nothing you can do about that.

It's going to be okay.

Okay, cool.

All right.

I don't feel bad about it.

Why am I feeling bad about it raining?

But I would, and I've gotten better at that.

If you could control the weather, man,

you'd be in a totally different business and you'd be be rolling in it.

Lets go back.

You said you closed on the purchase of the business at the end of February in 2020.

Thats right.

And mid march the world shuts down.

Whats going through your mind, man?

Youre going to put her head down and just keep going.

Im not going to listen to any of this.

Thankfully, a lot of our works, insurance based, its all outdoors.

We werent having to go to anybodys house.

And I'm not going to complicate this more than it already is.

Complicated.

It's a brand new business.

It's not like a startup where it's slow and then it slowly picks up over time.

I mean, it was the day one.

We got a business to run here.

You already had jobs lined up.

You had a pipeline, absolutely huge pipeline already rolling.

So we got it in the owners gentleman that I bought this from, we worked together for a couple.

He stuck around for a couple of weeks and was very helpful.

Were off.

And so I think my thought was I'm going to pretend like none

of this is happening and we're just going to keep going.

My biggest concern was my crews were all going to have to ride in the truck

together and one guy gets sick and that sort of stuff and, but, you know,

we got through it and there was I think Covid was, it seemed like it would hit.

And then like around June, there was like another big, oh, man, it's going to be bad.

And we'd have like two weeks of really slow and then we start to kind

of even out and people need more gutters, so we go back out and do it.

And then there would be like another three, four weeks of just like a lull.

And it was really, it made me super apprehensive on cash flow.

And honestly, it took me,

that seemed to happen in different iterations throughout kind of the two year Covid thing.

And it really took me like a year, year and a half after that, almost really kind of the end

of 2023, to where I could fully get a handle on cash flow and not be anxious about it because

I kept thinking, man, the spigot's going to turn off and can I make an investment in this?

I really don't know.

And it was, I finally am sitting comfortable with it, like, okay, I can manage cash flow fine.

It's going to be fine.

I know it's to mitigate.

And I don't feel like we're going to have that.

We all going to just get shut down.

I remember they had the, what were they calling it where you were the mandatory workers.

Oh, you were essential.

Essential, yeah.

So I just got on Microsoft Word and typed up a thing that says we're essential.

I just printed it and handed it to all the guys.

Just keep this in your truck.

If you get pulled over, like, remember that?

At the time I was like, I don't, I don't know if we're essential or not.

I'm going to call us essential.

Providing for your family is pretty darn essential.

Pretty essential.

And so there was a lot of that that I look back on that I think created some kind of anxiety

post Covid about situations that were very Covid centric that are no longer a real factor in.

And it took me a while to kind of, oh, yeah, why are we doing this?

Because of that or im nervous about this because of that, but thats no longer an issue.

Get over it.

Lets go back to investing and growing this business the best we can.

If I remember correctly, you fell between the cracks

because of the timing of when you bought the business.

When PPP funding came out, you were in this two week window where you didnt qualify.

You had to own the business prior to that.

Or I think maybe there was an after, but I mean it literally, we closed.

I think they were trying to prevent people from making up

fake businesses right there in that thing and then getting a bunch of government stuff.

And I felt right in the window.

And, you know, of course, ours was totally legit.

But, yeah, we got a, we didn't have a single dollar.

I mean, not a single dollar on that thing.

So what are you going to do?

Once again, it's one of those things like, I can't control that.

Is it something we're going to dwell on and just kick rocks over?

I mean, it's what it is, man.

Got to keep moving.

Just got to put your head down and just kind of just keep barreling forward.

Not give a lot of thought to it.

Probably my theme here.

Just go.

You mentioned that the owner that you bought it from, how long did he stay on with you?

Was that part of the agreement, that he would stay for six months or a year?

Two years.

Two weeks.

Two weeks.

He's had this business for 20 years, and you got two weeks to brain dump everything?

He was ready to be done, but he's very organized.

I mean, like I said, it was old style, paper wise and stuff.

He was organized, and it's really not super complicated business, but, yeah, I mean,

even after the end of the two weeks, I was like, all right, I think we got this.

When you got a month out, did you have moments where,

like, oh, man, I wish I'd have asked him about this.

Yeah.

And he was great about, call me anytime.

And I did.

I mean, there was a number of phone calls where call back, hey, what's the history on this?

Or what do we do here?

That sort of stuff.

And he was great on that.

So it was.

I felt good about that.

He would be answering my phone calls and, you know,

super solid guy, so it wasn't too bad, really.

But like anything, you know, you think, oh, two months into this thing, I think we got this.

But looking back, no, I've learned even in just what we've been four years now, we're so

much better, and I'm so much more comfortable with things that used to would make me nervous,

but, okay, we know how to handle this, and here's some adjustments we're going to make.

And, yeah, it takes time, you know, just to get good and comfortable with it.

So have you been able to really grow the business since you took it over?

Yeah, we have.

We've expanded out into some commercial work.

We've expanded into some different machinery that produces some different gutter profiles.

So originally, it was just very basic home,

what they call a k style gutter, very basic home gutters which is a great business.

I mean, but it's pretty competitive.

One of the issues with gutter, the gutter industry,

is that really, anybody can go out there and buy a machine.

They're expensive, but not super expensive,

and throw it in the back of a van or put it on a trailer and haul it by in a truck.

And so because of that, the price wars begin.

And so if youre not careful, you can get into some low margin type stuff.

And so some of these different profiles go on big, giant custom homes,

commercial stuff, and thats really where you can really expand margins.

So we made some investments into that stuff and then

were kind of furthering out the sales type stuff.

That stuffs a little different.

Basic home gutters is we get people calling us,

but it's mainly roofing companies doing insurance work and that sort of stuff.

This is more, you've got to go way out in front of the sales pipeline,

and you've got to get to, like, the design person that's designing the home.

A lot of times, it's not even architects.

It's more like the interior exterior design type groups

that make these really nice homes and make them special.

And so a lot of them don't realize that gutters would make a difference or so you've got

to really kind of go explain to them, like, hey, this, this profile is different.

It's different than the neighbors.

It fits the architecture of this, what you're doing here better.

We can do copper, which is fantastic, or different colors.

There's different trends, believe it or not, in gutters,

even four years ago, black gutters, we didn't use a whole lot of black gutters.

But then Chip and Joanna hit Waco, and she started putting black gutters on white houses.

And I mean, black and, like, bronze or just like, a dark color.

Those aren't bestsellers.

And when we go through a lot of black gutters,

and nobody would ever thought about putting black gutters on their houses not too long ago.

But I blame Joanna for that.

There's not a whole lot of difference between a Chevy suburban and the Yukon.

And when you go into the Denali edition,

it's the little trim, it's the little details that just totally set it off.

And I totally get what you're saying about gutters.

Like, a gutter can completely change the look of a house.

It absolutely can.

And it used to be that people tried to blend their gutters into their house.

They didn't really want to see it.

It was the same color as the fascia paint.

Or whatever.

Well, now it's kind of like somebody said, oh, it's kind of like jewelry on your house.

That's a good way to look.

I like that.

A little bling.

Yeah.

So we still do a lot of the high volume.

It's lower margin, but still good.

We do a good volume of just reroofing houses, particularly here in Dallas Fort Worth,

a lot of hailstorms, and we've already had a bunch in the last month.

That stuff will start coming here over the summer, but.

So we still do that.

But then we're trying to move into that higher end stuff, some commercial stuff.

And really at this point, we need to, I feel like we finally have our act together fully

to where I've got a very nice landing spot for that guy that bought a machine.

He's got a couple of his buddies, they're putting gutters out,

but, man, they don't want to communicate on the phone with the homeowners.

They just want to go out, work and make their money.

I feel like we finally have a very good landing spot to where I could go

to a lot of those guys and say, hey, man, come on over here.

We got a great home for you.

You're going to stay busy every day.

We're going to pay you well.

We'll treat you well.

We've got a system, and here's our system, and it's very conducive to making this easy on you.

And if you have a current customer of yours,

bring that customer over, we're going to pay you for that.

We'll bonus you out over time for that and just kind of

start bringing some of these really good crews in there.

And you can tell who they are.

They keep their truck clean, they keep their machine clean.

You can tell who these guys are.

Like, that's a guy that looks like we want to give them a shot over here.

So I feel that's kind of our next phase that we're really going

to be going through this year is kind of a mass recruiting effort to bring these guys

on and find the people that don't want to do all this back end stuff.

That's so painful.

Do you spend your days driving around town looking for different trucks and saying, hey,

I'm going to call this guy, or, well, see, where we really find them is at the distributor.

So we have a warehouse.

Our crews come in, and it's sitting there.

It's in a pile, and it's ready to go.

So they back up, load their stuff.

We got the paperwork for them.

Here's what you're going to do today.

Any questions?

Grab some coffee.

There's the water ice machine.

Fill your cooler up.

You're ready to roll.

They're in and out in 1015 minutes.

You go over to the distributor, every gutter guy in town's coming in in the morning, and you

may show up at 730, maybe 845 before you're out of there, while you're waiting in line.

And they're pulling all the stuff out of their warehouse.

So we buy from that distributor, they deliver it,

we redistribute it into our warehouse, and then now we've got a really good launching point

for our guys and we try to keep it very reasonable.

The amount of work that they're doing during the day, they're not dumb.

They know when they're getting overworked.

And they also know there's going to be some easier days, there's going to be some harder days.

But Sam works really hard, his office works really hard

to make this even to where we've got a pretty reasonable day.

And if it's a reasonable week, and then if it was a really tough one and they

produced, we've got different metrics that, hey, if this crew produced this much

revenue this week, which is the part that they can control, then there's bonuses

in that paycheck you're putting out good incentives for them to do that little

extra.

Yeah.

I think it's recognition.

Hey, I know.

I know how you did this week.

And, oh, by the way, they were all giant two story houses in South Lake, and it's difficult.

And you were hauling around two story ladders.

Three story ladders all week is really tough.

I'm just going to recognize you.

That's my favorite part of owning a business, is I can give away the money.

It's nice when you're working at the other two companies that I was running,

it's somebody else's money.

Yeah.

And it's not my job to give it away.

It feels really good to reward your people.

And for people out there that are employees that think that

ownership management just wants to keep it themselves, maybe not everybody's this way, but,

man, I get so much joy out of rewarding my people when things are going well.

And I think that most people are that way.

I think so.

I think once you start doing it, you realize that it's easier.

People would do it if they just give it a shot.

But we do.

You know, the company never had a Christmas party.

We throw a great Christmas party now guys are driving old trucks.

I mean, that's kind of their office.

We bought new trucks.

We're going to have nice, good trucks to drive in because you're out there on the road,

man, it's tough and you want to get back in.

You want the air conditioning to be working good and stuff like that,

things that you don't have to do.

But man, I like it.

I'd prefer it that way.

If I'm just feeling good on payday and I want to throw some more money at everybody's check,

man, we'll do it.

Why not?

It's great.

But it's mine, so I can do that now.

So I really like that.

How much different does your day to day look four years in versus on day one?

Well, Im here and my cell phone sitting over there and Im not worried about it.

So I think thats we were talking earlier.

We took that older, paper driven style of operations to what we made is a somewhat homemade,

mainly Microsoft based with some Microsoft Onenote teams.

We did some stuff to kind of make our own system.

But I think we're about to move to more of an enterprise software

that there's fewer kind of in the final pieces of interviewing and going through

the demos and trying to rank these different home service type stuff.

A lot of those are built for roofers and for h vac guys and stuff,

so nobody really builds that for gutters.

So I think we found one that is highly customizable, but that makes sense for us.

So I think that's kind of our next phase, which is

really going to allow us to scale as we bring those more crews in.

And we're based on the west side of Fort Worth.

I think we need a satellite warehouse in east side of Dallas,

somewhere in north Dallas, and then kind of looking at potentially

in Austin or Oklahoma City, something like that is kind of the next phase.

But there's all these little building blocks that we have to put in place.

How do we hire these crews?

And we need to be good at that to where we are really

comfortable that we can go out and just start bringing guys in.

This is a great place to be.

And then how do we have the back end office stuff to where we can scale this

to where when we see an opportunity in Dallas, hey, that's a warehouse.

Let's go buy that.

That's perfect.

Or we got a big roofing.

We found three roofers.

All of a sudden.

Let's go do some sales.

It's really not that hard.

We fit.

Here's three or four bam.

We got to be ready to go.

We're just laying out all these building blocks.

And frankly, if I have to look back, I'm probably behind.

If you had do it all back then, perfect.

We should probably, we're about a year.

I should be more kind of where I'm sitting now about a year ago.

But that's, in hindsight, it's what it is.

We're here now, so let's keep, just gotta keep moving forward.

What are the parts of the job that you enjoy the most?

And what are the parts that you enjoy the least?

I love the crews coming in, in the morning.

They're all characters.

It's fun.

And they've all got their own personality.

I like that.

I like the we have.

I will give credit to the previous owner.

He did a very good job, kind of, I think, culling out some

of these roofing customers that probably werent good to work with.

All of our roofing customers we work with now are good.

I mean, theyre really good, enjoyable to work with, pretty easy to work with.

I look for a customer that feels like were part

of the team versus that were just a sub to them.

And so thats really important.

And for the most part, I think we have that.

And so then you start developing these relationships because im

on the phone with them and were all, were communicating

with them all the time and you feel like you, you get to know him.

And it's funny because occasionally there's some of these

guys I've never physically met, which is kind of crazy.

Most of them I think at this point I have, but there's a handful.

There was a guy I met two weeks ago that I've talked

to a million times, never actually met him.

But it's neat.

Like, I feel like this is a group of partners and we're all kind

of in this together and they're all enjoyable to work with.

And I like that, man.

Relationships, you know, just building relationships,

people that I may not have known and, yeah, so it feels good.

What have you not been able to delegate off that you would like to?

If I had to go back four years ago, built to sell.

Have you ever seen that book?

But John Warlow is really good and its a lot of big piece of it.

It talks about not building this company around the owner too much because then it gets away.

And I did not do that very well in some aspects.

Theres still people that will call and say, I need to talk to Sam,

and theyre trying to relay something to me that Melissa in our office

is trained and ready to take that information, but they want to talk to me.

And so I think your question was what would you change, I guess,

or what are the parts you don't enjoy doing?

Yeah, so I don't mind talking to them.

But I did probably.

There's some aspects of this business that I built too closely around myself

to where now I'm the key to this thing and I shouldn't have done that.

And I can see it, it's glaring.

I know better, but I made those mistakes and it's glaring sometimes.

And I'm like, that's, I don't enjoy that.

I want something where Sam can step back,

not cause I'm looking for more free time or I wanna go on vacation.

It's just, I like, it's nice to make something and then

it's just bandits just out there working right.

And it's.

Doesn't need me, you know, that's nice.

It's kinda, you know, it's kind of your baby at that point.

And it's self sustaining.

And so there's aspects of this where, man, I've still gotta be

in this thing and that's not the best run business that we could be when it's still,

this key member is here and aspects of it won't work without him.

That's not the right way to do it in my opinion.

And you know, that comes from like old Marine Corps.

You can't be, we can't run this whole thing off when this guy could die

and he second gets shot and killed and the whole thing falls apart.

Well that's not a very good plan.

So you gotta, you gotta build stuff that's not based around you.

And I think there's aspects of that that I didn't do a good job

at that we're working on, we're trying to fix that.

So whats been, in my experience, when the business is yours,

the good days are better and the bad days are worse.

The highs are higher, the lows are lower.

What has been that just greatest mountaintop high for you so far?

Robert?

I think we finished this last year.

I felt like everything was under control.

We finished from a cash flow standpoint.

We finally got that its a seasonal business.

But theres not a lot of roofing gutters in December,

January, February and starts to pick up in March.

I was not used to that.

So trying to figure out the seasonality.

I wish I had like a big aha moment, but really I felt like at the end of this year I was like,

man, we've kind of figured this out to where I'm flywheels turning, flywheels turning.

And I don't have to be nervous about all this stuff that was probably Covid created

to a certain extent, throwing weird cycles into the business and all these different things.

And I was like, okay, this is nice and sustainable.

Well, I don't know.

That's not a super exciting answer, but it is just a day in, day out grind business to where,

you know, there's not some giant maybe thing that happens.

I'm good with that.

Day in, day out, man.

We're just going to chip away at this and make some money.

So you may have already answered this, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Yeah, what's next?

Yeah, I think we've got to build a formula for growth.

We've tested some of these things and we're kind of in the middle of that now.

But I want, I just finished a very detailed outline on an SOP, standard operating procedure

and its got appendices and all this stuff about, for example, one of the dependencies

is after Hurricane Ian hit Florida, I flew out to Florida, started finding roofers.

We were getting slow at the time.

I knew wed get slow in the January, February, March period.

Im going to go out there and were going to figure out how

to take crews out to Florida and put gutters on.

And from the time I landed to the time we put our last gutter

on was probably six months and there was a extra expense and mistakes made in there.

But I feel like at the end we had it figured out.

I was like, okay, the next hurricane that hits, I'm going to write an SOP.

So I remember all this stuff.

We're going to put it in the book and we're going to remember how to do that.

So I think what's next for us is really build this out to where almost if you had a new

office in Austin, for example, you just hand it to the manager and go, this is how we do

business right here and make that a really good book so that people can see it and we've got

a plan.

Once again, it doesn't rely on me to tell everybody everything.

It's just, man, here's the book.

I think that's next for us because it is, it's just very repeatable.

Day in, day out.

We're going to do the same thing.

We're going to do it well, but there's a lot of moving parts to it, so we need that recorded.

In my opinion, gutter business in a box.

Yeah, that's.

And it needs to be the gold standard of this is the best gutter company in the United States.

And if anybody else wants to do it, man,

if you can get your hand on that secret book, then you got it, you know?

So.

But, yeah, I think that's, that's the goal right now.

Just kind of our immediate, my next six weeks is to really put some sweat into that,

to make it all the things that we've learned over

the last four years and turn that into something that's tangible.

Is there anything we didn't get into that you had hoped to share?

I don't think so.

I mean, that was a great, great interview.

I'm trying to think if there's anything really, really interesting from here on out.

But now I appreciate you having me, man.

This is really fun.

It's good to kind of reflect on this stuff and think about and answer some

of the questions that I probably hadn't really thought a whole lot about.

But this is great.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks for coming and sharing your story.

Absolutely.

We'll do it again.

That was Sam Bluntzer, owner of Blue Ribbon Rain Gutter.

To learn more, connect with Sam on LinkedIn or visit blueribbonraingutter.com.

If you or a founder you know, would like to be a guest

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