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In this episode of Owned and Operated, we sit down with Brandon Schlicter—better known as Investment Joy—to uncover how a small-town Ohio entrepreneur built a multimillion-dollar business portfolio by mastering real estate, laundromats, car washes, and commercial roofing.
Brandon shares how his upbringing on a farm and early family struggles forged his hustle mentality. After getting his start in logistics and real estate, a single viral laundromat video catapulted his online presence, opening doors to massive business opportunities. Now, with a powerful social media brand and diversified service operations, he reveals how to scale a business empire while staying grounded in family and personal values.
This conversation explores Brandon’s tactical acquisitions, mindset for growth, and how he’s building a team and culture that supports big ambitions. He also offers candid advice for entrepreneurs navigating the early grind and looking to align business models with long-term vision.
🚨 In This Episode, We Cover:
🔹 How Social Media Launched a Service Empire
🔹 Turning Viral Views into Real-World Revenue
🔹 Strategic Acquisitions: Roofing, Laundromats, and More
🔹 Building Complementary Partnerships for Scale
🔹 Balancing Business Growth with Family and Life
🔹 Advice for Entrepreneurs from a Rural Hustler
🌐 [ownedandoperated.com]
🎙️ Host:
🗣️ John Wilson
🎙️ Guest:
🗣️ Brandon Schlicter (Investment Joy)
💼 Special Thanks to Service Scalers!
We’ve been partnering with Service Scalers to maximize our Local Service Ads (LSAs) and optimize our Google My Business profiles, and the results have been incredible. With hundreds of thousands in sales and 900+ calls in a single week, GMBs are now our top-performing organic lead channel.
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203 Transcript
Brandon Schlicter: [00:00:00] Absolutely massive following. You have laundromats, you have a commercial roofing business. Uh, I was working at the warehouse. I was like, how can I get out of this? And I said, if anybody wants to send me money and you wanna buy some properties with me, here's the routing number. I checked like three days later and someone wired $57,000 to me.
I'd been looking at, uh, different kinds of investments, uh, one of which was a laundromat. Took, did some YouTube videos on it. My videos started going viral and it was just me collecting $147. We're the quarters and it hit a million views in one day. And I started getting calls from everybody under the sun, anywhere from stalkers, psychos, creeps and stuff to like people that ran private equity.
Um, so I've built up this following with over a billion video views. We're at a little over 6 million followers. You know, part of my mind's still on the farm around the cornfield at the $400 a month rental that my parents could barely afford.
John Wilson: Welcome back. To owned and operated today on the show, I am Brandon Schlicter from Investment Joy. [00:01:00] All welcome. Great to be here. Fellow Ohio Boy. Yep. Just under Columbus. Mm-hmm. And, uh, absolutely massive following. You're in real estate. You have laundromats, you have a commercial roofing business. I'm sure there's more.
There's a car wash. I forgot about the car wash. Uh, so I'm really excited to talk to you today. It should be fun. I'm thrilled to be here. Cool. I would love, uh, to hear a little bit of the origin story and then we can talk about, um, like what happened since then. But like, your day job is running a massive social media platform that you've used to talk about laundromats and car washes and now roofing.
Mm-hmm. I, I'd love
Brandon Schlicter: to hear how that started. Um, so I born and raised in Circleville, Ohio, which is about 20 miles south of Columbus. I grew up on a farm in the middle, literally in the middle of a cornfield. Um, after about 1994, they made the choice of planting corn totally around our house. Nice. Um, it's not that we were farmers.
Um, I got e our family got evicted when I was six years old and we were just [00:02:00] trying to find any house that we could live in and we ended up in a little tenant house, um, outside Circleville. And, uh, it's just my dad was a truck driver. He was an owner operator, which was terrible. Um, and for him in the nineties.
Yeah. And that's good now, right? It's, it, it can be good now, but there, there's a, there's a problem in own owner operated trucks. I. In the sense that you're your own business owner and you're gonna make all this money. That's the pitch. And it's, it's like I found out when I got into real estate, uh, as an agent.
It's like, yeah, you do your own, your own business and it comes with the benefits of it, but it also comes with all these pitfalls and you're doing it by yourself. Yeah. So, you know, my dad was in, um, the owner operator trucking business from. 85, 86 ish, up till 2000. 2001. Never made any money on it. Um, he blew an engine in 1992.
In 1998. Wow. And it was, you know, $60,000 between two engines. Wow. They put on a credit card. My mom sold door to door mock cosmetics with [00:03:00] Avon.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, I threw that nu name out there on a lot of videos and I guess all my Gen Z audience has no clue what Avon is. So my, my social media team has said, stop saying Avon brand and say door to door cosmetics.
Okay, well that sounds kind of hokey. Whatever.
John Wilson: We just are finishing the best April we've ever had. 55% year over year. Organic growth. Really just a huge thanks to Service Scalers for being our marketing partner in that a ton of that growth came from both paid and organic SEO efforts. We did a ton of work on our SEO with service scalers, really strategizing and working on that about a year and a half ago, and the results have been creeping up over the past about year.
Really started to go crazy over the last few months as we're starting to see multiple six figures of revenue attributed to our website. And that's from their work on our SEO. On top of that, the management of paid has just been absolutely huge. Year to date, we're up 30 something percent. April alone was 55.
And, uh, we're just super grateful for service scalers in that [00:04:00] partnership. So if you wanna learn more about how they helped us, make sure you check out service scalers.com.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, so grew up, just never made any money. Um. The big upgrade in our life family situation was when my dad stopped driving a truck and he went to work at Walmart in Circleville.
'cause he had a consistent job that he wasn't losing money hand over fist, which is weird, but it was, it was nice. Um, he started working there when I was like 14, 15 years old. Uh, but then when I turned 18, he had a heart attack and um, he was just unable to work for the rest of his life. I went and got a job in Groveport, Ohio, which is kinda like a suburb of Columbus working at a warehouse.
Doing just logistics, fulfillment, like, you know, your normal Amazon worker is today. Uh, my twin brother, uh, went to work for the city of Circleville, picking up trash for the parks department. So, you know, just the normal stuff. Um, we did get evicted again when I was 18 and it was just a real weird time 'cause my dad couldn't work.
My brother and I, yeah, were supporting our parents. Yeah, I went out to the real world to get a job. We had kind of had some [00:05:00] entrepreneurial for forays my brother and I did prior to that point, but we just couldn't pursue anything like that trying to help. Keep our parents above water. Yeah. Um, so we did that for a few years.
I got, um, got to the point I wanted to get married and have the normal life of, you know, and had this aspiration for being a one income household. I. Um, 'cause effectively that's how I grew up. My dad did the truck driving thing and mom's door to door, cosmetic sales world, very part-time. Um, so she was at home with my brother and I pretty much the whole time, which is nice.
Um, you know, I, I talk about being poor growing up and people think it, you know, they, they, they lament about my hardships growing up as kind of an intentional thing. 'cause my parents didn't want to both be gone for my brother and I our whole life, which I appreciate at this point. So I got, uh, I was working at the warehouse.
I was like, how can I get out of this? How can I do, you know, aspire to a one income household? I got looking around to what opportunities are there in Circleville, Ohio, and the only thing that I saw that I could do in an approachable manner was to get a real estate license. [00:06:00] So I did that 2006 right as we were headed.
Sure, yeah. Right As we're headed towards the foreclosure crisis, I was like, this is a career for me to get in and, uh, did pretty well overall. Um, I got in namely serving Circleville or did you go to Columbus? 'cause that's
John Wilson: a 35 minute.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah, I, I did some Southern Columbus, but what I really got involved in heavy duty in 2006, seven and eight was in the foreclosure world.
John Wilson: Oh, sure.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, I, I know a bunch of people that like. Oh, he made
John Wilson: it
Brandon Schlicter: happen. I, I ran into a guy and all he did was broker price opinions and he was making 50 bucks an hour doing that. And um, he got me on with a couple of the different firms and I did broker price opinions for about three years. Made good money on it.
Got married, um, when I was 21. I. Did that for quite some time. And then the weird foray and change to social media and media in general was I started this blog back in 2009 and it was the phone number and contact information for every foreclosure department in the United States, and it was. If you see a, you know, an orange sticker on your neighbor's door, this is the person to [00:07:00] call to help get information on that from the bank.
So I had, I think it was the number one foreclosure blog online for, uh, a reasonable time period. That's crazy. So I was still doing real estate, working for a broker in Columbus, doing the blog thing on the site, closing leads. Um, from that, and then came to the realization, it's like, okay, I'm selling a couple houses on the side, but I'm also HER Realty's, number one outbound sales guy.
I did more volume in one month in terms of From the blog. From the blog than people did in a year. Yeah. Um, and I mean, distribution is the great, oh, it's the great equalizer. It blew my mind. So I was like, okay, I've gotta figure out how to do my real estate stuff with social media or, or online, whatever.
So then 2013 rolled around. I've been doing a little bit of everything, ran a bunch of blogs, ran a bunch of websites. I said, well, I can use my, my social media appeal to. Go and find some investors for real estate. So, you know, 2013, by 2013, I'd been [00:08:00] in the business for what, seven years, had unending properties in Circleville and the, you know, Circleville, southern Columbus area that were, you know, 25, $30,000.
And we were, were at the bottom of the market and I'm like. These properties all make money. They're, I can rent a house out for a thousand dollars a month and I can buy it for 25, like I gotta find capital now. And during my career as a, a sales agent, I never run into a poor landlord. They all had tons of money.
Well, that's, I need to get an investment property. So I started getting online forms, blogs, uh, websites like that and just started asking people for capital. And I had sold some websites off, so I had some money burning a hole in my pocket so I can go buy a couple rentals or I can take some money. And I can go find some investors to see if I can get more capital.
Within like one year I had, um, I had been able to get about $400,000 worth of capital together and we went out and bought 18 rentals. I. Took that portfolio [00:09:00] and kept getting attention for the portfolio. Um, I started my Investment Joy website and brand back real early in that period in 2013. Uh, got covered by BiggerPockets, um, was on a couple of their newsletters, and that was just like, you know.
Being hit by gasoline on. Yeah. Yeah. It was like getting hit by freight train. Yeah. I started having people call me all from all over saying, Hey, I see you're buying these $25,000 houses in the Columbus area. We like the central Ohio area as opposed to like Cleveland, Northern Ohio areas, which have always had you doing this on YouTube.
Were you creating content around this yet? Um, I, so I was using, I was doing it on a blog. Okay. So like, if someone would go to investment joy.com and go on the way back machine to 2013. So we start
John Wilson: as a blog.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. Okay. I started as a blog 'cause I was like, after I got into real, into investments, I'm like, I've made it.
I don't need to do anything else more in my life than just buy single family detached homes. Yeah. And fix 'em up because it's like I can take 25 grand, buy a house. Put 25 in it and I can have a nice house that rents for [00:10:00] seven 50, a thousand dollars and just the math makes sense. Um, so I did that, uh, it got covered by BiggerPockets and I got all these calls and I just opened up a bank account and I said, if anybody wants to send me money and you wanna buy some properties with me, here's the routing number.
Here's the, the, the account number. Just go send me some money. I checked like three days later and someone wired $57,000 to me. And I'm like, and, and he sends me a DM or an email and said, Hey, I just wired you some money. Let's go buy some houses. I was like, this is ludicrous. Like someone just wired money to me.
I've never met him before. That's definitely ludicrous. Yeah, it's
John Wilson: ludicrous. Like that guy needs to
Brandon Schlicter: be checked. Yeah, so, so, um, so I ended up just working with different investors and we would always partner. I didn't want to manage somebody else's property. I don't wanna manage any. Body's property that I don't own.
Yeah. Or at least partner with. So I got in, um, up till 2019, did all these partnerships, investing in properties, bought a trailer park, um. Then 2019 rolls around. I'd been looking at, uh, different kinds of investments. Uh, one of which was a [00:11:00] laundromat ran into the laundromat that I'm pretty well known for on social media.
Um, and I tried to buy that in 2016, but couldn't, and it blew my mind that the lady that had the property, she was trying to get 60,000 out of it, she was doing 8,500 a month in revenue.
John Wilson: Wow.
Brandon Schlicter: And I just was like, this is a 60. I mean, yeah. I mean, today in 2025, that's like probably a million dollar asset.
Yeah. It's probably not a million dollars, but it's. I, I, I would say it's probably worth it, it knowing the real estate environment in southern Ohio. Okay. Maybe four 50 and,
John Wilson: but like very underpriced.
Brandon Schlicter: Uh, well, it, it would be o Yeah, well, like at 60, 60,000, oh yeah. 60,000 is ludicrous. Yeah. 60,000 is ludicrous.
Yeah. So I tried to buy it and the deal fell through, but I bought it off. The owner then bought it and it. Was he ran it down quite a bit. Yeah. Um, but it just blew my mind that there were, there was some business or something I could get into that would perform better than, you know, 10 or 15 houses. Yeah.
And by that, by 2019, I had 140 doors. Mm-hmm. And was just like, this is gonna be my life. You know, this is what I set out for in 2013. Bought the laundromat and the [00:12:00] laundromat was making great money day one. Took did some YouTube videos on it. 'cause I was like, this is valuable content. I wanna produce content seriously on it.
Yeah. And after I started filming at the laundromat in April, 2019, October the seventh, my video started going viral. And it was just me collecting $147 where the quarters, and it hit a million, almost a million views in one day. And I started getting calls from everybody under the sun, anywhere from stalkers.
Psychos creeps and stuff to like people that ran private equity. I got the call from the vice president of one of the largest telecommunication companies in the United States. Yeah. Just saying, Hey, watch your content. I think what you're doing is great and it's kind of catapulted me in this world where now it's like, okay, so I had this goal of.
I'm buying, you know, just houses. And then it evolved into buying small businesses. And then 21, I bought some car washes. Yeah. And I've always had people tell me, you need to think bigger, think bigger, think bigger. And it's like, well, you know, part of my mind's still on the [00:13:00] farm around the corn in the cornfield at the $400 a month rental that I bear my parents could barely afford.
So I'm trying to be cautious and careful with the things I invest in. But I also do wanna think bigger. 'cause I wanna be able to buy some time back. I wanna be able to build some things where I don't have to be super hands-on and I can do what I want to do. Did the car washes and then last April I bought this commercial roofing firm outta Rockford, Illinois.
Yeah. Um, we did a national search. I looked at a dozen ish different companies. Is roofing or just any company? Any company. Um, so, so we're
John Wilson: going with the thesis of we're buying a bigger business. Yes.
Brandon Schlicter: Not necessarily a long term business. Something that's been in business for at least 10 years has good tax returns.
'cause I'm in the Laund Man car wash industry and. Oh yeah. People make jokes about it. It's legitimate, it's wild.
John Wilson: It's
Brandon Schlicter: 50.
John Wilson: We
Brandon Schlicter: tried to
John Wilson: buy a
Brandon Schlicter: couple of these and it was crazy.
John Wilson: Like they would hand us like maybe receipts or pictures and then here's the water bill and that's the expenses.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. Um, I would say 50% of the owners that I've talked to, and this may be it's just the owners I talked to, but at least [00:14:00] 50% of them are under reporting their income by at least 25%, if not more.
And you think about that from an accounting perspective, you're underreporting your top line revenue. But you're trying to over-report your expenses, so when it comes time to get financing, you can't prove anything. So I'm, I'm used to that world. So when we looked for a company, I wanted to clean books, I wanted a long-term history, and I wanted it in a market segment that, you know, everybody wants something, recession proof.
That's not going to exist, but I don't want something somewhat re recession resistant. Yeah. So, you know, in roofing at least you need to have a roof on at some point. And it's not the only company that I looked at that was recession resistant, but looked at a dozen different businesses. My favorite was an industrial and commercial electrician in Northern Florida.
Mm-hmm. Loved it. Did about 9.5 million a year top line revenue. The um, SDE was in the 4 million range. So it was an, it would've been an acquisition in [00:15:00] the what, 2.3 to 2.5 EBITDA range? Mm-hmm. Or at least, uh, multiple of SDE loved it, but I couldn't get the permitting for it. Um, in the state of Florida for commercial and industrial electrician, you have to have a, uh, permit that shows that you've been a, a commercial electrician for no less than five years.
Mm-hmm. Which I can't do that. Um, so that, that deal failed. I looked at a trucking company in Indiana. I looked at a commercial roofing firm here, uh, in Cleveland. I looked at a contract carrier for Greyhound buses. I looked at a paving company in Colorado. Loved it. Uh, the books were miserable. I looked at an excavation company in Colorado.
Books were miserable on it. Um, looked at a bunch of different other businesses that weren't nearly as interesting, but those were the top picks. And then we ended up with this, uh, commercial roofing firm out of Rockford, Illinois. That's been around for 26 years. The owner was just at retirement. He had tried to get his family on board to take over the company.
It's just, [00:16:00] it's, it's the double-edged sword of being a parent and successful. Yeah. You build up this great company and your kids don't have to do the same thing that you did. Mm-hmm. Um, the, the gentleman we bought the company off of, you know, he's worked every single day in his life and it's been hard work and he's, he built up this awesome thing, but it also provided his children the ability to not have to live the same kind of lifestyle.
So when it comes for the next generation to inherit it, it's very difficult to do, to pass the torch onto them. We see that a lot in our industry.
John Wilson: Yeah. It's uncommon to see the kids take over. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. Really not But you're second generation in this, correct? I'm third. All third. Yeah. So I bought it nine years ago.
It's obviously rare to see a third generation, uh, but it's tough, you know? And I think a lot of people ask us, um, what happens? And I think we have the same. A concern that this guy, uh, might've had where, hey, but like, my kids are four and six. Mm-hmm. And by the time, like, businesses only do two things. They sell or they shut down.
Mm-hmm. [00:17:00] Who they sell to. Like, are they selling to employees in esop? Are they selling to your kids or are they selling to an outside party? Maybe. Uh, but they sell that, they shut, shut down. And like, by the time we get to my kids potentially being capable, what are they gonna do with a $500 million business?
Yeah. Like, nothing, like you can't hand that to a 25-year-old. So. Um, yeah, I really don't know what's gonna happen.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. And, and that's the thing I've to a, a smaller scale, I have people always say the same thing with my kids and it's like, well, and it, it's always odd 'cause of my YouTube following. Um, so I've built up this following with over a billion video views.
We're at a little over 6 million followers and I have that question all the time. What are your kids going to do? Or they'll get really nasty and say, oh, I wish I was your kid 'cause you're gonna handle 'em everything. And it's like, for my kids, I've got five for reference. It's all I want them to do is whatever you do in life, be excellent at it and serve God that's like, and help other people.
As the third one. It's like, those are the three things I'm trying to instill in my kids. But taking over the company is not in any of [00:18:00] those things. So if my kids don't have a passion for any of the companies that I run, they, they can't do it in a way that's gonna help other people, then I'll sell them or I'll do something else because, um, all my companies that I've acquired, um, not so much the roofing company.
Uh, but you know, laundromats, car washes, and especially my rentals. Most of them were inherited in some way or they were passed to a second generation. Yeah. And the second generation didn't want, didn't want them or they weren't able to keep the sustaining growth. My dad always had this great saying, growing up, as much as he struggled with his business and everything he said, uh, as far as he was concerned in life, there were two, two things.
You either grow or die. Mm-hmm. And I've, and I, I constantly go back to him saying that, 'cause there's a lot of wisdom. And you either are growing and you're trying to achieve something bigger or better, or do something better, you know, do something more significant or you're on the decline. Because if you try to stabilize things, you're really on a slow decline, whether you can [00:19:00] perceive it or not.
And I see that with every business that I run into. You're either you're trying to get a little better or you're, you're not, you're, you're going the other way. Um, so with my companies, it's, you know, I'm more than happy to sell them out at some point, but I like the idea of doing an ESOP or something that will be able to continue itself for a long period of time because I'm sure I, you feel the same way that I do about my employees.
I've got a lot of employees that I just, I, I truly love 'em. I think they're great people. I'm glad that I get to play a role in their life and helping to them to take care of their family and so on. And I, the last thing that I want to do. Is to be, is to sell the company out, bring somebody else in, and then to change everything.
Yeah. Because I can't, I cannot vet with unlimited ability, somebody else to have the same moral level that I have or the same compassion to towards my employees. Yeah. Um, we just saw a roll up here recently in the commercial roofing area, [00:20:00] and they're. A year, year and a half into it, and it's absolutely miserable for the employees.
Mm-hmm. And, you know, if I needed another reminder there it is. To, to be cautious on that front.
John Wilson: Yeah. We've talked pretty openly with our team members. Um, like our hope is we're aiming at a hundred million, 2030, like it's on the wall everywhere as you walk through the building. Uh, but eventually we hope to bring on investor money and our goal, we've talked about this very openly with our leadership team.
Is, uh, like we want to make millionaires in the process. Like we wanna help that to be a thing. So we want people to be able to invest alongside as we continue to grow, uh, and drive towards the mission. So we've been pretty blatant about it. Um, that's awesome. But yeah, again, businesses only do two things and, and nobody wants us to shut down.
So like, we have to continue. Yeah. You have to continue.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. That's awesome.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: So, so you've owned the roofing company for a year? A year. We bought it April 29th. [00:21:00] Yeah. So whenever this podcast it's drops, it's gonna be over a year. Yeah. Yeah. So,
John Wilson: yeah. Can you walk me through the, like, walk me through the business a little bit.
Customer mix, what's the average ticket like? Sure. We have a lot of roofers. Listen.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. So it's a, it's a, when we took it over, they did probably 90% commercial, 10% residential. And just from my standpoint, there's no money in residential. Uh, we're a labor union firm. I. So we do, um, a lot of prevailing wage jobs.
Okay. Um, and, and a pretty reasonable amount of non-pro prevailing wage. So when you're paying a foreman, you know, 55 bucks an hour plus benefits, it's very hard to make money on a commercial roof that in our area, the average residential tickets maybe 25 grand. You, you really two hit that 25 grand. You've really gotta be in the insurance world, which they really did not have a process for the, um, in insurance.
Like residential, residential situation, but for commercial it's much, it's a much [00:22:00] different sales cycle. Yeah. Um, you're building a relationship with a general contractor, a facilities manager, an owner. You're working with them, you're sitting down with their capital expense planning team, and you're figuring out everybody's goals, which I love about the business because in residential, when I deal with residential customers and different things, it's always, there's typically a lot of emotions involved.
Mm-hmm. And with commercial, it's just, it's numbers, it's facts, and it's yes or no, um, or. Yes, but we, we have to wait a year. Yeah. Or whatever it is. Um, so, so our current mix right now, the average ticket's around 250, maybe $300,000. Um, this year, and I say maybe because this year we're going for bigger tickets.
Um, we're bid on one job right now that's in the four to $4.4 million range. Uh, just trying to go with bigger jobs rather than,
John Wilson: so that's like customer mix, right? Like you didn't necessarily raise price to go from 2 53? No, just totally different
Brandon Schlicter: customers. We just went with different customers. Um, we, there was a, uh, a lot of [00:23:00] hesitation and, um, lack of desire on the older owners' part to go after bigger jobs.
Um, just because I think one end, he didn't like the risk. And then two on his end was the capital planning. 'cause you're paying,
John Wilson: oh yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: He could be spending a million dollars on labor on that $4 million job upfront before you ever get reimbursed on just the labor, let alone materials. So it's How does payment work?
Like do you get a. Because it's a six month project. If it, if it's a six month project, it, it really comes down to the terms that you negotiate with the client. Usually they'll, a lot of 'em we see, they'll be bill and arrears. Uh, like net 30. Yeah. Um, once the labor is completed. So you'll work for 30 days, you'll bill for it.
Um, if the GCs good, then he'll pay you promptly. If the GC is not good, then he won't pay promptly. I think the average in commercial construction's about fif, I think it's a 57 day average between. Work performed and the time you're, you get a check, you get a check. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's a pretty heavy re There's a pretty, it's a lot.
Yeah, it's a lot. [00:24:00] It's a, it's a large float and it also kills a lot of the small, small guys. Yeah. Hundred percent. They can't. Float 57 days on a million dollar project, let alone a multimillion dollar project. So we've, we've spent a lot of time working on our capital planning, our outlook, but we've been able to grow average ticket, um, pretty reasonably, but it's also come with the additional benefit of a higher productivity per worker per day.
Um, that's kind of our goal of, you know, I have 16 laborers right now. Working for me on a job site. What is our average margin per person, per day, and what's our average revenue per person per day? And we're very concerned about aiming for, uh, margin per person per day, which was just was not a metric when we took the company over.
Yeah. Um, the old owner liked doing, you know, these small jobs and there, you know, 50, $60,000 roofs. Payment was super prompt for a 50 to $60,000 roof, which is a huge benefit to get prompt payment. But it's also, we're coming into the job site and we have one full day of setup. [00:25:00] Mm-hmm. Um, we do the job for, you know, three days, let's say.
And then on the, the, the fourth day, um, you know, day set up, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, we do the labor and the work. Day five, we tear down and go from the job site. So that's five days and we have a day of setup and a day of tear down. So, is 10 grand a day good or bad? Yeah, it, it's okay. Okay. Um, but it's also, that's 10 day, 10 grand a day on, on, on revenue.
It's not margin.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: And the margin on that might be $20,000. So. Now your margin for a crew is, um, less. Yeah. Is it, was it, so you started getting not great numbers? Mm-hmm. And then, well, what happens if you have extra laborers and you don't want to, um, lay them off? Which, you know, we don't, we don't wanna lay anybody off.
So now we're gonna bring in extra workers on the job site. Well, now we get the job done quicker. Mm-hmm. Now we don't need to be on the roof for three days. We could get it done in two days. So what do we do with that extra day? Mm-hmm. So it, you [00:26:00] start to get to this point where you're doing, dealing a lot of, um, job site planning.
Just to make sure that if you, uh, overshoot or undershoot that your guys are taken care of. Um, and with those larger jobs we've have found out, generally speaking, they're not as bad.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, you know, you, you, we do have a, a set a day of setup. We do have a day of tear down, and then we have 30 days of labor in between the two.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: So now if we overshoot or undershoot, what doesn't matter, we can go to another job site. We've got, you know, a couple days a float or maybe even a week a float, float for the next job. So we're able to go onto those, those next jobs, which has been nice. The margins are pretty decent, you know, in, in our read.
What is margin and commercial? Uh, in, in the greater Chicago area, it's about
John Wilson: 20%. Um, gross margin. Yes. So like revenue minus field labor minus materials.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, that number's gonna be closer to probably 25 to 27%.
John Wilson: Okay.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, than overhead. And then overhead is whatever it is, depending on how efficient you are. Yeah.
It doesn't sound like there's a lot. It, it's not [00:27:00] bad. I see a lot of teams that are overblown on their, um, on their overhead.
John Wilson: Do you, do you count foreman in cost of goods sold or over. Okay.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah.
John Wilson: I mean that makes sense. 'cause they're on site all day. Yes. It's a, it's a project live project manager.
Brandon Schlicter: Yes. Yeah.
So, um. Yes. Yeah, that makes sense. For, for Foreman, they're in cost of goods sold, or we have an overall project manager that heads up over the foreman. He's in our overhead. Yeah. So, and then. Everything else, you know, office staff and support staff, and we're growing our estimation team 'cause uh, rapid estimation is very important.
Rapid, accurate estimations. Yeah. Very important for commercial contracting because, you know, that's one thing that we have found out is we can have the lowest and the best bid on the face of this planet for a roofing assembly. But then if the general contractor doesn't get the job, you know, we're outta luck there.
John Wilson: So we, we had somewhere on the show. This was like four years ago. Mm-hmm. His name's, uh, Fon use, and he runs a [00:28:00] commercial flooring business. Hmm. And he built, uh, this was pretty Ukraine stuff, but he built a estimating team for commercial flooring in Ukraine. Okay. So then they, they get the opportunity to bid and then Ukraine works, I guess 12 hours apart.
So it's a 24 7 like bid shop now. Oh yeah. Which is kind of interesting. And they're churning out, like their closing rate is. 2% or 3%. It's very, very small, but they're, they do a lot of at bats, which was kind of wild. And they like really accelerated that process.
Brandon Schlicter: Yes. Um, we're, if I had a 2% close rate, that'd be awful.
But there, there are a lot of firms out there that do that. I was recently just firing '
John Wilson: em off. It's like every single request we place a bid. So yes. Hi. His goal, it was, it was kind of funny. He was aiming for like $5 million. He was bidding like a hundred million dollars. Mm-hmm. And I was like, that's crazy.
Yeah. That's
Brandon Schlicter: wild. I, I've, yeah, we're definitely not, um, [00:29:00] wanting to, you know, to do, was it a hundred million in, in, uh, bids a year or a month? A year. A year? Okay.
John Wilson: Yeah. I think it was 10 million a month or something like that.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah.
John Wilson: Our goals, I'd have to read, I'd have to, I wanna reread the show notes now, but
Brandon Schlicter: yeah, our, our goal is definitely around a hundred million in bids this year.
Um, yeah. But. My goal's also to close 20% of them. So I wanna do 20 million this year. Yeah. But I've run into these other comp, another gentleman that bought a demolition company, he's a gc but he also, like, he run his specific, um, crew runs demo one jobs, and he has said the same thing. The old owner was only bidden, um, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a week.
Yeah. In, in estimates. And well, it takes energy. It does, and it, it also takes, it also takes a good estimation crew and a good field crew to go out and make sure that the, um, the site survey Yeah. And everything's done correctly, so that when you, you get your bid and you give, you give them your scope, it's correct.
That was like his thing that he struggled through. And we were on the, the end of this with increasing [00:30:00] our estimation capabilities and our, our, our, our bid flow. And he was like, yeah, I never would've thought I'm bidding $3 million of demolition a week.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: And he said because of that, he said, you know, our close rates significantly lower than the old owner, but way more the amount of work we'll do.
And I think he was just more at bats. Yeah. I think he was on, he's on track to do like 10 to 15 million this year. Uh, which is, what are they even demoing like old factories or houses? Um, I feel like it was like. He did a lot of like concrete demo. He was out west too. Yeah,
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John Wilson: There's a company that I, I, I have to have 'em on the show. They became nationwide from this, and their name is Independence Excavation. Okay. They're in independence, Ohio. Oh, that's awesome. And like I've, I flew to Vegas five or six years ago for some work thing and like they had a sign out there and they started it as just a demo crew, I think exactly like this.
And they were just taking holes and then they started bidding absolutely everywhere. And now. They're all over.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's awesome. And I, I, the guys that I see that are doing pretty well, they're, they look at what works and what doesn't. It's, you know, it's, it's the terrible thing or the scare to me it's terrifying going and buying a company and to an extent, yeah, you're buying a brand name.
Yeah. You're buying some assets, but you're really buying the data.
John Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Brandon Schlicter: You're buying. The owner's former, the former owner's history of what [00:32:00] works and what doesn't from his perspective, which in our case was great. You know, our, our former owner was, knew a lot of good stuff. He's done great work for himself, you know, self-educating him in that world.
But then there's also a lot blind spots that we've discovered that we've had to go through and understand of, you know, with us being new to the commercial roofing industry. How do we deal with these things?
John Wilson: It is a small company too. I mean, the infrastructure is small. Like you, there's not a, an army of, you know, estimators or project managers or you have to, you're having to build a lot of it.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. And that's what we're doing and we're, you know, our team in Rockford's doing good. It's the first company I've bought that I'm, it's mostly remote for me.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: I drive there one week a month. Um,
John Wilson: it's in Chicago basically. Yeah, it's in Chicago. Chicagoland. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: It's in the Chicago, greater Chicago area.
We're part of the local 11, which is. Almost all of, uh, north central, north Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Okay. So it's the whole Chicago land area and it's about two hours outside Chicago. Yeah. [00:33:00] Um, so it's, it's neat. We do a little bit of work in Cook County, but in a, uh,
John Wilson: is Cook County Chicago property?
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah, Chicago proper. Um, it's one of the largest counties in the United States. There's 5 million people that live there. That's great. But it's super, super competitive. Uh, especially on the, uh, commercial front, it's very, very litigious. Inter high rises. Yes. That's a, that's a game. It, it is a whole different world.
Oh, I bet. I've talked to a few guys in the Chicago land area that do high-rise work and the fact that they use helicopters as frequently as they do just blows my mind. I wanna do, I wanna do a job just for the, the social media video aspect. Oh yeah. Of, you know, the helicopter delivery roofing materials.
It's
John Wilson: the same as like water towers. Like that was a whole thing. It was a documentary on this couple years ago, but it was plumbers replacing water towers on top of buildings in New York. And I'm like, that's insane. That is insane.
Brandon Schlicter: That Yeah. This guy was, and he, he was, he did a partial cost breakdown on why he has helicopters.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: And it was so interesting to me to see, yeah, you know, it's 30 [00:34:00] minutes of helicopter work for $15,000, but here's the amount of materials we can pull up and take off. Yeah. And I was like, well that makes a lot of financial, what
John Wilson: sense? The alterna, the cranes or
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. We, we've got a gigantic crane. Yeah.
And you can potentially do that, but it's also. Are you blocking the road? Yep. Your traffic flow. How long are you breaking it for? Are you blocking it for, and there's certain areas of Chicago where, I wanna say it's like $5,000 every hour for blocking the road. So, oh. That,
John Wilson: that's what it is here at Akron.
Mm-hmm. Uh, it's like five to 10 for right of ways. We have to deal with that when we're doing sewers. Okay. Yeah. If we have to carve into the road, it's a, it's a situation. Yeah. So not really much in Chicago land. We're avoiding that. Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: But then the rest of that we, we expanded our regional grasp by, you know, the old owner was doing maybe 150 miles.
And we're closer to five to 600 miles. Yeah. Because it, it's one of those things where, okay, if we can get a job that reaches our margin, [00:35:00] why is it disadvantageous for us? Yeah. To go and bid that. And it, it's, we've, we've really worked a lot. My team out there is obviously wonderful on trying to, trying to build a good work culture.
Um. You, we try to treat our guys right, give them money, make sure that it's worth their time to do travel work for us.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: And we took the company over there that's like hotels. Yeah. Hotel
John Wilson: five Oh miles is, that's long.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah, it is. You know, hotels and um, Airbnbs once in a while and just take dinners and just try to take care of the guys 'cause they're giving up time away from their family.
Mm-hmm You know, for a few guys, they love being away from their family, but for, you know, our average guy doesn't wanna be gone from his family for too long. So we know that we're asking for something. It's a big ask.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: And we want, we, we we're trying to, and I think we're doing a good job of respecting that for our guys and saying, you know, you're giving part of your life to work for the company.
Here's what we're gonna give you in return. Mm-hmm. And so far we only have a few, a very small handful of guys that don't wanna do regular [00:36:00] travel work. Um, the rest of the guys, generally speaking, do you know, we, we had some good conversations, sit down interviews with our employees when we, uh, before we took the company over and after.
And we continue to do that to make sure that. We're hitting the numbers that we want to. So now if there's somebody that needs a roof in, you know, Memphis, Tennessee, or Nashville or you know, Columbus, Ohio, we can, we can do the travel work now. Um, as opposed to being confined so much just to one market.
And as we find that our re our, our range gets bigger, the margin potentially has the ability to go up higher too. 'cause we're able to bring our assets online. For these travel jobs as opposed to a smaller firm in that market? Yeah. That might not have them.
John Wilson: We just had, um, Paul Reed Okay. On the show maybe two months ago.
And he, uh, he started as a storm chaser in, in, I'm pretty sure residential, but could have been a residential and commercial roofing. And they set up like 11 different [00:37:00] locations and I think they do 45 million now. Oh, that's awesome. And they turned into a hundred percent residential. Like in place, and it sounds a little bit like what you're describing, but like as they expanded bigger and bigger, they started just popping up physical shops Yeah.
At all these different spots, which I think you were doing that or thinking about.
Brandon Schlicter: Yes. Yeah. We're in the process of setting up some regional shops, um, through the Midwest. Florida is big, one of those big ones. We've, we've had some ideations and some game planning sessions about building a shop, either. I, I like Orlando because it's just centrally located.
And it's not as competitive as Miami, but it's also very litigious. Um, I'm, I, you know, growing up in here in Ohio and doing a lot of work in Ohio, I've never seen bandit signs essentially for report back contractors, but they're all over Florida with the one 800 number to, you know, is your contract ripping you off?
Report 'em?
John Wilson: Huh?
Brandon Schlicter: Which from the residential landlord side of me, I love seeing them because I've, I've been ripped off by residential [00:38:00] contractors. Um, I have elderly family members and friends that have been ripped off by them. So Florida's hard to get into legitimately, but once you're there, the margins are, are fantastic.
Um, it's Florida and um, California are two of the hardest states to get into for commercial roofing and residential for the most part. But once you're in, you can do very, very well.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. The, he was using, um, I don't know if this helps or not, but he, he was basically using massive storm events. As a reason to pop up a shop because it gave them multiple units of work.
So I was talking with Chris Hoffman yesterday and Chris Hoffman's 180 million, most of that's plumbing, HVAC, electric, but 30 of it's residential roofing. Oh, wow. And he's in Salt Lake? Sorry? He's in, he's in Salt Lake, but he's in, uh, St. Louis, St. Louis. Okay. And they just had a tornado apparently. Yes. Crazy
Brandon Schlicter: tornado.
Oh, oh yeah.
John Wilson: So their roofing company went from projected 20 million and like. They already had a big storm, I guess, in November. Yeah. And they can't even do an [00:39:00] estimate until June for residential roofing, so that's kind of crazy. Yeah. That's a month. And now they're, they can't even do estimates for
Brandon Schlicter: months.
And it's, you know, for, for residential roofs on the storm side, I've seen guys that have planning software and I know that a couple years back in the central, central, northern part of Illinois, they had one storm and they modeled that it was a a hundred million dollars worth of roof damage. In just 1 24 hour period, which just blows my mind that one natural event can cause a hundred million dollars worth of damage and a hundred million dollars worth of opportunity.
John Wilson: Well, the, the St. Louis one last week was a billion dollar form. Oh, wow. We had one in August here and it was 800 million. 800 million. Oh, wow. Crazy. But yeah, it, it was interesting 'cause uh, Paul was using these large storm events as like, okay, St. Louis is gonna be fucked up for the next two years. Mm-hmm.
We're gonna go drop a location there, we're gonna serve it and in the meantime build up, uh, build up work around it. [00:40:00] Yeah. That I thought was kind of like a good, 'cause the hardest part with the new location is leads. So you sort of solved it. Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. That's awesome. That's so funny. Yeah, re residential is something I would like to get into in the future, but, um, it's just hard being a union firm.
Having our cost the way it is. In order for us to do it, we'll have to make some other play and do probably a spinoff company or something. Um, we're not close to doing that yet. Um, we, we have a play. We we're getting, being courted by another union, which I, union politics and having conversations with them has been very interesting.
But we've got a potential for one union, um, in another state that we've talked to and. We're gonna be doing work in their, their local, um, organization. But we've had that conversation about, well, you're not price competitive for residential any way, shape, or form. Mm-hmm. And they came back to us very, very positive.
'cause in the Chicago land region, you know, we just, you commercial's fine. There's so many prevailing wage jobs, you just don't have to worry about residential for the most part. [00:41:00] Yeah. But going into these other markets, the unions have been really interested in working with us on the residential side.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: So I wouldn't say that, uh, it would be impossible someday to see a, a, a union labor storm chase, storm firm Oh yeah. Going after just those kinds of things. 'cause there, there's a couple game plays that we've seen that there might be some numbers that make sense. Interesting. You know, making sure the laborers have really, really competitive wages and, um, we're able to make money as a company too.
John Wilson: Yeah. Roofing is going well, business is growing. You're also in sort of a lot of other things.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. Laundromats, car washes. I'm still in residential real estate. Um, some commercial, a little bit of self storage. And then I run this news company in, in southern Ohio called The Scioto Post. Yeah. Um, my goal, you know, my, my game plan at this point was to be into, um, multifamily development, you know, building quadplexes and small apartment complexes and.
For that side, government compliance and dealing [00:42:00] with zoning has always been a concern of mine. So I bought into and built a news agency in southern Ohio to kind of help facilitate with that. Mm-hmm. Um, so that's one of the fun little side business I have that I don't do too much content on, but I'm hoping to get into the near future.
Yeah. Um, central Ohio's growing like crazy. Mm-hmm. And dealing with government compliance and things like that. It's a very difficult topic.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, it's, it's, I'm sure you see it on social media, social media. Can really shape and change people's per perspective on things. And for local communities it's the same thing.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, I bought a piece of ground to develop in Circleville in 2017, and the neighbors just absolutely hated the fact I bought it. And it was very odd because they had very weird, preconceived notions on what I was gonna do with it. They, they expected me to build like a, you know, a hundred unit subdivision and I bought it just for pure land.
Pure speculation. No plans whatsoever. And yet for the, uh, neighborhood to come out against me was pretty wild. Yeah. Yeah. That is wild. As you think about [00:43:00] the next couple years, what, what do you think your focus looks like? Um, I want to be able to get more time to just do social media. Mm-hmm. Um, I love sitting down and talking to, to you on a podcast like this, but right before we did this podcast, we were doing a, uh, video.
You gotta go see a
John Wilson: landscaper.
Brandon Schlicter: We gotta go see a landscaper. That's,
John Wilson: that's one of our visions for this show is we eventually, like, we love the sit down, we love the studio. We want to do site visits and go visit these companies and like I love a good shop tour.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. And, and, and I, I love sitting down talking to people in different industries just to hear their story.
Yeah. Because it's, it's very much the American dream. Um, if I can go from, you know, having a dad that drove truck to this and, um, someone like Sean that we were filming with earlier today. Was able to go from his background to running a very well landscaping company and now he's manufacturing products in the state of Ohio.
Yeah, that was cool. It's, it's, it's awesome to me to see how people can do that, but I also wanna understand the story of how did you get here?
John Wilson: Yeah. '
Brandon Schlicter: cause I talk to so many [00:44:00] people that feel so disenfranchised. Mm-hmm. As, you know, 20 somethings, or even 30 somethings here in the US and they say, well, I can never succeed.
And it's, I ha I've done a lot of coaching and consulting over my, my, you know, past five years. Of why do you believe that you can't do this thing well? Because everybody's against me who's actually against you? And I sit down and I have this conversation with people of like, um, what are your perceptions?
How do we fix the perceptions and how do we get you on a track to not believing these lies in doing something with your life? Because I have family members that, um, they're doing nothing, absolutely nothing at this point in life. And 20 years ago when I first got into real estate. They would tell me, you're gonna be a failure.
You're never gonna succeed. You're not gonna do anything. And here I am with all these things, you know, I'm very, very blessed to be at this point. But I also look back at them, and I think you did do anything in the past 20 years. And, you know, why is, why are there people out there that have this perception on life and everything?
There's so [00:45:00] much opportunity out there. Um, and I don't, I, a lot of people don't realize that I've got a twin brother and he does YouTube. He creates products and he's, he's equally as successful as I am, if not more so. He has the same, not grown up great lifestyle that I have. He's, you know, it's the brother that went to pick up trash for the city Circleville, and yet he's in product creation, uh, reasonable social media following, doing lots of great things.
And he's, he has succeeded too. And he's got a wife and three kids and I. Spends a lot of time with him and he's living the dream too.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: And if we've come out of, you know, some reasonably impoverished lifestyle, like what were the building blocks to get there?
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Because it was never, um, a background of, well, you could never do anything.
You know, we had people in our, our family that was, you know, you'll never succeed. Just go out and get a factory job. Just do whatever you can to just scrape the bottom of the barrel. And our dad was always like, well, I have failed at trucking, so I don't have the answers on business and money and finance.
You guys have to go figure that out for yourselves, [00:46:00] but if you put some effort behind it, you'll probably figure it out. So for my brother and I, that's what we've done and you know, done recently well at it too. And I want to be able to go and create social media to talk to people and kind of help them think through those things and be a voice that they haven't heard before.
Yeah.
John Wilson: What do you think? Uh, I have a couple. Sort of quick hit questions. What, what do you think over the course of your tenure has been the smartest move so far? What, what? When you think of like the biggest needle move.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, I, I'm trying to think, I'm trying to think of the person that told me to do it, but I, and it's been several people, was just think bigger.
Get, do something bigger. Don't confine yourself to just small opportunities. 'cause when I got into real estate buying, my first investment s was, I had this mindset, I'm just gonna buy 500 single family detached rentals. And um, you know, years ago I had people say, don't think that's small. I'm like, 500 houses is not small thinking.
And they said, no, you should be buying. Um, high-rise apartment complexes, you should be thinking [00:47:00] bigger and better things and more profitable things because your, your limit is, is unlimited. Just however big you can think you can do it. You have to build the steps in between now and then, but think bigger and, you know, I bought the, the laundromat in 2019 and I thought, okay.
$8,500 a month. That's the biggest I can do for a revenue generator per month on a single location. Then I bought the car washes and our, our top tier for that was, you know, $400,000 between two locations. And then I started looking into the roofing firm, and now we're shooting for 20, 25 million with it a year.
And IS I've had the opportunity to talk to other people. That are doing nine figures a year, and they're all thinking of what's the next step to get me to a billion dollars? And it's not that I want to try and put myself on a track to do a billion dollars. I think there's a lot of a advantages to, to that style of thinking, how [00:48:00] do I get to the point that I have something generating this level of wealth or this level of revenue?
Um, but it, it's one of those things where I really can confine myself to too small thinking. And I think that's, you know, I think in one end that's kind of the people that I grew up with of continue to think small because I was very much the outlier, um, amongst all the people I knew that did business.
You know, everybody's talking about having a taco truck or, you know, doing some sort of, uh, making, you know, like you can start your own business by baking pies in your, your kitchen. And it's not, there's anything wrong with that, but it's also, you know, you could go buy a chain of car washes. Later today, I meet with a guy that bought a chain of businesses and turned them around in a ear.
And it's just the, the bigger level of thinking, um, that I just was not doing up until a few years ago.
John Wilson: I was always, uh, dumb enough. To like, just believe I could.
Brandon Schlicter: Yeah. I, I think that I, I, I [00:49:00] run into a lot of people that spend too much time thinking of all the reasons for them to fail. Mm-hmm. As opposed to the reasons that they could succeed and having at least a little bit of faith in themselves and.
John Wilson: And, you know, so assumed success. Assume success. That's a friend of mine calls it that you just, anything you do, you just assume you're gonna succeed. Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: I, I think that's good. And then I also think that, um, you know, one of the other things that holds people back is, you know, what if I fail? So what if you do fail, declare bankruptcy, you can get a clean sl, you can start all over again.
Mm-hmm. That's very much an option in this country as opposed to other countries where you can't do that. It's kind of, kind of nice. You could, you can reset yourself at any point should you find the need to. So if you realize that you can just hit the reset button, um, it, it might be worth a shot to take on some level of risk.
John Wilson: So, yeah. What, what's the toughest moment been over the past seven years, eight years? Um,
Brandon Schlicter: I don't know. Uh, it would be kind of a, a, a balance between, you know, is it, is it a personal struggle or is it a [00:50:00] business struggle? Um, the, the bi the business struggle's probably been with the roofing company 'cause everything's big.
Mm-hmm. Um, I have not had to deal with a million dollars in accounts receivable ever. Yeah. And you know, last October, November I had a million dollars accounts receivable and I've never had to tighten, tighten that up. And you know, we got past it, but it was also a situation of I've ever had to experience this before.
Yeah, this is new to me and now I've got more, a bigger staff there than I do anything else. But for the amount of money that we're generating, it's also the easiest. Um, easiest that I've got too. Um, on a personal front, it's always just, uh, the balance between work and my kids. Um, I value my five children highly and, uh, it's the, the challenge or the struggle or the, the, the work on making sure that I'm in their life and we're doing fun things with them and they're not feeling that I'm spending too much time away from them because I, I've run into a lot of kids that felt that their parents were working too much and they weren't getting any attention and.[00:51:00]
When they become parents themselves, they want to only spend time with their kids and they only wanna spend time with their family. And I'm not saying that time with your family is bad 'cause you, you need it. It's a huge value, but it's also unrealistic for most of the human race. Um, you know it. And I think it's important for people to find that balance of, you know, family life and work and stuff.
And. They not only do they think they can, they coexist. I think they also have to coexist. 'cause otherwise you're gonna be super unhappy and you're gonna spend all that time working for nothing, essentially. Yep.
John Wilson: Any advice for folks trying to start off on their entrepreneurial journey?
Brandon Schlicter: Um, just go do it and, uh, just go do it.
And if you, there's something critical that you just can't do, like you feel that, um, you don't have the skillset, go find somebody that does. Because there's probably someone out there close to you that has that skillset that you need, but they also don't have the skillset that you, that the skill sets that you have.
Um, I've talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and they always, [00:52:00] the vast majority of them have somebody on their team that has a different personality and they compensate for it. And for me and my different companies, it's been going out and finding operators and partners that I can bring on board that are a different personality than me that can help.
Mm-hmm. Fix the things that I, I struggle with in the companies. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. We think of that in stages. So like, I'm a zero to one or two. Mm-hmm. Brandon, my president's, you know, two to six, and then frontline leaders are seven to 10. Toss them. Yeah. This was awesome. I appreciate you sharing your journey. Uh, this was a lot of fun.
If people wanna find you, you're pretty easy to find
Brandon Schlicter: e Everything I do is at Investment Joyce, so that's YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. I'm also on X fresh Twitter. Fresh to Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I haven't been on Twitter. I've had been on Twitter forever, but I've never really paid much attention to it. But for networking, Twitter's been incredible.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Brandon Schlicter: Um, done a decent bit of business off Twitter just. [00:53:00] In the past six months, maybe a year. Yeah. So I'm easy to find and uh, dms are always open. If somebody needs to get a hold of me, I try to, I try to respond to everything. Awesome.
John Wilson: Cool. Well, thank you Brandon for coming on. Well, thank you. If you like what you heard, make sure you like and subscribe and go to owned and operated.com for more.
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