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It’s SMBesties time again! John, Kelsey Lehrich, and Reg Zellers are joined this time around by Joshua Schultz as they will cover a few topics along the way. They will mention their Q1 struggles and successes, how they occasionally have to wear multiple hats and what can happen when this occurs. The guys touch briefly on mental health with the ups and downs of Small Business.
The big topic is the difference between Corporate vs pure bred entrepreneurship in Small Business. They dive into the mindset between the two. The good, the bad, and the ugly of being a part of Corporate America as opposed to the SMB world.
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John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
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Brandon Niro: Welcome back to owned and operated where we dive deep into the businesses we own, the businesses we are acquiring, and we also bring on guests to talk about their operating struggles. If you like what you hear today, follow John and Brandon on Twitter. That's John at Wilson companies in Brandon at Brandon Niro.
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Brandon Niro: It's sm besties time again John kelsey larrick and reg zellers are joined this time around by joshua schultz As they will cover a few topics along the way. They will mention their Q1 struggles and successes, how they've occasionally have to wear multiple hats, and what can happen when this occurs. The guys touch briefly on mental health with the ups and downs of small business.
Brandon Niro: The big topic is the difference between corporate versus purebred entrepreneurship in small business. They dive into the mindset between the two. The good, the bad, and the ugly of being a part of corporate America as opposed to the SMB world. Enjoy the show.
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Reg Zeller: I was just going to say the same thing. Look at this. And
Kelsey Lehrich: if you don't like it, we can really go like super.
Kelsey Lehrich: Bro. Yeah,
John Wilson: I have one of those. That's the blue Yeti.
Kelsey Lehrich: Sure. It's the blue Yeti. You would know. I have no idea. I said, Chris, buy me something
Reg Zeller: was Chris, by the way,
Kelsey Lehrich: Chris handles computers and things.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. Yeah.
Kelsey Lehrich: So is there a sound difference between that and this? Or does it sound the same? Testing.
Reg Zeller: That shouldn't do a whole lot other than if you enunciate, I can't think of what it's called, like when it blows up like P's and S's.
John Wilson: Yeah, it's called the pop.
Reg Zeller: The pop filter, there you go.
John Wilson: If I speak with a lisp.
Reg Zeller: Yeah, maybe if you do that or you just spit into your mic. But yeah, that should be all of that thing does.
Reg Zeller: So do I need to change
Kelsey Lehrich: any settings on here? How do I sound?
Reg Zeller: I have literally, I just plugged it in. There's a dial and buttons. This group, I tell you what you guys, this is 14 days late and the three of us run combined what 60, 50, 50 to 60 million more than that in companies. More than that. 14, 14 days.
Reg Zeller: I don't know because I
Kelsey Lehrich: can't get a damn forecast that I believe in. So
Reg Zeller: here we are top down versus bottoms up. Oh no, we're on
Kelsey Lehrich: the
Reg Zeller: Wagner now. Wagner.
Kelsey Lehrich: Oh yeah. Wagner. Wow. That's Gus. Not easily refuted.
Reg Zeller: It's the first time I've heard that one.
John Wilson: Let's do. Yeah. Let's do. Yeah.
Reg Zeller: I'd feel bad about us. Whatever this Wagner thing is that you're saying, but Q1.
Reg Zeller: We didn't even have a full Q1, right? Cause we got the last one, the end of January. We're already delivering crazy good results. And it all changed from two days, the end of January, beginning of February, when I may or may not have lost it. It's fine.
John Wilson: Yeah, that happened. Sounds like it's totally fine.
John Wilson: RQ1, we lost. I actually don't have final numbers yet. I'm the director of finance. Maybe you should close your
Kelsey Lehrich: damn books, John.
John Wilson: Maybe you should hire a director of finance. Reporting is very slow right now. Oh
Kelsey Lehrich: my god. Check your bank balance. As long as there's money in there, you're fine.
John Wilson: Honestly, that's, that's part of the current strategy.
John Wilson: But
Kelsey Lehrich: we brought in our director of finance. He had a six month backlog to work through it. We were flying blind That's yeah, honestly, that happened to us.
John Wilson: We're basically, we're a little bit better than we were. So I took the seat like a month ago when we let the last one go. And we're a little bit better than we were.
John Wilson: We now have cashflow forecast, which we didn't even have. So we now have like budgets. We have actual reporting going on. So we're in better shape, but we still don't like, we're not close to closing out the quarter. I have no idea. Yep. I know I lost approximately 250, 000 to 300, 000 in the first quarter, but that's round numbers
Reg Zeller: plus or
John Wilson: minus
Reg Zeller: it's fine.
Reg Zeller: Plus or minus a, use Tesla.
Kelsey Lehrich: How many downsheet assets do you have? There can't be that many checking accounts.
John Wilson: Balance sheet assets and checking accounts are different, but
Kelsey Lehrich: sorry,
John Wilson: how many assets, a lot, a hundred vehicles,
Kelsey Lehrich: not like that's not even
John Wilson: tools yet.
Kelsey Lehrich: No, not fixed assets.
Kelsey Lehrich: If you just took loans and cash and solve for change in working capital,
John Wilson: maybe
Reg Zeller: 40.
Kelsey Lehrich: That's more than I thought. That's a lot
Reg Zeller: more than
Kelsey Lehrich: I thought. I thought I had too many, and you have a lot more than I do.
John Wilson: Our structure's different, right? We're doing this right now, we're debt scheduling our stuff, because that wasn't done either.
John Wilson: There's about 25 loan accounts, because you gotta, we're buying vehicles, we're buying equipment. We just bought, yeah, you have the acquisitions, those are obviously the big ones. Yeah. But, we have another two million dollars in vehicles, and septic truck that we bought. And, we just bought a hundred thousand dollar excavator, and just a lot of fucking equipment.
John Wilson: I'm just gonna keep asking questions that get John in trouble.
Reg Zeller: I like that idea. Kelsey's just trying not to get cancelled himself. Yeah.
Kelsey Lehrich: If I get John cancelled, I'm in the clear.
Reg Zeller: I see, exactly. It's like the fastest bear thing all over again. Yeah,
John Wilson: it's pretty good. But yeah, so we have a lot of accounts.
John Wilson: You guys have less? I guess you have probably less sources of debt than we do because we have all this equipment.
Kelsey Lehrich: 13 checking accounts. All the credit cards roll up to one or two or three platforms, I think. And then it was a bunch of liability accounts, but not as many as you have. The bigger issue for us is merchant processing accounts.
Kelsey Lehrich: So you check out on a given brand and you're going to have PayPal and regular checkout and after pay and like the number of sales channels per brand is probably enormous for what you would consider. You had an eBay, Walmart, Target, Amazon, all those other sources. And that gets complicated for us.
John Wilson: Yeah, we only have four or five, a brand.
Kelsey Lehrich: So what method was the incredibly overpriced plumbing service that I received from your organization and how does that get deposited to your checking account for this made up service?
Reg Zeller: Nice. The shower cartridge.
Kelsey Lehrich: Yeah. What the heck is a shower cartridge? I'm like, Hey, honey, how long was the guy here? It was a pretty large bill.
Kelsey Lehrich: It must've been like a big project. Oh no. He was in that 15 minutes. Oh, I've
John Wilson: told you to buy home service companies.
Reg Zeller: It's the friends and family premium right there. Don't worry about it, Kelsey. You're fine.
Kelsey Lehrich: Yeah. I got a hundred dollar home visit and service charge and a 250 John VIP courtesy price
Reg Zeller: increase.
John Wilson: Yeah you're damn right. That'll go to pay for my time. That'll help pay for dinner on Monday. See, we're going to this
Kelsey Lehrich: fancy place on Monday for dinner. Now, I don't ask John for discounts. He just passes along surcharges. It's good. Yeah,
John Wilson: it's nice. Yeah, no, it works super well. But no, that one's actually pretty easy.
John Wilson: Cause it just swipes through our POS and goes into the check account. That one's pretty easy. I
Kelsey Lehrich: think you guys have my card on file. So just my phone just buzzed at the Apple pay alert. And it's Oh, like John has your money now.
John Wilson: Hey, Kud, we're starting to do Cards on File. We just got they just encrypted that section of the software, which we're pumped up about, because we can do, we're trying to turn our septic and grease traps into MRR.
Kelsey Lehrich: MRR. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Reg Zeller: It's freaking dope. Oh, this is not your father's plumbing company. Literally. Yeah. As they say. That's good. I'm actually, so we need to add this to one of the lists of topics is how we've broken finance as we've grown the business. Cause we talked about processes, but actually this is. Maybe you'll remember I stood on stage when we were at SM bash and said, Hey, I'm not worried.
Reg Zeller: We're running this company just fine. We shouldn't have any, I know we're flying blind, but I get the ins and outs. I didn't realize that we'd gotten so far behind in pricing that we were pricing six months behind and commodities were going up 15 percent
John Wilson: a month. I'm remembering exactly how confidently you said that.
John Wilson: I was so
Reg Zeller: It was only one of our companies too. Thankfully it wasn't as bad, but this is no shit. We figured this out. We threw a million dollars in a hundred dollar bills onto the center of the conference room table and lit it on fire last year, just in pricing, just that one thing, because we were flying blind and I had no idea.
Reg Zeller: And as soon as I heard it in my directors, the director of ops was like, Oh yeah, we're pricing like this. I was like, Oh fuck. Like I knew it and it was from then until two weeks ago. We're going to talk about our main topic, but my mental health breakdown that we all had in the first quarter was, I was just like, I was just waiting for how big the bill was going to be.
Reg Zeller: It's Oh God, it's going to hurt. I just don't know if this is going to hurt like 200, 000 for the year or seven figures for the year. Unfortunately, yeah, it was a bad year to be flying blind when commodities are rocketing up and you stop doing processes and you lose sight of financials all at the same time.
Reg Zeller: Had we known about that in September, we'd have fixed it in days. It was fixed within hours. As soon as I heard it, I knew exactly what they were doing.
John Wilson: How do you like fix that loop? So it doesn't happen again.
Reg Zeller: J O S H. Exactly. No. Really Josh. But this is part of it. No, because Josh had set up a new way of doing this, but we're following it.
Reg Zeller: But then I said that day, we're putting in a new process and all customers know this right now. They're going to get a price the day we ship. Based on commodities and what's happening. It's not oh, we're going to give you a blanket PO. Nine months ago and confirm it. And there's no, you guys know how you've seen roughly speaking.
Reg Zeller: We have to do the same thing with
John Wilson: Hey, John,
Kelsey Lehrich: can you get the editor to go back to our podcast about inflation and just edit in where Reg said he had pricing power and to put a clip of that right here. We don't use it.
John Wilson: We're re releasing
Kelsey Lehrich: dear editor. Please insert Reggie's quote from three episodes ago. I
Reg Zeller: was in North Texas. I almost drove off the road because I knew how bad it was going to be. I knew it was going to be bad. I just didn't know the impact of that. But anyway,
Kelsey Lehrich: I can't wait until I can finally quantify our lost revenue out of stocks that we can't demand forecast enough for.
Kelsey Lehrich: It's a lot.
Reg Zeller: It's a lot. So by the way, are we actually going to start on any of our topics? Is this going to become our first time?
John Wilson: We basically already started. So like, how did we break finance every
Kelsey Lehrich: episode?
Reg Zeller: The John intro. Is that what you said? The cold intro. You
Kelsey Lehrich: just start. Yeah. We're doing that every time.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. All right. I think it's just better
Kelsey Lehrich: until health or
Reg Zeller: corporate. No, let's go mental health. I already said, I've already tipped off how I started. We've all virtually talked about what led us down these paths. Losing a lot of money quickly, you do it, you have a real mental health crisis, start burning a hundred dollar bills.
Kelsey Lehrich: We had our best Q1 ever and I had a mental health crisis. So there's that Q Kelsey, exactly. I'm with John, John, it's not all about the money. Sometimes wait
Reg Zeller: till you get that spike on the other. The only way to look at this Kelsey is now you've only got one level of amplitude. You've got another level on top of it.
Reg Zeller: Just wait till you have a bad quarter and a mental health case. But just hold on, buddy. It's coming. We've all been there. All right, Kelsey, kick us off. Let's talk about this.
John Wilson: I just want to dive into a mental health aside. How'd you have a good quarter? Everyone on Twitter in the e com space was like bleeding from their eyeballs.
Kelsey Lehrich: The financial results of the quarter were good. Could they have been better? Probably. Is they all said they were better. Ecom Twitter is a really bad echo chamber. I don't know that scrolling through there is the best way to gauge sentiment of anything, business or otherwise. So I wouldn't read too much into that.
John Wilson: All right. Continue on. You had a great first quarter. You rubbed it in Reg's nice face. Thank you for that. And yeah,
Reg Zeller: we had a great first quarter
John Wilson: and you still struggled with the mentals.
Reg Zeller: I did. We're just going to that. Say, all right I'll kick it off. As I told you, from when we got that.
Reg Zeller: Conversation with Josh and that group, I think. So before we get on this path, let's start with this. I think the three of us are relatively similar in the way we handle things. I think we all try and work out, eat relatively healthy, keep up healthy habits enough. I don't think any of us are going to be used to being perfect athletes with a great diet and habits, et cetera.
Reg Zeller: But it wasn't even I didn't even let that slip that much. It was just more like we just got bad news and it felt like one of those things in small business. I don't know how you guys have felt year over year, but we're a little over five years in now in this business constantly. I just think all small businesses are this way.
Reg Zeller: It's one step, two step, three steps forward. And then one step back. And when we got that news I thought we'd turn the corner on stuff like this and we weren't going to see this again. Nope. There it was again, reared its ugly head. Mine wasn't good. Was no. Personal, nothing like that. It was just one more thing.
Reg Zeller: And I was just, it was like a week of just misery. So I'm just like, God, how are we in this spot again? How did this happen? And then the more I learned, the more I dug in the worse it got. Finally, Josh was like, he literally called me up and this just completely broke the entire, it went from like the prior Monday to the following Tuesday.
Reg Zeller: And he called me, I think it was like a Tuesday or something. He's Hey, I just want you to know, here's some of the preliminaries of what. The first quarter is looking cause the first quarter was fine. Close the deal, did all that, but it was the look and review. And then we couldn't get the books closed.
Reg Zeller: So it was like eight days of every two hours finding out more bad news. And it was just like dying the death of a thousand cuts. And he just called me. He's Hey man, listen, like I got that, but that's in the past. And then I reviewed the whole year review of all the bad things that got us there.
Reg Zeller: Cause I bought one business that was bad and screwed all that stuff up. And then he just called me like, Hey man, look, I'm It's fine. We got this stuff fixed. It is what it is. And he gave a great line. He said, listen, it's really expensive tuition. Yep. We probably lost a million dollars. Didn't lose. We left it on the table, but at the same time, that stuff's fixed.
Reg Zeller: We got a good team. We're figuring all this stuff out. Calm down, bro. Like we're here for the next 20 years. And I was talking to myself in that same thing, but for whatever reason, when he said it and gave me the results. It was like a full, just switch just flipped that day, but it was still eight days.
Reg Zeller: It was rough. Not good.
Kelsey Lehrich: I think that the expectations play a lot. And I think that control factors play a lot of like things that are in your control and out of your control.
Reg Zeller: I think you hit that one right on the head when I can't control things. I will quickly spin out of control myself when things are out of my, could I do not do well, I want to be able to control.
Reg Zeller: And by the way, when you're in the year of the process, like we're trying to improve everything and I'm letting the team run it and I would it was rough. It was rough,
Kelsey Lehrich: but the stereotypical SMB visionary CEO type that's present on this call. And I think it's probably 10 X the average of most people like to be in control of things.
Kelsey Lehrich: And so that's a typical human nature. I have a feeling that some, probably a lot of people listening to this conversation will identify with the fact that they have a overactive dose of that particular strain of DNA.
Reg Zeller: And it can be very
Kelsey Lehrich: painful,
Reg Zeller: but it's something you have to think. It's just something that, and I didn't everything imaginable, like we dealt with it.
Reg Zeller: We talked about it, but I did not jump in. And fix it. I'm actually like, you know what? Because one thing I would pat myself on the back for, I didn't think it was so much against my nature, but I knew I hired a good team and I, this was an output of results that we'd already had and bad processes and things that were already broken that we'd already fixed.
Reg Zeller: And it was just like, I had to keep telling myself like, just
Kelsey Lehrich: as a founder
Reg Zeller: away, don't screw things up.
Kelsey Lehrich: It doesn't matter. It's one thing to identify and fix mistakes. It's another thing to feel like you're on the hamster wheel and you thought you had it fixed and then the team didn't fix it or you realize that at the end of the day, everything is your fault.
Kelsey Lehrich: And it comes back to you, the standards you set, the culture, you enforce the business that you run. And it's very easy to internalize a lot of it.
John Wilson: Agreed for sure. Can I briefly introduce you guys to my new president?
Reg Zeller: I'm hoping it's your puppy dog or what in the hell is going on right now. Someone's going to die.
Reg Zeller: John, is there a river in Columbus or Josh? We were just chatting. You can literally for people that aren't able to see for people that aren't able to see the rest of the group, Josh is in his nice warm. House in Austin, Kelsey's doing a pretty decent job of keeping it together. Although John is actually crying and on mute, like he was just rubbing his eyes.
Reg Zeller: Tears are to his eyes. Cause this is funny. Josh, by the way, is not coming to work for you. It's not happening.
Kelsey Lehrich: What's
Reg Zeller: going on,
Kelsey Lehrich: brother?
Reg Zeller: Hey man, what's happening? I was just telling him the story about how I got on stage at SM bash and told him we were going to figure it out. It'd be fine. And you told me you weren't sure cause we couldn't see anything.
Reg Zeller: And then we realized that we were totally blind to financials and. We steer the Titanic into an iceberg, but we're coming out of it. We're doing all right. That's what I told him. I'm like, Hey, and it was, it was eight days of hell, but you and I finally had a good conversation after dying the death of a thousand cuts about every two hours was worst performance about the year before.
Reg Zeller: But yeah, with an update of, Hey man, here's some interim results. Chill out. We got this. All right. You've hired a good team. Just stay on the sidelines and go learn Spanish and play golf and get out of here. We've got this. We don't want you being our director of finance or running marketing like what happens up there at Wilson companies and things get screwed up.
John Wilson: Oh yeah. That was super embarrassing. All right. Let me tell you guys about this really quick. So yesterday I'm put in charge of marketing for, I honestly mean about 15, 20 minutes. I scheduled. Clarify first. Yeah. What that means. Put in charge. Who puts you in charge? Exactly. I took a task over from Brandon to help him out, basically.
John Wilson: So I was like, all right I'll take it over. I got this. Don't worry about it. Jesus Christ. So I take over this email through our mass email software. I'm going to pull it up. This is so embarrassing. So we use like an email template and I thought a bunch of this stuff was going to get Filled in any time there was parentheses.
John Wilson: So one. Hi, first name, John here.
John Wilson: So I get my first text about it this morning, like six and that the one that everybody circled and sent to me like, bro, really? It was like a list of problems that could happen if you don't service your AC. And the bottom one was parentheses, insert a problem that people in your area would have.
Reg Zeller: And this went out.
John Wilson: Oh yeah. Oh
Reg Zeller: yeah. Oh
John Wilson: yeah. No, like 10, 000 people. How many customers? Like 10, 000? 10, 000. Yeah. Oh my God.
Reg Zeller: So
John Wilson: terrible.
Reg Zeller: This is why I stay out of Josh's way right here. Self appointed. Hey Josh, don't worry about it. I got that. Just let me see if we can burn a furnace up for you. No problem. I just stay out of the way.
Reg Zeller: What do we bring Josh on? Or other than to make fun of me.
John Wilson: So Josh and I actually had a scheduled episode at 3. ran into it. Whoa,
Reg Zeller: whoa. Can we clarify what 15 minutes late. This didn't no. You showed up 14 days late, let's be very clear. You showed up 15 minutes late today.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. This is
Kelsey Lehrich: 14
Reg Zeller: days already, let's be very clear about this. All right, of the six people that
Kelsey Lehrich: started listening to this, we've lost five of them that don't want to hear this anymore. Yeah, that's true. We're just shutting this
Reg Zeller: was going to be like a tag team interview. I was stoked. I was like, we're going to do a KainCast ops show with the KainCast owner and all of his besties.
John Wilson: Honestly, now I'm curious what you guys did. So you had a big financial problem. How'd you guys solve it? Like not from Reg's perspective, from Josh's perspective,
Reg Zeller: faster iteration cycles. So market was changing. We weren't changing with it instead of realizing the market was changing at a different pace.
Reg Zeller: We needed to change with it. I think what happened was we basically just stayed on our old cadence of quarterly updates or annual updates. So pretty simply just updating sometimes daily to keep on track of our pricing and our quotes. All right. So since we have Josh.
Kelsey Lehrich: Can we do topic number two and have Josh jump in?
Reg Zeller: Yeah, let's do it. I don't even remember what topic number, oh, corporate versus. Yeah, so we had this debate. All right, so we'll revisit the first, the end of this first topic, but all right, some other time. The end of the first
Kelsey Lehrich: topic.
Reg Zeller: Yeah, we'll revisit it the next time we crash one of our ships, onto the shore.
Reg Zeller: We'll talk about mental health. I think
Kelsey Lehrich: mental health breakdowns happen whether or not you trash the ship. It's entirely an inward facing issue. All right. So corporate versus purebred entrepreneur in small business.
Reg Zeller: Go. Just my take. I think there are some things you can learn from corporate, but I also feel like it's totally different culture.
Reg Zeller: I can only speak from my background and that is I love small business. I said, a lot of stuff was kind of bullshit and small business. I then was put on the leadership of a corporate team that ran about 32 divisions, pretty small, I think, compared to regist history, but. 150 million sales and realize that not all of what I thought was bullshit.
Reg Zeller: So took away maybe, let's say 20 percent of the things where, Hey, this is really important to keep your team on track and focused when everybody is as motivated as you are. Your team isn't just six, seven people. I'd say I don't do well in a corporate environment, which is why I left after the buyout.
Reg Zeller: That I had that put me in that position. I just I like faster feedback, faster iteration cycles. I feel like corporate is a very slow moving ship. And if you aren't confident in yourself to get that feedback and to grow, then you're not going to do well, but it's got a lot of payoff and upside for if you that.
Reg Zeller: Steadiness to it. I don't, I like things moving, shaking, breaking a little bit, growing faster, and then getting that feedback on a weekly basis.
Kelsey Lehrich: I think the genesis of this topic was John and I thinking that reg was like an odd ball coming out of corporate and being. Successful in small business. I think John and I are a bit jaded having only really done small business, that we have a strong opinion.
Kelsey Lehrich: I'm not speaking for John here. He might disagree that most entrepreneurs that are lifelong that hit some amount of scale. Look at people that have been in corporate for a long time and think Oh you never had to mop the floors and you have an HR team that handles everything. And you'd never had to insert small business problems, one through a hundred.
Kelsey Lehrich: And you just assume that people that have run a large P& L at. Fortune 500 would have a hard time adapting the small business.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. But have you heard Reg's background? He literally just broke shit at three or four different places. He went in and said, your supply chain is broken, built a model and, pretty much upended how they did it.
Reg Zeller: And then he got pulled out and upended how they did M and a, his whole thing was an entrepreneurial guy inside of corporate breaking it. So I agree with that for corporate standard, but I don't see Reg's corporate standard. So
Kelsey Lehrich: do you think the average corporate standard would Excel or struggle?
Reg Zeller: In SMB, so hold on, don't make him guess on this one. Cause let me clarify one other thing on this. And then it's saying
John Wilson: it, man. I know it was, I already
Reg Zeller: know, but so here's
John Wilson: his mouth. You had to like, bring it back
Reg Zeller: in, but you have 80 or 90%. Of the folks in corporate that wouldn't do it. And so again, where this conversation came from is there are a hell a lot of talented people in corporate, and they will stack that top five, 10, 20 percent on top of each other, and more or less you start in the bottom and it's like rats trying to get out of the bucket and the people that do get out of there, they slap the golden handcuffs on you so fast so that you're not.
Reg Zeller: Dumb like me and jump ship to go clean the bathrooms and do whatever else in small business. My perspective on this is, can they do it? It's interesting. You're going to have to want to do it. There's some people that just can't like me, I couldn't handle being there anymore. That's the best way to put it.
Reg Zeller: Did I have the skillset? I don't know. They taught me a lot of it. I, there's a lot of things that I screwed up on someone else's dime to get there. Size wise, right? You're talking tens of millions of people that exist. There's a lot of people that if they wanted to come out in corporate, if they wanted to leave, I think they have a tough time doing that.
Reg Zeller: Especially once you get family obligations and a lifestyle. I've seen a tough time
John Wilson: with skill set is what I've usually seen. Yeah. Anyone that I've It's most noticeable in finance, maybe for us, for the people that we've hired, who gave you reports or did you have to get information? It's like that one little thing, we've hired people or interviewed a bunch of people for senior finance roles.
John Wilson: And like a lot of them are used to just being handed all the data and then they can do whatever they need to do. But Hey, there's not 30 people on the accounting team. It doesn't look like that. There's five. That's seemingly the most noticeable. And I complained about this in a newsletter. Maybe a month ago, but at our, all of our scales, we all need more doers than, I don't know, collectors or whatever the opposite of doers is, but we all need more doers and I have found it very difficult to find doers in corporate.
John Wilson: Cause usually they can't do it because there's so many handcuffs or, red tape everywhere they go. So they're never really even taught how to do
Reg Zeller: it. It really depends where they are in the organization. There's also a lot of territorialism in corporate. So yeah, you're right. They don't know how to reach across the lines and figure stuff out, but it's not necessarily because they don't have the skills.
Reg Zeller: And so they never had the opportunity. People hide it from them or you just go do it anyway, or you go break stuff and a lot of people. This story is, I learned a great lesson in this guy, my first major job in a company, let's put it. And he told me that you can do whatever you want in a corporation. Your way, as long as you're making your numbers, if you're not doing it their way and you don't deliver numbers, you are gone, just be very prepared.
Reg Zeller: You have to, isn't
John Wilson: that small business too?
Reg Zeller: I think, yeah, I think it for sure is that it's just in, but you can also have a pretty good career in corporate doing it their way. You don't have to, you can do it their way and not deliver results as long as you do it their way. Honestly,
John Wilson: that's how it works in our company too.
John Wilson: I don't know if like I'm imperfect, but if you built your own system, that's different from my system, it better work because otherwise you broke my system.
Reg Zeller: That's Josh right there. I love it. Now he's got to deal with it, but no, I think, but that's exactly right. If you do it. If you do it, how your boss tells you to do it or their boss tells you to do it and you think it's wrong and you do it your own way.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. No bueno. Bye bye now. But you can succeed doing it. It is just painful. Every quarter, every year you get beaten up by your bosses about, Hey, you're not doing it our way. You're not doing this. You're not a team player. And don't you ever just shut up and do your job? I
John Wilson: feel like this is directly from
Reg Zeller: Reg's courtroom.
Reg Zeller: This is literally like He's
John Wilson: like reading off a teleprompter. You should have seen all his bullet points.
Reg Zeller: Brutal. You could Did you leave corporate or were you removed? Oh no, I left before they could remove me. But it was just a matter of time. You can't fire me. I
John Wilson: quit.
Reg Zeller: I kept leaving jobs. It was just a matter
John Wilson: of time.
John Wilson: Exactly.
Reg Zeller: I kept leaving. It might've been when I saw I got called in by the way, I'd like to come to the HR office with your boss and bring your stuff. And I just brought a signed resignation letter. That's how that went but no, I, again, like there is a select group of people inside of corporate that, I know a lot of these guys, these are the people that I associated with the good people.
Reg Zeller: I could name you 10 guys right now that I've. Helped either leave corporate or thought about leaving corporate that I know they would succeed, but to your point, though, they are doers. And these are guys that are willing to get their hands dirty and gals. I don't mean that one way or the other, but they'll get their hands dirty.
Reg Zeller: They'll jump in, they'll do stuff, but yet at the same time, they understand what it's going to take to scale a business and what it takes. When we talked about some of this stuff. Training and how you build systems and how you help your teams become leaders, all that stuff that I think that fades fast.
Reg Zeller: As you go down the organization, thinking about it, like I'd say the leadership teams I was on 80 percent of them could probably leave and do what I'm doing, if not better. But the second you go to like just mid level managers. Probably 40%, not even half would be able to do it. And then once you go below that, you're looking at people that literally want to work eight to five or less, they want two hour lunches.
Reg Zeller: They don't want to do anything. So I think it's also where you're coming from. The org reg was high up in an organization. I luckily got drawn in high up, but once you get below that, it fades fast. But people up there are super intelligent, very capable. I was there for one year and one of them, and I pulled away three or four of my biggest.
Reg Zeller: Lessons and running a large organization that I use Caincast. Yeah, I remember even, where I was, it's, but it's such a huge pyramid. I think, I don't know if you were there last week, Josh, and I was telling the story or not, but at the very bottom where at the time in GE was 300, 000 employees, it was top 3000, which they don't really, but then the next level up is 300.
Reg Zeller: Everybody gets cut. By 90 percent to get to that next level. And they double, you double your compensation. They double your options. They double everything for you at every level you go up in. So, whether you're number what
Kelsey Lehrich: you're saying is you're a one percenter
Reg Zeller: 301 and no, whether you're number three, you
Kelsey Lehrich: are a G E one
Reg Zeller: percenter.
Reg Zeller: Oh my God. Here we go. I catch so much crap. I almost did. It's always back
John Wilson: to PJs.
Reg Zeller: Well,
John Wilson: I'm just wondering how long I'm in that level. Now we're talking just put it in your
Reg Zeller: center. I don't even know if I'm a cane cast one per center. I'm not sure. I like that you're on the cane cast. Very talking more. Very top exactly.
Reg Zeller: I don't even, I don't even count anymore.
John Wilson: I'm on the bottom of our company. I'm on everyone's shit list. I just bombed a simple email like a few hours ago.
Reg Zeller: Literally how many customers you have the
Kelsey Lehrich: last time? Last time I sent an email, I did the same thing, but that was like three years ago.
Kelsey Lehrich: You too. I really
John Wilson: appreciate that. It's just I can do this.
Reg Zeller: The two millennials on this, I can't figure out how to send emails. That makes sense. Millennials don't send emails.
Kelsey Lehrich: I segmented the list and I sent it to the exact wrong segments and it blew up so many things.
John Wilson: Oh man. I almost did the same thing almost purchasing
Kelsey Lehrich: Product X
Kelsey Lehrich: Yes it was supposed to be like these people had just bought something so they're not supposed to see this new special deal or whatever. I sent it to the wrong half of the list. You guys have seen the wall art in here. There's literally like company jokes about that event. And it made it into a tagline that's in like the mural on the wall.
Kelsey Lehrich: That's incredible.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. Again. You two are no longer allowed to be marketing or it we've learned. So it's good. What else do you guys think? I get the doers thing. Do you think it's because you came without any of that? Experience. Am I your first corporate friend? I don't know. Oh, yeah. I
Kelsey Lehrich: don't even know anybody.
Kelsey Lehrich: Couldn't name one. No, I'm serious. Yeah. I think I'm a little I'm
Reg Zeller: serious about that. Yeah. For real. Oh, Reg has friends.
Kelsey Lehrich: Only once he met on the internet.
Reg Zeller: Besties. You're my first corporate acquaintance. Yeah, they're in Akron and I'm in Minneapolis. That's the only way this works. We're separated by a long plane ride.
Reg Zeller: Anytime we want to get together once a quarter.
Kelsey Lehrich: That's interesting. And I feel like there's going to be a stereotype that like SMB people have a chip on their shoulder around, like you hear the stories of people that say they want to leave corporate and then they report the trigger and risk tolerance and PG's and the salary and whatnot.
Kelsey Lehrich: And I think that a lot of people have not done that. Myself included have a chip on their shoulder of must be nice. I'm over here, making my own way in the world. And if you want, whatever that is, you should make the jump to and stop talking about it, put up or shut up, which you have done, which is probably why I like you.
Kelsey Lehrich: But there's many more who maybe want to pick your brain for five minutes. We'll have a phone call to talk about it, want to insert whatever. And you just feel like, nah, you're not going to do this.
Reg Zeller: I think it's accurate about for every. 10 people I talked to, I don't know, maybe one leaves, but there's a lot of folks.
Reg Zeller: To be fair, a lot of folks that I talked to are obscenely successful in their corporate careers, and I don't think I would tell them to leave and where they are right now, especially get older. You may as well take that last bite of the apple for the next. Two, five, 10 years. You're going to live a great life.
Reg Zeller: You can always buy something at the end of it. And by the time you're going to buy something five years from now, you're buying it with a GM and you're buying a whole team in place, you're not starting and grinding it out from where we started at, where you actually do have to clean the bathrooms or whatever.
Reg Zeller: You can get put into a much, much better position than we started. I just physically are really more mentally probably than anything I just had to get out. Just, there's no other way. It was a rather harsh statement, but. I think from what Kelsey was saying, people say, I want to leave and pick your brain and all that.
Reg Zeller: I think there's two kinds of people that are trying to get that conversation. The first one knows inside that they can't do it. Like they're almost looking for somebody to tell them that they can, but, inside when you're riding coattails at a corporate job versus you're getting stuff done and you have that like real insecurity I don't know if I could make this happen.
Reg Zeller: And then you have the other ones that. Have always made everything happen. It's not even a concern for them. It's not if, but just how, and they word it differently. The first people are like, can I talk to you about what it's like? And for them, you're like, Hey, already know you're not going to make it.
Reg Zeller: And then the second ones are like, Hey, I just need to know when you do the SBA, is it one, two or three? And who do I reach out to? And you're like, all right. You're a doer. You just need to know who to talk to. You're like, yeah, let's take 10 minutes and I'll walk you through it. And those are the two conversations I get again, harsh, but I've had that before where I wanted to do something and I'm asking people and inside, I know I can't do it, but I eventually don't do it because I feel that
Kelsey Lehrich: the red flag for me is when people phrase a question that is around.
Kelsey Lehrich: Like a textbook or checklist, correct answer instead of the meta level. I know how to solve the problem from first principles. It's more tell me what the answer is. What's the market terms for this? It's there's no market terms. You go negotiate it and solve the problem. If there's a problem, it's your job as the entrepreneur, create a solution.
Kelsey Lehrich: You don't go point to businessbuying101. com and say, Oh, this is what we should do. No, go create the outcome. If you don't have that personality, you're going to have a tough go.
Reg Zeller: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a wrap.
Kelsey Lehrich: One last observation from today. We all know John is like as squirrely as can be, but he has left the camera no less than 16 times.
Kelsey Lehrich: Where if you wanted him to speak, He wouldn't even be present
John Wilson: easily.
Reg Zeller: He was eating and drinking a bit ago. His daughter was on his lap. He brought Josh on.
John Wilson: I introduced my new president. You mean introduce Josh,
Reg Zeller: Josh, did we buy mine? I got
Kelsey Lehrich: Brandon in the
Reg Zeller: lobby. Yeah, I didn't see him come through in the financials, but it might be delayed,
John Wilson: might be delayed.
John Wilson: You guys are a couple of months back. You'll see it next
Reg Zeller: January. We got the Q1 update that John just talked about. Doesn't feel like exactly what we're looking for, Josh. It feels like we came out of the problem. So that's why our financials were crappy end of last year. You're just buying home services companies.
Reg Zeller: That's what it was. I like yeah. We got to circle back to that eventually, because part of that all came from the fact that I just cannot stop beating myself up about that bad deal, even though I'm getting closer now. But once Josh fixes that, then I'll feel a lot better. But. Anyway,
Kelsey Lehrich: I'm over mine now.
Kelsey Lehrich: I'm just pissed off at an underperforming and all this stuff that's going well. I want it to be better.
Reg Zeller: I'm totally fine now until we had to bring it up today. No, but I do want to make sure that we've closed the loop on John there in that one of the times I was trying, I won't name the business, just.
Reg Zeller: For John's benefit, he's actually trying to still procure this. Let's just say it was a text thread between Kelsey and John and I. And John says, Hey guys, talk me out of buying blank. And it was within. Easy. It was within. Asking the question. It was within seconds. Both of our like, you are an idiot. What is going on?
Reg Zeller: And then was this the
John Wilson: bowling alley?
Reg Zeller: I don't know if you're
Kelsey Lehrich: supposed to mention it. Yeah, it was the bowling. Oh my God. That was going out of business all over the country.
John Wilson: I
Kelsey Lehrich: think Reggie and I just termed it a tax shelter after because all it's going to do is lose money. That's all it's
John Wilson: going to
Kelsey Lehrich: do. But
John Wilson: you get to hang out.
John Wilson: Wait, do you have any money laundering clients?
Reg Zeller: So right after, this was not a healthy, all of them. Was it 48 hours after we talked about how this was going to be like the year of the process, we're not going to buy anything instantly. John's guys,
Kelsey Lehrich: I want to buy a bowling alley. No, every time John has this come to Jesus.
Kelsey Lehrich: All right, guys, the team's got this thing going a day later. I found this beautiful company. I'm not supposed to buy it. I think the owner will let me tie it up for one year under diligence. Closing
Reg Zeller: December. It's fine. I'm going to do that anyway, but still it's not a bowling alley. It's still a foundry, John come on, killing me here.
Reg Zeller: Yeah. And then it Kelsey's he's yeah, John's got the brain of a squirrel or something like that. I finally, I screenshot of that and that's still circled. I still have that somewhere in my pictures. All
Kelsey Lehrich: Last one. John found a gem on biz, but I still today.
Reg Zeller: Oh
John Wilson: my God. Oh, did you ever? Oh my God.
John Wilson: I'm going to read this out. This was incredible.
Kelsey Lehrich: This goes out to all the Boomer business brokers. I
John Wilson: took screenshots of it because I was like they're going to change this. Okay. The biz buy sell like daily updates Hey, we've got two new deals. Okay. So one came up today and I click on them cause I'm always curious.
John Wilson: And this one was titled well run and profitable single owner business. Feel free to search it. It's in Massillon, Ohio, and I haven't signed an NDA. So anything I'm about to say. I'm only going to say it because they themselves made this happen. This is insane. So just
Reg Zeller: repeating water and you have screenshots to verify it.
Reg Zeller: I thought you were joking when you sent it into the chip.
John Wilson: Oh, no, this is insane. Okay. So the broker, when he posted it. He like took their text message and copied absolutely everything from their, like the conversations about the deal, about assets in it. So we should, let's put it in the chat. This is just unbelievable.
John Wilson: Can you link it? I got it. I'll find it. But it has like the timestamps for the texts. It's talking about pricing assets. It's they literally like copy and pasted the text conversation about closing this company. And they threw it up on biz by sell the whole thing.
Reg Zeller: Everything is still live. Josh, what's best
Kelsey Lehrich: for you?
Kelsey Lehrich: Let's do Thursday after five. They're like talking sounds good. Dinner plans. Hey,
Reg Zeller: it's amazing. It's as if John is running in marketing for that broker now. So it's fun. They have been one problem.
John Wilson: Yeah. I started a sell side
Reg Zeller: advisory. After my beautiful marketing debut, I figured I'd follow that up with, Oh, how do I, John?
Reg Zeller: I love it. All right, kids. All right, Reg, we'll see you Friday. Josh, are you coming to the thing? No, I can't. I have a previous obligation I'm stuck with. I can't get out of it. My wife is going to Miami. It's her first trip since having my daughter two and a half years ago. And two months ago, I watched the kids.
Reg Zeller: So if I back out of that, it won't go well for me.
Kelsey Lehrich: Don't do that. Yeah,
Reg Zeller: especially when she calls me and I'm drunk with Reg, like three nights out of the week last week. So it's hard to be like, you can't travel. We had to entertain way too much last week. I've been recovering all week. Just brutal. I'm too old for this now, but the guy that was training me, it was like, what happened to your sleep recovery for those four days?
Reg Zeller: And I was like, I don't want to talk about it. Pretend like it didn't exist. We're back on track now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, you guys will get to meet the better half. I'm super excited. Fun times. Friday. How about Melissa? Yeah, she's coming.
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