Don’t Let Weak Process Stop Your Growth with Archibald McLellan

Reece sits down with Archibald McLellan of CBIS to talk about why weak process can quietly hold a construction business back long before the owner realizes it. For builders trying to grow without losing control, this episode gets into why better systems, cleaner numbers, and stronger communication matter more than ever.

Arch shares the hard lesson of losing leverage on a project because the paperwork, documentation, and financial visibility were not where they needed to be. Reece and Arch also break down job costing, cash flow planning, transparent communication, and why knowing your numbers early is what keeps growth from turning into chaos.

https://construction-integrators.com

Show Notes:
00:00 Show Intro
00:42 Meet Arch
04:05 From Marines To Construction
08:05 Private Equity Lessons
11:42 Proving His Value
16:00 Starting CBIS
18:21 Early Hard Lessons
22:02 Why Pain Matters
23:55 Strategic Partnerships
34:50 Process Starts With Numbers
41:17 Transparent Communication
43:55 Closing Thoughts

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast  Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

We're trying to grow an organization that looks like a 30 year old organization, and we're trying to do it in five years. We are really spent the time to make sure we've got the right process in place, and the process is strategic partnerships. Welcome to builders, budgets and beers. I'm Reece Barnes and I started this podcast to have real conversations about money in the building industry, the wins, the mistakes and everything in between. I believe builders deserve to feel confident about their finances, and that starts by hearing from others who've been through it too. This industry can be slow to change, but the right stories and the right tools can make profitability feel possible. Let's get into it. You all right, mics are hot. We're recording arch. Thanks for jumping on the show, dude. Hey, I'm so glad to be here. Reece, thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, of course, of course, we had God I think you reached out on LinkedIn the first time, yeah, and this was right when you were starting your apparatus and adaptive journey. And my MO for that is to, you know, hey, let's make this connection legit. Let's schedule quick 15 minutes. And that first 15 minute conversation, I was like, arch, we got to get you on the pod. Just an absolute electric contractor, not electrician, but you have an electric personality, and your story was super compelling. So I'm glad that you're here. I'm glad that you're going to be sharing your wisdom with the contractors out there. Well, hey, I certainly appreciate Reece. And you know, you came highly recommended because we were talking with our apparatus team teammates, Tanya, and she had mentioned that, hey, by the way, you know, the adaptive guys have a podcast. You should listen to it. She sent me one of the copies. And I mean, right away in the beginning, you know, beers builders, I was hooked and and then just the topics happened to be, as I was trying to create our cost codes, was whether or not you needed lots of cost codes or a few cost code. So it was immediately relevant, totally on the cost code thread. We don't have to make a whole episode on this. I was just talking to a contractor out of Denver, and it was the same thing. These guys have been in business forever, and they were getting confused with, like, just tons of cost codes, which were really like the descriptions from their estimate, and that failure of understanding to know that it's like, we don't have to track this down to the nail. We don't want Cost Codes down to the board, right? We want this to be categorizing our costs that we'll be consistently using, so that it paints a picture, a relevant picture, for you to know where your cost and income is going in the business, so you can make better decisions. Yeah. And I think, you know, that's a there's a certain level of, I hate to say maturity, but, but business maturity of knowing these things. And if you've grown up, you know, in a in a time of scarcity, you want to know where every Penny's going. If you've grown up in a period of abundance, you're less worried about it. You know, those are, those are rounding errors. And, you know, we shouldn't have to worry about that, but, but I think today, with the competitive environment, everybody's looking, everybody's looking for a competitive advantage totally. And I think anything we can do as contractors, as service providers, really helps us kind of set ourselves apart in the business, vice, vice, a guy that shows up and, you know, writes a invoice or a proposal on a on a bar napkin, and you wonder why it's never Right, totally, 100% and I think, like, just to that point of, like, the competitive advantage, essentially, like, building the moat in your business is, like, it's not as much as, like, going to the market where there aren't as many contractors, sure that would help. But I think the biggest moat that contractors could get is running an extremely tight operation, right? An extremely tight business, following the numbers, building off processes, and that's what we'll talk about today. But before we get into it, the listeners got to know who you are, what your background is, how you got into building. Let it rip. Well, I tell you my first job, I worked in a grocery store. I thought I was King Kong. You know, it was cool inside. There's air conditioning. But then around lunchtime, all the construction guys would come in, yeah, and I realized they were cooler than I was working in the grocery store. And so my sophomore year in high school, I said, Hey, I want to get a job in construction. And so a friend of the family said, Hey, I'm going to take you down there and I'm going to introduce you to a guy, but, but you cannot be, you can't be a wuss. Yeah, you've got to be ready. I mean, you go down there. And he introduces me. And the guy looks at me and kind of says, Hey, you have any back problems? Can you lift weights? Can you do I said, Yes, yes, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes. And he happened to be a former Marine, okay. And so he was, he was happy to see me, and then he worked me like a dog all the way through high school and college, yeah. And was very happy when I made the choice to take a. Small exit from construction after school, and I went in the Marine Corps. Love it. Thank you for your service. I can't believe they paid me to do it. Yeah, it was an absolute blast. And I spent 33 and a half years in the Marine Corps, and then came back to the construction journey after I retired. I love it. Arch you had, I mean, okay, so 33 years like, I can, I can only imagine there were not many dull moments in a 33 career, your career as a as a Marine, what was some of the stuff you were doing? I think you were in like aircraft, weren't you? Yes, I was. First half of my career was all aviation focused, okay? And then slowly it started to transition into doing a lot of work with special operations. And then the whole last half of my career was was really focused on special operations, doing work very cool in special operations. So had had a fantastic opportunity and worked with, you know, all of the best organizations in the world. Yeah, very cool. Wait, you were talking. I think you were, you were telling me was, there's, was the helicopter that you, that you were working with. There's my little model in the back. What is that? Ch, 53 echo. They've not come out with the K, but that's, that's 53,000 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal. Dude, that's insane. How much is, how much is away again, it's 53,500 pounds. 53,000 pounds full bag of gas. And then you can go pick up. You can see that one right over there, yeah, carrying the howitzer, the 120 millimeter gun underneath it. Okay, so did you operate these things? Yes, yeah, I was, I was a pilot, and then had an opportunity to be a forward air controller, and then went through our weapons school house and was an instructor at a weapon school house, and then came back was a squadron commander got out of aviation as I went down to SOCOM, and then got into a very interesting, it's called the 3x operations, and did a bunch of very cool things all over the world, and then went to MARSOC. Had was up there and had command up there, and then out to South Africa, and then Afghanistan, and back to SOCOM, where I retired. Dude. That's insane. That's insane. I mean, I think, long story short, don't mess with arch, don't but you are. I mean, you're showing you're extremely friendly. You're extremely friendly. Are all Marines like you? Of course, yeah. I mean, yes. Well, who was it? General Mattis, no better friend, no worse enemy, exactly. No better friend, no worse I love that. I love that. Okay, cool, so you got you got into construction after your 33 year career as a Marine. Yes. What was that journey like? When, when did you start? How long? How long has CBIS been? I retired in 20 right amidst covid. Couldn't be a better opportunity to go find, find a new job than during, you know, the midst of covid. So the I ended up working for a private equity firm with a mentor of mine, and he said, Hey, you're kind of interested in construction, and you're interested in technology and all this other stuff. And so he brought me into this private equity company, and everything was focused on construction. And so we started to do this building information modeling. We started to take a look at the process, the strategy, all this other stuff that went into this. And we found that there was a gaping hole, you know. And it was, you know, this was right after the McKinsey report had come out about construction was slow to evolve and adopt technology and all this. And this gentleman happened to be one of the guys that worked for Skunk Works back in the late 60s, early as they were doing some very interesting aircraft thing, and he couldn't understand why construction hadn't adopted modeling, three dimensional modeling, the way the aviation industry did back in the 60s and 70s, when it just got too expensive to go out and fly an airplane, rip their wings off and go, huh? Okay, yeah, let's figure out something a little cheaper than that, yeah, and, and so we got involved, and we did a project. It was really interesting. There was a commercial car wash, and they were about 60% of the way through the or 50% of the way through the project. The shell had been done. They were just getting ready to start on the interior MEPs and all that other stuff. And we agreed we were going to do a proof of concept, and ended up doing the full three dimensional thing, BIM model, all that other stuff. And the guys were like, Hey, listen, we're having a lot of trouble building the model from from the beginning because none of the data worked. And I was like, Okay, fellas, they're almost, you know, they're almost 60% through sprinkles. Some fairy dust on this thing. Move out. Let's, let's get, let's get ahead of these guys so I can give them some good stuff. Yeah, they're like, we'll figure it out. So they whatever they had to do to mesh up the model that all the different models and and then I got this list of a dozen or two dozen things, and the contractor looked at me and goes, arch. That's great. But these are all the things I expect my project manager and super and Superintendent on site to fix. Okay, unless you've got something more important than this finishes. This doesn't help me at all. And I said, you know, the only thing I can think is you guys probably had a hell of a time with the data in the beginning. Yeah. And he goes, holy cow. Let me tell you about the datum. You know, commercial car wash. We've got a water retention system. The first thing we put in on the site was a water retention system. We sunk it in 10 feet of concrete. Yeah, we had to pull it out because it was at the wrong level. We didn't want to put in a sump pump to draw, to put everything in there a station. And he's like, and then we did that. We put it in what we thought was the new data, the right datum, only to find out that wasn't the right datum either. Ah. And he goes, it was six weeks and 10s and 20s of 1000s of dollars delay and things. He goes, how much did this cost? And I was like, it was a lot. It was a fraction of that, yeah. And it matched, you know, the first thing it did was match all the datums. Yeah, dang well. And that's why information is important. Information is important. It really is. And, you know, more important than that is the humility when you don't have the information to ask the question, totally, totally. Okay. So this was like, this was in your in your private equity set. Why didn't you stay in private equity? Why did you jump into the business owner? Into the business owner world? Well, you know, I took us. The next step was I decided that, you know, I was a little short on experience. My last experience was 33 years ago, construction, and I needed, you know, to get my hands dirty. So I went to work for a general contractor. And I still keep in touch with the private equity guy, still a mentor of mine, and, you know, hoping to work projects now as as a CBIS, as Sebas, the company. But, you know, I went in there and the general contractor looked at me and said, you don't have any construction experience. You know, I built decks. I'd help friends build garages. I'd, you know, done small projects. And I was like, You're right. And so I agreed. I said, Hey, I'll tell you what. I'll work for you for 90 days, as long as on the 91st day, you sit back down with me and we renegotiate my value to the company. He's okay. Well, what kind of compensation you want? I said, I'll tell you what. I will take whatever you're willing to pay me. And so I was lowest paid employee. Spent the first week out in the field with our superintendent, Doug, hanging windows, doing things on a multifamily project. Then I went with another superintendent, Chuck and and then they brought me into the office. I was in the office for two days, and they said, You're never going back in the field. And I was like, Okay, so, so by this time, we started to do meetings, we started to do all the things I thought we needed to do to kind of build the team. And then, you know, I went to the president construction said, Hey, I'd like to do a superintendent working lunch once a month, bring everybody in. So we brought everybody in. And, you know, I asked the accounting team to come in. I asked, you know, the project management team. I asked the, you know, the marketing in the front office folks to come in and sit down for this lunch. And it that first meeting was brutal. It was it was a two hour bitch session. We hardly had time to eat by the third meeting, we had done that the third month, coincidentally, close to my 90 days. Yeah, we got that meeting down where in 45 minutes we had every project being briefed, every superintendent felt like they were hurt. We were able to eat lunch in about 25 minutes. So at the one and a half hour mark, guys were walking back out the door feeling like they've been hurt. And then we would do meeting notes afterwards, and we'd say, Hey, this is what we heard you say, and this is how the how the organization is going to get you the materials, get you the things that you need do, the coordination, make sure things are taken care of. And it was like, these guys started to look forward to this meeting, and that's awesome. Became incredibly powerful dude. That's awesome. And I think that, like, that just goes back into like, the skill set of the individual, right? And like, you've got like, 30 years and military experience, you come back in, right? You had the humility to like, at least accept to be like, Look, I don't have this experience, but I do believe I can bring value and like you brought value in organizing and bringing a team together and then starting to execute and roll out better, better ways of doing things. That's so important, that's so important. It was really, you know, it was, it was just, you know, I always say the blind squirrel finds a knot, sure, every once in a while, that's right. And this was, it was a great team of people, and I'm still indebted to, you know, that organization for giving me the opportunity to come in, you know? And what was really good was the 91st day, they said, Hey, we love what you're doing. And by that time I'd figured out the accounting system, I knew how much they were billing me out for and what we were doing for in. The projects, we had turned projects around, yeah, considerably. And, and they said, hey. And so I said, Okay, any anything more? They said, Keep doing what you're doing. I mean, you basically, you're running all of the projects, you're doing all this other stuff. We love it. And I said, any more responsibility? They said, No, you've already absorbed everything. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, Okay, how about, how about compensation? They said, You know what it's, it's October. Let's wait till the end of the year. And so I pushed my resignation across the table and said, hey, yeah, I'm afraid there's something more out there for me than this. And they were like, what I said, Yeah, we agreed. We were going to talk about, you know, compensation, everything. And, you know, I think I've shown what my worth is. And they said, Are you open for a counter offer? I was like, of course. They doubled my salary, they gave me a truck and and made me director of construction. Yeah, okay, so, okay, so you did stay. You did you accept the counter Okay, I did okay, but you still had that yearning, right, for something more, because now we have C best. Yes, exactly it was. It was during private equity, you know, the the private equity gentleman I worked for, said, Hey, you need to start your own LLC, whether it's just consulting or whatever, you start an LLC. So that's, that's where the start, yeah. And then as I watched how, through my, you know, 18 months at the company, I saw how the business was being run, and I was they did a great job with with the resources they had, but, but I likened it back to my days in the early Marine Corps, back in the in the early 90s, where I remember bringing my own government pen to work, and you would go to get a new pen, and they would say, Okay, let's see the old pen first, and you'd have if the if it wrote, or if it, even if it, if it dented the paper good enough, you couldn't get a new pen. We would bring our own toilet paper. Is how, how Spartan the living was at the time, and which seems quite opposite to what it is today. Well, hey, I'll tell you 20 years of the global war on terror, it certainly allowed people to focus rightfully so, to make sure that our troops had the resources they needed to be successful. Yeah, totally, totally, I love it. Okay, cool. Well, and so on that thread. So you, so you, you leaned in, you leaned in to see, to see biz. And do you call it CBIS, or sea biz, sea biz, CBIS, yeah. Okay, cool. I just wanna make sure. I wanna make sure. So just not sea biscuit, not sea biscuit, no. Sea biscuit. And actually, God, it wasn't Seabiscuit. Ah, this is gonna be an awe, okay, squirrel moment for me. So are you familiar with the brand area or Ariat, the boot brand? Yes. So do you know where that name comes from? No, from Secretariat. It's the back. It exactly, the horse, exactly. And I was gonna make that reference to sea biscuit, but there's not a boot brand named biscuit, so it doesn't work. Yeah, no, not, not that I can think of. Yeah, no. Okay. So anyways, I digress. Okay, so, dude, okay. So, okay. So this is fantastic. So far, I want to know, like, what were the first call it 90 days of C biz. Like, what was it like? Like, you resign as director of construction, you're all in on starting the construction company. You saw what worked, what didn't work. You had ideas and ways that you wanted to, like, really stand this thing up. What was the first 90 look like for you? First 90 was, you know, almost almost immediate success. Okay, we this was after, you know, there's a little bit of time a couple jobs in between there. C biz is actually job five after I retired. Some people that have helped mentor me along think I may be unemployable, so I had to do my own thing, yeah, sure, but each one was a strategic step to get to where I am now. And we had won a contract for post hurricane. We had two hurricanes here last year, and so we had won some storm remediation for a friend of mines, significant other relationship. And so it was like, hey, you know, we're just getting started. We're working on our process, all this other stuff. And we were the dog that caught the car, sure. And it was like, we didn't have processes. We didn't have books keeping. I was doing things on QuickBooks Online, you know, because it's not that hard. They've got that little button you can push up there, and they'll, they'll help you. Yeah, it was a mess. I got my bank account. I got the bank account synced with it. We had job tread. Which job tread has been fantastic, but it's only good if you know what you're doing with it totally, and you know all the back end stuff of connecting it with QuickBooks. Whoa. It was, needless to say, this, this is also one of the hardest lessons we've learned, is that we were not really good with paperwork in the beginning of this and and we really went on people's work because this was a friend of a friends. Why should we have any problems with this? And so we weren't really particular about. Change orders and and because we get things done, you know when, when the client says, Hey, I think I'd like to go instead of just a regular countertop, I think I'd like to go with the upgrade for the backsplash. I think I'd like to go with the one that goes all the way up the wall, if we could. Yeah, we're like, Absolutely, hey, here's a here's a number. Go talk to this guy, go pick it out. We'll get that installed. And we finished this project. And, I mean, we, luckily, we got it permitted. And everybody was like, Oh, geez. Why'd you permit it? I mean, you're kind of and then it was like, during the storm, right after the storms, the city of St Pete came out and said, Hey, if you do any storm remediation and you're not permitted standby. And so we did this, yeah, we were one of the only people on that street that did all permitted work. And so it just, it, just because, hey, listen, military guy, I'm a little bit of a rule follower. Yeah, you tell me what I got it now, the soft side, the Special Ops side. So do those rules really apply? I mean, I can't call her outside this line. Which line can I call her outside? Yeah, but it was, it was really good. And at the end of it, we kind of came and said, Hey, here's what our contract was. Here's what we did for work. And she said, I'm not, I'm not saying I'm not going to pay, but I'm telling you right now, I'm not paying anything. I didn't sign and in our documentation wasn't where it needed to be. We didn't have it was, in a way, we we kind of lost. We ended up going to mediation. We won the mediation, but in the end, we lost, and it was all due to lack of systems, lack of process, and, you know, really lack of being dialed into what our numbers were. And so that was, it was a horrible lesson, but it was a great lesson, and the fact that it was a very small project, relatively speaking, compared to what we're doing now, totally if you've got to learn that lesson, that was the time to do it well. And so that was gonna be my piece. Because, like, I mean, hey, arch, this is, like, this is tracking quite well to how construction companies start. We've got, we've got someone who's a builder, right, loves to build. We've got someone who hates paperwork, right? We've got people who aren't accountants, right? We've got people that are like, starting this thing, as any company is with, like, very little process, right? So, like, you were like, par for the course, my question is, is like being like the director of construction? Do you think that you could have before you started this? Do you think that you could have taken that and gotten around this really hard lesson? Or do you think that the hard lesson is more or less a requirement in this industry? You know, I think to a certain degree there is a requirement for the hard lesson. It's like the five stages of grief, right? You're going to go through all of them, right? Some of them you may get through pretty quick, pretty pretty easy, and then all of a sudden you get pulled back, and then, but you're gonna go through all five of them. I don't know how fast or how slow, and it may not always be an order, but you're gonna hit every, every single phase. So I think everybody's gonna go through that. You know, one of our challenges now is, because I am getting a little long in the tooth, i This thing's got to be successful, yeah. And, you know, I've burned the burned the canoe on the shore, yeah. And what we're trying to do now, and with, with the help of, you know, apparatus and adoptive and job tread and QuickBooks and bundle and all these other things, we're trying to grow an organization that looks like a 30 year old organization, and we're trying to do it in five years. Yeah. So we are really spent the time to make sure we've got the right process in place. And the process is strategic partnerships with apparatus, who's partnered with adaptive, so that handles all of our bookkeeping, yep, and you know, that was really one of the one of the things too, is, as we went through all this, I ended up finding a great bookkeeper, and he stayed with us for just a little over a year. And last October, he called me up one day and he said, Hey, he was in his late 70s, because I'm going back in retirement. And my wife and I had just on our walk that weekend, because that's what old people do. Yeah, and he said, and we talked about this, she goes, Hey, how's the business going? She's invested in this other horrible life choices. She stayed with me throughout the whole military career and public school teacher. 33 years my folks were public school teachers before they got into construction. Go ahead. Yeah, okay, so you've got this whole, you understand this whole thing, construction, public school teachers, everything. It's it fits in well. But go okay. So with your bookkeeper, 70s, you and your wife on your walk, yeah, and she goes, how's the business going? I said. Hey, well, listen, I think we're doing okay here. And she goes, I hope you're doing better than that last job, because that, that was almost, that was almost the end of me, yeah, when I said, it's not that bad, you know, we'll just pull more money out of savings. It's, it'll be fine, yeah? And she was like, I thought you said you were going to make money on this thing, yeah? This, this is worse than a nonprofit, because it just keeps costing us. And so she goes, how's the bookkeeping? I mean, how you doing the bookkeeping? Because you said that was a problem. So you brought, brought this gentleman on, and it was going well. I said, that is the best part, because I'm confident the books are fine. And she was, well, good. Whatever you got to do keep him happy. And he was a great gentleman. To this day, we still keep in touch. He considered himself my Dutch uncle, and he was the Navigator. I was the pilot. He goes, you just got to tell me where we are, and I'll tell you if there's a mountain in front of you, you know, you got to climb, or you got to descend, or there's clouds, because it was a great relationship. So when he called me, it kind of when he said, Hey, I'll give you till the end of November, but, but that's it. I'm done. Broke your heart. It did. It was, it was on every level. It was it was emotional. It was like, I almost got, you know, I'm sitting here going, I don't know how I'm going to be able to pick up the pieces. We were just on the edge of getting a couple big projects, yeah. And it was all based on having some degree of certainty in our books, right? And not to the point of having to do bonding and all that other stuff, totally. That's the next step. And so I'm sitting here, I didn't know how to tell my wife this, and so I said, You know what? I'll quit tomorrow. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to bed, get a good night's sleep, and then, you know, I'll figure out what I'm going to do and and just out of happenstance, I said, You know what? I had some notes somewhere, and I'd heard on a podcast about apparatus, precision accounting for construction, yeah. And I said, Well, you know, I think that's what we need. You know, I'd already learned my lesson. I think that maybe this is not so I jump on their website, I look at it, and I reach out to Steve kretzberg, yep, and it wasn't him. I mean, it was, obviously, it was their service, you know, hey, listen, I'm looking for this. 10 minutes later, I get a note from Steve, from apparatus, the president, and he goes, Hey, I'll book you a call tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. And I was like, okay, so instead of rolling around all night, I was at least like, Okay, now at least I have a I have an idea. And that was the absolute best thing we did. Yeah, was way more expensive relative to what we were paying Terry, yeah, but what we got out of this with the relationship between because I didn't even know adaptive came with this, right? And then I saw on the thing with all these green check marks, I was like, wow, this is, like, fantastic. Because not only was it, you know, precision accounting, but they were going to help us with our manage our w9 they were going to manage all of our CEO eyes. They were going to help us with our Lean because now I'm looking at trying to find some little old lady in tennis shoes to start to manage this stuff, because I don't want to be doing all that stuff. Yeah, and when that came with the package, it was like, wait a minute, all of this comes and then we looked at the nine stage onboarding process. And then, of course, never give a marine a process, yeah. And so they were, they were like, well, listen, it's nine stages. You know, some people go through it pretty quick. And so Carlos and I, Carlos is our project manager, who's also a retired Air Force guy, you know, with with soft background and and so we heard this, and we're like, what's the fastest any of your companies have ever made it through? And they said, well, it's about two months. Was the fastest we've but they, I mean, that's not even fair to compare, yeah. And so we got involved in the first week of November, and we were stabilized the last week in December. That's awesome. A month new record. Well, it was, it was, it was two months. It was November and December, yeah, okay, temp for it. But so still, that's incredible, I mean, and I think, like, even just going back to this, like, hard lesson is, you took it on the chin, right? Oh, look at that mug. Look at that mug. Is that apparatus? Oh, that just happens to be apparatus. I love that. But you took, you took the hard lessons, and then you were extremely actionable on them, right? And I think that's the important part. And just back to my initial question was like, Do you think this is necessary? Because I've had enough of these conversations, obviously, on the podcast, but even just like in general, I mean, I've been talking to some of the contractors the last 10 years, right? And it's one of these things where it's like, I don't know if it's ever that calculated, or if it's like, God, just like, give me the answer, or like, make this not happen. I don't think it's, I don't think that's how it works. I just don't think it works. I think it has everything to do with is like, get. Into the experience, getting into the situation, navigating it appropriately, and then preventing it from ever happening again, right? And when it comes to, like, these types of situations with your books, right? It's like, we've got Terry autopilot, great team. We're this dude, the guy's gonna retire. He's 70 years old, as he should, right? But now, how are you gonna respond as a business owner, and then you, like, immediately start taking action, and then you take things seriously. You made a comment earlier about, like, the business maturity, right? That's such a huge part of tracking construction accounting and financials, and it's not as simple as just plugging someone in to fill QuickBooks with information like that is, like, the first step, and if that first step isn't done consistently or accurately enough, everything from there is going to be shot. So I applaud you for doing this and taking the action and moving through it from a very, very calculated standpoint. Yeah, you know, and I think that's, that's a lot of you know, the maturity we needed, I needed was, you know, having the experience of being in the military and being a small cog in the wheel, to being the spoke, to being, you know, the hub, to then being the rubber, then, you know, just all parts of it, and then getting a chance to to basically learn your trade, become a master craftsman, and then start to instruct, and then start to lead. It was, was really good. You know, the neat thing about aviation is aviation's got some, some very strict principles in rule. Totally. Gravity is one of them, that what goes up must come down, and you've got a bag of gas, but it only lasts so long. You got to have a plan, when you get to the end of that bag of gas, what you're going to do, yeah, Mother Nature doesn't always cooperate. Yeah, totally. And then, you know, the other thing was, you know, that my my experience in special operations, I was kind of a senior guy coming in doing some of the things I was doing, and I was working with some very qualified, very great individuals, Greenberry seals, Rangers, all that stuff. And they would look at me, and they would go, Oh, look, he's an aviator, you could tell, because he got a checklist, sure, yeah. And I was like, I was taken back a little bit, you know. So I would hide it. I wouldn't always carry my checklist with me, put the clipboard away, and but, but then all of a sudden, you know, when I first started, I had like 10% of the portfolio of this thing we were doing, yeah. And then all of a sudden I had a couple of wins, yeah. And then all of a sudden I had like 15% I was like, okay, that's, you know, it's now a disproportionate amount compared to everybody else, sure. And then all of a sudden I went to, like, 40% Yeah. And then I was running, you know, about 75% of the portfolio. And it was because every time I got involved, all of a sudden, things kind of went from this to kind of just this, yeah, steady, Eddie. And it was because these guys had great personalities, they had huge egos, and they would walk into a room, can? They would own the room, yeah, and then they would make miracles happen, yeah? But if they went into the wrong room or or things weren't quite set up properly, they didn't have enough wasta to be able to pull it off every time. And so this, this checklist mentality, this process, the discipline to have a process of ask those questions, really helped us kind of kind of solidify this. And, you know, at towards the end of this, I was able to be the director of this program, yeah. And we started to implement some of these things, and we started to foster relationships, yeah, because at the end of the day, this whole thing construction is all about relationships. Totally it's the field, it's the office. Totally can't be it's got to be together. It can't be adversarial. Totally Well, and that's where, like, you aced, it is like you need, you need to prep the individuals and get a plan in place for the right people to come in and execute. Like the general contractor is really the quarterback. And like, I love that you framed at the beginning. This conversation is like a service per like a service provider, because that's really what it is like when you think about it. It's like, I'm a consumer and I want someone to build me a home, right? Or I'm a consumer and I want someone to build me a commercial property. It's like, you start the relationship with a general contractor, but it's like, it's not like the general contractors out there swinging the hammer, right? At least they probably shouldn't be, right? They're like, they're organizing everything like they know the process they know, all the way from like the very beginning to getting the permittings going through, all of the planning going through all the pre con getting the right people lined up, getting them in at numbers that makes sense to deliver the work that we need, and then scheduling everything out and getting everything going to that point. What were some of the early processes that you had established at Sebas? Like? What would you urge listeners to do to maybe not even if they're just, like, starting a company, but there's processes that they should have in place in their companies. You know, it, I think we learned this several years ago. You know, it's not just about the money. Yeah, it's all about the money, right? And so if. You don't start from a position of knowledge and strength about the money you're off to, you're off to a race to the bottom, and we never want to end up down there. So, you know, the first thing is really being able to develop the overarching strategy of how you're going to do this thing. You know, the budget and the schedule have to be inextricably linked, and then your communication plan of how you are going to communicate. Because communication isn't just about telling people what you're doing. It's about making sure you foreshadow you you let them know that, hey, in six weeks, we're going to be doing this therefore. And you know, before you start the project, you work out the cash flow plan, and you make sure that they're good to go that's tied into your budget, so that the communications are strategic steps to get you to the point of going, Mr. Client, I need you. Mrs. Client, I need you to give me the check, because over the next period of time, we're going to be doing these seven things you've agreed to have us do. Yep. And so it all comes together and and so the books are the most important thing, because at the end of the day, if you can't pay people, they typically don't want to work if, if you can't pay suppliers, they typically don't want to loan you their trusses, their their plywood, their nails, their glue. So you have to have that money. And clients, you know, want to make sure you've got a plan. You know, let me see the budget. Let me see the schedule. Okay, let me who are you talking to? Because at the end of the day, you know, per the AIA contracts, you know, the client and the architect and the design team have the ability to refuse letting you work with certain people if they've got a reputation of not doing good by the client or by the design team. And so I think this whole thing kind of comes together that it's having a, you know, an overarching process. You got to have your books, you got to have a way in which you're going to do your subcontractor agreements, your purchase orders, and then your invoicing. Them to you, you to the client, so that you can track your accounts receivable, accounts payable. And then, you know, one of the things that we have just recently started is back costing okay, I love it, and because with the ability we have with apparatus and adaptive now, every week, it's like in the old days of month end closeout. Month end closeout wasn't at the end of the month, you wouldn't get those numbers until, you know, maybe mid month, totally, two or three weeks after and then you're, I'm already on two other projects. I can't remember what that who was that? Again? Where was it? Oh, yeah. And now you're trying to go back. Okay, we're onto this next one. I don't have time to go back. So this ability to go back through at the end of the week, because every, every Sunday night, Monday morning, we get from our from Tanya, Tara, Manu and Muhammad, our apparatus, compadres, we get our reports, and they come out, and they're all from adaptive and Mallory and the team there, And they let us go back through and see what, what? What? Credit card transactions don't have receipts, which ones aren't properly cost code. So that gives us a really good sense now in where we are with our job tread, so we can see as of Sunday, exactly where we are kicking off the week. I love it. It's unbelievable. I love it. And so two points on that, so like, first the timeline right of and the timeline and accessibility to information, but then also the importance of knowing your numbers as you are starting a company. Or even, like, again, this isn't even just synonymous to like, starting a company, because there are a lot of contractors out there that are running big construction companies, and they don't even know what they're gonna be making on these jobs, but they fall hand in hand, because it's like, when you are starting out as a contractor, and like, as you would put it, like you're the dog that catches the car, or caught the car, right? It's like, stuff moves really fast, but you kind of have that opportunity in the beginning to know what you're gonna make on the widget that you're providing to the community, right? You know what this thing should cost? Or at least you have the opportunity to sit down and, like, do it methodically, and then before you start scaling and throwing more work on right? More revenue, more cost, more more employees, more overhead, all this stuff. You can know and follow these numbers and be like, I know that I'm going to net this much on this widget. And if I can do that consistently and repeatedly. Now I've got a business now it's much more it's less risky for me to start scaling and bringing this on. And when I'm looking at projects, I'm thinking about it more holistically. So I totally, totally agree with that concept of like, know your numbers. And like, get your numbers dialed from the jump, because it's only going to get harder with the more variables you throw into the equation. But the second piece, in terms of like the timeliness and accessibility to information, that is where it's almost like you need like the timeliness and accessibility of the information before you start getting into scale. Because it's in that timeliness and accessibility of information, you can make better decisions, and you can prevent those costs. Sleep mistakes from happening more so in the future. It's so obvious, but that's what we're learning over at Adaptive is it's like, Sure, automating AP is cool, right? Making it really easy to get receivables or draw packages out is cool. Like being able to stay on top of expenses and show all this in the budget, that's great. But the most valuable piece of all of that is is when you automate those workflows, and you get the people that are in the field and that are on the team that access to that information, which they really have, like the key to the remaining part of it, that's all driving, like an automated WIP report, right? So now we're talking about cash flow, and now it's not just like I get a WIP report at the end of the month to your point, end of the month, two, three weeks after the end of the month just to do reconciliations and adjustments. But now I'm getting WIP report in a real time basis, to get the feedback from the field, to know what my percentage of completes are, to see what my cash positions actually are, so that I can see the mountain before I crash the plan into it. Yes, end of rant. But I think it's great. I think it's great that you're thinking of that level. That's the business maturity. I don't care if you're a $500 million company or a $3 million construction company, right? It's that. It's that understanding of where you're trying to go and focusing and prioritizing it. That's the big piece. Do you have any thoughts, anything to add? No, that is absolutely it. And you know that if you know your numbers and you've got a good handle on it, then it's easy to implement transparent communications. And you know that that's the one thing that we pride ourselves on, is having transparent communications. And the communication goes both ways. As a general contractor, like, I think, your analogy of the quarterback, you know the cog in the, you know, the center, the hub of the wheel, the nucleus, really the what they're the nucleus, yes. And you know, it's important, because now you've got to be able to work with the client. You need to let them, and if you've done a good job, then you've done a cash flow analysis with them. Of here's where we're going to be over the life of the project. You need to be able to support this. It's your project. And then we can also communicate that down to our subcontractors, in our own folks working for us, our superintendents, who again, have that interaction on a daily basis with the client, likely, and then they also have the daily interaction with the subcontractors. And you know, there's nothing I remember with a couple of the companies I work for, the curse of slow pay. The Curse of slow pay is, is that you had the A team in the beginning, everybody shows up. They're excited, the a team's there, and then you miss that first pay window, and all of a sudden it's the B team shows up, yep. And then the B team, they take longer lunches, they don't show up on time, and in fact, sometimes they don't even show up. And then, and then, when you miss another payment opportunity, now the C team shows up. And the C team are the same guys you recognize when you drove by Home Depot, and they were the guys like looking for work, and totally, what are you guys doing here? Hey, we just signed on with this company, really, and so now your production slows down. The quality is out the window, and you will never get that back. So it is so important to start these things right, and the basis of it is knowing your numbers and having a forecast as you go into this. So my advice to people is spend that extra time, you know. And I think Todd Duvall from construction leading edge coined the phrase jets, just enough to start, yeah. And you know, part of that is to make sure that you've got your finances, the financial plan laid out so that you know how it's going to go invoicing, you know, pay, accounts receivable, accounts payable, to make sure that you're able to take care and bring those people along the journey with you. That's awesome. That's awesome. Arch, this was a fantastic episode. I love it. I think the story bleeding in all the experience. Your journey with seabiz, I'm super stoked to follow you along, and thanks again for jumping on the show. Well, hey, thank you, Reece and man, I'm a huge fan. I love what you guys are doing. Give my best to Matt and the rest of the adaptive team. Certainly will, certainly will enjoy the rest of your day, man, hey, thank you. Take care.