Episode 132 - Punk Rock, Paint, & Pivot Tables: Meet Construction’s True Renaissance Man

#132 | Martin Davies O'Connor | Mill City Restoration | Punk Rock, Paint, & Pivot Tables

In this episode of The Curious Builder Podcast, Mark Williams sits down with Martin Davies O'Connor from Mill City Restoration for a lively chat about Martin's fascinating career path—from punk rock and Excel training to importing tequila from Mexico and ultimately running a successful commercial painting business in Minnesota. They dive into the realities of entrepreneurship, the challenge of cash flow (especially in commercial construction), the importance of work-life balance, and why understanding your numbers is key for any business owner. It's an energetic, honest conversation full of great stories and practical advice for anyone interested in building a business or just curious about unique career journeys!

Listen to the full episode:

About Martin Davies O'Connor

Martin Davies O’Connor founded Mill City Restoration with his partner Michelle O’Connor. As a husband and wife team, parents, and homeowners, Michelle and Martin know the importance of trust between contractors and homeowners during a painting project. This is their key commitment to their clients, and they treat your home as if it were their own! It is their passion to preserve, restore, and revive your home in an honest and professional manner.

Resources:

Visit Mill City Restoration’s Website

Visit Mill City Restoration’s Facebook

• Transcript

  Martin Davies O'Connor  00:04

  As my dad started navigating the intricacies of selling tequila, which there's a lot of intricacies, you know, if you want to bring booze across a border, we get the container, and we get the orders, and we do all these and we get it through, and the check clears. And I'm super stoked. I'm like, this worked, dad. I can't believe it today,

  Mark D. Williams  00:31

  on the curious builder podcast, we had Martin Davies O'Connor in from Mill City restoration, and you're going to want to stay tuned. This goes a little over. We go about 20 minutes over the hour, but stay tuned this you're going to see a ton of energy between the two of us, and really, it takes about a half hour to get through all of Martin's various careers. He's a true Renaissance man. If you like serial entrepreneurs, you're in for a good one. Buckle up your seat belt. Here is Martin with Mill City restorations. All right. Welcome to the curious builder Podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host today, I'm joined with Martin Davies O'Connor from Mill City restoration, right here in Minnesota.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  01:03

  Thanks Mark. Thank you so much for having me today. It's a real honor in studio. You know what?

  Mark D. Williams  01:07

  I actually was looking back, I can't remember because we hadn't met before. No, was it did your wife reach out? Because I know you guys on the business together, or I can't remember how we got connected.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  01:15

  I so some of the things that I like to do, and this was some of the focus of this year, is I just reach out to people if I like your branding, if I like your advertising. And so I came across your ad, and I just reached out to you. Oh, there we go. That's what it was. Yeah, I couldn't remember. I'm like,

  Mark D. Williams  01:29

  because usually have a pretty good I was like, Where did this come from? Because it's funny on like, when people come into our custom home company, we have them go through the portals. Like, did you hear about us on Google, or word of mouth or referral? I don't have one for the curious builder. It's anyway. So I was like, sometimes, because we book out five six months in advance, we probably booked this back in April. We did, and then it shows up on my calendar. I'm like, I don't know who Martin Davis O'Connor is.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  01:50

  Yeah, we've never met until like five minutes ago, which, I mean, honestly, a lot

  Mark D. Williams  01:55

  of the people I don't know or have not met before, which is fine, but yeah, it was just Oh, okay. So anyway, as I did some research earlier the week, kind of figured out a little bit more about your con about your company. But yeah, you're a renaissance man. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile. I mean, honestly, I don't know if a Rhodes Scholar has as many jobs landing as you had. Let's start just because I find it really interesting. Yeah. So I'll go in reverse order from what you're doing now. We'll spend most of it talking about Mill City restoration for the last 11 years, but your first one, Microsoft Excel trainer, three years you sure, traveled around the United States as a presenter, trainer, keynote speaker, yes, addressing crowds of 100 to 200 How old were you when you're doing

  Martin Davies O'Connor  02:30

  this? I was in my late 20s, and maybe what I should do is just step back if you want to know, yeah, how did that journey happen? Yeah, right. So okay, so currently I'm a little older than 50, we'll say that. And so, so what happened was I grew up in South Minneapolis, really. Well, I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota as a teenager. Then I moved to Minneapolis with my dad, and in that time frame, that was an exciting time to be in Minneapolis, the late 80s, early 90s. And so I kind of enjoy, well, I got into the punk rock movement, yeah, and the punk rock movement sort of kept me active. And what I mean by that is that it made me want to not really settle down, not really want to do a lot of things, not do what I would consider like a traditional move forward. So in my mid 20s, I got married, and then we had, I inherited one stepson, and then I got another son. Kind of the bonus, yeah, yeah, the bonus pack, buy one, get one free. Yeah, that was exactly right, exactly. And so what had happened was, in the in my late 20s, my brother has been living in Guadalajara, Mexico, now for 30 some years, and back then, it was not that long, but I had traveled there a couple of times. And when my children were younger, very small, I decided real quick, when my youngest son was there, that I wanted them to be both bilingual and bicultural. And I had a business painting in Fargo, North Dakota at the time, where I'd gone back to finish my finish my degree. And so what I did is I sold the business, and I said to my wife, let's move to Mexico, where my brother is. And I promise this gets to the exciting. This is amazing, yeah. So, so we moved to just south of Guadalajara. So Guadalajara is Mexico's second largest city, and then just south of Guadalajara is Mexico's largest lake, Lake Chapala, and it's the largest community of Americans outside the US and my brother lives in Guadalajara, the big city, and then we moved to the village, and so when we were in the village, that's when I decided I've got to do something. So I wish I was independently wealthy at the time and that it could have just retired. That would have just retired, that would have been dynamite. So this is late 90s. Yeah, late 90s? Well, a little bit after 2000 there, yeah. So maybe I'm in my early 30s now. I probably am getting the time, but early 30s. So, so anyway, my brother, who we were talking just a little bit about before, and he was doing some training at the time, and. It's called soft skills. So how do we relate to other folks and that kind of jazz? And so he said to me, Hey, my company has an opening for hard skills trainer training Excel. And I said, That's dynamite. What is Excel? And so that's so and so I made, like, the demo tape, and with what limited knowledge I had, and I got the job. And this

  Mark D. Williams  05:21

  is well before, like virtual or anything like that, right? So you're, how is he training these people from Guadalajara?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  05:26

  So we're, so what happens is that you, you leave, you train them on site. And so, for example, I would fly to all sorts of different all around the country. In Canada was really great. The better you became at the job, the bigger your crowds. And then you got to go to the larger cities. So, so Seattle, from anywhere from Seattle to New York City, my favorite, not that they're big ones, but was my Juno was the Alaska tour. I love doing Juno Anchorage, Fairbanks, that was the tour. So, so anyway, that's so when I that's how it happened. I just decided I've got to do something. So I was living in Guadalajara, basically. And I would fly out, and I'd work anywhere from two to eight weeks on the road, and then I'd come home. And what I loved about it was the freedom. Then when I came home, it was over, but work was over, right? So it could just shift

  Mark D. Williams  06:13

  it was almost like shift work. It's two eight weeks on and then how long would you take off and be off?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  06:17

  It would depend a couple, few weeks, three weeks, I don't know, a month, something like that, yeah, and it was, it was really great. And it was a good time to learn Excel, or to be an Excel instructor and learn it at the same time, because I had to figure out what I was going to teach. I mean,

  Mark D. Williams  06:30

  obviously, very charismatic. So your, your brother is lining up these events, so you're going up to Juno, yeah? It's who's paying for this. Like, I'm now, I'm just sure this business, yeah, right,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  06:39

  right. So it was a, it was a couple, it was two different things. You could either have a seminar at, let's say, a Marriott, and then different companies would send folks. So for example, with Excel, a lot of people need CEU units because I'm an accountant, or I'm whatever it is. And so you may have a Marriott lobby, and then you've got 10 different companies that have each paid X amount of dollars to come Gotcha. Or the flip side is, if the demand was great enough within your company, you might hire me to just come into your company and teach 20 folks about pivot tables, yeah, and they get their CEU. So those are the two ways that that worked, and I loved it. And the reason I loved it is because it's a real dry subject, but what you start to figure out is you're trying to translate. It's a language, right? Excel is a language or just like anything else, and so in or and what I mean by that is that not everybody speaks fluently in Excel, not everybody understands the nuances. So what I really enjoyed about that, especially with, say, a crowd of 100 plus, you'd had to figure out real quickly where people were at so you could talk to them in their own language. Some people were programmers, and so they loved VBA, and they were there for, like, really hardcore stuff. And other folks just really wanted to figure out how to take a set of data and just turn it into a spreadsheet, or, sorry, into a graph or something like that. And so you can make it fun, because I know it sounds wacko, but like that, I don't know about now, but there were like, shortcut keys that could bring you right to Solitaire. So like, those would be like the crowd favorites to try to make it fun, but at the same

  Mark D. Williams  08:11

  time, that's like that precedes, like, the boss button for NCAA. You know what that is? No so like for NCAA brackets and March, March Madness and whatnot. Okay, if you're in corporate America, which we're clearly not, you would have, there would be a boss button, so you'd be watching these live stream games, and then it was like, the idea was, like someone would walk behind you, press the button, and a bunch of spreadsheets would show up on your dashboard. Your boss would walk by. You'd unclick it, it would go back to the NCAA basketball.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  08:35

  Yes, yes. So for me, that was, yeah, that was exactly it, like you'd have the secret button, Solitaire and things like that. So I really enjoyed that. And what I didn't know, which kind of brings us up to today, or what I'm really happy about, is that currently I'm in a master's program for accounting, and so all of these things that I did 20 years ago, you know, it all becomes called College circle eventually.

  Mark D. Williams  08:57

  Well, that was a quite what's amazing, you stayed there for three years, because usually, as you go through this, so then you were tell me about Ian import. So you were this, obviously, this now makes way more sense. When I was reading the bio, it's like, you're negotiating tequila sales, yeah, exporting to Budweiser in South Texas. Honestly, this is, like, reads like a Narcos, like you're a training mule, and like you're doing, like, yeah, it wasn't just tequila. Tell you, Mark man, this is like, early, like, I know they

  Martin Davies O'Connor  09:20

  can fit little boxes. Yeah, no. What had happened was, so it's, it's so my son, who's named Eamon, is, so we started Amon imports with, this was with my dad and my dad, he's a little bit of a wacko, and so he was, he could never retire. He could never sit down. So he lived in Mexico at the same time as he moved down to be with his grandkids, right? So he couldn't just sit still. So he was, he moved down from North Dakota, yeah, sorry, no, he was in Minneapolis. Minneapolis, yep, you're right, yep. So moves from Minneapolis and he comes down and, yeah, he's just so Guadalajara, I should say this Aliso. In fact, the state that Guadalajara is in, you have to call something tequila to actually brand it as to. Tila, as opposed to mezcal, or another variation of the agave plant. It has to come from the state of Jalisco, which is where we lived. So my dad, he was always out meeting folks and doing things like that, and he met a gentleman who sold tequila, but they didn't have distribution in the US. And so my dad came to me one time. He's like, hey, guess what we're gonna do. And what was great about that. Is, at the time, I owned a design company, which I think is in there, and so I had OC two, OC Two Interactive, yeah. So I said, well, that fits in great. So as my dad started navigating the intricacies of selling tequila, which there's a lot of intricacies. If you want to bring booze across a border, you can't just do it. So he figured out all that, and then he would say, we need a label for this. We need a label for that. So we designed it all. And that was kind of a tragic story. That's like our tragedy, though, because that was so much fun, but it was crazy. Like, I mean, you don't think you're gonna sell tequila, you're just gonna move down. What are you selling it to? Are you selling it to middlemen? Warehouses? Sure. So what had happened is, just at that, right around that time, Budweiser was purchased, and I'm not going to get all the details right at this point, but I think they were purchased by Heineken, or something like that. Let's say

  Mark D. Williams  11:11

  I thought Budweiser was actually bought out by that big company in Europe, blanket on their name. But anyway, they bought, like, a whole series of right brand of them all.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  11:20

  Yeah, and I want to say maybe it was umbrella as Heineken, I don't remember, but prior to that, they're just the prior to that, and I forget exactly, but you had to stay in your lane. So if I was a Budweiser distributor, if I sold Budweiser, that's what I did. I sold Budweiser and beer, and once they made this arrangement, they were able to expand beyond just beer. And so my dad, I don't know how he did it, but he contacted whomever within that Budweiser family in South Texas, and they said, Sure. And so bring the tequila up. That was a lot of fun. So we brought the tequila up, and I couldn't believe it, because really, it's such a strange thing at the time. You're like, I'm gonna sell tequila. So we went up and met with them, and then they said, Yeah, let's do it. So what was great about that is we go back and we get the container, and we get the orders, and we do all these and we get it through, and the check clears and everything. And I'm super stoked. I'm like, this worked, dad. I can't believe it, like all that it took us, like, a year to make the labels and to do all this stuff, and we get it through, and we're like, Oh, we did it. This is so great. And then, like, literally, the next week, the gentleman, because Texas is, like, multi tiered, if you sell booze, you can't distribute booze. If you distribute booze, all these different tiers. So our distributor, who sold it on our behalf to Budweiser, his wife got sick. The stress of the sickness caused him to have a stroke. So he calls us the next week, and he's like, I just quit. I just quit. And so we've got, like, a container up there. And to be honest with you, I don't even know if it's ever been distributed for all I know it's collecting dust up there. And collecting dust up there, and that's the God's honest truth. Like, I was so excited.

  Mark D. Williams  13:06

  Like, there's literally a one and done empire. You're like, we did one ship. You're not here to do it. Hey, maybe it'd be a collector's item. It's like, I don't know, I don't know if I have tequila ages, like wine. It's like, they

  Martin Davies O'Connor  13:16

  find it's super on Yahoo now at this point, yeah, it's just age and that's what happened. And like, so, so I love to put on there, hey, we did this. We were able to do all the intricacies of it, and then that's what happened. The guy got sick, and that was the tequila empire.

  Mark D. Williams  13:31

  I didn't realize. Yeah, this makes more sense. Your general manager of Mexico, logo design guru, yes, that's all part of that, right?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  13:37

  Because what had happened was, when I was teaching Excel, I was in Philadelphia, and this gentleman who owned logo design guru attends my class, and he's like, I really think you're fun to talk to, and you live in Mexico, we should and they were doing great at the time. So this was at the time you doing online logo design. It had shifted. The whole the idea of creating a logo was kind of catching on. So you could do all sorts of branding and all these different things. And so he saw my speed, or whatever he saw, he went to my class, and he was like, Man, that was a lot of fun. And I'm wondering if you'd be interested in opening up a design company, being the manager of it. And by that time, I was getting tired, but had been a few years. And when you're doing eight weeks well, I'm sure you've probably, well, I don't know, in your industry, if you do a lot of out of town stuff. But no,

  Mark D. Williams  14:24

  not for me. I mean, because I'm doing residential construction, right, my main job, right? So I'm sort of confined to, obviously, let's call it 100 miles, 150 miles. There are some builders I know, like buddy of mine, Brad Robinson, down in Atlanta, Georgia. He's looking to go into Charleston market. So the normal model is you'd hire a pm or a couple people, you'd set up a satellite offices. So it's just not super common, especially in high end, custom residential it's more common, let's say national builders, of course, and yeah, sure, more spread out through the curious builder entity. However, I do actually end up doing a lot more travel, but that's just because, whether it's education groups like the curious collectives or we have something. All the boot camp, and there's a bunch of other things. So, oddly enough, for my building company, I don't travel much. For curious builder, actually travel a fair amount. My wife the other day goes, like, you are traveling a lot, like, basically, like the person I married is traveling way more, because usually hear about people that traveled a lot early in their career, right? They get married, they have kids, yeah, they travel less. Yeah. I like the I back, in fact, in inverted, like I had no travel when I first got married, have kids, and now I'm starting to travel more, which is sort of ironic, is that what like, is that like the Costa Rica? Is that? Costa Rica is the curious builder boot camp? So a little tangent. Yeah, I want to hear it. So I love wellness, love running, love athletics, all those things last couple years I've done, I've gotten into Ultra running because my neighbors got into it and live next to them. And what's that like? Ultra running, 50 mile, anything over a marathon. So 50 miles, 100 miles, 100k anything above and so ultimately you just end up being around your peers, or who you end up modifying to. It's kind of like that old saying, if, like, show me your five best friends, I'll show you your future. And so it turns out my five best friends are all Ultra athletes, so I guess I am now too. Right on. It's like, who you hang out with, anyway. Long story short, I like the Boundary Waters. I like getting off the grid. And so the boot camp became we tried it this year in Zion National Park in May. And so the goal was, is two a day workouts for three days, get off the grid, no phones, no alcohol. And the whole goal was to kind of do a reset and let wellness and like, wellness means a lot of different things. It could be your health, it could be your mental. Could be your mental stability, your physical just so many different things. So I wanted to see it was a beta test to see if it worked. We had 12 builders show up from around the country, and it was great. So we're doing our second one in January down in Costa Rica for three days. Same concept, you fly down there, no phones, no alcohol, two day workouts, amazing accommodations, amazing food. But it's also, they're mostly owners of businesses. So it's really, you get so many of the conversations of how we learn is just, it's even why we have the podcast, just having conversations about life and how you balance all this stuff. There's no training manual on how to import tequila or trade. It's just, it's all these stories. It's a little bit like branding. You're just sharing the story and how that impacts people. And so we have 13 people signed up. We have room for 20. And yeah. So I kind of want to fight the stereotype that that builders are fat, hairy, alcoholic flannel wearing fatties. I say that sort of globally, but just like the idea that, like our industry, is very underrepresented, and there's a lot of stereotypes around it, and so I want to challenge the status quo. And that was kind of so anyway, that was kind of the goal with it. Oh, that's great. Now we'll see what happens. See what happens, and then the next one will be in Guadalajara. There we go. We all have to talk about, I can't wait. I want to see about this lakes. All about, did look at? We actually looked at because Cancun is easy to fly into, sure. So we're gonna fly into Cancun and go down to, oh, what's just south of Cancun? Two hours. Oh, well, let's see Merida is down there. No, the town. Oh, my word it can't be as I'm blanking on it. It's now, it's become, it's becoming sort of some of the Mayan ruins are and things like that, not like Palenque. I can't remember. Oh well, it doesn't matter, any way south of me. So, yeah. So anyway, I was just trying to find new places. It's always fun to, if you can kind of make vacation. It's not vacation because you're working hard. Yeah, it's just kind of different, getting you out of it's just trying to get people out of their comfort zone. Sure, do something different, to sort of reconnect with others that are in similar stages of life, but also kind of reconnect with themselves, because sometimes you just need a

  Speaker 1  18:07

  hard time out. I dig it. Yeah, so that's what that's all about. Yeah, that sounds great. Did you come? I probably

  Martin Davies O'Connor  18:12

  will be now. It's amazing. If you've been

  Mark D. Williams  18:21

  listening to the podcast for a while now, or even if this is your first episode, I talk about the contractor coalition summit all the time. Our next one is happening November 7 through November 10 in Chicago, and all the details can be found at the contractor coalition summit.com. You've got Brad Levitt, Nick schifr, Tyler, Grace, Morgan, Molitor and myself will all be there. We've got great content over three days. You've got builders from all over the country try to get it to about that 30 people number. And we'll have sponsors as well that add a lot of value to each one of these dedicated days where you're talking about contracts and spreadsheets and margin and whether you're doing fixed bid or cost, plus your pre construction agreements. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. If you haven't been following it yet, you should. The contractor coalition summit Instagram page is giving you a steady diet of the conversations that are being had, a lot of promo reels, a lot of the interviews that I've done personally at Omaha, which was my first contractor coalition, where I'm part of the leadership. I interviewed all 36 people that attended, and we're going to be unveiling each one of their interviews over the next couple of months, so people that were not able to attend and would like to can kind of get a better idea of the value that builders are getting. So if you're going to sign up and come to Chicago, you can type in the promo code, curious builder, and get $2,500 off. And we'll see you in Chicago when it comes to quality, craftsmanship and performance, Pella sets the standard whether you're building custom homes or designing a timeless space. Pella offers innovative window and door solutions that blend beauty and efficiency with showrooms and experts around the country. Pella makes it easy to find the perfect fit for your next project and their team to support it. Build. With confidence, build with Pella. Visit pella.com to explore products and connect with your local rep. Today. For more information, you can listen to episode one or listen to episode 109 where we bring on Pella owners and founders at Pella Northland, as well as their innovative team behind the steady set innovation. So OC two, you're interactive, so you've got a branding company. How is that different than logo design guru? Because you're you kind

  Martin Davies O'Connor  20:24

  of, yeah, what happened was, is that so with, with logo design Guru, I was the manager, and so, so I actually, so logo design guru had three offices. They had one right outside of Pennsylvania, or, sorry, outside of Philadelphia, kind of Bucks County area, and then that's where the owners lived. But one of the owners was originally from Pakistan, so there was a second office in Pakistan, and then the third office opened up, and it was mine. And so what had happened was, is we continued to I like to perform. I like to perform well. I hadn't worked for anybody in quite some time, so I wanted to do well for them. So we built up a great we built up this really nice, I mean, one of the beautiful things about where I live is because it's the largest community of Americans. What I realized quickly, so first, the first stage in that was that we started a design component of the company, and we thought, what originally we thought is that we would do a Spanish version of logo design guru. So it was called logo tipo. Like logo, tipo is logo in Spanish. And what we found soon was that even if you were Spanish speaker, Spanish speaker, you were still searching in English. But luckily at that point, what we had found is that our design team was culturally so you had designers in Pakistan, you had designers in Guadalajara. And the thing about the Guadalajara is that we were just a little more aligned culturally, the relevance. And then a big thing that you don't think about as often, but when you're doing that kind of work is we're also in the same time zone as many folks. So if you needed something done, my office could do it just like that. We didn't have to wait a day and all these other kinds of things. So a lot of the that work back then was crowdsourced. Wouldn't be crowdsourcing, but it would be outsourcing to, okay, down there, yeah, yeah. So, so, and then what we did found so, so all of a sudden my design team starts to take over in terms of our design. And I'm like, Yeah, this is great. So, like, our designs are better or a little more aligned with what people because we understand the language. And then we realized that we could transfer, we could also shift and do support work, for example. So customer service went down, because now I could just talk to folks that were retired and looking for work and bring them right in, and they loved it. So now all of a sudden, we become the support team, and then that just transferred into sales. So basically the entire company operations moved to my office in Mexico. And then what happened was, is maybe five years something like that. The shift then was not just kind of this outsource, but then it became crowdsourcing. So everything that we did was in house, and then, like a really, I think it's a cool thing. But you see things like, I don't know what they are now, but like, Fiverr, maybe it's still around. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, no, I've seen Fiverr where now you can post a bid. So it used to be that we had fixed costs, and

  Mark D. Williams  23:11

  now he's like, hey, I want a logo. My sister did it. Actually. She had a little side business out in Colorado, and she needs some logo work done. Yep. So she's like, Hey, I want a logo. Here's the description. People would bid on it. Hey, yep, whatever it is. And, I mean, yeah, it's great.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  23:25

  It is. I mean, it's a great, it's a great, budget sensitive solution to that. And but that was so disruptive that at that point it was just too disruptive to really kind of keep logo design guru going as it was. And so at that point, we split up. And I said at that point, there was not enough there still. You couldn't really crowdsource out, well anyway, and maybe you can now web work, web design. So OC two interactive. There's two. It's Michelle. So my wife, Michelle and myself, we're the two O'Connor's. So OC Two Interactive, yeah, nod to her. Hat tip to Joe Whitney, who came up with the the name. But yeah, so that's what it became we. So we took the web work from logo design guru, and we became that solution. And so that's what we did for many years. Was emphasis on web design and development.

  Mark D. Williams  24:15

  I should go back to this before. Why was it important that your or what was the epiphany that you wanted your family and your children to be bilingual and bicultural? Sure? What was the driver behind that? Because it had a huge impact on your whole life. Yeah, totally,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  24:28

  totally. So my brother who, so he was 21 and he and I are the same. We're 10 months apart, so basically we're the same age. When he was 20 ish, 21 he was

  Mark D. Williams  24:39

  a star Irish twins.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  24:39

  That's correct. Yes, that is exactly right. And so my mom was busy for a while, and so he was a stockbroker in Chicago, and so just a young kid starting off his career, whatever it is. And we went down to Mexico. And at the my mom got married, remarried, and so at the time we go down to Mexico, my brother and I, because my mom. Wanted to just bring us down there afterwards as sort of a celebration. It was my brother and my mom and her husband. Bottom line is, we went to Mazatlan, and I'll tell you, here's a side note. My brother and I were, like, so wet behind the ears. I remember we got off the plane. It was really late at night. We get zoomed to our hotel. And I've never been to Mexico at this point, right? So, and it was like, it felt like they were, like, tinted out windows, and we're like, where are we going? Man, what is happening here? Get to the hotel. It felt like we were being whisked away, but we get in there, and I just remember saying to my brothers, we went to our room. I'm like, do you think those palm trees are real? We found out the next day they were plus the other 10,000 of them. But anyway, when we were down there, my brother met some folks, and my brother started dating, my brother, who's gay, he started dating a guy, or met a guy anyway, comes back to Chicago, and then, like, a month later, he goes, Hey, man, I'm moving to Guadalajara. Oh, my. And at that point, outside of a Steely Dan song that goes, Guadalajara won't do and I was like, I don't even know what it is. And we didn't have Google back then, you didn't go Google it. So, yeah, he just moved so anyway, he goes down there. My brother's a fair my brother, Dan, I'll just call him Dan. Dan's a pretty smart guy. He learned Spanish just like that, like within six months. It's weird how fast he learned it, and it was just so beneficial for him, you know. So now all of a sudden, he's totally bilingual. And the benefits that I could see of just being bilingual at the time were huge. I know it's not quite that the same, only because so many folks nowadays are bilingual, but at the time, it was a heck of a skill set. And so when my kids were grown and again, kind of going back to that punk rock ethos of just saying, Hey, I don't want to settle down. I don't want I don't want these things right now. I want a little bit just keep shaking it up and but I also want to make sure that my kids are prepared for the future with some real foundational things. And so I had the opportunity, like I said back then, to not only have them learn another language, which I think is amazing, right? The immersion schools here and whatever you might are choosing to do nothing wrong with it. But I thought, let's take it one step further and, like, really, just kind of make them by culture. Really understand the cultures of it all. How long did it take you to learn the language? Oh, I don't even know if, right now I still take lessons, yeah. So, I mean, I was doing a great job of it, learning Spanish, and I'm still I can talk a lot. I mean, it's really beneficial in my industry, especially in commercial, to know Spanish and be able to talk to my a lot of my guys are Spanish speakers, but you know, for me, it was, I was learning over a couple of years, still nowhere near what my brother was. But the biggest problem, the biggest challenge after that, is, well, there's two challenges. I live in the largest community of Americans outside the US. It's an English driven economy, so even all of my Mexican friends get to practice it. Yeah, they're like, Hey, let's speak English. Like, after a while, you're like, Okay, that's a lot easier. And then the second problem that I had is that my son, once he was about four years old, was totally bilingual, so then all of a sudden, I've just got this little translator perfect. So I'm so that stunts my language growth as well, but

  Mark D. Williams  27:58

  actually, a little time out here. So yeah, I'd love to get your perspective on this. This is my guess, and I would love for your viewpoint, both as an entrepreneur and someone who, you know, bicultural and bilingual. So we had, we still have it, although we're not active with it. So we have the curious builder in Espanol. Okay, bellicus Cruz is someone I interviewed, amazing Latina woman. Love her to death, she's awesome. We had her doing podcasts in Spanish for curious builder, because I don't speak Spanish, and I wanted to be I want these stories of entrepreneurship and all the stories to be shared. We found that we had a she had a really hard time a getting the Spanish speaking owners to come on the podcast. Number one and number two, we had a real hard time with listenership. And I look at like in construction, like a lot of your normal a lot of my painters, my ciders, my roofers, concrete. I mean, there is, I'd say, 40% of our construction base in Minnesota speak Spanish. This is a total guess, right? And so I'm like, I just want the resource to be out there. We thought about translating it like my interviews, but I wanted also to have a woman's perspective, who's an owner, bellicis point of view, plus she's obviously a native and can speak the language, amazingly and so. But we found that the owners that are in the US that own businesses a speak English, want to speak English, and their clientele that they want to be paid from our English speakers. Yeah, not Spanish speakers. So it I had never thought about that before, but the reason I bring it up now is to get your perspective on it. Is it makes a little more sense, because even when you're in Guadalajara, in this expat community, yeah, it's hard for you to practice English or Spanish, because everyone you're like in this insulated bubble of English, yeah. Why do you think the podcast didn't really take off, or why it didn't work? And is my idea just sort of doomed to fail, or is it sort of like, I mean, what we found is just it, just we couldn't find a base like the people that would listen to it would probably be in, be other countries, right, not in the US. I What's your thoughts on

  Martin Davies O'Connor  29:58

  that? I mean, it reminds me of again. The logo tipo. But you think to yourself, hey, you know what? We've got this logo design guru. Nobody's servicing the Spanish speaking community. We should just make this whole shift. And we spent a long time shifting everything to Spanish the website, everything to the Spanish speaking and it was exactly what you're saying. We found that business owners, maybe it was in San Antonio or Houston or Minneapolis, whatever it was, they weren't searching in Spanish. They were searching in English. Every their everything they were doing was English based. They understood English enough. And I think that for them, I mean, this is just me having lived through this is it's like they just kind of moved towards English because they speak it. And so I don't I'm not surprised by what you're telling me, because I imagine the very same thing is happening that most just just exactly like you said, the folks that don't speak English most likely work for the folks that speak Spanish and English, and the clientele, for the Most part of the Spanish speaking business owners are English speaking, or most likely bilingual, like if they are, if they do speak Spanish, or they come from a Latino or a Spanish speaking country, that to your point,

  Mark D. Williams  31:11

  and that was, you actually nailed it on head. Most of the people that bellicis interviewed were bilingual, yeah. And in fact, the first one that we ever had on was from Florida. I'm blink on her name at the moment, but it was a year and a year and a half ago, but I interviewed her in English, and bellicose interviewed her in Spanish, yeah, and she being in down Miami, and it made a ton of sense, because she catered to both clientele down was just much more prevalent in terms of who speaks the language down there. But it was a lot of pressure on owners to get interviewed twice and making sure, because obviously, as a business owner, you want to come across as competent. You want to come as competent. You want to come across as you're telling your story, but you're also, most people are thinking like, Well, hey, will my clients listen to this and will it help them choose me to be the business and the new shocker is, most of our peers listen to these kinds of podcasts. Most of our clients do not now, yes, every once in a while, a client will surprise you and be like, Hey, I heard this really amazing interview that you had with Martin. I'm like, Well, I'm glad you did. And anyway, I think it's going to come more and more, but most of this is entrepreneurs and business owners, because that's kind of what it's set up for. It's not really a client facing podcast. It could be, I mean, yeah, that's not really where we're coming at, yeah. And I think

  Martin Davies O'Connor  32:17

  even if you're talking about the clients, the clients that you're probably looking at would be bilingual as well. And I think that there's a tendency, and this is just me throwing this out, is that I still teach exactly to your point, that I think the tendency for a lot of the business owners and also even the clients that they service, is to be in an English speaking

  Mark D. Williams  32:34

  world, yeah, I mean, it is. I mean, obviously we're biased, because we are in the United States, but also you look at, like the dollar and like, if anyone's gonna learn a second language in the majority of the world, their second language is likely English as a trading link, right? I mean, we didn't invent that. The British probably did, yeah? Anyway, well, that little cultural tidbit, we haven't even got to your job yet. We're 32 minutes in, and we know the audience doesn't even know what Mill City restoration even is, which is fine. This story is way cooler. Okay, we are finally arriving, yeah, after all these decades, we have finally arrived to Mill City restoration. So you commercial painting, you've had clients like T Mobile, DSW, Victoria, secret Prada. Tell me about this. Like, how did you then navigate from Ian imports and this colorful backstory down in guala Holler to Mill City restoration, which, for those from Minnesota, Mill City is kind of a Minneapolis icon, right? Yeah, nickname, yeah. So I'd love to know a little bit more about that. And then why you started a painting, buddy,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  33:32

  sure. Well, it's a culmination. So just stepping back once, one step as I grew up, my dad and I had a painting business in the one you sold, yep, absolute painters. It was called, and so, and that was, again, you when you talk about marketing, absolute we just went with a, b, and we wanted to, this is pre Google, yeah. So, this is all about the this is all about the Yellow Pages. Yes, 100% Yeah. So, and then play. And then we stole the absolute vodka, which was hot at the time. We took it right from them, and I was hoping I'd get sued. I mean, that was my hope, sue me so we can get but, you know, it was a great it was a good run. So was my dad and me. So do that, like I said, we sold it, and then we come back. And then what happened was, quite honestly, I'm in Minneapolis, or sorry, I'm in Mexico, and my dad got sick, and so he was a Vietnam vet, and so he he got, he had Agent Orange, which devolved into cancer. And so we're all down in Mexico, and he had to do a lot of VA stuff. Was just the truth of it. All right, being as raw as I can, yeah. So he's doing a lot of VA, and it's gonna have to be about up here in Minnesota. And so at the time, I was like, oh gosh, what am I gonna do? I just needed to make sure that we could take care of them. Sorry, I get a little emotional. But anyway, so moved up here, and when we were up here, I just started talking to my old guys, and they're like, Hey, man, you should do stuff up here. And I'm like, Okay, what do you want me to

  Mark D. Williams  34:55

  do? Start with that quick timeout. What was the time gap between when you sold absolute. Painting to this period of time,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  35:02

  1010, years, 10 years, and some change. Okay, so like, all my guys are still kind of doing their thing, and then we always had a great relationship with everyone that worked for us. And so when we moved back up, they were like, You should start another painting business. And I'm like, Oh, I don't know, but as my dad got sicker, I needed to start. I needed to put something where I didn't have to think basically, and so now I could take all of my prior so I was like, I'm going to SEO a site. I'm just going to search engine optimize a site. I'm going to start putting it out there, and we're just going to start seeing if I can get something for these guys while I'm up here, because at the time, I'm still kind of traveling back and forth and doing my thing, and that's really the evolution of what becomes Mill City restoration. And also another hat tip to a great friend of mine, and someone that does tons of podcasting. His name is Mark Levitt, Ian, and so Mark's up here, and he had, he had a business that was Mill City publishing, and they did self publishing, everything. So mark. So I took Mark's name in Mill City. We'll get rid of publishing, and we'll just call it restoration, and then, and I'll take my background in doing SEO and web work and branding, and we'll just kind of see what happens. And like I said, I couldn't think about anything because I was doing web stuff. But web when you're doing creative work, you have to have a lot of interaction with your clients. You have to make sure that I'm understanding what you're looking for, what your vision is, who you know, what's your who you servicing. And we used to do a lot of fun stuff that I think is even fun. I've often wanted to do it in for a while. Wanted to do it in, like, say, high end residential the same exact I used to do this. It was kind of trying to pull out of somebody, what do they want? So we would create and maybe you do this when you're talking to I don't know what you do. I'd love to know what your process. But you know, when you're meeting with someone, it used to be that I'd have the decision makers, and we would do a 30 minute process. By the end of it, I could make a statement by filling in the blanks that gave direction and goals to your design wishes. And it was a lot of fun. It was just so much fun, almost like Mad Libs. It was exactly like Mad Libs, but we would create like, I know, yeah, I would say, I don't want to hear about, oh, I want a 3030, to 45 year old. No, I want to know there's a 35 year old named Mark who likes to do extreme running, and so he loves the weekend off. And because of that, we want to make sure that we're designing a website that approaches

  Mark D. Williams  37:27

  it you wanted, you were trying to get to the why? Yeah, right.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  37:31

  And it was a lot like, why exactly, who are we doing this for? Why are we doing this? And don't tell me, generic. Oh, everybody's my client. No, they're not. They're not that's not true. You've got to zone in a little bit. So I got so excited. We're just talking about Mill City starting. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so as we got so we start doing this, and we just start getting traction, and that's all I can tell you. So we start getting traction, but at the time. So now I'm, this is about eight years ago, or something like that. So I'm in my mid 40s. I've come back and did you move the whole family back your wife? Well, at the time, we hadn't, and I never really did. So my older son was already moved out, so that was okay. And then my younger son, no, he just kept going to school. And he did do, like, a year or something in Highland, or something like that. He studied abroad in Minnesota. That's exactly what he did. It was so weird. Yeah. Oh, totally Yeah. That was exactly right. The really reason to bring it up

  Mark D. Williams  38:27

  is I went to school, but I was in college. I was at the University of Minnesota, but I went down to Australia for a year. And in hindsight, I really my cousin went to school in Mendoza, Argentina and picked up Spanish. I'm somebody that doesn't learn great by I mean, I was smart enough, like, I can't being in a clash. I need to be culturally immersed in it. Like, if you dropped me off on an island and gave me a couple years, I'd learn the language. Yeah, yeah. Totally, you're like your brother, Dan, I don't think I would have picked it up quite that quick. But anyway, long story short, I just loved that rollover sold that. Oh, your son came back to Minnesota,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  38:56

  and he just graduated from the U of M, okay, which is full circle. Yeah, so, so, so we're doing our thing, and anyway, so we start kind of getting a little bit of traction. And I'm not really seeing a vision, but I'm in my mid 40s, and I'm like, because at the time, as I said, I'm just really kind of focusing on my dad. What are we going to do with my dad? Take care of them? Okay, here's a job here, here's a paint job there, here's a website here, there's a website there. But at a certain point you're just like, I can't there's too many things to juggle web, to be honest, it just wasn't my passion. Is what I fell into because I was good at Excel, and then the guy asked me to do that, and I'm doing that. So we get into, we get back into painting, and really commercial painting then becomes an accident that I was really happy with, because I just started working. I was working with, do you know, do you remember seven Steakhouse? Any chance downtown, seventh and Hennepin? So I was working down there with an owner, and this was kind of my transition. I was working with him doing social stuff and some other things. And then all of a sudden, one of the one of the folks there needed a J Crew painted, or knew somebody that need. I forget how it all worked. Hey, can you do a bid? Sure. And I don't know anything about commercial at the time. I mean true commercial. I mean when? And now, this is me being a little snooty right now, but a lot of times I'll see on the side of a truck or something like that, residential and commercial. And I'm like, I don't think you're commercial then, because it's they're just two monstrously different things. I think some people do some like, they go to a small restaurant, maybe paint the back walls or something. And again, I'm not taking, I'm not putting a different animal. It's a different animal. I didn't know that at the time, so I've got the job, like,

  Mark D. Williams  40:41

  I'm walking on, probably, like, 100,000 lower than the other bit,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  40:45

  probably, and I walk on, I've got, like, because I'm, I don't know if you've noticed this, but I've got tattoos. And so I said, I'm, I, like, I used to wear like, kind of funny socks to sort of take the edge off of my look, to be honest with you. And so, and like, you walk on this commercial site, and that's just not happening, yeah? Get your work boots on and all this stuff. So I started learning, like, real fast. We're like, Hey, what's going on? But I started learning, I like, this is cool. I like working with a soup who's going to define our goals and we're going to have

  Mark D. Williams  41:16

  so do you This is actually the main part of the interview I want to get to, yeah, we love talking about entrepreneurship, yeah, being a residential being a residential builder, yeah, and everyone I hire, you always hear about commercial, oh, you can't do commercial. It's different. But I've never tried it. Yeah, I don't have a lot of interest in either, sure, other than I'd maybe want to try one just to see, just only to speak about it, like, how different it is. Yeah, I would love to hear your perspective, perspective to break down for the audience, because I think a lot of people like I have no question that I have the skills. I have the skills to be a commercial builder, but I am not a commercial builder. Yeah, if that makes sense, totally so I would love to know like for you just I'm guessing, based on what you said, you have all this going on. Your data sick. You're you got 20 businesses rattling around your head. I'm guessing you like the fact that someone else helped bring order. My favorite quote last year was boundaries, great freedom. They created boundaries for you, yes, to then be very clear on your scope. Is that what you about? Is that a, yeah, I

  Martin Davies O'Connor  42:08

  think that's a great way of saying it. I hadn't thought of it in that way, but I think that's exactly right. I mean, one of the so what i Okay, so if we're talking about one of the neat things, like, for example, residential high end, and I'm going to say that higher end residential clients, which I still do. I don't want to. I want to step back like my favorite project of the past year was one of my favorite residences, the prince house like that was super fun, super spectacular. But even there, like this gives you a good perspective of it. Things are always changing. It's a really fluid thing. So if I'm so most of my clients. On occasion, I worked with builders like yourself, but then a lot of times, I'd also work with the client,

  Mark D. Williams  42:45

  homeowner, Director, homeowner. That's right. So

  Martin Davies O'Connor  42:48

  that's challenging. It can be. It can definitely be a different animal. So if I were to start talking about some of the differences, one of the best differences is I get to read a set of plans, and I know exactly what's being asked of me. I kind of specialize in, not kind of, I specialize in big box stores or tenant remodel. So for example, I was telling you that right now we're doing a Madewell at ridgedale, and then we're doing a J Crew. So our current projects at another J Crew coming full circle J Crew at Southdale, so I've got a set of plans. Read the plans, this is it, and it's very clear for me, I can have my paint delivered. I know what's happening. And then the only the unforeseen challenges, for example, might be they're mostly based in timeline, and it's normally based on, like other trades. I mean, I like to pride myself on the fact that I deliver. If you're telling me it has to be done by this time, it just gets done by that time. But what might make it more difficult for me is the taper and Mudders didn't do the right whatever happened.

  Mark D. Williams  43:57

  Got a news flash for you? It's the same in residential. Yeah.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  43:59

  Right, right, right.

  Mark D. Williams  44:09

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  Martin Davies O'Connor  44:45

  But so what I like about commercials it's all really clear is like, for example, with residential, I had a friend of mine that I worked for, and he would do all that. He was great, great work, great stuff, but it wouldn't be really clear what was being asked of me. So I might walk in and. He's trimmed out everything. I put a coat of paint on there. I'm like, Man, you've got a lot of nail holes. Your seams aren't matching up. And he's like, Well, I was hoping you'd do that. And I said, What do you want me to do? And he'd say, Well, can you grind everything down and and it's like, well, but then I'm a sander, I'm not a painter. Like, okay, I can do that kind of stuff. And so, like, the clarity wasn't really there. And so I like that. I like the fact that, for the most part, you're left alone too. Like, that's another thing. Like, here's what we need you to do. So even though I'm working for the soup, who's working for the GC, who's working for J Crew, this is still my world. When we come in to do my painting, I just, I'm gonna talk to the soup, I'm gonna coordinate with the soup, and then I'm gonna ask the soup to

  Mark D. Williams  45:40

  step back. Do you think it's fair to say that I have a militia who's like, I've got guerrilla warfare, and you're in a military with, like, clear boundaries, like, it's very organized, oh, yeah, compared to residential construction, I think the further up we do high end residential work, like, you clearly have to have, not only competent people, but you have to have clear lines of scope, especially when you get to higher end architecture, higher end design, there's clearly things you clearly things you need to do, yes, but I feel like there's probably more leeway. There's definitely more cowboys in residential construction, because to your point, I think for us, after doing this for 21 years, I think you vet your partners, and you really understand what they're capable of. And I always say you need to do about two to three projects with whether it's your cabin shop, your HVAC painter, whoever, so they understand you and you understand them. But I tend to stay pretty loyal to my people, yes, assuming their skill sets can transfer to where we go, and vice versa, and timing. And you have a couple in case the timing doesn't work out. Obviously, don't want to be hamstrung, but at the end of the day, you kind of the relationship is really good because they know what to expect when you get a lot of it. And it's not, for me, it's not always about a number. I've always heard that commercial can be really cutthroat in terms of the price. Is the price? Is that true? Like, I think that is relationship building work in commercial versus cost.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  46:54

  Yeah, so I think that's, it's a good question, and I think there's a combination of both, I mean, and I'm sure it's with you as well. You've got somebody, and you ask your painter, hey, what's the price on this? And you just trust that it's a fair price, right? As long as all of a sudden it's not whatever. I mean,

  Mark D. Williams  47:11

  you get multiple bids. So usually they're usually it's like the throw away the high, throw away the low. They'll be two in the middle, and they'll be pretty

  Martin Davies O'Connor  47:16

  close, yeah. And so then what happens with commercial is you've got those folks, like, for example, a shout out to elder Jones, who's a commercial contractor here, and they've also got offices in Arizona. They're exceptional, they're great. They're well funded. And they're not arguing with you. They know that. Like, for example, I did an aloe with them out at Galleria, and it was to your point. I don't know where I came in with the bidding process, but I've never been the lowest. Most of the time, I'm hovering towards the the higher end of what's going on, but I don't so that, but they'll know because of our relationship. Hey, it's easier for me to work with O'Connor here, and maybe it's 1000 couple 1000, whatever it is that we're talking about, but I don't have to search around. I don't have to do those. I know I'm getting it's a known entity. Yeah. Now the flip side is that a lot of folks so, like with commercial, the flip side is that some GC out of New York City might have all of the like, I say, A J Crew, and so they're coming into each area, and then they don't know, they don't have the relation. They're trying to get the lowest number possible. So I try to find those people not work with them.

  Mark D. Williams  48:25

  Yeah, your other thing, identifying your ideal client is perfect, like, you can't work for everyone, yeah, and there's enough work for everyone. You just really need. I know sometimes, especially if you don't have work, you don't believe that statement. But the, I think, the that when you really have your niche or your kind of clientele, it becomes much more true. I mean, everyone's been at points in their career, and sometimes you have to rediscover it, where it's like, I need work. I need to put ready, to put coins in the meter to let this thing is ticking the mortgage, yeah? Like, I get it, like, multiple times in my career, yes, yeah. And because I think construction is cyclical commercial, and it used to be that when residential was up, commercial was down. They kind of had this inverse wave. I don't know. Now I'm sort of out of touch with that wave, but I'm curious, do you think that is there any pattern between residential and commercial from what you've observed? Or not,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  49:13

  it's hard for me to know that answer, because I spent so many years now in the commercial world, and the residential that I do is fairly high end residential for a couple of select clients, sure. So I'm not quite sure how the residential market itself plays out if I were to like another big challenge that I have. And then this speaks to the idea, and this is one of the things as I've grown and been able to do this. So to your point, seven or eight years ago, as we're starting out commercial, it's like, I don't care anything anybody who's got it. One of the biggest challenges, and what's, and it's actually what led me to get my Master's in accounting, is that it's about cash flow. I mean, one of the biggest things that I love, and one of the reasons that I keep a handful of GCS, i. Don't try to I don't do any I don't do any more. Working directly with the client very rarely. I shouldn't say I'd not anymore, but very rarely, and it's almost got to be word of mouth from a client. But the biggest challenge, and this is why I keep some GCS that I'm working with, is just when you get paid. So like with commercial, there's a whole range of you know, it's kind of based on the GC. And one of the things that I've noticed with general contractors over the past couple of years, you've got two one set of general contractors is trying to push all costs, holding all costs onto all of their subs. So, for example, I just finished a job so that we'll see how long I'm working with this particular contractor. But I'm holding the I'm holding enough money that I'm not comfortable with for about three months.

  Mark D. Williams  50:47

  Ian, your work is done. Yes. Why would they so is that retainage? No, so why are they not paying for three months?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  50:55

  So what happens is, depending. So this is kind of how you So, for example, we start the job at the beginning of the month. Okay? So then what happens is, at the end of the month, or the beginning of the next month, you then Bill for what you've done, but that billing doesn't get submitted till the end of that month, or 60 days in arrears. Now we're at 60, and then once they submit the billing, the client has another 30 to submit payment.

  Mark D. Williams  51:20

  Can you now? Okay, this is just my logic on Yes, so can you charge more for that? Because you're waiting so long. I probably should, because I always, I used to always tell people like my clients will sometimes ask me, Hey, you need to lean I hate that word, hey, you need to lean on your guys. Make them do less. I'm like, No, you didn't come to me because I'm the lowest provider. I will get a fair deal. I would get a good value, yeah, but I would be far better off to going to Martin and say, Martin, my client's goal is this, how can you help me? Yeah, I believe in partnerships. I don't believe in I don't like the word boss, I don't like the word owner, I don't like those words. I write partners. I hear you. Well, of course you do, because it makes because it's a better way to run a business. Absolutely. Yeah. And so it's when someone comes in and tells us how to run our business. That's when things usually don't go super great. Don't go super great, but going back to charging more, it's like, okay, they want you to wait 90 days, yeah, to get paid. Yeah. They want you to do your work. I'm sure they want you to do it fast and jump. When they say, jump and say, how high? Not those things to me, I've always told clients, you can ask for price, you can ask for speed, or you can ask for quality. I mean, this is, I'm not the one who invented this. Yeah, pick two, right? It's the three legged stool. Yeah. And so you're going fast, you're going quality, but pay, you should be paid more.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  52:28

  Sure i Hey, I really like what you're thinking. You should get into the commercial GC world. I think Mark good for you.

  Mark D. Williams  52:34

  I get fired by all my all the Wall Street people to pay me. Like, man, Mark's jobs, they caught. They go way, cost overrun, man. He's nice to his

  Martin Davies O'Connor  52:41

  guys. Guys love him, yeah, sure, they wait. But I mean, like, Yeah,

  Mark D. Williams  52:44

  well, I agree to it. Why is that normal? So it only works because another painter is willing to do it. That's right. And so that's part of its education. Part of the reason why we have this podcast Yes, is to say, like, this is not normal. This is not good, right? Like, they they should not be pushing on their financial responsibilities to you, unless you acknowledge that know about that and are either compensated for it or there's a return. Maybe it's like, Hey, I have three other jobs coming. If you help me out in this one, that totally makes sense, that I'm then you're knowingly making decision. I'm just curious is like, is this normal for commercial? Are you just saying this is the type,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  53:21

  a type of, AG, that's a type of GC, the and they exist, by the way, in residential too. Oh, I believe it, sure. But I think the flip side is, and again, I'll just go back to elder Jones, who I don't not mind naming, because it's for good reasons. Elder Jones is 90% when you walk on the job, when you walk on the job day one. No, I don't know if that's just with me, because we've got a good relationship, right? But, yeah, I walk on the job.

  Mark D. Williams  53:44

  It's nine. What about materials? I mean, let's say you have $100,000 job. Are they giving you 20, $30,000 up front the Type A, one? No, you have to front

  Martin Davies O'Connor  53:51

  all that too. Yes, right? So, I mean, it's Yeah, so, like, that's part of the so every year I try more and more my one of my first questions talking to any GC now is, what are your payment terms?

  Mark D. Williams  54:04

  I was I was told, I was told by my lawyer, so, like we don't have in residential, it's very uncommon, from what I understand, to have liquidated damages. I know that's very common in commercial. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about that. And then two, retainage. I've always been told, run for the hills. Someone asked for retainage, and I Brad Levitt was a good friend of the show and a good friend of mine personally. He often shares this thing, and I love this. He was talking with someone, and he asked for 10 20% down upfront, but it doesn't go against your monthly draws. It goes against the final bill. Oh, and the client had said something like, even like monthly he had in his contract, or another builder in his builder group had talked about this, that if you miss a payment, or, let's say, as the owner, or GC, in your case, doesn't pay you within whatever your terms are, seven days, 10 days, whatever, fairly short, they can charge 30% interest per day. Now, technically, Minnesota, that's illegal, so no one should do that to their own contract. But the whole point was, the owner told this builder, said, what? What? 30% he's like, why are you planning on not paying me? And it was just dead silent, yeah. And he signed the contract, yeah. The point was, it's like, this is only a problem if you choose not to pay me. Yes, all right. And if you're planning on not paying me, why don't we save ourselves all a bunch of time and headache and effort, and why don't I just not work for you?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  55:18

  It seems to ask. I totally am with.

  Mark D. Williams  55:21

  So I brought that up to my lawyer, and he's like, yeah, he can't it. Goes, I love that. He's like, the balls on this builder was something else, yeah? And he goes, I love it. He goes, first of all, it's against the law in Minnesota. I forget that the rate is 18 20% or whatever it is. But, like, I mean, credit card companies do it to every single person in America, yeah. We just need

  Martin Davies O'Connor  55:37

  to move to South Dakota. While I was in South Dakota, that's where you get to charge all the answer. Well, that's used to be the gig, right? Or you can charge you can charge any interest rate you want. Oh, really. Oh, yeah, that's why. Like, if you look back now, this is 20 years ago, but like, if you look at the major Chase, things like that, they're on Sioux Falls, South Dakota, because they could charge whatever. That's where your APR is, yeah, that's what interesting.

  Mark D. Williams  55:56

  All right, that little tangent. Okay, so back to So, okay, so then you've got one that pays you 90% up front. That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. Shout out to elder Jones again. Way to go. Elder Jones, I like this. I like this. Yeah, there's so many more questions I have that we're not gonna have time for talk to us about liquidated damages. I've explained this to a few so I have a few clients that have commercial facing companies, big, big companies, and they've had lawyers on their teams ask me, Hey, Mark, we want to hold a 10% back. And I just simply say, No, I'm not going to agree to that. That's not how we do business. I need to understand the why. Like, what are you? And we've always been able to work through it in commercial. Like, sometimes I've heard of architects holding retainage. They will hold five to 10% it depends a little bit where in the sequences, like on the sequence of a build. Let's say concrete, like found, I'm doing residential here, but let's say it's foundational. I mean, if it takes a year to build, the concrete, work is probably done in the first three months. Yeah? Like, why would you hold 10% let's just use 100 grand, sure. Why are you holding 10,000 that's not right. Yeah, that should be released. Yeah. In my opinion, I hear you, and

  Martin Davies O'Connor  56:58

  I agree with everything. Paints, paints a little bit difficult. Really need

  Mark D. Williams  57:02

  someone in this seat over here to disagree with us right now. We're just saying, you're saying, Yes,

  Martin Davies O'Connor  57:06

  this is great. This is amazing. Oh yeah, no, I hear you. I mean, especially in my life, I understand. I think I get, I mean, in terms of retainage and things like that. I think, like for me as a painting subcontractor, I just get thrown because I've got a, maybe two, two clients or so in the past year that have had held retainage. Now, one of the things about that is that normally, as the painter, I'm the one of the last ones in so for me, retainage doesn't become that much of an issue. But I still think it's weird, I mean, but I think, to your point, I think I'm kind of getting lumped in with the concrete guy or the plumber or the electrician. They want to hold it. Maybe I can understand that a little bit. Hey, we want to whatever it is six months to make sure there's not going to be a fire, and then I just kind of get thrown into that mix. So it's a little bothersome. But to me, that's if you've paid me, let's just say 90% or something like that, and I'm waiting for my last 10% of retainage for a couple months. A couple months. To me, it's just part of the commercial game. And again, it's all about filtering out the GC if you've got that opportunity speaking to you what you were saying, if you've got that opportunity, which I do right now, to be able to say, these are the GCS I want to work with, and this is why, and I'll tell any GC why. It's because you pay me and you trust me to get the work done, and I also don't have to fight you for like you're so true

  Mark D. Williams  58:26

  on that. I have a, I Well, how do I gage this? I can't. I have a friend trying to figure out how to nuance this. But I have a wow. I don't know how to talk about without keeping him anonymous. This is the first for me. I can't believe I'm tongue tied on this one. I guess we'll just talk about this. Sure. I'm trying to think of how I really want to talk about it. Get honest. Well, I am. I just got to make sure I'm not throwing people under the bus that owe me money. But it's like, okay, I guess pursuing pills kind of a different tactic here. If you if I want higher quality paint job from you. Yeah, and I'm constantly asking you to do better work and better work and better work and be at my beck and call. But every time you call me, you're asking to be paid. Like, those two things are incongruent. They're gonna hit heads. Now, if I pay you all the time, on time, you can do all those other things for me, and you're happy to do them because I pay it becomes really hard. And like, how much more could you do from your or recommendations? Like, if I spend all my time and energy trying to get paid? What if you want? What about introducing you to other builders I know, like, there's just so much more we can do to help each other. I have a good friend that every time they speak in front of that audience, and he's definitely right on, this is that let's be an audience of 2030 people. And you say there's enough people in this room that if we just leveraged who we know leverage is a good, good term in this way, if we can just leverage our relationships with all the people we know in this room, we'd all be busier than we could possibly handle this next year. So why don't we get busy helping each other? And we need to do two things to do that. One is ask for help, and the two is, be a help. And I think that's a beautiful. Message. But the point is, is, if you have a partner, whoever this partner might be, and all you're doing is asking for something versus like sharing, the relationship isn't balanced, and it's really hard for you to kind of go back to that principle of ying yang helping each other. And I don't think there's always a quid pro quo, or you help me, it needs to be out of a genuine care. I think that's one of the things I love, excuse me, about relationships through with the sub base is like I've had, I've had subs before that that have called me and said, Hey, things are really tight. Usually we do 50% at rough end, 50% at close. And they call me and they said, Hey, we're having a hard time making payroll this month. Would you be willing to front us 25% of that last 50% that's due? I said, No problem. I said, I've been working with you for two decades, right? You've never asked for this. Of course, I'm willing to help you, and I'm glad that they felt that they could trust me and be vulnerable to ask that. Now, if that was the first time I ever worked with that person, I couldn't say yes, because it wouldn't be fiducial, it wouldn't be responsible for me, for with my clients money to do that. But like, after actually with this couple it's 40 years between my dad's company and my company, like we'd worked with this family, like we knew it was fine. You trust them. Yeah, different than that elder Jones, yeah, and this would be elder Jones podcast. They're paying you 90% but they know that they're that they're helping you make payroll and get, oh yes, you're gonna jump over back. You're gonna work nights, weekends, whatever it takes to get them done.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:01:21

  Anytime that phone rings, yeah, and oh, 100% Yeah. I don't have to elaborate on that, because you're 100%

  Mark D. Williams  1:01:29

  that horse to death. It's a dead horse. You had mentioned something before we came on the podcast here. Maybe I could sounds like you and I could talk for about three hours. At this rate, you had mentioned that one of your big goals was sort of transferring knowledge and empowering other people. You've done that with all your various careers and jobs already, plus your family and yourself and and how do you what does that look like over the next three years, five years, 10 years in your career now?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:01:53

  Yeah, so that's part of the reason right now that I am getting my master's in accounting, is because it was a journey that it happened from commercial, and it was really about a cash flow. And so when we talk about transfer knowledge, one of the biggest things I want to at least talk to anybody. But because my world's commercial is trying, I do want specifics, because I think here's some specific advice that I would like to impart on most folks starting out in commercial, because a lot of us start out. If you're starting off, you start off in residential or whatever. If you're starting from the ground floor, you didn't have your Dad, you didn't grow up in the trades, you didn't grow up with this. But a lot of us will start at Ground Zero, and if you're successful, especially in commercial, to what I was talking about, you have to understand cash flow. So many folks don't understand running a business versus doing what you love. If you tell me, God, I just love to bake. I can't wait to open up a bakery, it's like, don't open up a bakery. Just be a baker. And I know you've heard this, you know where it's like, don't tell me you want to do it, because that's not what you want to do. Or a great friend of mine, this is probably the best this guy was one of the best tattoos here when we were growing up the old punk rock stuff. He's doing great tattoos, great tattoos. Moves to St Louis, and now he owns multiple tattoo shops, and he owns a tattoo removal and, I mean, it's really like kind of a tattoo empire.

  Mark D. Williams  1:03:15

  I like tattoos and tattoo removal. Oh, he's got it all figured out. So my kids are obsessed with Dr Seuss, the star belly sneetches, you know this, yes, right? The star bellies with our stars and without, yeah, yeah, come on, put them up. Put them up, and then there's no money low, yeah.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:03:30

  I mean, it's like, so genius. And it's in the same place, like, here's where you go to get the tattoo you don't want, and here's where you go to get it removed. But, you know, like now, and especially, we're hitting it in our mid 50s and things like that. One of his big complaints is he's like, Man, I don't get to tattoo anymore. And it's like, well, yeah, man, you run a business. You run multiple businesses. And he hates it. He misses right? Because he grew up as an artist, not as a business person. So for me, I think one of the one of the fortunate things for me, to your point, is it's like, I've done a lot of different businesses, but they're all running them right. So it's like my mindset can kind of change depending on what I'm doing. And so specifically, then stepping back to this, though, one of the things I was unprepared for and talking about holding 3060, 90, is cash flow. So when business really started to click for me. And I went from a quarter of a million to half a million to three quarters of a million. The problem was, is that I'm holding 70, $80,000 now for 369, months, and I just It was horrible. It was horrible for me to like have to be looking at $100,000 in receivables, but I still don't know how I'm going to make payroll this week. I still don't know how I'm going to do this, what I'm going to do for my suppliers, and I don't know how. And so you've got to understand I think the sooner you can understand it, the better. And for me, I didn't understand it until just a few years ago, that it's like you want to keep your books looking good, and you want to make sure that your financial. Are ready to rock and roll because your financials aren't for you. So this is where we kind of get into the specifics of the advice. One of the biggest things that I want to tell younger, or people starting out, I don't care if you're young or 40 man, make sure that your financials are correct and looking good, not just for you to kind of look at the end of the year and be like, Oh, look at that expense. Or look at this. No, it's so that you can hand this off to an investor, to a creditor, or to whomever, and they can say, God, you've done a great job here, Mark, and you're, I mean, if your financials look this good and you're doing this kind of business, we can ride with you. Here's a here's your credit, here's your loan, here's your things like that. And that's one of the biggest things that I would tell most people getting into commercial is to make sure that, as you're growing that your books are tight and that your financials are tight, and so that's that's so when you talk about where do I want to be in five years? I want to keep I've got, I want to keep this business solid. I've got two sons that flirt with the idea of staying involved in this business. I don't know if they will or they won't. I've got another smaller business in Guadalajara, but as we continue to grow and I get a little bit older at this point, I do, I don't paint, and when I hand it off, one of the things I'd like to see transition is to help folks prepare for the future. Prepare for their finances, prepare for where they're going. And so this is the whole thing about my accounting degree was to try to say to, not necessarily you, but you know, someone, just say, this is how we're going to sit down. Mark, where do you want to be? Oh, you're hitting three quarters of a million. What are you doing to make sure you're prepared for the person who doesn't pay period? I mean, I've had, I don't know about you, but I've had, I've had clients. It was two years ago. Was the weirdest thing, like two or three clients, it cost me $50,000 because they just said, Oh, we're not paying after I painted their pizzeria. Okay, I guess that's weird, but so so you've got to be prepared for what if they don't pay and how are you going to keep paying your folks? So those are kind of the biggest things that, if I was to talk about transitioning in five years, would be to keep this business figure out how it's going to be run, and at the same time, work with other people in this space to prepare them to not have the same challenges you're going to have your own, but to not have the same challenges I did when it comes to like cash flow, for example.

  Mark D. Williams  1:07:16

  I mean, I think it's such a I mean, that's a whole episode. It's a whole life, actually, yeah, get there. I mean, I feel like I'm just ready to say, Amen to everything, because I would say, I mean, I've talked about this a lot of times in the podcast. Two things. One is, I didn't know. So the contractor coalition Summit is something that's put on a couple times a year. The audience knows about it, but basically twice a year there's a group of builders. Now I'm actually a part of it that you go for three days and it's you open your books, you talk about strong construction statements, you talk about contracts, you talk about contracts, you talk about lawyers, you talk about all the things to run a business building just happens to be the business that we're talking Yes, because entrepreneurship, like you could listen to this episode, I don't care if you build, if you sell Lacroix, if you have Apple iPhones, you make pens, cameras, homes. It doesn't matter. All the stuff that we talk about is relevant, right? And I think, yes, school can help you with a number of things, but life and experience and failure and all those things, that's the real school. And I remember it's you ever get hear those things where it's like you heard them when you were a kid, or whatever age, and then, as you now, I'm 45 I'll be 45 next week, and I'm like, you look at it, you're like, wow, it makes way more sense now that I'm a dad and adult, and I've gone through this. My dad used to always say early on, I was in my 20s, had no idea what he meant by this, and now I say it all the time, you could be a good builder and you could be bad at business, and you won't make it. You could be good at business and a bad builder, and you could make it. Hopefully you're good at both. And I think that speaks a little bit to you need to know how to run a business. You need to know your cash flow. And I think once you get that, and once you're healthy, and once you understand, like, I didn't know the difference between markup and margin until three. I'm not an accountant, and nobody explained this me. I don't know why my CPA never explained that to me, because I would have been helpful to know that, hey, I'm charging 12% then how come at the end of the year, I'm left with 10% Yeah, that's because you were using markup, not margin. And guess what? You report anyway, just all this stuff that we talk about all the time on the podcast. So rather than me just repeating what I've repeated before, my question to you is saying you need to understand your numbers is great. Yeah, that's high level. It's true. Yeah. What does that mean? What are two or, let's just because we're well past time and I want to respect your time and theirs. What are two things that you would advise someone to do, regardless of where they're at their business, like, what would demonstrate to themselves or others that you know your numbers? What are some things that you could practically do? Is it, seek a financial planner? Is it? Review it once a quarter with your CPA? Is it? What do you how do you actually do something about, quote, understanding your numbers. Now, I have my own thought process on this, but I'm curious. That's what you're passionate about. What would it mean to you?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:09:48

  Yeah, I mean, that's a good question that I haven't thought about. So let me just say, off the top of my head, to your point I would have said that is that I would find an accountant that speaks your language, because here. Is my critique of some accountants is, it's that some accountants, some CPAs, they're just filling in numbers, right? And what I need is an advisor. And I think that strategy, I need a street and that's really what a high level accountant should be doing. I can get a bookkeeper to fill in numbers, and I can get a bookkeeper that can so I would find an accountant that's willing to sit down with you, because so many accountants, I just feel like they send me your books. Here's your stuff. Do you agree? Sign here, off we go. There's no discussion. And so it would be, find the accountant that you're comfortable with that you can have these discussions with about how to strategically grow your business. And then the second strategy that I would have, that I don't think a lot of folks do, is understand what your numbers are, understand what your financials are. Take a minute to look at the business side of it. And also, I think maybe a third thing is, and we were not hinting, but talking about it a little bit earlier, is decide whether or not this is what you want to do. Then do you want to run a business, or do you just want to be a great painter? Because you can make an amazing living as a painter, someone who just works for someone like me, you can do this and then go to bed, or whatever it is, the stressors that some of us have. So I guess if you were talking about the first two things, it would be, and this is probably just because we're focusing on it right now. Oh, this would be my this would be my third thing. Understand real quickly. And I don't know that this is in alignment with what we're talking about, but I would really and this kind of speaks to what you were talking about with Costa Rica and everything else. Understand what life balance means, because I came from a generation I think is ridiculous. Like I hear when I hear, especially, like old time, old guys like me now, like, God, these guys are so lazy. When I was a kid, we worked 80 hours, and go, That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And I tell them that right now, oh, like, when somebody says to you, it'll really show that you'll love this company. Is if you work over the weekend and you do all then you go, no, no, understand that you have value and that this is also just how you make money and make sure that, like you are doing something that allows you to have peace. Because peace is what I think we're ultimately all looking for. We're not doing any of these. I mean, maybe you are to be the greatest of whatever I'm not, but

  Mark D. Williams  1:12:21

  I think what drives you You're right, your joy. I mean, peace and joy, I think go hand in hand, right? Yeah? Like, I'm no, I'm not gonna marriage relationships, they're all kind of analogous to the same thing. Like, you need balance, and there are a period of times they go up and down. We have seasons of life, yeah, and 100% agree with you. Especially, again, I keep saying this. I was gonna say every year I have a favorite quote, but this quote but this quote has been going on two years, and I can't come up with a better one. It's boundaries create freedom. And for me personally, I was very fortunate to have parents that modeled this behavior for me. They were very home there. My parents read every single thing we ever did as kids. My sister and I, and so like having that modeling, obviously, is super important in absence of that, having podcasts where people talk about it, and having examples, or just having aspirational saying, like, I Enough is enough. Like a lot of people do the 80 hours things, or 100 hours, or whatever it is, until they get to a point where, like, No, we had Chris Montana on the podcast a couple episodes ago, and he founded do Nord distillery, a whiskey distillery. He was a lawyer. He didn't want to work 120 hours. He goes, Well, don't start a business, because that's that was the same thing. He had two strokes by the time he was like, 3132 pretty healthy dude. Do Nord over in South Minneapolis, yeah. Oh gosh. His episode was two weeks ago. You should check it out. It was fascinating guy. And his point was, stress, stress, that's, yes, too hard. Two strokes because of stress. One was he was working on a political campaign. He didn't say which one, but he was in DC, working crazy. He sleeps like, three four hours a night after they he said they won the election, and he said he had a stroke, like, two months after, and the doctor said, I see nothing in your medical record other than, like, it's not normal to sleep three to four hours a night. You need more exactly, basically, work yourself to stroke your 20, late 20s, like this is not normal. Yeah. And so again, why? Why we think it's the old guard is celebrates this idea of, well, back in my day, I walked uphill both ways. They just eye rolled. Stupid. Why are you walking uphill two ways? Like you should have slide it down one day in the wintertime, at least on a sled.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:14:17

  Yeah. Doesn't seem to have made you a happy person, either, like anybody who's toxic is normally just some grumpy, but you're like,

  Mark D. Williams  1:14:23

  well, and it's not just building, or it's not just optional. Honestly, it's everyone in life. Yeah, and I think it's a message. I think there's this narrative out there that pick your Gen, Gen Z. I can't keep track of what Z, what number, what letter is for, what Gen. But basically they're all lazy. Whichever ABC, they're not as good as us, yeah, but no, like, my brother in law is like, no. He's like, I want to work for an aspirational company. That's awesome. You should do that. I want to work. I'm fine with working hard now. I don't have a family or kids, and, like, I love doing this. My peer group is here. Great. No problem. Are you happy? Yeah, I think he does. Exactly right. I'm not saying that you can't work 80 hours a week and find joy and happiness, but be very careful that doesn't become a habit that is mindless, that just perpetuates itself, and marriages are wrecked upon it, kids fatherhood and motherhood is wrecked upon it, and no one is above it. I think we all can kind of get sucked in, and I find that like I love what I do, it's not hard to work. It's hard for me to set down the hammer, and I think the anvil is always there. Like, can you set the hammer down and come back and pick it up on Monday? And you're right. A big part of what I try to talk about and get out of people, because it's important to me to share the messages, the boot camps, the life balance, like not checking your emails on the weekends, having an off switch. Because if you can't be off, how can you really be on, in my opinion, anyway?

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:15:43

  Well, you're also gonna, I think you're also gonna mistake activity for production. Like I think the other problem for a lot of folks my age, in our 50s, you just have to be doing something. You just have to be doing something. And you go, man, you're missing the point. I mean, there's strategic thinking. There's nothing that I you don't know, but it's just, like, at a certain point you fool yourself into thinking being busy is productive, and that's not always

  Mark D. Williams  1:16:12

  the truth. So say that one more time. What about productivity and activity? You said activity is not necessarily productivity.

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:16:18

  Yeah, I'm just Yeah. Like, just that, yeah. I mean, that's, I, like, the way you said it, yeah, because it's, I just think a lot of folks, I mean, I see with my wife and I, it's like, what are we doing today? Well, we've got a whole list of chores. Why do we have to hold have a whole list of we don't have anything to do today. What if we just didn't do anything? Oh, my God, I don't know. And like, that's just, that's a problem of folks my age, it's like, we just got to do something right? And that doesn't always translate.

  Mark D. Williams  1:16:42

  So, I mean, that's so funny, man, this is hilarious. I mean, I'm a bit like that. I am too. Caleb McDonald, shout out to him. I've mentioned him a number of times on the podcast. He's been on a couple of times. He's up in Canada. Once a month. He takes a day off to work on his business. He dresses differently. He lives up in Toronto. He are near it. He takes a train to downtown Toronto, goes to, like, a favorite restaurant. No one can get a hold of him except his wife, and he does, and he works on his business in a different way. I bring that up only. Like, free freeing your mind, yeah. Like one of the reasons why I love Ultra running, or I love, like, for me, I had a goal about two years ago. I love the mountains. We had a cabin in Glacier Park for 25 years. And I just love being in nature. It's my place that just gives me energy. I like the freedom, and so I love to go and just be in the mountains. I come back with so many ideas, so much energy. And so anyway, you need this space of quiet to have the things that make you tick and give you joy. Yeah, well, we could talk forever. We got to end this at

  Martin Davies O'Connor  1:17:41

  some time. I understand, understand, Mark. I can't tell you what an honor this was. Yeah, this is a

  Mark D. Williams  1:17:45

  great time. Thanks again, for everyone tuning in to curious builder podcast. We'll have Martin's all his details in the show notes. As always, you can tune in on Mondays for one hour episodes, Thursdays for 20 minute Q and A's and everything will be on YouTube as well as the website. If you're interested in the curious builder boot camp, you can go into curious builder.com and under retreats you'll see boot camp for Costa Rica. If you're interested, better sign up quick. We only have a handful of spots left, and we will see you soon. Thanks again. Thanks for tuning in the curious builder podcast. If you like this episode, do us a favor. Share it with three other business owners. The best way that we can spread what we're doing is by word of mouth, and with your help, we can continue to help other curious builders expand their business. Please share it with your friends, like and review online, and thanks again for tuning in.

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