Don't take on too much. Don't stretch your people. Everybody should be pushed. I believe that. You set the bar just a little bit higher than what someone thinks they can achieve and you'd be amazed that they can achieve it.

Today, I have a special guest, Jeff Calabro. He is the president of SDI Services, a drilling and solar installation subcontractor on the show. I'm going to just jump right in. My first question for you, Jeff, is given everything that's going on in the economy with the solar industry, is it harder to grow revenue or find good talent?

Find good talent.

Okay. So like let's unpack that because I talked to a lot of contractors and a lot of owners out there and they always say the same thing. It's so hard to find good talent. So let me ask you this. Do you think finding good talent is more about establishing a good work environment where you can attract people or is the marketplace seriously just lacking really good people?

I think it's creating an environment that is attractive or compelling to the employee. And I think for your situation, it's probably a lot more challenging to find talent compared to a traditional GC or another subcontractor doing plumbing or electrical services because a lot of your projects are out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the desert. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. I mean, our projects take us across the United States and we perform work in some real remote areas. So again, when it comes to that environment that people are looking for, being out in the middle of nowhere is not that attractive for somebody. Especially when they have families and it's going to require long periods of time away from their families and just travel and the remoteness of these job sites. Is that correct?

That's right.

So let's build on this concept because you and I've been working together. So just a little bit of backstory for the listeners. Jeff and I, we met when was it back in 2018, 17, 18?

I think 17. 2017.

And I was working as a CFO of a large EPC. Jeff was working for a mechanical contractor in the solar space. And that's really where our relationship began. And I liked right at the beginning when we met, like our minds connected on all different levels, just from the philosophy of leadership, from strategy to how to build a high-performing team.

So let me ask you where did your leadership skills come from and how did you develop yourself into this type of strategic leader? Because I think a lot of people that are coming up in construction, they start from either engineering or pre-con or operations, and it's harder for them to develop those types of leadership skills as they go up the ranks.

That's a good question. Let me try and frame it up this way. I wouldn't say leadership came early. It was more about building the foundation for building into that leadership role. I don't think anybody's equipped early in their career to really step into a leadership role without the experience. So initially it was trying to gather up as much experience as I could and along the way, build up that confidence that I really believe true leaders, they need. Not everyone falls into that leadership category. They need to be led. And that's the whole point of leadership. And in my case, it was something I wanted. It was something that visually I could see myself doing. And then also I wanted to control the outcome. And I feel in order to do that, you have to be a leader and you have to get others to buy into your vision and the direction that you want to go.

So let's talk about the evolution of your leadership style, because not only does leadership, I believe, get better with age. Like for me, I know I've become a lot softer over time. If you back up like 10, even 20 years ago when I was like leading teams and leading my company, I could be a lot more direct and a lot harsher, but now I've like softened up and I think that'll hopefully continue over time. But even within your situation, if we back up to solar in 2009, 2010, in that era, the price per megawatt was a lot higher. The jobs penciled out because there is a lot more room for margin with these large solar jobs. But then as the industry evolved and more people entered into the space and there is more pricing pressure, like downward pricing pressure on just megawatt prices, it really squeezed a lot of contractors in the solar space. And my understanding is it continues to squeeze contractors in the space.

How do you see things from your perspective and how has that shifted your leadership style as some of that fat, some of that margin’s gone away and you've had to become more scrappy amidst a tightening labor market?

Yeah, so I'll first address the leadership 10 or 15 years ago. Much like yourself, I too was very direct. I had a goal. I had that vision that I spoke about and nothing was going to get in my way. And unfortunately, there was some collateral damage along those lines. And it took time to realize that being direct, being at times abrasive does not get people to buy into your vision and you have to adapt and you have to be more acceptable to the challenges that you're faced with. And again, you have to get that buy-in. No one person achieves a vision by themselves, especially in the corporate world and especially in construction because you're building something specific to the industry. The solar industry is volatile. It is subject to government changes. It is subject to product changes, to financial changes. Much around that time he referenced that 2008 period, that 2009 period was the financial downturn and that had a significant impact on the business. And so solar always finds itself having to recover. You have to be able to adapt with those situations and you almost have to have the ability to foresee them coming. And that's a challenge. Right now the industry faces another one probably within another two years based on the recent implementation of the big beautiful bill. And so you have to start forward thinking. You have to look at opportunities where you can pivot and pivot successfully.

Now in your previous company, you were in a leadership position where you were helping to direct the strategy of the business. But my understanding is oftentimes you would maybe clash with the CEO as far as direction or just methodologies on pricing or business development or projects to pursue. Just the overall ops of the business, overall strategic direction of the business. Talk to me a little bit about that and maybe you could give some advice to somebody who may be in a leadership role. Maybe they're in a senior management role and they may have a differing opinion about where to take the business. How do you deal with that and how do you walk that fine line between respecting the vision of the CEO but also wanting to have a positive influence for everybody? Because I see you as a person who's very collaborative. You like to work well with others. So I don't see you like off to the side trying to go rogue and take the business in a bad direction. I see you as definitely a team player but how do you navigate that if you're working with somebody with a differing style or opinion or strategic direction?

Thanks for those last comments. It falls on the same theme of buy-in. Now you're talking about upward buy-in or with your vision you're trying to get those to follow and you're trying to lead them to that vision. Now you're trying to get someone above you who is responsible for the business, the owner of the business to again buy into what it is you want to do. And at times, yeah, you run into obstacles. You run into walls or just a general challenge just to know we're not going to do that. And so my approach would be to approach it and let's follow chunks. I would say, okay, well, if I can't do all of this, let me do this. Let me show you that we can accomplish this successfully and then we can start looking at the other pieces or the other chunks and then build that out. Sometimes it's challenging to get people to see your entire strategy or your vision. And so what you have to do is again, take pieces of it and approach those individually rather than as a whole.

No, that's great. And then you moved on from that company and you took on the president role of SDI and it wasn't necessarily a turnaround situation. The company was well-established, is operating pretty well. Maybe there's some things you had to reorganize in the business, but by stepping in this new role, I imagine you had the opportunity to implement your own strategy and have a little bit more flexibility to grow the business in a way that you wanted to.

Yeah, a different situation for sure. The CEO of that company was a former business partner. We were business partners in the prior venture. He had his vision and his vision was to exit the business. He purchased it in 97. He had been in it for 25 years and he was looking to exit at a good point. And so I took his vision and I modified it because his vision was definitely, let's get out of the business, but it wasn't, how do I get there? How do we build something up that is attractive and compelling to a buyer? And that's where I stepped in and immediately focused on communication, operational efficiency, getting teams to work together, creating that vision, did it annually. Each year I would create a theme or say, this year we're going to focus on communication. The second year, let's focus on teamwork. The third year, let's focus on now the departments and how those operate, not only by themselves, but together and ultimately to boost the top and bottom line, what buyers are interested in or the financial performance of the business. That may be comprised of good people or a good product or a good service, but ultimately they're looking at the financial performance. And so what you have to do is that while you're doing all these other things, you have to make sure that the business is functioning and performing financially in a consistent way to where, again, you are an attractive, compelling option for someone who's either looking to get into the space or to add to their existing business.

Yeah, exactly. And I want to dive deeper into that whole process and the whole process of selling a business, but you're absolutely right. Like if you go to sell a business and your financials are all over the place, like you alluded to, for example, you're profitable one year, you're losing money the next, you're profitable, losing, losing, profitable, profitable, whatever the trend may be, it's going to be really hard to sell your business because an investor wants that consistency. They want to know that they could buy the business, they can pay down the debt that's used to buy the business, or they can earn a return that is consistent and reliable instead of, you know, this rollercoaster. So I love how you brought that up. You know, I'm a big financial guy, Jeff, we're going to get into that here in a second. But before we do, I want to ask you this question.

When things start to feel chaotic or overwhelming in the company, and that's like for everybody running a business, right? At all levels, what do you usually trace that back to?

Well, the first thought that came to mind is, is workload. And looking at our business, it's variable. We have spikes in work, and we have drop offs in work. We have work that is affected seasonally or affected by the seasons. We have work that is affected by again, changes in government strategy. And, and so there is no consistency.

So I immediately look at, okay, what is the workload, I try and honestly, I try and foresee the workload, I will communicate with the team, like, hey, look, what's coming, we have a hockey stick coming, let's make sure we're doing resource planning, let's make sure we're getting in front of this, rather than getting into it, and then having to react in a code red manner.

And so with the teams, I certainly try and, and focus on operational efficiency, visibility, resource planning, to deal with the challenges that again, that that excessive workload. And then I also look at the individual departments and see who's more overwhelmed than others and trying to have those other departments step in and support, I have to step away because my work, my response, my overload is the entire company, I have to look at the individual business units or departments, and really see, okay, who's struggling? What do they need? But again, I really try to emphasize the let's get in front of it. Let's look at what's coming, resource planning, proactive planning, from there.

Let's dive deeper into that. And I want to go on a smaller scale. I mean, you have experience running organizations that are larger from a revenue perspective. But I think that seasonality and just the cyclical nature of solar in your business carries across other scopes and other trades.

I mean, you can be an operator of a landscape company and deal with seasonality every single year, you may be in an industry where it's more cyclical nature like solar. And when you have the combination of those two, it can make your business very volatile. So what would you say, Jeff, to somebody, maybe they're operating around three to $10 million in revenue, and they're constantly struggling with this cyclical nature of their business, these ebbs and flows, which makes it really hard, to your point to get in front of things into plan correctly, and just to evaluate resources and allocate them, you know, efficiently and all that other stuff. What would you say to them is a good strategy or something to focus on when it comes to like keeping work a little bit more consistent?

Another good question. When looking at the business, you have to evaluate where you excel. Now, if you're just doing one thing, this might be not the right response. But look at the business, look at areas where you really excel in your offering and see if that offering can be taken and put elsewhere into a market where that might not be seasonally affected, or that might have a different period of seasonal effect.

Take that, try and diversify, but don't get too far away from your core offering or service or product. But you have to, if you're in a seasonal business, and you know it, one, you need to be prepared financially for that. And so you need to run the business on a 12-month cycle, even though your business might yield a higher top line and bottom line in a six-month period. But I would look at that business again, as I said, and look at areas of opportunity where you can put what you do into maybe another marketplace or area.

Yeah, and I think that's great advice. Well, let me ask you this. How practical is it really, or how hard is it to stay disciplined to that? Because when you have crews that are out of work, your backlog is drying up, and you're sitting here thinking, we need to get some work. Have you ever stepped outside of your normal scope of business and really regretted that? Or do you feel like you've been pretty disciplined to what you just explained?

Yeah, so our core competency of the business that I joined a little over four years ago, the core competency was drilling about a year into it and looking at the direction the market was going, and the players that were coming in, and this difference between subcontract and self-perform, I recognized that we needed to increase our service offering. We need to go from drilling and putting a pile in the ground to now building on top of that pile, and now putting the solar panel on top of that structure that you just put on top of that pile.

We did that about a year and a half into it. I can tell you that the owner at the time was very reluctant because it increases your headcount in the field, it increases your risk, it increases your cost. That was a challenge, but I was able, as I mentioned earlier, to like, okay, let's do just mechanical. Before we touch modules, let's do a job where we can take on the mechanical. We did that, and then we brought in the modules. We took what we were doing. We took the general competency of the business, which is construction management. We built on top of processes that were inherent to our drilling. Then we went out and we did it, and it worked.

Again, it was something that also along the lines when someone was coming in and looking at purchasing the business, they saw this as an additional value add and made it, again, a more compelling purchase for them.

Yeah, no, and I love that. Would you ever recommend somebody buying work? What I mean by that is they lower their prices just to get work in the door. Do you recommend that? Do you think that's a terrible strategy? What's been your experience?

I don't think it's the best strategy. I can understand why people do it. They've built the business up a certain way. They have good people. They don't want to fall back from what they've already accomplished, but I'm not the biggest proponent of it.

I can say even today, we had a meeting along those lines. We're falling short in one of the business units. The question came up, well, should we reduce our margin target? My response to that was, no, this is not a top-line game. This is a bottom-line game. Why don't we look at what we can do with what we currently have, be more efficient, maybe get the work done sooner without compromising safety?

It's not always the best strategy. Again, I understand why people do it, but the problem with that is the more you take on with the less amount of margin or gross profit, and then you have a risk presents itself, you're only further eroding that margin target. It makes it even more challenging for the business.

Yeah, I agree. It could snowball out of control.

Let's dive deeper into a concept you just touched on, efficiency. I remember we were working on a project back in the day when I was CFO of this solar company, and it scoped out 450,000 solar panels. I remember having a meeting with the team and I said, look, if we waste one minute per panel, which is so easy to do, like, I need to walk over here, I put my tool down on the ground, maybe the staging's off, whatever it may be, but one minute a panel, which is super easy to do, right? That's 7,500 labor hours potentially wasted. And if we just multiply that by $40 an hour for a boat in labor rate, that's 300 grand, right?

So it's like, okay, every one minute that we waste on installing these modules on this massive job, it's 300 grand. Waste two minutes, 600 grand. Three minutes, 900 grand. That's a million bucks just by three minutes wasted. And you multiply that on scale, because these jobs are massive. If you've never been to a solar project, I'm not talking to you, Jeff, but I'm just talking to the listener here. If you've never been to a utility scale solar project, I mean, you're driving down roads, which are full of roads and rows and rows of panels. And essentially, it's like running an army out in the middle of the field. Like you're running a manufacturing plant onsite in the middle of the desert.

So Jeff, how do you look at operational efficiency and keeping like that in mind and how that could potentially impact the financials of a business? What are your thoughts on that?

Solar projects are inherently difficult. As you mentioned, you're mobilizing an army. You're building in kind of a factory fashion or manufacturing fashion. However, as we started off with, you're doing this in a remote area. You're doing this across 2,000, 3,000 acres. You're doing this in raw terrain. People don't do civil much anymore unless they absolutely have to.

And so you have to look at your manpower. You have to look at what is expected of that manpower. You have to then factor that into the conditions, as I just mentioned. Where's the project located? What are we going to run into seasonally? What are we going to run into with respect to ground conditions? What effect is that going to have on our equipment? And so you have to bring all those things into, let's call it, the formula or your production planning.

And then you look for areas of opportunity where, hey, we could potentially do better here if we do this. Maybe it means adding an additional person, but adding that additional person, while there's a cost associated with that, our production might be greater as a result of that. Maybe bringing in a different piece of equipment. There are a lot of different things, again, that can affect your production on a solar project. And each job is different. So the approach changes every time. And I feel our team does a really good job of that. But it's also staying on top of those productions and looking at those velocities and making sure they're being maintained. Because, as you mentioned, a minute drop-off is significant across the entire project and has a very quick impact against your bottom line.

Absolutely. I agree.

So let's talk about another topic, which is kind of taboo. I was talking to a leadership team just the other week, and I said this four-letter word, and their jaws dropped. They were like, what the heck is Steve talking about? He's gone completely off the rails. But I said, when it comes to running a high-performing team in a successful business, it comes down to love. And they're all like, love, we all do that kind of stuff, you know, that soft crap, whatever, Steve.

And I said, look, don't mistake love, like what I'm saying here, for weakness, right? Because sometimes leading with love is more difficult than the alternative of just like yelling and screaming at people and stomping your feet and trying to use like a Machiavellian approach to driving performance.

And so I explained to them, I said, look, love isn't going up to somebody and saying, oh, Jeff, you're the best in the world. You know, you're my bro. Give you knuckles, put my arm around you. And then behind your back, I say, yeah, Jeff's doing a terrible job. He's dropping the ball all over the place. He's not holding people accountable. And I'm talking all the smack behind your back. That's not love.

Love is going to you and saying, hey, Jeff, look, last week in the meeting, you really said something that rubbed me the wrong way. Can we address that? That's love, right? It's addressing things head on. It's putting your arm around people and saying, look, I care about you. How's your family? Like, I know your wife was in the hospital. Are you doing okay? Like, what can I do for you? How can I help you? How can I support you? What resources and tools do you need?

And I think when you can build a culture of love, of directness, of kindness, of mercy, of forgiveness, of all this stuff, right? Giving people grace, I think performance will naturally increase, but maybe you disagree with that. What do you think about this concept of love in construction, Jeff?

The concept of love in construction, well, I wouldn't necessarily use the word love because in construction, you know, just as much as I do, it's an abrasive environment. That has changed. I have emphasized that change myself by getting people to conduct themselves in a more professional manner, to not be so vocal, to not be so abrasive.

And this is where that concept of love falls in, at least for us. We do a lot of recognition. Even on our—we have a weekly management meeting—and I ask each of the team members to recognize somebody in the organization for something that they've done well. And I think the response to that, and while that individual may not be on that management meeting, I take the opportunity to then turn around and go to that employee and I'll say, hey, you were recognized in the management meeting for this or what you did here.

And the emotion that they respond with, right? You can see it changes their demeanor. You can see that the look in their eye changes. And that recognition to me is the love that you're talking about.

Everybody knows this in the work world, unless you're sitting at home working remote—we spend more time with the people we work with than we do with our families. And we really do need to find a better way to embrace each other and have understanding for each other and be cognizant of the things that we deal with in our outside lives, our non-work lives, and be empathetic. And I think all of that, all encompassing, is the love that you're talking about.

Businesses, I think we got away from that. It was detrimental in certain instances. I just feel in kind of the general work environment and people retaliated. You see that very often. And so, yeah, I think the kindness that you talk about, we just need to find a little bit more of it.

And I'll just give you a quick story real quick. And this is non-work related. I was with my in-laws over the weekend and my father-in-law was not doing well. And they went to a neurologist and the neurologist was extremely, extremely abrasive with my in-laws. And they just—they left, they walked out of the room. I mean, here, my father-in-law is trying to get help. And their neurologist was really just different than she was before.

And I told my mother-in-law and I said, hey, why didn't you ask her to step out of the room and just say, hey, is everything okay? Are you okay today? Because this is what's happening right now, because this is awkward for us. And so, yeah, I think people—we respond more than we take a moment to maybe look at what the other person is dealing with. And I think that's along those lines of love that you're talking about.

I think that's great. And sorry to hear about your father-in-law. I think it's interesting because when I was in landscaping back in the day, day, I was like a teenager. And I remember I was trying to fix this kinked line. There's a lateral line and the pipe was kinked under the fence. And it was a really tough spot to get to. And I was on my hands and knees with a little garden shovel, you know, like one of those little tiny shovels. And I'm digging there and I'm digging and I'm digging. I was probably at it for like half hour, just trying to like fit in this tight space.

And here comes my boss. And he was this Marine guy, like, hoo-ah, you know, he's like, get out of the way, son. And he grabbed this spade shovel and he was like slamming into the dirt. He loosened up the dirt. He grabbed the pipe. He cut it. He put a coupling in it, crimp clamped it on each side. And he's like, that's how it's done. And he walked away.

And I was like, you punk, don't you talk to me that way. Don't you embarrass me like that? Because everybody was like, oh my gosh, I was like totally humiliated because everybody saw it on the crew. And I remember I went back to work the next day. I'm never going to put myself in that position again. And I worked like 10 times as hard. I just put my head down and he recognized it and I earned his respect. And, you know, I became like one of his best employees on the crew.

But then contrast that with somebody else, like in the future, like I've had other experiences where somebody will raise their voice or they're like screaming at me or, you know, shouting profanity at me. And I totally shut down, walk away. And I'm like, screw you basically.

So it's interesting how like sometimes it can be effective. Other times it's disastrous. And if we take those few times where it is effective, which is, you know, more rare, I believe, then we may think, oh yeah, yelling at people. That's the way it gets done. That's how we do it in construction.

But I'm a big believer in love just like you, like, but it's gotta be defined the right way. Love is respect. Love is like having standards for people and love is holding people accountable. The opposite of love is talking behind their back, not having standards, having no KPIs, having no production rates or expectations on them. And it's like, do whatever you want. And then I'm going to be hard on you when you don't meet the numbers or when you don't get the project done on time. That's not love. That's the opposite of it.

We communicate behind walls, as I say to our team. I mean, you should be able to, if you have something to say, you should be able to say it to that person's face. And while I'm not encouraging negative behavior, I just—I want people to stop hiding behind certain forms of communication as a means to convey a point or uphold their argument.

And, you know, again, along those lines, this is about communication. It's first and foremost in any business, in anything you do, communication is key and how you communicate. It sets the tone. It really does. And so this concept of love and really empathy too. I think empathizing with people, because again, there are outside influences that people might not be aware of. And unfortunately, it's the world that everybody says it's the world that we live in today, but the big chunk of the world that we live in today is work. And so we somehow, yeah, need to bring this back in and the love and empathy and the kindness. And it's tough because stress doesn't yield that emotion.

Yeah, I agree. Absolutely.

So let's switch gears here and pivot completely. I want to talk about the recent sale of the business. So you went through an acquisition yourself under this president role. I want to talk to you about this because, well, I guess I'll just ask you this question.

How difficult is it to sell a construction company? If I'm a business owner and I'm thinking, you know what? Maybe I want to get out of my business. I've been doing this for 20, 25 years, and maybe it's time to hit the market and sell this thing. How easy is that to do?

On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being most difficult, let's call it a nine. And let me provide some clarity to that.

Construction, you're providing a service. You don't have, unless you have residual contracts that are generating annual income for the business. Again, construction, you're providing a service, you're on a job, you're off a job. If you have a good amount of pipeline or backlog for the business to go out and construct, that's a good thing.

But again, we're a service business that's highly leveraged by labor. So when people are looking at acquiring the business, they want to see history, they want to see solid financial performance, and they also want to see what value that brings to them or what the business and relative to its value brings to them. And then what is the future value of that business?

Again, in construction, it's very challenging. And sometimes I say we're only as good as our last job. If you have a product that is part of that construction, that's a good thing. Again, repeating, you know, if you have annual contracts, or if you have backlog, that's a good thing when looking at selling your business.

And talk about the process. Like, since you just went through the process, were there things that you experienced where like, Oh my gosh, I wish we had better systems. I wish our financials were cleaner. What were some of the takeaways from the experience that you wouldn't want to repeat in the future? And how would you set up a company moving forward? So you don't, you don't repeat those same things or the same pain points or headaches?

Yeah. So what had I wish I'd done better or position the company to be better prepared for? It was the financial side. I didn't anticipate the amount of forensic auditing that took place operationally, because that was one of my focuses earlier on getting the company stable and operationally efficient. We passed what's as they say, flying colors.

But on the financial side, we were prepared for the amount of, again, the information that was required as part of the financial audit, the tax audit, the insurance audit, benefits, those things. And so I wish going into it, it's not a wish. I just, we say that flippantly, but I would have liked to have been better prepared on that side, because it delays things. Again, people want to, they want that visibility.

Again, first and foremost, for anybody who is buying a business, they are focused on the financial performance of that business. Again, return on investment, right? When am I going to get my money back? And how much money is this business going to make me? And so having that buttoned up, at least to the best of your ability, at least having your tax documents and monthly income statements and balance sheets and all that prepared, ready to go positions you better. And again, I would have liked to have done that better.

Well, that's an interesting point. I mean, obviously finance is my background and that's my strong suit here. And I know finance isn't your background, but you know numbers, you know your way around financials. How important do you think it is for business owners and their management teams to be reviewing financials on a regular basis and making decisions based on that data instead of just like winging it or making gut based decisions?

I believe it's absolutely 100% important. I am a firm believer that numbers will expose your problems. By looking at your income statement, by looking at the balance sheet, really your income statement more and your costs, your operational costs and comparing those to prior months to prior years, it gives you visibility into the business that you're not going to get from someone who's just going to come up and say, Hey, we've got this problem over here.

I believe that, strongly believe that, yeah, you should be reporting on a monthly basis. And again, doing comparisons and analyzing data. And then when you make changes in the business, focusing on those as well and seeing what impact they have on other areas in the business and what other costs that they're creating.

Yeah, extremely important. And how far down the line should that information flow? Because I know like from my experience talking to whether it's, you know, PMs or directors of construction or supers or whatever, it was always, always this balancing act within companies. And some companies are very transparent. Others are like, okay, I don't want to share all pieces of information with them. Maybe they're in a bad financial situation or maybe they're in a good financial situation.

And I think some people, they don't understand the numbers. So maybe a superintendent would look at numbers and be like, Oh my gosh, I need a raise. Look how much money they're making. And it's like, yeah, but you're not accounting for working capital and taxes and reinvestment in equipment or et cetera. Right?

So I think there can be some pros and cons to sharing financials, but what's been your take on all of this?

Construction relative to the level that you now exposure to the entire company financials. I believe that is director level. Anybody who's either a business unit leader or department head, if they have responsibility for a portion of the P&L or a P&L that flows up into the total company income statement, then to me, they should have the visibility to how their business unit is performing. And then the effect of that's having on the overall performance of the company.

I think exposing people in the field to entire company financials, or at least the department financials, I don't think that's necessary. I think what they should be given access to is the budget for their job, right? And it should be the costs. If you should give them that this is your cost, this is your budget. Then if you perform to this, then you will hit the profit target that we have for the entire business.

And you're right, Steve, I just had this conversation with the CEO of the company prior to this call that people in these let's call siloed roles or responsibilities—they don't think about the entire company. They don't think about tax. They don't think about depreciation. They don't think about direct and indirect costs and SG&A. And they just—they're not looking at it. They're looking at two numbers. What was my top? And what was my bottom?

Yes. Did I do, and did I hit the bottom number and how I got there? It doesn't really matter. And I'm not saying as a broad sweeping statement to your listeners or anybody, it's just that you truly need to understand the financials, the financial operations of a company before you give that access, or at least the individual should understand the financial operations of a company before you give them access to that information, because they won't understand it. And then they'll glean their own takeaways from it. And how can I—and some most—how can I benefit from this?

Yep. I agree. Great point.

So let me wrap with this last question here. What advice would you give to another construction business owner who wants to grow their business, but they don't want to burn out or lose control in the process?

Burnout's a tough one. I mean, construction is, is challenging. I would love to meet anybody in construction who said, I had this budget, I had this schedule and everything went accordingly, and I nailed it to a T. So that's a tough one.

Burnout—don't take on too much. Don't stretch your people. You can stretch them a little bit. Everybody should be pushed. I believe that. You set the bar just a little bit higher than what someone thinks they can achieve. And you'd be amazed that they can achieve it.

But burnout as a leader of a business, as an owner of a business, is dependent upon how much you take on and what risk you are willing to absorb in that process. I believe risk is a strong contributor to burnout. And what I mean by that is if you're not up for the risk and things start to go wrong, that burnout will happen quickly because it is time consuming. The impacts of risk or the negative side of risk are exhausting. And that is burnout.

For growth, have a plan that is three to four years. If you think you're going to grow the business in a year and to a certain point, that's going to basically double the infrastructure or your internal resources, you're taking on, to me, an insurmountable challenge.

I would say if you're looking at growth, approach it on annual kind of targets. We want to do this, we want to do this this year, and we want to do this the next year. And this is how we're going to do it. Build out your three, four year plan. If the environment or the industry that you work in—and it's construction—you got to make sure that there's enough runway to do that.

Yeah, well said. Jeff, I mean, we could keep going on forever. I love our conversations. You have such a wealth of knowledge. And I just love your leadership style and what you've been doing in the world of business, especially in construction. I wish you all the best and continued success as you continue to crush it at SDI Services and beyond.

Thanks, Steve. I appreciate you. You know, a very strategic type of mindset. Let me say it again. I, I, and if we just multiply that by 40, let me just do the math here. Hold on. Love, like, don't mistake me. Don't mistake.