AUSTIN GRAY: Welcome back to the OWNR OPS podcast! I'm your host, Austin Gray, and in this episode, I have Chris Bergethon joining me. Chris is a serial entrepreneur. We got together a couple of weeks ago on the mountain and skied for the first time. I guess we've been—how long have we known each other at this point? Eighteen, twenty-four months? Something like that.

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, it feels longer though, doesn't it?

AUSTIN GRAY: I know it does because, um, yeah, I don't know. You've helped me so much in growing my business, so I'm very thankful for that. But Chris is a serial entrepreneur. He's a car wash guy on Twitter, has an e-commerce business, and he's got multiple other businesses as well, so we're going to have a lot of fun with this podcast.

Yeah, whenever we were jumping on the call here, we were diving into V02 Max. Chris just did a V02 Max test, so yeah, tell me about that.

KRISS BERGETHON: Um, I think Peter Attia’s new book—bling name of it—I think it’s "Longevity" or "Lifespan" or something. Whatever it is started talking about this, it's something that was in the back of my mind anyway, but it's associated with longevity, and I’m coming up on 50 here in a couple of years, so it's something that I'm very attuned to.

Turns out there's a college here in town that has setup to measure it, so our mutual friend Dave turned me on to these guys. I emailed them and set up an appointment, and for a hundred bucks, they measured it. It wasn't too bad. They did a ventilatory threshold test, which is—they can project your V02 Max. If you truly want your V02 Max, they put you on a bike and raise the resistance until you literally cannot turn the pedals anymore.

This test was just sort of projecting the first kind of half hour of your fitness—intervals increasing the resistance—and then they can extrapolate your V02 Max, so they don't kill you, um, so that was nice. But it turned out to be very educational, and I think really anybody who's concerned about fitness should find a place to do that because it's very eye-opening.

So what does it actually test?

KRISS BERGETHON: It’s a measure of how efficiently your body uses oxygen. So they’re measuring the—in the lab, they know how much oxygen is going into your body. You have a tube on your mouth—there's a picture on my Twitter profile if you guys—or my Twitter feed. And then they're actually measuring the expired gases, and that tells them how much oxygen you’re inhaling and how much you are exhaling and the expired gases.

So that tells them how efficient your body is. And the more efficient it is, the higher your V02 Max, the better cardiovascular fitness you are in. All these studies have come out that V02 Max is associated with longer living. So I think it’s a big reason why we see so many of the longest-living people, at least in America here in Colorado, is because of the altitude, right?

If you can live at—I mean, you probably live at, what, 8,000 feet? Something like that?

AUSTIN GRAY: My Garmin says 8,573, where I'm sitting right now. Yeah.

KRISS BERGETHON: County Colorado, where Breckenridge and Keystone are, is the highest living longevity county in the country. I think a lot of that has to do with the altitude, and that directly impacts the V02 Max. The more you live at this altitude, the more efficient you are at converting oxygen into—or using oxygen in your body.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, that's incredible. Just the other day, whenever I went out and did an uphill skin session at the mountain—so just for people listening who aren't familiar with it—um, they have what's called Alpine touring setups. You can put skins on the bottom of your skis, and then there are bindings that allow you to hike up the hill.

So the other day, I was doing it, and there were literally—there had to be at least a couple who were 70 years old. This couple was just walking and talking and smiling and looking at each other, and I was waving to them, they were waving to me— "Hey, you have a great day!" You know, like they weren't even breathing hard, and they’re walking up Sleeper, which is like one of the steepest runs on Mary Jane. I just thought it was awesome.

It's like if I can be like that when I'm 70 years old, that’s a life well lived.

KRISS BERGETHON: Totally, totally. I go on this annual mountain bike trip with this guy Pete, who’s 83, and he mountain bikes for four straight days out in the backcountry of Utah, and he just refuses to get old, you know?

It’s just staying active, staying on the bike, refusing to let age catch up with you. I think that's one of my ultimate goals too.

AUSTIN GRAY: Well, you're well on your way.

KRISS BERGETHON: Thanks, man. The V02 score you got was—what did you say it was?

AUSTIN GRAY: Top 1%.

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like superior, almost elite level. So I've just been, um, I’ve been working on it a lot. To be frank, I was in terrible shape ten years ago. When I was 38, I was probably at least 30 pounds—probably 40 pounds overweight.

We had just had a kid. I had all the issues with early fatherhood that apparently you don’t have, by the way—because you’re looking good. But I was drinking too much, I was just not living a healthy lifestyle. I really treated my body poorly in my 30s, and it wasn't until I got into those early 40s and realized, like: “You know, this is all you get. This is the only body you have, and you better be nice to it.”

I was having all these back problems, all these digestive problems, and I just decided to get healthy, and it's been a really—about a ten-year quest now, I guess. And so this is—I can honestly say now I'm in better shape than I’ve ever been, even in high school when I was playing football and playing basketball all the time, and I was constantly moving. I was not nearly this strong, and I’m sure my V02 Max wasn't this high.

So it’s just been a lifelong quest, or a ten-year quest, I should say. What do you do for training?

KRISS BERGETHON: Um, right now, I’m doing a lot of these functional fitness classes. It's kind of like—a little bit of a circuit. My trainer sets it up, and there’ll be about ten of us in there.

You’ll do, you know, one station will be renegade rows. The next station might be squat thrusts. Uh, the next station might be flipping tires. It’s a little bit CrossFit without any of the big like clean and jerks or stuff that people tend to get hurt on. He tends to stay away from kind of these giant lifts that can hurt people. He does a little bit of deadlift, but it’s more—and then you’ll have to get on the assault bike, you know, and grind out twelve calories or something.

So it’s basically high-intensity interval training, and it’s served me well. I mean, that day, that you and I went—the powder day we had at Aspen, which was just epic—I had a lot of similar powder days when I lived in Steamboat, but I was good for maybe five or six runs. I could do about two hours on a good powder day. You and I went for five, and I was still crushed.

But the next day, I was fine. I didn't really feel sore. I wasn’t completely out of it for the rest of the week.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, you were ripping that day. It was incredible! Like those first two runs, I was like, “Holy crap, this is—my quads were on fire! I have to keep up with this guy all day!”

KRISS BERGETHON: Well, you were right there with me, dude! I was chasing you too. This was definitely a two-way street!

AUSTIN GRAY: I love it. The only video I got of you was on the last run when we were just absolutely wiped. My legs were just cooked too, and you posted that one from like three hours earlier and actual powder going down a cool run—we're just going right down the lift line on the last run of the day.

Anyways, um, let's jump into some business stuff because, uh, yeah, I’ve had so much fun going back and forth with you. Early on, I really don't even remember how we met. I know it was on Twitter, but yeah, I think we found out that you were in Winter Park and I might have reached out—one of us reached out when we realized we were both in Colorado.

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, for sure.

AUSTIN GRAY: And then I think one of the early connection points was the fact that one of your first businesses that you were in was sewer and water excavation.

KRISS BERGETHON: That's right.

AUSTIN GRAY: And you know me—being in land clearing and also doing some of the dirt work, I really didn't have a direction when I started. It was just like, “I'm going to get a yard and I'm going to go start charging people money for whatever services I can offer” right? And I love that—that's what attracted me to you in the first place because you were just like, “I’m just going to go figure this out.” Twitter is full of this sort of latent anxiety about what should I do, what should my business do?

You post a business idea, and you'll get all these people weighing in on why it's a bad one or, “Oh, I'm really going to do this.” You just hear so little about people who are in your position actually doing things and actually just getting after it.

And so much of Twitter at the time was about buying a business too, and I was on the camp that your first business, I think it's—in a lot of ways, especially for a service business, it's a lot less risk to start it. You know, taking on a $500,000 or a million-and-a-half-dollar or two-and-a-half-million-dollar SBA loan to jump into a business that you don't know anything about and that you've never been in is a tremendous risk!

Buying a skid steer for, you know, whatever it was, 50 grand or whatever, and financing it and just diving in and just figuring it out was totally new from what I was seeing on Twitter, and I was so intrigued by you. I was just like, “This guy gets it! He’s just getting after it. He’s just going for it.” So I think that’s what started it.

KRISS BERGETHON: Well thanks! I appreciate that. And then very early on, we started sending voice memos back and forth. So yeah, I would just text Chris, and I’d be like, “Hey, I'm thinking about doing this!”

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah.

KRISS BERGETHON: Or, “Here's what I'm thinking about right now and I don’t really know what decision to make. How would you think about this?” And then you just started replying back with voice memos—and they’d be like three to six minutes long. I just remember sitting in my truck, going from job to job, listening to those, and I'm like, “Dang, this guy gets it! He's awesome!”

He provides really thoughtful responses and actionable advice. And so I remember the first one that we talked about was—yeah, the first challenge you gave to me was: “Dude, stop chasing the checks right now! Hire an office manager! Just figure out somebody, right, who you can pay 25 or 30 bucks an hour, who's local, right, and just start them off part-time.”

KRISS BERGETHON: And you were just like, “That person exists in your county! I promise you they exist—just go find them!”

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah! Well, and of course, all this comes from experience of me screwing this up because my first business, with the excavation company, I did everything. And finally hired out a person—what we would call an office gal—just to answer phones and run the invoices and, you know, open the mail.

God, I did all that stuff for years and realized it was just killing myself. So all these things, you know, I wasn’t smart enough to know them; I had to figure them out through experience and mistakes. But I remember we talked about getting you some help.

Delegation is, I think, a skill that so many early entrepreneurs especially really fall down on—feel like they need to know every part of the job. So they start doing everything, and they never let it go.

And um, that's been my big push over the last probably five or six years—is saying no to as much as possible because a lot of this stuff comes from the bottom. Even when you have people working for you, they will tend to push stuff on you, like, “Hey boss, can you do this?” or “Hey boss, this needs to get done.”

And the entrepreneur's ego and sense of responsibility is to say yes and, “I’ll do it.” And now I say, “Hey, that’s a great idea! Let me know when it gets done. Let me know when you’re done with that because I think you’re right—I think it does need to get done! So if you need my support, I’m here for you, but I’m not going to do it. I need you to do it.” And that’s something that’s really hard to do—it’s kind of an ego check.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, for sure. So we haven't even jumped into your backstory here. Can you just give us a rundown of like the evolution of your entrepreneurial journey, starting out with whenever you bought that excavation company? Take it away; give us some background.

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, I'll give you the short version. So 2003, I just had this—I was 27—had basically what I call an early-life crisis that I think a lot of people have around that age, and realized I hated my job, I hated my girlfriend, I hated where I lived. I was living in Alabama at the time. I was a construction engineer on a big civil project, and so I dumped the girl, dumped the job, dumped the house—all in a 48-hour period.

I loaded up a U-Haul truck and headed back to Colorado, where I was originally from, and just realized that I hated corporate America, and I hated everything—all the jobs I had had up to that point. I hated—and I realized the main reason was that the people above me were making such horrible decisions on a daily basis I just couldn't stand. And they were always affecting me and the people below them, you know, in a negative way.

I thought, “Well, I guess I just need to be the boss.” I guess I had enough ego to think I could do that, but I had no entrepreneurial instincts. My parents were both long-term employees; my mom worked for the federal government for 40 years. You know, there was no instinct to start my own thing.

So I moved in with this guy who had had the same crisis, and he had gone out and bought a lube shop—a Valvoline franchise—and he was doing great! There were definitely good days and bad days, but there were many days when he was playing golf at two o'clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and I thought, “That looks pretty good.”

So I found an excavation business on BizBuySell—the very first iteration of BizBuySell.com—and um, got an SBA loan. It cost me only $180,000. I had $50,000 in a bank from working my previous career. I put it down; I got the loan, and off I went.

It was just a total baptism by fire—it was a very, very tough business. I definitely wasn't playing golf at two o'clock on a Tuesday. It had to be—I had to grow it, you know, because it was only grossing about $200,000 a year, so in order for me to make any money in this and pay the bank, I had to grow it right out of the gate.

And so I had to get off the machine—it was really an owner-operated deal, so I learned how to run a mini-ex, but I had to get off that thing as soon as possible and go sell work.

I found out that that was my best asset—I could sell the work, I could meet with the clients, give them confidence that we could do the job, even though I had no idea what I was doing—just kind of figure it out, right? So I grew that business. We went from 180K to 2.6 million in four years. I sold it to a buyer in 2007 right before the crisis hit, and literally went off the grid.

It was such a stressful gig that the girl I was with at the time, who’s now my wife, showed me how miserable I was. I went completely off the grid—literally and figuratively. We moved up to Steamboat Springs; we moved into an off-grid home. My plan in early 2008 was to start building houses up there—build off-grid houses.

I don't know if there's a worse time in history to build spec homes other than 2008, but that was probably the worst time in my lifetime. And so that didn't work out, but I read "The 4-Hour Workweek" from Tim Ferriss. I didn't know anything about the internet really other than email, and we were in the middle of nowhere. I was literally off the grid—I didn't have any choices. There were no jobs.

The only other thing I could do was probably plow snow. So, uh, I bought a little website and grew it—it happened to be about solar power because I was living off the grid. I knew a thing about it through that. And that really built my background in the Internet space.

So now I have that, transitioned into a supplement business—kind of a long story, but basically had some health issues, I figured them out on my own, and I figured out that a lot of my audience who were interested in solar just happened to be interested in natural health products as well, so we released our first health product in like 2010-2011.

And we've gradually transitioned away from solar and into a natural health supplement, so that's my main gig. I don't talk about it on Twitter much because nobody's really shown much of an interest in it. I talked about it for years on there, and I never got any traction.

And then I went out and bought a car wash and figured out that it had these huge tax benefits, and it was a great investment, and that's what people love—that completely took off on Twitter. So now I'm the car wash guy.

AUSTIN GRAY: I love it! I love the fact that you've just done so much in your entrepreneurial career, but I feel like each one, from our conversation, has sort of built off of each other.

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah.

AUSTIN GRAY: And I definitely want to dive into the car wash business, and I know a lot of our listeners will want to hear about that, so we will come back to that. But before we get away from the early-stage excavation business, it was doing $200,000 in gross revenue whenever you bought it, and you grew it to $2.6 million. Wow, that's pretty cool!

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, and you know what we did, Austin? We did this crazy thing—we just showed up and did the work when we were supposed to, and then we did it over and over and over again! No amount of advertising I ever did worked.

I tried Google Ads, which were in their infancy back in those days. I tried Yahoo Ads, which was the only game going online. I tried Yellow Pages, which was huge in 2004, and nothing worked! Like just doing what you said—you were going to do—and that reputation, which seems so obvious to a good business operator, but is so lacking in the construction industry, especially in the home services industry, it was just like a rocket ship!

We just had to hang on, and I did—I made every mistake I could in building that business, but revenue was not one of them. It all stemmed from the fact that we probably took on a lot of work we shouldn't have, and you and I have talked about this—about being able to say no to certain types of work. I didn’t say no to a lot of different things, but I still think I learned a ton.

I had to figure out what to say yes and no to, and the only way to do that is to say yes to everything.

AUSTIN GRAY: I think what's very interesting is you said you had no prior entrepreneurial experience, and you were baptized by the fire, but you obviously learned something decently quick to figure out how—like one thing you said to me early on, whenever—I’ll never forget, I was in Florida at my wife’s parents' house over Thanksgiving or Christmas, and you and I were talking over the phone.

Yeah, and I was asking you more about the excavation business, and you said, “Yeah, I was in the machine in the beginning, but very quickly I figured out if I wanted to grow this thing, I had to get myself out of the machine.” Yeah!

So that was sort of the first step. And I think that's important for a lot of our listeners because that was one thing you challenged me early on—not only get an office manager, but I think one thing you said to me was, “Get out of the machine quicker than you think you should, and do sales longer than you think you should.”

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah.

AUSTIN GRAY: Talk me through what else you did to grow the business. I mean, you obviously had to get good at hiring other people or putting people in the right spots, yeah, to follow your sales. Like what were some things that you did there?

KRISS BERGETHON: We did some things early on that probably seem obvious now, but the little bandit signs in our yards—those weren't really popular back then.

AUSTIN GRAY: Huh.

KRISS BERGETHON: But we did that—that’s obvious! Well, what we figured out—we would go and fix a sewer line in the alley in Denver. They’re all these old clay lines, and the city would come through and inspect it and say, “You’ve got to fix this.” They’d send a letter to the homeowner, and we figured out that if this house needed that, well, probably every house on the block, or every house in the immediate area, needed to do that.

And so in the beginning, I would just knock on the doors, and it started off as a conversation, saying, “Hey, sorry for all the noise and racket—your neighbor’s got a sewer line problem, and we’re going to fix it, but you know the alley’s going to be gummed up and all this stuff.”

And then that would just start a conversation. I’d say, “Well, have you had yours looked at?” And a lot of the time they had, and I’d say, “Well, you know what? I'm closing this alley anyway; I’m here—all my gear is here. Why don’t we just do yours? I can do it tomorrow; I can do it this afternoon or something like that.”

And it actually got to the point where I would do five or six in an alley over a two-day period, and I would charge just a little bit less. But instead of making say $4,000 in that alley, I was making $20,000 in it. It was bundling jobs, and that was a big breakthrough for us—especially in construction. You and I have talked about this exact thing—is reducing your M-time.

The mobilization time of going to a job and setting up is always longer than you think it is! You always think you’re going to show up and go right to work—no! It takes you forever just to pick it up and put it where you need it to go. So the longer we could stay on those jobs and just grind out work, the better. That was a big breakthrough—handing out some flyers and stuff like that.

But anytime I would see a plumber’s van—because we work directly for the plumbers. The plumber would go into a house, they would figure out the sewer was bad, and they would call us if it had to be dug up. Anytime I saw a plumber's van, I would just knock on his window or knock on the house and say, “You know, hey, what's going on here? By the way, I dig up these yards for a living.”

So a lot of it was just this hitting the street. It was really that simple, creating relationships. And that's where I'm talking about you with your sales. When people know they're talking to the owner—especially at the level that you're working at right now where you’re working intimately with a homeowner—when they know they're talking to the owner, it goes a long way.

If they’re talking to a sales rep or a guy who’s working the machine or something, that's a tough relationship. Anyone who owns these HVAC companies who are trying to scale them will tell you that's really the bottleneck—is the sales. Getting a guy who both understands the work and can impart confidence in the customer that we can complete the work and, by the way, do it at a price that we can make a lot of money at doing—like if you’re just going to go around and undercut everybody’s bidding, you’re going to do great, but you’re not going to make any money.

So that sales role is so critical. And I think that’s probably something that you can really focus on. I’m sure you’re really good at it, but you’re still running the machines and stuff like that, and I just—maybe you’re better at that than I am, but I could not do both. I could not focus on getting this trench cut correctly while my phone’s ringing and the customer who, you know, I’m supposed to be on their job tomorrow was yelling at me, “Are you gonna be here?” You know, I just could not multitask like that!

And I think the business benefitted from just focusing on those customer relationships and the supervision of the guys instead of the completion of the work.

And to answer your question—no, I’m not that good at it either! It's just sort of the approach I had to get the business up and off the ground, so that's what you had to do! That’s what you had to do!

So I'm listening to guys like you and Dave and taking your advice on getting out of the machine as quick as I can.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, and you love that part of the business too. You love that, so you’re gonna miss that aspect, right?

KRISS BERGETHON: I do! And don’t get me wrong—I will definitely jump back in the skid steer or the mulcher whenever I see an open afternoon or an opportunity to do that, but my main focus going into this year—and I've already talked with our lead operator about this—is like—the expectation is that he’s leading all the whole field crew and the operations associated with it, and my job is to just keep the pipeline full.

And so I’m really excited about this upcoming year because of the two little things that you said there.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah!

KRISS BERGETHON: If I can still meet the crew at the job site and be present, bring some energy, you know, boost morale—the crew knows I’m around, but then they see me going and knocking on all the ten neighbors’ doors, yes!

And it’s like, “Hey guys, we just got three of those ten! We’re gonna be right here for the whole next week or two, right?”

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, that’s right!

KRISS BERGETHON: People feed off of that! And then, um, the second thing you said is just like knocking on the plumber’s window.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, the relationships!

KRISS BERGETHON: By pulling myself out—that’s what I’m excited about here is being able to do more of that this year, um, yeah, because one of those relationships can get you ten jobs, right?

Finding those people that I call the hubs of the wheel—they have all these spokes shooting out, and they can refer you work. That’s way more effective in your line of work than any advertisement will be.

The next piece, like the next challenge I’m dealing with right now—and I’ve been fortunate because our lead operator is basically recruiting people who he either knew or worked with in the past—wow!

So I'm very thankful going into this—we don’t have any hiring needs right now based on who we have submitted offer letters to, but recently it was a concern—it’s like where are we going to find the guys to fulfill the work? And so I’m curious—whenever you’re running the excavation business, if you’re driving sales, you’re taking a business from $200k to $2.6 million in revenue per year. You've obviously got to have guys to fulfill the work.

How are some creative ways you recruited team members in 2003, 2004, and 2005?

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, it was—it was a little bit of the what I—we just talked about. If I saw a guy sitting on a backhoe who was working for another company and I didn’t think his supervisor was around, I would watch him for a little bit.

I’d make sure that he wasn't, you know, a total bozo—it's kind of hard to tell sometimes! But I would watch him for a little bit, and then walk up and talk to him and just hand him a card and say, “If you ever get sick of these guys, let me know!”

A lot of it was referral work—um, or referring people. I would ask this guy who was doing great work for us, and he would bring in his brother, you know, and he would bring in his buddy—so those referrals are important.

The problem with that is that you come up with this sort of— it can become almost a de facto union, whereas this whole crew are all buddies, and you’re the outsider. They just can decide, like, “Hey, we’re gonna go march into the office and ask for a $10-an-hour raise!” You know, or whatever it is.

I think that’s rare, but you don’t want the entire company to be this sort of bro-down of guys who are all—and invariably they’re going to bring in some friends who aren’t very good workers; they’re just going to bring them in because this guy’s out of work.

And I made the mistake of hiring a brother duo, and the one brother was so bad that I had to fire them both!

So it’s trial and error. I did not figure out any great hacks other than I realized the Mexican nationals were such good workers for the real labor. We just started advertising in the Mexican grocery stores—like at taquerias.  

There were also some Mexican newspapers, and we had a flood! Like we never lacked for people in that. Now in the small mountain towns where you are, that’s a little trickier. You don’t have quite that population, but that was a game changer for us because we could just snap our fingers—we could literally say, “I need two more guys tomorrow,” and they would just show up!

And that’s one benefit of our current immigration situation right now. I love working with Hispanic workers. I get to practice Spanish! And I grew up working around them. I worked—I'll tell you—growing up, I have never seen anybody outwork them!

Absolutely! They work their tails off, and if you tell them, “Hey man, I need you Saturday and Sunday!” they’ll just show up, and there are no complaints.

And I had—I consider myself a patriot, and this is a touchy issue. I tried to hire—we would have to pour a lot of concrete because we were cutting a lot of concrete. We would hire union concrete finishers, and they would complain, they’d be late or they would be literally calling me like, “Hey, you gotta bail me out of jail for me to come work today!”

And it was like, “What?! Like how do you guys live like this?” The minute we kind of started hiring some of the Mexican nationals, especially for the lower-level positions, all that went away.

So it's a weird issue, but it’s so prevalent in construction that if you’re going to be in home services and construction, you've got to figure this out—you’ve got to figure out how to get these guys working for you!

AUSTIN GRAY: Absolutely! Well, before we jump into car washes—yeah, I’m sure there are some takeaways that you have learned in building your online businesses or from just becoming a more seasoned entrepreneur. If you were to jump back into home services at this point, knowing what you know now, what would you have told yourself back in the day running that business?

KRISS BERGETHON: That’s a really, really good question. Um, I really believe that there is a natural ceiling for a lot of these businesses that tons of entrepreneurs in our sort of demographic bust their asses to break through and waste a shitload of money.

If I had kept my crews—I had about four crews, about sixteen guys that were really tight and really good, super efficient. As soon as I went to twenty and twenty-five, everything fell apart. All of a sudden, my stress level went up, my income went down, and I just hit the wall. That’s when I burned out, and sold the thing.

If I had stayed at a level where I could manage the guys, and I had the office gal running the back office, I truly believe I was making probably—in today's dollars, I would have made close to, because that $2.5 million probably would have been somewhere, let’s say five.

I probably could have banked a million bucks a year; I could have reduced my hours down to 20 or 30. I could have poured that extra income into real estate and other projects, and I still could have sold the business for a great multiple!

But instead, I just completely ran myself ragged trying to grow that thing. I had this in my head that we were going to be this hundred-million-dollar company.

And what you see so often with the boomers who are selling these businesses is that they have this nice little company. They've got six or eight trucks, whatever it is; he’s got a great lifestyle; he’s got a beach house, he’s got a mountain house; he’s making phenomenal money; he’s making half a million or a million bucks a year.

All of us come in there and say, “Well, how do we blow it up to 20 million?” Well, this guy figured out that he has a fantastic lifestyle with this quote-unquote small company.

And now this is exactly what I'm going through with my supplement company. We touched just under $20 million bucks in 2022—uh, we were at $18 million, and we spent the last two years trying to break through that mark. This year we’re down to $8 million, and I will make more money this year working less than I ever have.

And now I have the energy, the time, and the bandwidth to go after car washes and do these other things. And so it's really hard to internalize this and to sort of limit your own ambition, but every business has this what I call the curve of enthusiasm, right? You get into it, and you’re right in that steep slope right now—you are loving it, man, and you are crushing it.

You’re hiring great people; you’re in the steep curve. You’re probably, I’m guessing, you’re probably going to double your business again this year, right? In another two or three years, you’re going to reach a point where it’s like: “Do we blast? Do we get through the orbit and really get into that 10-20 million range? Spend a lot of money to get there, hire a lot of people that we don’t know, move into regions that we can’t control as well, maybe into verticals that we don’t understand as well?”

Or can we just sit right here and have a $5 or $6 million top-line business, and I’m putting anywhere from 20, 30—maybe 40% in my pocket? And can I just be happy with that, and then find another—I’m maybe doing real estate; maybe I’m doing podcasts.

Like, that’s where I wasted a ton of money even just a couple of years ago trying to— that ego, right? Chasing that top line! I’m going, “I gotta have that $20 million business! Then I gotta have that $50 million business! Then I want that $100 million!”

Right now, I’d like to think—ask me again in a couple years, Austin, because I may have changed my mind, but I like to think now that I’ve really let go of that, and I’m very, very happy I’ve let go of the status symbols of the top-line revenue.

Let go of the—you know, chasing revenue for revenue’s sake. Now all I care about is that bottom line, baby! And if I can make seven figures and not work that hard, and have a bunch of fun side projects, and get to talk to Austin Gray on a podcast on a Friday afternoon, I am really, really happy with that!

And ride the White Rim Trail, and ride the White Rim mountain bike trail and mash pow on a Tuesday in Aspen with my buddy Austin—I mean, to me, that’s living, you know? The guys I know that do have a $100 million company—they cannot do that; they do not have the time and the bandwidth for that. That is a 60-70-80 hour week gig!

I believe that’s one reason we’ve connected so quickly early on, because I believe that we share a very similar—it’s like, I’m going to try to verbalize this—yeah, there is this internal drive to always do more.

Yeah! And you and I talked about it over beers after smashing pow that one day, and it’s all—and it all comes back to the ego! But when I was driving home that night, I was thinking about it—I’m like, “What number?”

First and foremost, I think the answer for entrepreneurship is like: what number do you need to take care of your family? Because that is an important thing; it’s very important to make sure that your kids have a roof over their head and they have food on the table.

And I get a lot of motivation from that. I’m always, always, always trying to do more in whatever I do. The hardest thing for me to do is to pull back and just accept where I am and be happy with where I am—it’s hard!

But when I left that day, I’m like, “Dude, if I can build a business right now in an area that I actually enjoy—if I had to be out in the field, yeah, like, I enjoy doing that, and I enjoy being here in the summers of Colorado, and I get to go ski in the winters in my slower season, and the business still has enough cash flow to keep our employees on and keep their expenses paid and whatnot”—like, yeah, why can’t I be happy with that?

And that’s where I ultimately got to that night, and I was like, “You know what? I’m 32 years old—let’s stop trying to build a $100 million business by the time I’m 33,” and be okay with where we’re at right now—build a great business that prioritizes the health of our employees, the lifestyle they want to live, creating situations and opportunities for them to have a fulfilling work life as well!

KRISS BERGETHON: That’s right!

AUSTIN GRAY: And then be happy with the fact that you live in a place that you enjoy and get to go enjoy skiing with a friend on a Tuesday afternoon.

KRISS BERGETHON: That’s right!

And the odds of you being super passionate about building a land clearing business five years from now are probably pretty low. Your energy is kind of going to ebb out. And at that point, it’s a great time to sell it!

You can sell it for a really good multiple or find somebody to run it for you at that point—maybe you have somebody who can just manage this thing. Like you—you will have the institutional knowledge within that business that maybe it can run itself, and you can go do something else.

You can decide, I want to build houses, or I want to buy the local Ace Hardware, whatever it is. Because I know how you are—you had a coffee shop, you had co-working space, you’re probably going to get bored with this at some point!

And the odds of you being so dedicated to land clearing specifically that you'll have the energy and the willpower and all that stuff to carry it through the monumental task of getting that to $100 million is so hard and it takes so much energy—it’s so stressful that I think there’s nothing wrong with realizing I don’t need that; I don’t want that!

And maybe you decide you will, but I think the vast majority of entrepreneurs discover they don't, and they waste a lot of time, energy, and blood, sweat, and tears to figure that out.

AUSTIN GRAY: Well, I think it comes back to one thing that you’ve heard you talk about a lot— is a lot of your motivation for entrepreneurship was freedom in the beginning.

KRISS BERGETHON: Yes!

AUSTIN GRAY: And I have a lot of that as well! Do I want to build a great business? Absolutely! But it comes at the sacrifice of me being able to spend time with my family after 5:00 PM, or being able to slide out on a Thursday afternoon in the wintertime.

Yeah, like I live here for a reason! And so I think that’s where we share a similarity.

For our listeners who are listening to this right now, um, I think you hit on something that’s very, very important—the boomers who are selling these businesses right now. I think it’s worth taking note of, like: where is that business right now?

We just asked Chris what would he have told himself—he said after sixteen employees, it got way higher stress and way lower income.

We don’t give these boomers credit enough! We kind of think they’re kind of old-fashioned and, "Oh, he doesn’t even advertise!" Well, maybe he did! Maybe he tried every kind of advertising there was for 20 years, and just figured out, "All I need is these four guys in these four trucks, and I just have a full pipeline, and all my customers are referrals," and I don’t have to waste money on that—on Facebook you know, or whatever it is!

I think we give ourselves a little too much credit, like we’re gonna come in and figure something out that they didn’t. And a lot of these guys are smarter than we give them credit for!

They show up, for example, one of the retired loggers in town. He’s like the best-known logger in our area, and he retired a couple of years ago, sold all his equipment. He shows up at my house; uh, he’s related to the sales rep for my equipment. He shows up at my house in overalls, you know, in a flannel shirt!

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah!

KRISS BERGETHON: But apparently, the dude's got real estate all over Florida, right? He’s way smarter than anyone would give him credit for on Twitter!

AUSTIN GRAY: That’s right!

KRISS BERGETHON: Like these guys have figured something out. And I think it’s time we as, you know, millennials and Gen Z, who are getting enamored by this whole “Buy a Business” and SaaS and all that stuff—it's like these guys have something to share!

AUSTIN GRAY: They do! There’s a ton of embedded knowledge there that took me a long time to figure out. I needed to be listening to these guys instead of you know, tech entrepreneurs from San Francisco or something.

Alright, let’s transition to car washes. I know this—that people who are listening to this, it’s definitely going to be in the title of the episode and the show notes. So, um, tell us about car washes. Why car washes?

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, I completely stumbled into it! I was—by 2020, I’d been looking for a kind of a side gig; I was a little bored with the business, if I’m honest. And at that time, you know, Sweaty Startup and these guys really had just started talking about storage.

So I went after storage—I figured let’s found a—my local friend of mine here, right where I live—our families are really close, and he has a business and he had an interest in self-storage too.

So we started doing the whole method—you write the letters and you make the calls, and we figured out in a hurry that either storage is so good that nobody wants to sell it, or nobody liked us because we couldn’t even get a call back for the most part.

But in that process, I met a real estate agent, and he says, “Well, if you’re interested in commercial real estate, you should take a look at this car wash.”

And I realized the playbook that the guys were using for storage was very applicable to the car wash. It wasn't on Google Maps; the pricing hadn’t been updated in ten years; the offerings were low—it just—the owner had just neglected it.

It was about $650K. We bought it, got a conventional loan on it, and immediately did all the things that you and I would think to do.

We put it on Google Maps, we got it a bunch of five-star ratings, we did a little bit of Google Ads, we raised the prices up to market rates, and before we knew it, we had raised both the value and the profit of this place by 50%.

And right about that time another car wash came along that had actually been built by the same company—it was almost identical—so we bought that one, and um—it turned out that the synergies between the two—we could have the same guys working at both, you know, rotating between the places, and just really pouring in what—that’s the kind of energy that you would pour into a business, Austin, would make almost anything grow, right?

If you bought a coffee shop, right, there’s a million ways to run a coffee shop, but just your attentiveness and your willingness to try new things and the embedded knowledge that you have helped it grow, right?

Well, that’s all we did with the car wash—it was basic marketing, basic customer service—we improved the customer experience, and so it worked out great! We thought, “Okay, well this is fun,” and then, uh, December of 2022, I was emailing with my accountant, and I said, “You know, okay, what’s the damage?”

I always do this at December of every year—what is my tax bill going to be? It’s always painful—I always kind of wince and wait for that email to come back. And she says, “I think you're getting a refund!”

And um, that’s all it said in the email, and I kind of did the cartoon “IUB” like “Refund? What are you talking about?” I called her. I said, “What are you talking about refund?”  

And she says, “Well, this depreciation thing for these car washes is amazing, and you’re not going to owe anything—in fact, whatever you paid on the quarterly estimates is coming back!”

And I honestly did not believe her for a month! I kept sending her all our financials, and I kept asking her—like this isn’t right! Like I don’t understand what’s happening here! Tell me—I had to explain it like four different times, and finally, I got it through my head that this was because of the way car washes are.

They have a tremendous bonus depreciation asset with them, and that’s why you see a lot of the tunnels being built. Um, so it turned out to be a fantastic investment on its own, and then the tax benefits were tremendous.

So we’re buying more! I bought another one last year! I’m trying to buy four more this year, and it is a really fun project to have a whole new different business!

The internet stuff was fun, but you’re just kind of shuffling pixels around. The money flows into a bank account from a credit card account; it feels very sort of vapor, right? Like whereas a car wash, I can show up there; I can get my car washed for one, and I talk to the people!

I talk to the customers; I talk to the guys—we talk about building new stuff, installing new stuff, changing the signage—it’s very physical, and it’s a very satisfying thing!

And it’s—and our system works! We raised the income at the latest car wash—we've only owned it for 40 days now—and we’ve raised the income at that place by about 39%.

So we’ve got this playbook now, and we’re just going to keep rolling with it until it stops working or until we hit that ceiling where the income goes down, and the stress goes up.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, for sure! Can you just tell me like what—what would, what are like the first five to ten things that you’d do, or maybe it’s three to ten, whenever you buy the car wash?

KRISS BERGETHON: Uh, first of all, we make sure the prices are at the market rates. Um, we also go in and make sure that everything's working! It’s amazing how many times we go into these properties and we talk to whoever works there, and they’re like, “Oh yeah, that hasn’t worked in years,” and the previous owner just didn’t care enough to get it fixed.

And that flows through all the way to the customers! If the customer knows that this thing doesn’t work, whether it's the rinse soak or the tire soak or whatever it is, they’re going to stop coming. So we immediately fix everything!

Um, get everything running—it usually doesn’t take as much money as you would think—we figured out that we spent about $1,000 total on this place to get everything working correctly.

And then we've stepped up the marketing—we do Google Ads; we get a bunch of five-star reviews. Um, and we clean up! Like the place we just bought—it was completely trashed out. There was trash everywhere; there were weeds everywhere.

We cleaned all that up day one! And literally, the day we closed, we had that stuff cleaned up!

And just we think about what the customer is going to think when they arrive at this place—how is it? Is it well-lit? Is it obvious what to do? There are some people who don’t know how to work a car wash! It seems obvious to you and I, but there are some people who literally drive up and are like, “How does this work?”

So our attendant now, he’s trained—like that’s his job, is to help people get their cars washed. It’s not to run off the kids who are hanging out in the car smoking weed or whatever.

It’s to help people wash their car! And so he’ll just grab a brush sometimes if a little lady is having trouble; he just grabs the brush! I can’t tell you how many times he has to jump somebody’s car, right?

And before, he would sort of hide and get away from those people and hope they figured it out. And now he’s out there helping them jump their car!

AUSTIN GRAY: So, is there any scenario where a future exists of like one-time upsells for that person? Just having some sort of card reader like, “Do you want to just stay in your car, and I’ll just knock this out for you?”

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, we’ve talked about that! Because there are some guys who are actually at our car wash now who want to do detail work. And so we’re trying to figure out how would this work if we just say, “Yeah, here's the package!”

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah!

KRISS BERGETHON: So there are absolutely opportunities for that. And then, you know, most of our car washes, we have automatic car washes as well, so try to get people onto a program—a monthly membership program with that too—is a big part of our upsell proposition.

So like part of running my business, we get dirty equipment. So people are going to start seeing a trend here. Like, I’m really interested in the wash industries because I am dying to pay somebody to clean my equipment, and nobody offers the service!

Like ever since the middle of the summer, I’ve been talking to Spencer for the—he’s in the wash biz, dude! I’ve had him on the podcast; that episode is actually dropping tomorrow!

KRISS BERGETHON: Nice!

AUSTIN GRAY: For creating power wash! He’s built businesses up in Canada—all on like industrial fleets, fleet washing, truck fleet washing—in kind of more like the industrial and commercial side but for car washes.

The reason I’m interested in this is because every time I go to wash my piece of equipment, they put some sort of limit! Why are the limits there? Like I would literally spend $30 or $40 bucks if that card reader would let that!

KRISS BERGETHON: That is one of the main things we do—we raise the limit!

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah!

KRISS BERGETHON: And the reason that it’s there is because a lot of people forget to push the stop button! They drive away! And then if the limit’s at $30, it’ll charge them $30.

But if we have an attendant there, we specifically tell them to go and make sure that you’re pushing the stop button. And we raised the limit to $25 to $30 and we try to attract people like you, because there’s a lot of—there’s literally a car wash in town—it’s called the Grand Junction truck wash.

And the mean old gal who owns this place sits in her Cadillac on that lot, and if you show up with a dirty truck, she will run you off! Big muddy vehicle—like I’m sure all of yours are—she will tell you to go away!

I can’t wait to buy that place because I will—I will literally—the first day I put up our motto, “We love your mud! Just come in here and spend two hours! Spend three hours! I don’t care! As long as the meter’s running, I don’t care how long you spend in the bay!”

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah!

KRISS BERGETHON: And we’ll clean up the mud. You just get out of here and get a clean car! But there are a lot of people got into this industry thinking it was passive—it kind of got this weird reputation as a passive business like you just show up and dump the quarters once a week.

It’s not that at all! And if you treat it as active, you attract more customers, and you end up paying for your more labor. And all the cleanup you have to do pays for itself because people are spending more money!

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, I’ve just never understood that! Like every single self-service car wash I’ve been to, it cuts me off at either like five minutes or ten minutes!

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah!

AUSTIN GRAY: Like ten bucks!

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah!

AUSTIN GRAY: And there’s this whole—I mean, you and I have talked about deep work, right?

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah!

AUSTIN GRAY: Like, when you get focused on something, man, I'm in it!

KRISS BERGETHON: Totally!

AUSTIN GRAY: So if I'm washing the equipment—if you stop me at ten, I’m probably only going to spend $30. If you would just let me go, I’m going to get every single nook and cranny because I’m deeply focused on that—no interruptions, I might spend $50!

KRISS BERGETHON: Well, that's what a lot of people do, and as soon as the thing beeps at them and says that you’re done, they’re like “Okay, I guess I’m done!”

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah!

KRISS BERGETHON: Or if you just raise the limit, they’ll just wash and wash and wash!

So I was actually—it’s funny when you bring this up. I was looking at our credit card charges two days ago, and I couldn't believe how many people would charge $25, and that’s the limit. And I realized, “Well what if we just raised it to $30?”

And if they call and complain—”Like, hey, I didn’t—you know, I drove away and didn't push the button. I didn’t mean to spend $30!” We just give them their money back! We give them all back!

I don’t say, “Well, how long did you use?” or I just give the full $30 bucks back, or the $25. But now I’m like, “Well maybe that’ll be $50!”

If that’s if I’m gonna help people like you, maybe I’ll just do that!

AUSTIN GRAY: I guarantee you I would easily spend $40!

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah! And so for example, like when we landed that federal project, we had to clean every single piece of dirt, dust, grass, branch, you name it, every single splotch of grease had to come off!

AUSTIN GRAY: Wow!

KRISS BERGETHON: For all of our equipment! So I’m sure the Grand Lake car wash guy is having a great year or a great week in Mexico on vacation right now because of how many pieces of equipment we brought in and spent at least $50 on each piece to get it perfect!

So we had to inspect, and then in the middle of it, we got this—we had like a week downtime, so of course I'm not just going to sit around. I started calling some of our other customers and lined up like three jobs in Grand Lake, and we go bang those out during the week!

Well guess what? We got to do again—run everything back through the wash! So that was a requirement of the government contract—that the vehicles were clean when they came in!

KRISS BERGETHON: Oh yeah!

AUSTIN GRAY: Absolutely!

KRISS BERGETHON: You play by the rules!

AUSTIN GRAY: Absolutely!

KRISS BERGETHON: Um, I mean we, on that mobilization day, we spent two full days cleaning our equipment leading up to taking that over!

AUSTIN GRAY: Wow!

KRISS BERGETHON: Wow, that is wild!

AUSTIN GRAY: Anyway, it’s cool. That’s great! Great news for me! So that was my next question—is, as a car wash owner, do you encourage or discourage people with heavy equipment to come in, like skid steers?

KRISS BERGETHON: Encourage! Yeah, bring it, man!

The one problem we have with our new car wash is kind of the turning radius, right? Getting in and out with a big trailer. So we're trying to figure out if we can improve that a little bit—push back some of the curbs and stuff. Yeah, bring it, man!

Unfortunately, our car washes here in town don't have a great height clearance—they're about 9 foot! A lot of this equipment needs a ten or twelve-foot clearance. But bring it, man! We don’t really turn anybody away.

If they’re spending money with us, I am not in the business of saying no to that! I don’t know that there’s anybody we don’t let them dump—you know, you get some—they’re the pooper scoopers. They’re the ones we don’t say to get out of because they’ll come with a little truckload of dog poop and try to spray it into our drains—and it makes a huge, awful mess!

They’re about the only ones! Bring your mud, anytime!

AUSTIN GRAY: Got it. Got it.

Alright, what are your goals with this business? I know we’re a little over time here, so if we need to wrap this up, we totally can!

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, yeah, let’s wrap it up here. But—for us, we’re trying to get—I think we’d love to get 20 to 30 properties.

We’d brand them all the same; we’d have them all on the same membership program. And if we can get our EBITDA up into the five, you know, three to six million range, um, that means we could have somewhere of about a 15 to 20 multiple.

That’s a big number that we can sell this thing at, and we’re also building this intellectual property stack. We’re building Stop Wash Go University, where the entire process of buying, running, and managing car washes is going to be this intellectual property that we’ll license.

Then we may franchise and that kind of thing, and that will make it even more attractive for a buyer. So that’s the goal—to have an eight-figure exit sometime—again, when our curve of enthusiasm drops off, so hopefully we get there in the next five to eight years—maybe ten.

And hopefully, there’s a big exit, and then we go on and do it again—we’ll do it to something else. Maybe it's—I’ll hook up with the gas biz guy to do gas stations, or something. Maybe we’ll do land clearing with Austin!

AUSTIN GRAY: Hey, there you go!

KRISS BERGETHON: There you go!

AUSTIN GRAY: Well, cool! Well, thanks for being on, Chris! I really do appreciate you coming on. I love the show! I love what you’re doing with the show; you’re showing a side of entrepreneurship that doesn’t get talked about enough—the startup, the starter guy, the owner-operator stuff.

I love it, and I’m a big fan of Austin—have been for a long time now—and I can’t wait to see where you go, what you do!

KRISS BERGETHON: Thanks, man! I really appreciate that!

AUSTIN GRAY: Well, thank you guys for listening to the OWNR OPS podcast! Once again, this is Chris Bergethon, who has joined us—the car wash guy on Twitter. Where can people find you online?

KRISS BERGETHON: Yeah, jump on Twitter! Just Google or search on Twitter for “Car Wash Guy.” I have the big yellow sign behind my head. And if you’re interested in this car wash stuff more, you can go to TaxFreeCow.com—we built a course about how to find, buy, and run your first car wash.

And, uh, hit me up on Twitter! Let’s talk!

AUSTIN GRAY: Sweet! Yeah, we’ll add that to the show notes too!

So once again, thank you guys for listening! And if you are enjoying these episodes, and if you’re listening to this on YouTube, please make sure to like, comment, and subscribe.

Any subscriptions really help us get these episodes out to more people who are interested in starting service-based businesses. If you are listening on Apple or Spotify Podcasts, please make sure to like and follow, and we would greatly appreciate a five-star review!

A five-star review means the world to us! We set the standard in our service business that we are delivering five-star service—we are committed to doing that—and I’ve transferred that over into the podcast as well.

I want to make sure that we’re bringing on people who have the same type of mindset—five-star mindset! So, if you would, please leave us a review right now. And, uh, with that being said, we’ll wrap this episode up. We’ll see you guys in the next episode!