Austin Gray: What's going on? It's Austin Gray, host of the OWNR OPS podcast. Welcome back to the show! In this episode, I have Mike Flaugher joining us. Mike is a friend and fellow excavation contractor. He worked as a foreman for a local company for 14 years doing underground grading, excavation—all that good stuff. Then he decided to go off on his own. I hope you guys stick around for the whole episode to hear his story. He shares some creative marketing techniques for OWNR OPS early on, one of which is he puts signage or branding on the side of his equipment and his trucks. That's nothing new, but he makes it a point to drive a different route home every single night so that people can see his trucks. He's picked up jobs that way. Sometimes, guys, it's the simple things that matter whenever you're starting these local service businesses.

So stick around for the whole episode! If you are enjoying the show, please leave us a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. Look, I talk about this all the time, but getting five-star reviews in a service business on your Google My Business account is one of the most important things. The podcast is no different. It helps us out, helps us get the word out about starting local small businesses to more people if you leave a review.

I'm on a mission to help people start a local service business. Why? Because we have so many people trying to start the next tech or e-commerce company and not enough people out there getting their hands dirty, delivering a needed service to their local community. Therefore, I want to make local entrepreneurship more accessible to people.

We've documented everything that we have done when building Bearclaw from zero. We're well on our way to seven figures here, and we've put that in a school platform. It's called OWNR OPS. Think of it as the operations playbook for a small business owner. So check OWNR OPS out if you do want to start your own business because, like I said, we've documented the whole process. We’ve put video trainings on everything that you need to do from starting your LLC, setting up business bank accounts, setting up QuickBooks—all that boring stuff—to how to go get your first customers. Then how to make your first hires and what software we use for invoicing, quoting, and customer relationship management. We go through all that stuff.

So check out OWNR OPS if you are interested in starting your own small business. My mission with this podcast is to make this the last podcast you have to listen to before you go start your own small business.

Okay, so many people have been reaching out lately asking, "How do I start? How do I start? How do I start?" I'm like, well, I had to document that, so that's why I put it into OWNR OPS. But the point is, I think there's so much content out there that's just putting you on this content flywheel. You're listening to podcasts all the time, you're watching YouTube videos, you're watching TikTok, you're watching Instagram—all that stuff. I hope I'm the last account you come across before you take action.

All right, so go follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—we are @theownrop. We're talking about how to build a small business from the ground up.

Okay, once again, the most important thing—you can consume all this content, but if you don't take action, you're not going to start a business. I'm encouraging you to take action. If you want to start a business, the best time was yesterday; the next best time is right now, and the next best time is literally this weekend. If you have a job right now and you still want to start your small business, start it this weekend. Go out and do it.

Go back and listen to the first eight episodes, go join OWNR OPS. It's literally 49 bucks a month. At some point, we're going to be charging somewhere between 5 and 10K for it because it's simply worth that once we get done recording all the content. But for right now, you can still get it for $49 a month as of what is today, May 30th, 2024. Mark my words, it will be going up because if you want to go buy a franchise, it's going to be 50,000 bucks, okay? We're going to cut that price way down and give you everything that you need to do.

It doesn't matter if you're starting a power washing business, a tree service business, an excavation business, or a plumbing business—it doesn't matter. They're all the same from a mindset perspective and from a strategy perspective. Look, you still need to go get in front of customers, you need to find the work, you need to sell the jobs, you need to deliver great service to your customers, and then you need to get five-star reviews. Then you need to have a marketing engine that's working for you in the background, right?

We're going to show you how to do all of that stuff inside OWNR OPS. I'm going to stop rambling here; let's get to the episode. Thanks again for watching. Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less. Let's rock and roll, baby!

Real quick wanted to share with you two agency partners who have helped me grow Bearclaw Land Services. Striker Digital manages all of our SEO services and they've gotten us to number one on Google for specific search terms within our local service business. Cedar Digital Consulting manages all of our social media and YouTube, and they make it very simple for owner operators like myself. All I have to do is go take photos and videos in the field, upload those on my phone to a shared iCloud album very quickly, and they handle everything else from there. They edit and they publish; I don't have to worry about it. I can focus on growing my business.

So if you're looking for SEO services, check out Striker Digital—that's stryker-digital.com. And for social media, check out Cedar Digital Consulting—that's cedardigitalconsulting.com.

Mike Flaugher: Thanks for being on!

Austin Gray: Absolutely, thank you!

Yeah, so we were just talking about getting started here. So you started—how many years were you with the company that you were just telling me about doing all the site work, underground pipe, and road work?

Mike Flaugher: I was there for 14 years, so I started in 2009. I was actually 16 years old. I started the first year just around the shop, cleaning the yard, all that stuff. That was actually prior to you having to be legally 18 to go out in the field. So when I was 17, I went what I would have been—first half of the year I was still in the yard. Then as soon as I turned 17, I got put out in the field. I worked up until, shoot, I think I was 24 when I became a foreman. So the last six years I was there, I was a foreman. We did everything from pipe work underground, sewer lift stations, water main, road building. I mean, just everything.

They had asphalt paving and concrete supply; they had 17 locations, three of them had dirt crews. The rest of them were mostly just trucking in concrete and some other odds and ends. But three divisions—they had dirt crews in them, total of like 650 employees. Pretty wild!

I mean, I know at one time they did snow plowing and everything too. At their highest point, I think they had 28 loaders that had snow pushers on them for wintertime—just small loaders that were all site loaders. And then some of the places had like CAT 980s and stuff without a pusher, just using the bucket for snowplowing.

Austin Gray: That's just wild.

Mike Flaugher: I mean, kind of funny—it was a mom-and-pop type of place when it started. I actually worked for the owner of that business for his farm before I went and worked there. That's how I got in there. He started out with that entrepreneurial dream. I mean, probably a lot of the reason that gave me the drive that I ended up with—I mean, he literally had nothing, worked a bunch of random jobs, everything else, trying to build something better for himself.

It was kind of in an era of time where there weren’t a lot of jobs, and he was going to make his own job. He actually got a loan from a lady at his church, and she told him, you know, he kind of pitched his idea to her. She was widowed, had no kids, and she said, “You know, I’ve always thought highly of you. I have faith you’ll do good stuff with it.”

She gave him the money, and he started a restaurant. Then took the restaurant, went from there, sold that after a few years—it wasn’t really his dream—found this guy that was retiring selling his business and bought his excavating business. It started with a dragline crane and a dozer, and he had a couple of little one-ton pickup, three-yard dump truck deals.

That was in the late ’70s, and he literally took it from there to the point where my dad works for the company. He started in ’94 as employee number 203. I started in 2009 as employee 1386. So they kept man numbers going. If people quit, that number stayed with them just for seniority reasons.

They had a couple of years where they started recycling numbers, and people started getting huffy-puffy about, “My man number is lower than yours,” and all that garbage. So they ended up cycling them back out. Number leaves with the people. But man, the last time I knew, they might have been in the 4,000 range. It’s been a couple of years since I've been there. But I know as I was leaving, they were in the mid-3000s of how many people had come and cycled through there over the years.

It's pretty crazy how many people have come and gone through that place.

Austin Gray: What's the name of that company?

Mike Flaugher: It’s Elmer's Crane and Dozer. Everything, they kind of have just a working name that they use called Team Elmer's, so they're on social media and stuff everywhere. I think at one point, BuildWI actually went to one of their sites. I know there was some video and stuff of that—they were doing some training stuff with it. Pretty neat.

Austin Gray: Yeah, they're crazy. I mean, just in the time I was there, it went from—you pretty much knew everything and everybody and what was going on. It was big, but it was still small enough to where you still had that small feel. Then all of a sudden, it was crazy how quick it turned.

I mean, you got to a point where you'd show up to one of the other locations. Because I originally came from the original location in Traverse City, Michigan, and they purchased an excavating company where I live now. I moved over here and worked with them when they did that in 2011, 12, 2012.

It didn’t take but a few years after that; you'd go back over, and it’s like, “Who are all these people?” It was just wild how big and how quick it started to grow. I mean, they were to the point where they were just doing massive jobs. I mean, there were some where you were moving 600,000-700,000 yards of dirt just to get a site leveled out so you could start putting in pipe and everything like that. Pretty neat.

Austin Gray: It's incredible. So you were there as a foreman for, remind me, the last six years before you decided to jump off and start your own company?

Mike Flaugher: Yeah, correct. So I don't know—it kind of got to the point where we were getting into—it's just really wasn't starting to get a little bit stagnant, I guess is—I think was the final driver of it.

I would attest a lot of that to making it to where I did young at like 24 years old as a foreman and then, you know, going through all these challenges and everything that we did as a foreman. Then kind of getting to the point where you get comfortable with it—you know, before that, everything's a new challenge.

Even though you've done it before and worked on all the jobs before, now it's your baby, so you're sitting there, you know, worried if something's going to go wrong or you're not doing it efficiently fast enough or whatever and trying to keep all your guys happy and stuff.

Everything was always a challenge, and then it got to a point where one day—it was like I think it was the first time I did a road job. It was something I'd wanted to do. I loved running the grader. I did a lot of site work grading and you know, parking lots for, you know, building like Walmart or something, a Home Depot, and grading out these parking lots and doing all this stuff.

It was just something I really liked doing, and I wanted to get on a road job. Then I finally got my first road job. We went through, and I was beating myself up, losing sleep at night waiting. You know, you got to go in, get all your cross-seas and stuff put in, and get all your ditches shaped and get everything ready. Then the last thing you do is grade it and pave it. Worrying myself to death that it wasn't going to be good—I mean, pretty critical. You grade it out, and they come pave it. If there’s a bump in the road, well, everybody knows you're the guy that put the bump in the road!

We get done with it, get it paved and everything else, and everybody goes through—lots of guys from the company, like my project manager and stuff—go through, and they're like, "Wow, this is great! You did a great job!"

I went, and I personally sat down with the paving foreman of the company we had worked with. I mean, my whole life he was the only guy I remember ever being the paving foreman. I had a pretty good respect for him and looked up to him a lot. Those guys were awesome to work with.

I was like, "Hey, shoot me straight; what do you think?" He’s like, “Oh, it was whatever, this and that,” and, you know, kind of just blew it off. I’m like, "No, I’m serious. I was like, that was my first time doing it.”

He’s like, “No, it wasn’t! I’ve seen you in the grader all the time.” I was like, "Yeah, in parking lots and stuff! I’ve never graded a road!"

In the parking lots and everything, we usually had GPS or total stations and stuff. So I'd go through and set all my control points and set up a total station and hook it up to the grader, and then you have a grading profile on it. It’s giving you grade and everything else, and when you do the road, it’s all by hand. You’re seated pants, what it feels like; you’re just going doing it yourself.

So I was like, “No, seriously, what do you think?” He said, “That's your first one?” I was like, “Yeah, it is!” He’s like, “Yeah, obviously, there's guys out there better. But if that's your first one, you're right there!”

Then I went home that night, and I was worrying this much about all this stuff, and this was something I’d wanted to accomplish for so long. I think I was almost hoping that it wasn’t going to be that good to give me something to work towards.

It hit me; that was the one thing I'd been waiting on for years to do, and it didn’t give me the satisfaction I was looking for. It was like, “I got to find a new challenge.” I was starting to feel like I'm getting to that point where I'm not seeing the next step in things, you know, and the next challenge.

I was looking at there were four other foremen in my division that were going to be my competition. They were nowhere near—10 years probably before the next one would retire or move on to something else. It’s like I'm really looking at sitting in the same spot that I’m in for quite a while, which is probably going to hurt me, I guess, was my thought.

I never liked that. I never wanted to sit. You know, as the next challenge, I always want to be learning and trying to do something new. I don't like doing the same thing over and over.

I would probably get fired if I had a factory job or something because I would rip my hair out. I don’t know. I just like woke up and I was like, "I gotta do this!" I've always kind of wanted to, but it’s like to that age now where you're old enough that you’re not a child anymore, so you can be taken seriously.

And I'm, you know, still young enough that we got some energy and some momentum here to go try to do something. We bought a dump trailer. I mean, sat down with the wife, had some conversations, and already had a ¾-ton diesel pickup. It's like, "Let's go get a dump trailer!"

I had a tractor; it’s like we can use that for a little bit of stuff. We'll run an excavator and do whatever we have to do, but I got the tractor and stuff—a back blade for cleaning up driveways when you're done—and just doing little tedious work. We'll rent the rest and see what happens.

We started building some business cards and kind of pitching it out to people, letting them know that we were going to be doing some residential stuff. I continued on that last year, 2022, with my job, working 70-80 hours a week, and then on the weekends doing my thing on the side and putting in another 25-30 hours.

I literally made it to October 1st, 2022; that was my last day with Elmer’s. I think I just got to a point where I had enough workload to make it through. I wasn’t going to get done—it wasn’t like it was enough workload to make it till spring, which is crazy to quit your job in October in a seasonal position. But I had enough stuff to get through the rest of October and November that I wasn’t going to get done if I was still at my job.

It was just a rip the Band-Aid off type of moment. It was like, I can’t sustain working 90-100 hours a week for a whole another year.

The wife was, you know, concerned. Three kids at home; my income was the only income. You know, “What are you going to do if this doesn’t work?” It’s like, you can always go get another job. But in my opinion, if you make a plan B, you're setting up plan A to fail.

So throw all plans out, put all your effort into one, and you don’t fail. You know, you make it work, especially when you got three kids at home to feed and put clothes on. It puts quite a drive behind you.

I think that was a lot of—you make it too easy on yourself; it sets you up for failure. I mean, I backed myself right into a corner, then cut the tether and said, “Let’s go!”

I think a lot of that pushed you to, you know, make something happen because you just got to go out and be making phone calls and pushing every envelope that you can and trying to make something work. Fortunately enough, so far, it’s worked, and I can’t complain.

Austin Gray: Man, I resonate with you so much there. I was just talking to somebody the other day about that—it's like people just give themselves the plan B, and they have the plan C, and it's like, if you're thinking about the plan B and the plan C, how are you going to do plan A?

So I just love that mindset of—and you said something that resonates big time with me as well. Like, I love backing myself into that corner because in that corner, like you are challenged in so many different ways. If you burn all the other bridges to get to that corner, you have to creatively come up with a way to get out of that corner.

Mike Flaugher: Right, and I see—I’ve talked to other people who—it seems like there’s a small amount of people, though, who have that mindset. Maybe it’s just the way people like you and I are wired. Maybe that's what we need to sort of propel through those early days.

But that’s exactly what I did as well. I just said, “Hey, we’re going with this.” Right? And the creativity that comes out of that to go find that work really starts pushing the business in the right direction early on if you don’t have that backup plan.

Austin Gray: So talk to me about how you got—so you had work for October, November. What are some ways that you figured out how to make it work at that point?

Mike Flaugher: Well, it’s probably this way everywhere—since COVID, just house building and stuff went nuts. So all your builders that normally, in their slow time of the year, wintertime, would go do remodel work and stuff—they’d been just slammed. Most of our builders are booked out two to three years.

I had a handful of people that I knew—they're like, "I've always done all my own work and stuff in my house." They’re like, “Hey, what are you going to do this winter?” I’m like, “Don’t know yet; we’re working on that. I gotta get through this, you know, and then we’ll hopefully keep pushing and doing stuff.”

A lot of the remodel work was planned for getting advertising and kind of getting an actual business fully set up because we were just kind of going out on a wing. They’re like, “Hey, if you’re interested in doing some remodel work and stuff in my house.”

I’m licensed in Michigan, and to do it—there are a couple of ways there. There’s a sub-set of the builder license that's called a maintenance and alteration license, and then you pick what part of that falls under construction.

So you can pick excavating or you can do whatever. I’m looking through the list, and there’s excavating, there’s concrete, there’s basement waterproofing, roofing—all this stuff. I started doing some math; it's like if you pick two categories and test in them, by the time you take the test and pay for it, you’re basically at the same cost as doing the builder’s license.

So let’s just get a full builder’s license. That way, all my avenues are opened up. If you're slow, you know, we have to go do something else to make it work.

So I had a builder’s license, had a few people reach out to me. That first winter we ended up doing some remodel work—putting together some bathrooms and stuff, doing tile work, building some custom showers, and doing some kitchen backsplashes.

Fortunately enough, a few of them led into, “Hey, I know what you really do is excavating stuff. I got some things in the spring; let’s check them out.” I had a couple of jobs from the fall before that turned into—once I got there, they wanted some bigger stuff which we weren’t going to get done that fall.

So it turned into springtime. I really had nothing last spring. I had enough to know that we could get out and get moving and basically hoping for the phone to ring. But we stayed busy enough with odds and ends through the winter to maintain, and then when we got to spring, frost laws come off and everything was good to go.

We started hitting a few jobs and it stayed steady enough to stay working and moving. Just really kept my head down and just kept doing what you can.

We got to June. I mean, we stayed steady enough until June and then got approached for a commercial contract for doing a bunch of concrete work, which I didn’t do at that time.

I wanted all the dirt work portion; there was nothing there. Some of it was remove and replace. A lot of it was cut out, regrade, fill in with sand, get everything graded out and ready for concrete. I tried like heck to find a concrete contractor to work with me, but nobody was carrying the insurance that was required to work with these guys, nor were the ones that I were finding that were insured. A lot of them didn’t have a license, and they needed proof of license and insurance and workman’s comp and all that good stuff—like everybody else.

All these guys were like, "Well no, I don’t haveworkman’s comp. It’s just me." It’s like, "Well you can’t do this by yourself; I can’t do this by myself—that’s why I’m trying to hire it out."

So I couldn’t find anybody, and honestly, what the heck happened—I ended up—I think it was like $70-some thousand worth of work gross, and it was like I'm not walking away from this.

There was one that was a small one; it was like a 10 by 12 pad with 25 foot of 4-foot wide sidewalk going to it. It was small enough, whatever. So I hired a guy, and I really attribute a lot of where I am now just because I got put in a position where it was like I’m not walking away from this.

I needed somebody to help me do it. If the worst-case scenario is I got to find more work to keep this guy going if he wants to go after this; you know we kind of discussed it. He was like, “Yeah, that’s fine. If that’s all it is, it’s all it is. It helps me out for now, and we’ll go from there.”

We did the first one, and it wasn’t that bad. I was nervous—not knowing what you’re doing with concrete because the only thing you know is it gets hard, and it gets hard quick, especially in the summer.

We got after it; I mean, I’ve been around it enough over the years with all the concrete contractors we had on our jobs for doing curb and sidewalk, and everything so it wasn’t like I had no idea what was going on, but I’d never finished it myself other than a couple little random sidewalks at my house type of deal.

And it went well—they liked it, and that was the only one they turned out to us. They had all this other one, but I think they were just testing us.

After that, they were like, "Okay, hand me a stack of papers. Give us numbers for all this stuff and let’s go!" So I gave them numbers; they shot it in corporate, got it approved. Their fiscal year ran to September 30th, and by the time this all got approved, it was like almost August. By the time we got in and got everything rolling, so we had like 45 days total—probably like 25 working days by the time you take out some rain days and weekends to get eight projects done. It’s like, holy cow!

I ended up hiring another guy and started doing those. Honestly, that got us—they were spread out over four counties, and it got us moving in enough areas that I have stickers on everything from headlight to tail light on my trucks and stuff.

I mean, that was probably my biggest investment for advertising because it goes everywhere you go. I put a lot of it towards them jobs.

I mean we got moving, got going around, and next thing you know, the phone's ringing more. I picked up a couple of other commercial concrete jobs doing a few things, and I'm a certified septic installer for four counties, my surrounding four counties.

So it ended up just being out and about enough. We got into some septic systems. Just everything really—I mean, redoing driveways, putting in new driveways, culverts—I mean, you name it! We started hitting a bunch of stuff and ended up turning into quite a substantial year.

I mean, we went to the point of I think October of this past year was our biggest month. I did more revenue in October than I did from March through June combined. I mean, it was just wild. It was like once it hit, it all went nuts.

I mean, August, September, October, November was just wild; it pretty much made my year.

Austin Gray: That’s awesome!

Mike Flaugher: We just caught some traction. Now, it’s proving to be a good thing; it really got us out and about enough that we really got more established.

I mean, I was advertising in newspapers, Facebook, and anywhere we could, but nobody really knows who you are. That’s kind of that thing—I feel like until somebody can kind of put a face to it.

And it doesn't have to be your face; it's just seeing you around, seeing your stuff, they feel like, "Okay, I know you; I’ve seen you over here and over there." I’ve passed you three or four times now. I see an ad in the newspaper—they stopped just glancing over it.

Then they’re like, "Well, I do have something. Let’s make a phone call."

Austin Gray: Type of deal.

Mike Flaugher: It’s crazy! I mean it took off, and we got to wintertime, and we had the mildest winter I’ve ever seen in my life. We had like three snowfalls that actually accumulated to something.

Shoot, it was 56 degrees here on Christmas Day!

Austin Gray: That’s nuts!

Mike Flaugher: My dad and my brother-in-law usually go out ice fishing every Christmas after, you know, mid-day after presents and all that stuff. My dad lives on a lake, so we usually go out and go ice fishing. It was wide-open water and sun shining.

The kids were outside in their t-shirts, yelling that it was hot, running in circles. My dad was crying; he loves winter, and I’m like, "This is awesome!" He’s like, "Yeah, whatever; it might be for you, but I hate it!"

We were putting in a new driveway—we took the week of Christmas and New Year’s off and we went out and put in a new driveway January 4th! I mean, that never happens!

I mean that’s an emergency case if someone’s building a house or something; you just go scrub on in and tell them that, you know, we’re going to have to come back in the spring to make it right. But this—get you access!

Yeah, we were putting in driveways in January. I was building retaining walls in February!

Austin Gray: That’s crazy!

Mike Flaugher: Then this whole month of March has been like nothing. I mean, we got a little bit of kind of a rain/snow mix over a couple of days, but it’s been mostly above freezing and a lot of 50-degree days and stuff.

Shoot, the other day it was like 70!

Austin Gray: Yeah, here it’s been a weird winter as well.

Mike Flaugher: Yeah, not great for everybody pushing snow, that’s for sure.

Austin Gray: But no, I opted out of this year.

Mike Flaugher: I did too.

Austin Gray: Which, what was your decision? Like how did you make that decision not to?

Mike Flaugher: Man, it probably could have gone a little longer, but just consistently the last five years, there hasn’t been enough in my opinion to make a business out of it.

Then you’re always beating yourself up as a business owner. We had one of our good snows right after Christmas. It was probably the second week of January we got like 22 inches, and we haven’t had a snowfall like that in probably four years.

I think that one was in like April; it was just a freak spring snowstorm. I was like, "Man!"

I kept putting it off and putting it off. It’s like we just hadn’t been getting snow; it’s like I’m not going to do it—not worth, you know, spending the money and, you know, buying plows and everything else and trying to get geared up for it and then not have something turn up of it.

Then we got 22 inches of snow, and I spent the three weeks until it melted, kicking myself, going, "You’re an idiot. There was all this snow."

There were a few other little storms in between there where once you already have snow on the ground, you know, that couple inches is another plow job.

Then just the random, you know, warm-up and refreeze—you would have been getting into just scraping stuff back and doing some salt things. It’s like, "You’re an idiot! You should have been doing it!" Blah blah blah, and then all of a sudden we hit two weeks straight of 50 degrees—40 and 50 degrees in the end of January, and everything was gone again.

It’s like, "All right, maybe you did make the right move."

Then it snowed again, and you know, and it still wasn’t great. You really probably wouldn’t have made any money this one winter; you might have broken even on it.

I kind of fully made the decision well—I sent some bids out the other day for some commercial plowing that they just let out for next year. So if I get them, I guess I have to do it now.

So I pretty much just made up my mind that I’m so sick of the back and forth and beating myself up and wasting the brain space of "Should I have done it; shouldn’t I have done it?"

It probably just saves more time and hassle to just go ahead and do it and take on just a small amount if I can.

You know, if you can stay at least keep my guys moving and stuff, you know, it’s probably the biggest thing I’m looking at. If I can pick up enough snow plowing mixed with, you know, if you do have decent weather, you can get out and still do some jobs like we did, and just try to basically throw together a handful of everything to conglomerate to a full schedule.

Then it keeps everybody moving and keeps some money flowing in, at least, and at least keeps things rolling.

I think staying at least in the practice of business instead of, you know, going straight on “Okay, guys, we’re going to take a month and do maintenance and everything else,” well you just kind of get out of the swing of things and you're not moving and then you kind of have that restart period where it’s harder to kind of get moving in the spring and get everything back, well-oiled and working the way you want it to.

Austin Gray: Yeah, I hear you on that.

It’s funny because I feel like you and I are thinking through a lot of the very similar things. I think we have a little more snow than you guys have had, so it’s an easier decision for me for next year just because like my whole goal this year was—similar to you, like we had a really good fall, and my goal was to really assess the snowfall year this year.

I had like two years where I didn’t—I told you we had our first kid, so I just built my house and started the business as well. It sounds like it’s just like, you know, similar to you, you got four kids, and you’re starting the business, and you were working 100 hours a week.

So at a certain point, I had to make the decision that, all right, I’m going to be in this business thing for a good while here. I’m going to make a good run in my 30s. Off a good year, I said no to snow plowing because I’m like, I could definitely use some more family time right now.

Mike Flaugher: Right!

Austin Gray: And, yeah, like take advantage of that. And you know, the podcast is fun; like that’s been a project we've worked on, and we've worked on a lot of the backend stuff on our marketing.

But at a certain point, it's something you said there—it’s like I have gone back and forth in my head, “Should I do it? Should I not?”

And I think like at a certain point, you just make the decision and say, “You know what? Let’s stop thinking about it. Let’s just go do it!” Because I think like sitting around is probably the worst thing for guys like us.

Mike Flaugher: Yeah, and that’s kind of where my brain's gone too.

My wife just yelled at me this year; she’s like, “I’m not listening to it anymore!” She’s like, “You are 100% against it,” and then you’re crying every time it snows that we should have done it.

It’s like, I’ve always been against it because it’s like—it’s just a—

I guess a lot of guys probably say about the excavating or even like the mulching and stuff like you do—mulchers are super, you know, maintenance-intensive and high costs that come with it and everything else.

It’s like, there’s probably guys looking at us going “Look at these idiots; they’re just running to go break it down and try to fix it.”

That’s the way I look at it with snow plowing.

Then you kind of look at what you actually do, but it’s just what you’re comfortable with. So you’re like, “Oh no, it’s no big deal; you just grab me on this and you fix it, and you go, and you're back at it.”

Well, there are probably guys—you know, there’s a lot of landscaping guys that do snow plowing; they’re probably going, “Look at these morons with these big machines that cost three times more than ours.”

That’s just the way it is!

Austin Gray: Yeah!

Mike Flaugher: I mean, as long as it really doesn’t matter what business you’re in, everything has costs. As long as you can go in and try to mitigate it and control it and do what you can, making sure you have the right guys that aren’t just 100 miles an hour banging snowbanks with it—you’ll figure it out.

You’ll make it work, and if it absolutely doesn’t work, then you’ll drop it.

Austin Gray: That’s right!

Something you said I wanted to come back to—and you and I in our first conversation, you were asking me a lot about the marketing. But I think it’s important is that like you picked something. You said, “Hey, I’m going to go put stickers on everything because those vehicles go with me everywhere.”

And I’m in four counties doing work, and you went and put decals, you invested the money in stickers on your trucks; you put it on your equipment as well.

Mike Flaugher: Yeah, I gotta get better with the equipment. A lot of the stuff where we’re at, the equipment’s hiding—we’re a little more rural—so not always sitting out wide open.

I went to the dump trucks and the pickups first. I have smaller stickers on my equipment this year. The biggest thing is I’m ripping the stickers off the booms and stuff, and in place of where the name brand was, I’m getting full-length down the boom of the excavator—the name and phone number.

On the back, when it’s sitting on a trailer, somebody's staring at the phone number on the back of it. Yeah, we’re going to get after the equipment. But I didn’t do a lot of it with the equipment last year either because I had a fleet that I wasn’t going to keep.

I mean we got into some starter stuff; I had a pretty old beat-up skid steer to start with. It was just a good deal, but I knew it wasn’t going to last long. I think I made it three months. I traded in on what I have now, which I’ll keep. Fairly new machine; it was like two years old, had 900 hours on it.

So I got a few years of use out of that one before it’s ready to be replaced. So that one will get all stickered this year, and my excavator I bought was kind of—I wasn't sure; I just bought a 4-ton mini and wanted to get bigger.

So I had this big hope and dream of with a machine like your size, like a 5-6 ton machine; that was kind of middle ground. The more I get into it, the more I realize it’s just too big for small jobs and too small for big jobs.

So you’re just kind of—you’re trying to Swiss army knife it, but really you’re just hindering yourself in both directions. So, I think we’re going to end up keeping the small normal mini and then we’re just going to try to get into an 8-ton size machine this year and have the two of them, so then I’ll get stickered.

But yeah, it was a huge investment. I mean the one truck I went pretty extravagant on. The one— the other one was a little bit cheaper because I took the bed off and put a flatbed on with toolboxes and everything on it so we could load up all the tools and everything.

And that one—the other truck I use more, it’s mine; it’s for moving equipment and stuff. The other one’s for my guys; it’s got a regular box side on it.

It’s a Dually, so with having the fender flares on it with being the Dually, it’s like, “Okay, we can do some cool stuff here with some color transitions.”

Everything we have is just black, white, and gray. So like my dump trucks, the cabs are gray, the boxes are black and white stickers. My truck is white with—I actually have transition stickers that go from gray to black, and did some pretty cool stuff.

Then like the phone number and stuff is in white reflective over the top of the black transition stickers so when headlights hit it or whatever, it reflects just like a mailbox.

You can see it from a quarter mile away! That one was like almost 900 bucks, and I was like, “Oh man!”

I was like, “Holy cow! I mean I got two-foot tall letters on the doors that go from the front fender all the way to the back fender," and I was kind of cringing on that one because the first one, we only had to do the cab because I had the flatbed on it, so that was like 500 bucks.

I was like, “All right, that’s not bad,” you know, and didn’t see a lot out of that one.

Then I went back to the guy that does all my stuff, and I was like, “Okay, this one being white, let’s get some tint on the windows. Let’s get the color transitions with the gray to black; let’s really make this thing pop.”

I was like, “I’m going to give you, you know, this is kind of the concept of what I want; I’m giving you full transparency. I’ve seen your work; I know what you can do. Have fun with it; send me a picture before you hit print at least.”

He’s got a full mockup on his computer, so he can pull up what your vehicle is, and it can literally give you a digital display kind of real life of what it’s going to look like.

I’m at work, like four or five hours later he sends me a picture, and I’m like, “Do it. Hit the button. Let’s go!”

Didn’t even ask how much it was. I was just all day, “I’m like, this is gonna cost so much.” And we get done, he calls me, and I go back to pick it up; he’s like, “Oh, and I added a sticker across the tailgate,” and I was like, “Oh, I never thought about that.”

But I’m like, now I’m seeing dollar signs. I’m like, “Oh man!”

Because he’s got it all the way across the tailgate with the name and the reflective with the phone number and stuff.

At this point, I’m thinking like 1,200 bucks. I’m like, “My wife’s going to kill me; I just spent a pile of money on this, and I just bought the truck like two weeks before that.”

I’m like, "Well, what is it?" He’s like, “Oh, it's 800." I’m like, "Well, that sucks, but it’s better than what I thought!"

Yeah, for sure!

Mike Flaugher: It took no time. I don’t think it was a week. Once we paired two trucks and then the dump trucks and stuff, next thing, we're running. I got people stopping me, and they’re like, “Man, you guys are everywhere!”

It’s like there’s only two of us, and the one guy’s part-time—sometimes three of us. They’re like, “You guys are all over the place!”

It's like, "Yeah, we are!" I’m like, “No, we just make it look like we’re everywhere! You know, at least get our name on it.”

I’m a firm believer—don’t go way out of your way. I was talking to Danny about this on the video the other day, and I would go a different way home every night.

I mean, not like way out of the way, but if there’s a three blocks away, take a different road. You know, five miles out of the way; drive down a different road—you have a rolling billboard!

Yeah! It’s like, “Man, you have a rolling billboard and a huge investment in this thing; go somewhere else.”

I mean, because everybody is talking to like, "Oh yeah, I seen your ad in the paper quite a few times or whatever."

Then I seen you in town, and then I called you.

I’m starting to figure out that people gotta see you before they start feeling comfortable. If they never see you but they’re seeing an ad, it’s like, “Who is it? Are they even from here?”

A lot of people want to do local if they can, you know; there’s a lot of people that don’t care if you come from three states away; they just want the cheapest price.

But there’s a lot of people that just care about, you know, spending local.

I caught a huge traction on that; it’s like, “Okay, we gotta be, you know, seen to be matching the face to the name type of deal.”

That’s when we just—I mean, we’d literally leave a job if we had a couple vehicles on it. It’s like, “I’m going to go this way; you go that way, and we’ll meet back at the barn.”

We’d do that; then it was literally everybody’s like, “You guys are everywhere!” We’re going down here and there, and it’s like, “Yeah, ‘cause we were strategically driving separate ways home from the jobs and stuff, you know?

In the mornings, we’d all go together, so you know you’re all there on time, and whatever. At the end of the day, it’s like you go that way, I'll go this way, and see what happens.”

I don’t know—getting creative—it's like, I can afford the extra $10 in gas, but I can’t, you know, go call up and get a billboard.

I mean, we looked at that. By the time you make a sign and sign the contract for the term agreement, it’s like $7800 for two years—and it’s like, I’m sure it’ll pay off.

But I don’t have that upfront right now starting out, so we’re going to drive in circles till people think that we're everywhere!

Austin Gray: I love that! I love the creativity that you brought to this.

So there you have it, guys and gals. This is MikeFlaugher, and correct me if I'm wrong—Mike Flaugher.

Mike Flaugher: Yeah! Mike Flaugher!

Austin Gray: All right! Mike Flaugher with EMPI LLC; it stands for Empower Property Improvements.

Okay! So my wife’s initials, my initials, and then property improvements.

So that actually was kind of another way of just getting into it, and that’s why it’s kind of shortened down to EMPI.

The whole goal was to get into excavating. But obviously starting out, you just gotta make money, and you gotta make this work.

So we started as excavating and landscaping, so that’s where the property improvements kind of kicked in. It was less geared towards getting people to just go, "Oh, well, I got this little project," and it’s like, "Not what I’m trying to do."

But if I can get in there and basically sell yourself, you know, you’re getting a lot of little calls—couple hundred dollars, $500 type deals, you know? Whatever.

"Let’s go out; we’ll run and gun; we’ll make it go."

This isn’t what I want to do; we’ll slowly transition out of it, but we’re going to go do whatever.

You get there and start looking around; they don’t know that that’s what you do because the way I’m portraying it is we just do little stuff.

They’re like, “Hey, I see this, or I see that,” and, “Oh, do you do that?” It’s like, “Yeah, I do.”

Well, give me a price for that.

It was more or less just to try to get busy and then get out there, and the more people you tell, then if they like what you did, they’ll tell the next person—"Hey, my septic system failed!"

Well, my guy that just was here just did, you know, he does that stuff. It was kind of a crapshoot, but it played out. I mean, it worked.

It’s not crazy! I mean, there are a lot of guys that start out in landscaping and then merge into the excavating world.

I never wanted to be a landscaper, but I mean, there are certain aspects of it. The retaining walls do a lot of boulder walls, so the majority of what I do is septic systems, and boulder walls are kind of my forte, I mean, that’s what I really enjoy doing.

We’re pretty much full service; we do everything, but I really enjoy the boulder walls just because it’s not, you know, standard pour concrete or your standard landscaping block where everything's cut clean, perfect stack, and go—that's boring to me.

I like the end result of them; they look awesome!

So I still enjoy doing those but not as much as you take a natural rock, and now you go and dump a couple truckloads of them, and let’s pick them all up 14 times, turn them around in 32 circles, and pull it back out because it doesn’t look right.

Most guys—it drives them nuts, and they’re like, "Get this out of here; I don’t want anything to do with it.”

It hurts my brain to even try to figure these things out, and I like the challenge of it because there are sometimes where you will get a rock, like Third Rock in this 80-foot-long wall and set it, and then get down five more rocks, and you're like, "Nope, looks stupid!"

You pull it back apart, pull it out of there, try it again. I’ve put it back in the wall a dozen times—turned it around, flipped it over, whatever, can’t make it.

I mean, like it’s almost there, but you can’t make it right, and you get all the way down to the end of the job, and it never ends up in the wall.

You load it back in the truck, and you take it home and throw it in the spare pile for the next job; it’s just dumb!

It’s like, I literally fought that rock the entire time, and I’m getting to the point where it’s like, okay, if I’ve tried it twice, it’s getting thrown off to the side until I find this spot where you’re like, “Oh man, that is the rock!”

That’s happened a few times, but 90% of the time, you’ll fight that thing all the way through, and you’ll end up taking it home with you and you’re like, “Ugh!”

So I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve quit trying to force them in there because I’m so adamant.

It’s like, I got to make this thing fit in here. It’s a cool-looking rock; it’s got wild shapes to it; it’s going in this wall.

You can’t make it do it!

So yeah, we do a lot of that, so that’s kind of where the landscaping part started because you’re not getting a lot of calls for retaining walls as an excavating company.

Which the crazy part with the boulder walls is I’ve—the company I worked for before, we did them.

We did a lot of shoreline restoration and stuff, so like Great Lakes, Lake Michigan, and Lake Huron mostly get huge storms and high water times and wash out the shoreline and stuff.

It’s getting close to eroding out the highway, so we would come in and do all these boulder walls and then like armor stone and stuff in behind them to protect the shoreline.

That’s kind of where I found my love for it. I just—I don’t know; something about it just intrigues me, and I really enjoyed doing it.

Well, we got into doing a bunch of the boulder walls around some bigger houses, to the point where we were setting them with, you know, like CAT 330s—30-ton machines—with a thumb on them because we were setting, like, 5-foot boulders and stuff.

I mean just huge to the point where you can only fit three rocks in a truckload. I mean, just wild!

It’s funny to think that most people just envision that with landscaping; you can probably count on one hand how many landscapers in this world are setting stones with that big of equipment.

Most landscaping companies have, you know, little dingo skid steers and minis and stuff.

I mean, there are some out there that have larger equipment doing larger stuff, but I mean it’s like in my mind, we’re going to have the larger equipment and stuff.

That’s something geared towards what I like doing, and it’s really geared toward our business. Within a 10-minute drive of where we’re at, you can hit 11 different lakes, and the majority of them are all on super steep slopes at least on one side of the lake.

That’s where we picked up a lot of it.

So the landscaping kind of started totally geared toward getting ourselves kind of in that boulder wall world and then just transferring everything else into the excavating.

It was just more or less to make myself known as I’m the guy that’s going to come in and do your boulder walls if you want a boulder wall.

And it’s worked! We’ve done four of them now in this past year—pretty extensive size ones.

Pretty, pretty cool, especially when you’re sitting on the side of a lake doing it—getting all the permitting and stuff for the soil erosion and everything. You know, a lot of steps and hoops to jump through, but when it gets down to the end of it, it’s intriguing because usually you’re dropping down a 30-40 degree slope sliding with the excavator, trying to carry rocks in and out.

I remember my first employee—we went to a job, and he looks down, and he’s like, “You’re going to drive the excavator over there?” I’m like, “Yeah.”

He’s like, “That’s not that steep.” I’m like, “No way.”

I’m like, “Well, you gotta carry the rocks to me with a skid steer; I’m not driving down that!”

I’m like, “It’s not that bad!” I was like, “It looks terrible; we’re on tracks! You’re going to be fine.”

By the time we got done with the job, he’s like, “That was pretty sweet.”

He’s like, “You’d look at it, and he’s like, anybody’s normal brain would just go, ‘There’s no way you can get equipment down there; there’s no way you can do anything with it!’"

Because the wall we tore out was a timber wall that somebody hand-built because they didn’t think you could get anything in there, and it rotted away and failed.

We get done, and he’s like, “Yeah, that’s just nuts; I didn’t think you could get stuff down there.”

He’s like, “You’re crazy!”

Plus that one was early in the year, so there was ice and stuff on the ground, and he’s like, “You’re going to slide into the lake!”

I’m like, “Hopefully, there’s enough ice on the lake, man! It’s like, I doubt it! We’ll scratch it up with the teeth, and we’ll get some dirt going.”

I’m like, you know, you test it; obviously, we’re not going to be dumb here. It’s like “Go in, do some testing; if it feels like it’s going to be a little bit sketchy, we’re going to back out, we’ll come in at a different time, or we’ll improvise—we’ll make the changes, and we’ll make it safe.”

It’s like we’re not going to do anything stupid here.

It’s like, but I don’t know—it's just one of those things where just with my background too. I mean, I’ve been in 50-ton excavators, massive—climbing on barges unloading barges.

There’s a huge cement plant, Lafarge, right by where we’re at that would bring barges in and unload. You’d literally throw crane mats for track ramps off the dock onto the side of the boat and climb literally like at an angle like this.

Just reach in with your stick and grab a bucket full and pull yourself up in! I mean, 12-14 foot height change over 10 foot of distance—I mean, you’re literally straight up and down and pulling yourself up and in, and climbing up on a pile and be swinging back and forth on a boat for 16 hours straight unloading a barge and just doing wild stuff!

I mean, we got into some pretty, pretty cool stuff. It’s helped me tremendously with my business.

I mean, just being comfortable with what you’re doing, and that’s kind of the thing with owning a business too: you better just be comfortable being uncomfortable because nothing—not a single thing is going to be easy.

I mean, as long as you can go through and mitigate your risk and, you know, make sure you’re doing the right steps and everything to be safe, the rest of it’s just fun.

Once you’ve done it, and you start getting comfortable with it, you look for the new challenge.

Austin Gray: That’s the 100% truth!

It’s like you said something very important there: be comfortable being uncomfortable.

And, yeah, I think that’s like the underlying core of starting any business. If you’re not comfortable being uncomfortable, you might as well just keep your W-2 job because, I mean, I think every single day I wake up—it’s like there’s a decision to be made.

Sometimes you gotta make the decision like right now, and you don’t know whether or not it’s going to be the right one or not.

And that’s uncomfortable! It’s also uncomfortable to just like not know where the next job is coming from.

But to your point earlier—backing into a corner, burning all the bridges, cutting the tethers and finding a way out—that recurring theme I’ve seen with you.

I am very appreciative that you have spent time with us this morning. We’re getting to the hour mark here, so I’m going to go ahead and wrap this episode up.

Mike, thank you so much for being on the show! Where can people find you and your business?

Mike Flaugher: So we’re on Google, Instagram, Facebook—all that. So it’s all under EMPI Excavating.

I try my best; I’m no digital marketer, but we’re trying to take cool videos and do stuff and put more together.

You know, with as much as we had going on last year, I mean starting out wasn’t a lot, so I mean it turned into more than I ever expected!

We push as much as we can, and then sometimes you get busy, so you forget. But this year we already have a workload comparable to what we did last year in total.

So we’re getting pretty stacked out already, and frost laws come off this morning. So we are now going to be having a baby next week! Then after that, it’s hitting the ground running.

My other guy went full time this year, so all three of us are full-time going like crazy chickens with their heads cut off. So we’re going to try to take as many pictures and videos and try to put as much stuff up and try to keep kicking and making everything going!

That’s the whole goal: as long as we’re moving, we’re doing something!

Austin Gray: That’s great! Good stuff!

Well, thank you guys so much for listening to this episode. If you’re listening on YouTube, please make sure to like, comment, and subscribe.

If you’re listening on Apple or Spotify, please like and follow the podcast to get notifications about when new episodes drop.

Just like building a service business, I talk about this a lot—five-star reviews are super important for building a local service business, but they're also really important for podcasts as well.

So if you're listening to this right now and you have enjoyed the episode, would you mind taking 30 seconds to leave us a quick five-star review with your thoughts and opinions about the show?

Tell us what you like about it so far.

Finally, this episode is brought to you by OWNR OPS. OWNR OPS is specifically a place online to help small local service businesses grow.

You can visit and learn more at ownrops.com—that's ownrops.com.

We’re going to wrap this episode up, so thank you guys for listening! Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less. We’ll see you guys in the next episode!