AUSTIN GRAY: Scared Excavating, we started in 2018. So we're shooting for $6 million. We came into this year with about just under $3 million in signed contracts, so we had a pretty good backlog coming into the year. $6 million is what we're shooting for this year.

ANDY GARRETT: That tries to keep you from doing it; usually that turns out to make a great thing. So I'm excited about this.

AUSTIN GRAY: I agree. I mean, it's like, I mean you run an excavation business. For the listeners who are listening to this right now, we just had massive issues with the recording software. And what are we at? 6:18? 7:18 now? We're 18 minutes behind, but that's basically an excavation business too. It's like you show up to the job site, and if three things don't go wrong, it's probably not a normal day. I don't know, maybe you run a tighter ship.

ANDY GARRETT: Nope, we're still trying to figure out how to have a perfect day around here.

AUSTIN GRAY: Right there with you. It's like you get started, and I feel like that's all excavation is: you just solve problems as they come up on the fly.

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, well, I mean, I'll be honest. Zooming out a little bit, any small business is hard. I've run a few different ones, and Excavating is one of the most difficult I've ever run. But the reality, when I think about it, is I kind of like that because it keeps people out of it. It keeps the competition low. And the reality is a lot of people, even this morning, I'm sure you had thoughts of maybe we should just cancel this and reschedule because things weren't going right. I think that's, you know, the people that can push through the challenges, push through some of those struggles, they're the guys that win.

AUSTIN GRAY: This episode is brought to you by Jobber. Jobber is the all-in-one software management solution specifically for home service and trade businesses. I remember when I was starting Bearclaw several years ago, I was wondering how the heck I was going to send estimates, keep track of a job schedule, send invoices, and collect payments. When I came across Jobber, I felt like I had found the Holy Grail. Jobber makes the backend of my business so efficient, and it saves me time as a business owner. So if you are in the early days of starting your home service or trade business, look no further than Jobber as your software management solution. And if you use our unique link, I get a commission from it, and Lord knows I still have debt to pay down on all this heavy equipment. If you've been enjoying the podcast, this is one way you can support us. Visit go.getjobber.com/OWNR OPS. That is g o .getjobber.com/OWNR OPS.

Listeners, Andy Garrett with Garrett Excavating is on this morning. Andy, welcome to the show! Could you tell our listeners just a bit about your background? You mentioned you’ve run other small businesses and then also the business that you currently run right now.

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, so Garrett Excavating, we started in 2018. My father and I had a truck, trailer, and a skid steer, and it was a perfect marriage of skill sets. My dad is a master technician. You know, he's 67 years old now, and I still have to yell at him to get out of the trench. It's in his blood; he just loves it. Prior to Garrett Excavating, I started a couple of escape room businesses in the Cincinnati area in 2014 with a couple of buddies. It was a wild ride. When we invested in the business to start it, I had $47 to my name that weekend. I remember telling some friends who were going out that weekend, "Guys, I got to hang back. See you! I don't even know if I can fill up my gas tank this weekend." It was kind of the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey where I went both feet in. I was in over my head, underwater, trying to figure it out. Thankfully that business worked out. I took the profits from the first one and opened two more. In 2018, Garrett Excavating came along after we had kind of systemized that business and transitioned it to a management team. When my dad called and said, "Hey, I want to do my own thing," I said, "I think I could probably help."

AUSTIN GRAY: So do you still own those escape room businesses or did you sell them?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, so we still own the escape room businesses. We have three of them. We're local partners with those. We partnered with a group out of Lexington, Kentucky. Yeah, we still own them. They're pretty neat little businesses. When we opened them, we kind of thought, man, this would be a fad. In a few years, it'll fade away, and they've been pretty resilient little businesses. It's nice. I spend no time on it. I got completely lucky! I spend no time on it and, every now and then, get a check from it.

AUSTIN GRAY: So why do you say you got completely lucky?

ANDY GARRETT: Well, I mean, we started it when we were young. I was in my mid-20s, and we didn’t know anything. What we did know was that we were willing to put the energy into it and put the work into it and just will our way to success. We partnered with a group out of Lexington, Kentucky, that ended up opening over 50 locations across the country. They transitioned it to a franchise model, but we got lucky because we got in ahead of that, and we were basically local partners, so it was a joint venture. We didn't have to pay any franchising fees or anything; we had full rights to our ownership. It was probably 2016-2017 when they came to us and said, "Hey! We want to just take over the management of all the stores, and you can kind of step away. We'll take it from here." They didn't buy us out, and we've just kind of owned the businesses and haven't had to do a whole lot with them. Like I said, it's just luck. People talk about passive income, and I'm like I don't believe there's such a thing as passive income, but if there was, this was it. The reality is we spent four years building the business—staying up late nights, getting up early mornings, taking care of customers, putting out fires, building a team. Now it's passive, but it wasn't when we first started it.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, for sure. It's interesting because a lot of people reach out about starting a business, and you know my first question is, "What's your motive?" And sort of, "What's your expectation?" For our listeners, how many hours did you put in whenever you were working in the early years of that business? How many hours a week?

ANDY GARRETT: So we had several weeks in the very beginning where we'd work till 1 or 2 in the morning, and then we would be back in the store at 5 or 6 in the morning. I mean, literally, we had a week where one of my partners had worked so much that week that he physically got sick and started throwing up in the bathroom—all the while, we have customers in a room that he was managing. I'm in the game master room, running two games through microphones because obviously, when you're in an escape room, you have a guide who, if you get stuck, can kind of give you a clue. I'm sitting there with two microphones saying, "All right, check under the dresser. Make sure you think about it this way," all the while he's in the bathroom, puking because we've just worked way too much and physically depleted ourselves. So it was a lot! To quantify it, we were working probably 18-19 hour days.

AUSTIN GRAY: Geez, that's crazy. When I started this podcast, it was like two things that were really important to me. One, if I took on sponsorships, I was going to push products that I personally believed in. Two, I just wanted to showcase real-time, under-the-hood, what it's like to build businesses and just be really open and honest about that because I think like... I see a lot of people jumping into wanting to start a business because they don't want to work corporate anymore and want more freedom. In all reality, don’t get me wrong, I love what I do. I love entrepreneurship. I love business. It's become my hobby now. I maybe ride my snowmobile like once a week. But when people are like, "Hey, let's go do this in the afternoons," I'm like, man, I just want to work because I love this stuff.

ANDY GARRETT: But the reality is, like, kind of like what I think you just shared is that starting a business... I don't think you immediately get tons of freedom; it's almost the exact opposite.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, I mean specifically in the beginning, because you've got to do whatever it takes to get some degree of stability. And in the beginning, there's literally nothing, right? So you’re taking nothing and trying to turn it into something stable, and the reality just takes a lot of time, a lot of thought, and a lot of effort to do those things. I don't think it's for everybody. That's another realization I've had. With our escape room business in 2014, and then Garrett Excavating in 2018, I mean, it's a grind. Even where we're at now in Garrett Excavating, I look back, and I'm like, if I had to start all over again, could I do it? I really don't know. Because it's just so much time, effort, and stress, and yeah, it is tough.

AUSTIN GRAY: So let's take it forward a little bit to 2018. From that first business, your dad reaches out to you. I’m guessing he’s been in the excavation industry?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, he’s been in the excavation industry. I believe he started his first business in 1984, and they did 100% residential excavation. They were digging foundations and basically doing finish grade for home builders in the Cincinnati area. They had some great relationships and did that for, you know, I guess 30 years. But in 2008, when the housing crisis happened, he and his partner had to liquidate personal assets to keep the business going. At the time, his partner just had more personal equity that he was able to put into the business, and so he got bought out. In 2008, he basically became an employee. There was a handshake agreement that they would reallocate ownership, and that just never happened. My dad, being the blue-collar handshake guy, probably should have gotten some counsel on that. But nonetheless, he worked as an employee for 10 years and finally got to a place where he was like, "I've got to try something else. I’ve got to try going back out on my own." So at 62 years old, he went for it.

AUSTIN GRAY: You know, it's amazing because when I reflect on that, a lot of people at 62 years old are ready to wind down. They're ready to do the comfortable thing and start picking out a house in Florida and retire. I commend him because I mean he took it on at first and said, "I'm going to go start a business."

ANDY GARRETT: I love that, man. I love it. I have so much respect for that generation. My dad's about the same age as your dad, and just the level of work ethic that that generation had is something that Millennials and Gen Z can definitely learn from.

AUSTIN GRAY: I'm interested to hear, at that point when he said, "Hey, I want to go start a business," and you said earlier in this podcast, "Yeah, I think I can help," what did you go into that business with knowing that you could help with?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, so in the beginning, I truly thought it would be him, truck, trailer, and skid steer, and he just kind of rode it into the sunset as his last dance. I figured I'd help him on the back end, just make sure that he didn't get into any legal trouble, make sure everything was clean from an accounting standpoint, and just make sure that he was organized and could focus on the field stuff. That was really my thing. Honestly, when we started it, I was like, "I don't even know if this will turn into a full-time thing for me." As we started to get some first projects, he started inviting me into the field because he said, "I need help out in the field. I need somebody to help me labor and do this stuff." I grew up around excavating, but transparently, we never had a lot of money growing up. For me, I kind of fell into the belief that when you work in the trades, you really can't do well financially. That was a false belief, but I went and got a college degree in business because I was like, "I'm going to stay far away from that." So, coming back to 2018, I just kind of thought I'd help him out, and then slowly, I started getting out in the field, started seeing how the business functioned, and started thinking, "Man, maybe we can do something with this."

AUSTIN GRAY: And at that point, what did you do next to grow the business? If you stepped back into the field, take us through the growth—like year one, year two—what happened? What changes did you make? Who did you hire? How did you think about it?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, we had an architect from a previous relationship who reached out to us several times saying, "I'd really love for you guys to give us a bid on this." At the time, it was a small commercial project, about $150,000. But to us, it was like—we couldn't fathom doing a project that big because it was really my dad, my son, and then one other older gentleman who was an operator for us. We told him no; we said, "We're not ready for that yet." He kept coming back at us, saying, "I'd really love to get a bid." Finally, on the fourth phone call, I was standing there next to my dad, and I just looked at him and said, "Hey, just tell him we'll get him something." I had no idea how we were going to estimate it or pull it off, but my dad and I sat down, and our Caterpillar sales rep introduced us to a guy who had just retired—a commercial estimator in his 60s. He came and sat down with us, went through the entire project, showed us exactly how we needed to think about it, showed us how to do takeoffs, everything—helped us put the bid together. We sent the bid in, and a week later, we got a call asking, "When can you guys start?" We were like, "Oh man." It was one of those moments where it was like, "Alright, it's time to jump; it's time to see what we can do." That project gave us so much confidence because it went really well. We did more than we thought we could do, but it gave us a ton of confidence. A month later, we landed another commercial project. Once we had a little bit of stability financially, we started bringing in some pieces. We hired some operators, hired some laborers, and I started to figure out how do we build leads? How do we develop more business here? Once I could focus a little bit more of my energy on that, then we hired a project manager and continued to build the team out.

ANDY GARRETT: But I'm telling you, if we would have said no to that first project, I truly don't know if we’d be where we are today because it was the springboard that kind of launched us into the direction that we ultimately have gone.

AUSTIN GRAY: What was the size of that project?

ANDY GARRETT: It was about a $150,000 project.

AUSTIN GRAY: And where are you guys at right now? Can you share revenue numbers?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, so this year, we'll do—I mean our budget is built around $6 million. So we're shooting for $6 million. We came into this year with about just under $3 million in signed contracts, so we had a pretty good backlog coming into the year. Six million is what we're shooting for this year.

AUSTIN GRAY: That's a decent amount of growth.

ANDY GARRETT: But we branded last year as the Launchpad year. We really focused in on building processes and systems, and then this year and next year—we're branding it as the launch. So we're really trying to scale our operations, build our team, and continue to build out our fleet over the next few years.

AUSTIN GRAY: The audio cut out there for a second, at least on my end. You said you branded last year as the what?

ANDY GARRETT: The Launchpad year.

AUSTIN GRAY: Yeah, so last year we branded it as the Launchpad, and that was really symbolic of if we're going to launch, we've got to have something stable to launch off of. That was building systems, building processes, making sure we have the right people in the right seats. You know, this year, next year, and beyond—we're branding it as the launch, and that's really continuing to scale our operations, continuing to put the right people in the right seats, but also building out our fleet and taking on larger projects. So yeah, we feel ready for it. But it's definitely, you know, it's one of those moments where you just got to take the jump and make it work.

AUSTIN GRAY: This episode is brought to you by Bearclaw Media. Bearclaw Media is a growth agency for service and trade-based business owners. If you want to grow your business and you offer a high-ticket service in local service or trades, there's a really good chance that we can help you grow with Facebook, Google ads, and content creation for platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. If you're interested in growing your business, check out gobearclawmedia.com.

AUSTIN GRAY: Okay, so this year's projected at $6 million. Let's talk about—that first phase in between whenever you landed that first $150,000 project and going from there to like your first year hitting a million in one fiscal year.

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, so that's a great question. We started to get some smaller commercial projects, and we were also doing, you know, custom residential projects. Some of the things that we really started identifying as competitive advantages for us were, one, we got set up with a website pretty early. We focused on SEO and started building out our Google My Business reviews, and once we started doing that, people started finding us. That made lead generation a lot easier for us because it was one of those things where I wasn’t running around putting yard signs in the ground, I wasn’t knocking on doors, I wasn’t cold-calling as much. I still cold call to this day, but once we had a consistent lead generation system, things started to come in more consistently.

ANDY GARRETT: The transition from that $150,000 to a million was interesting because, even though I had started to hire people in the field, I was still doing a lot of stuff. I was getting pulled into the field consistently. I was managing projects, I was doing the accounting, I was doing the marketing at night, I was putting together estimates and bids, and during the day, I would leave job sites to go meet with customers. I reached a point where I thought, "If I'm going to run the business this way, I don’t want to be in the business anymore." I was sitting at home at dinner one night, and my daughter was talking to me. She said something to me, and my wife kind of hit me on the shoulder, saying, "She's talking to you." I wasn't listening because I was so focused on what was going on in our business. I was physically at dinner, but I just mentally was never available for my family. That was a turning point for me where I was like, "Alright, if I’m going to do this, I’ve got to run it like a business. I’ve got to systematize this, and I’ve got to find the right people that can help me make this a little more consistent and manageable."

AUSTIN GRAY: I'm quiet because I'm seeing if you'll go any further on that because that right there is the real problem. At least, I experience that. Did you get rid of that, or do you still deal with that? Because I feel like almost every night there is not a single moment where something is not running about the business in my brain. I'm curious if you've completely eliminated that at this point.

ANDY GARRETT: I don't know that I've completely eliminated it, but for me, it got to an extreme point where, you know, I wasn’t at dinner with my family mentally. I averaged three or four hours of sleep a night because I'd wake up in the middle of the night, and it was fight or flight. I was thinking about gravel orders, pipe materials, and whether we called rentals off or paid that bill, and just these thoughts kept coming to me in the middle of the night. I hit a point where I was like, "This is actually going to kill me because it's not sustainable." I didn’t enjoy it. I think for me, I hit a point where it was just too much. The reality is, I still to this day sit at the table, and I have to fight those thoughts off to be with my family. I'm constantly fighting that. Part of it is like I’ll wake up in the middle of the night at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. The reality is, I'm just excited to start the day. I'm eager to get going. I really do love what we're doing, and sometimes I just don't get a good night’s sleep because I'm just excited about it. So yeah, that never goes away fully. But I do think there are degrees of managing it well, keeping it at bay, and not letting it run your life.

AUSTIN GRAY: What are some rules or parameters you've set for yourself to make it to where you can be more present with your family?

ANDY GARRETT: I mean, transparently, I struggle with anxiety. It's always been something I’ve worked through. For me, it was getting the right tools to stop some of those thought patterns that would lead me to a bad place. An example would be I’d forget to call a rental off, and then I’d spiral into a place of—you know, if we didn't call the rental off, they’re going to charge us another week. We didn’t have that in the bid, and so now the whole bid’s going to turn upside down, and if we lose money on the project, we don’t have enough in savings. It would spiral to a place where I would convince myself that we were going out of business. The first thing was putting just some healthy thought patterns in place and telling myself, "When you start having those thoughts, just stop them." The reality is, it's never going to be as bad as you think it is, and it’s probably never going to be as good as you think it is. It’s somewhere in the middle and just giving myself permission to stop and pause those thoughts.

ANDY GARRETT: I think perspective is huge as well. I think a lot about the end of my life, and when I'm on my deathbed, what's really going to matter? I want my kids to be there celebrating my life. I want my kids to be there taking care of me in the end. I know if I don’t allocate that time and perspective to being present, then those things just won’t happen. So I think those are two things. Just zooming out toward the end of your life and then also not letting yourself cycle into unhealthy thoughts.

AUSTIN GRAY: Okay, so where's that trigger? Because I’m really interested in this. I do the exact same thing, and it likely ends up not only are we going to lose money and go out of business, it's like, "You suck, and you're the worst at your job." I'm sure you've gotten there before. Entrepreneurs—you're probably a perfectionist too. You like being good at what you're doing. But if I'm not careful, I'll get down in that headspace of, "Man, I just let my team down completely because of something I missed." The reality is you're handling a million different things at any given time. So when that fight or flight response comes in and it wakes you stone cold up at 3:30 because you forgot to cancel the rental, what do you do at that point to stop that negative thought pattern?

ANDY GARRETT: So I actually got some help on this, and one of the things that was really powerful for me was basically playing out the scenario of "what if?" What if—I put myself out of business? Why does that affect you? Why does that bother you? For me, distilling it down to this fear of failure—our company's grown to the place where I have friends, family, and a lot of strangers that don’t know who I am, who would see that I failed. They'd look at me and say, "Man, Andy's a failure. He's not very good at running businesses. He's not a good leader." As I fleshed that out, the guy I was talking to, my counselor, said, "So what? Will your wife think you’re a failure? Will your kids think you’re a failure? Will the people that actually matter think you’re a failure?" He was like, "No, they’re not going to think you’re a failure. They’re going to understand how difficult it is. They will have seen all the work and effort that you put into it." For me, just playing that scenario out—realizing that the people I actually care about aren’t going to see me as a failure—was powerful. I just realized I'm letting a lot of people that I don’t even know—who don't have any influence on my life—influence my life a lot and add a lot of anxiety and stress to it. So that was a healthy practice for me. I still have moments where I spiral. I haven’t perfected it, but it's all about taking one step forward, and I can reflect on a few years ago and say I'm in a better place now than I was then.

AUSTIN GRAY: That's great. I appreciate the effort you’ve put into addressing the psychological portion of this as well. Now logically, let's go back to—you’ve addressed that; let’s go back to that story. Your daughter talking to you at dinner, your blank stare, and then your wife can tell. She smacks you on the back and says, "She's talking to you!" At that point, it sounds like you consciously made some effort or decision like, "I got to figure this thing out, and I got to put the right people in the right place so that I'm not managing like 18 different people's roles."

AUSTIN GRAY: What's the first role you go to delegate and hire to get off your plate at that point?

ANDY GARRETT: So for us, it was project management. I realized that between the execution of projects, the projection of continuing to try to get more projects, and develop more business, my head was—I wanted to be in the future. I wanted to focus on developing business and building new relationships. That's where I wanted to be, but my head continued to get pulled into the day-to-day and the execution of projects. We hired a project manager. I told him, "Hey, I need you to plan all of the things that are going in the field. I need you to make sure rentals are getting called off. I need you to make sure we have gravel orders. I need you to make sure we have trucks showing up." When he started taking that off my plate, that was a huge transition for me, allowing me to step out of the field a little more and focus on actually building the business.

ANDY GARRETT: The next significant hire for us was we hired somebody to lead our operations. I lean more toward a Visionary skill set, so I can think of things, break through walls, but I just leave a mess behind me. I’m not great at building systems. I realized that was a key skill set we needed if we were going to continue to grow the business sustainably. So I hired someone to run our operations. He came in and built out procedures that were consistent. Accountability was consistent, expectations were consistent, and once we started doing that, the business started to stabilize. You know, you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel a little bit where you're like, "Alright, I see the path here. At some point we’re going to be able to drive as much revenue through this as we want because we’ve got the right process and system in place to manage it profitably."

AUSTIN GRAY: That's such a good word, and it's awesome to hear that you could see that light at the end of the tunnel because sometimes when you're right in the middle of it, you're like, "How the heck are we going to solve this?" My specific questions are, let’s start with that project manager. What specific roles did he or she handle, and what did you continue to handle during that phase?

ANDY GARRETT: He really took on field-related execution. It was scheduling, making sure we had materials on site so the field crews could execute the work. If fires arose in the field, he got the first call. It wasn’t just coming to me. Now, certainly, when we’d have a fire, he would consult me, and we’d work together to solve that. But I basically added a layer of protection between me and the field, which opened up the window for me to focus on building relationships, visiting customers, putting together estimates, and following up with estimates. That was a big thing—I'm scatter shooting estimates. Before we hit a million, I had no time to follow up with people. I had no time to actually build the connection and answer their questions and give them the time and thought they needed for their project. The reality was, once I started having that time and those conversations, we started to see our sales really start to grow because, for residential projects, customers are spending thousands of dollars. It’s not just a shoot an estimate and click accept. People need to be talked through that and convinced that’s the right solution. Even still to this day, I love meeting with customers and still love building the relationship. Thankfully, I’m doing a lot more of that than I used to.

AUSTIN GRAY: So you were handling the sales, and you delegated project management at that point.

ANDY GARRETT: Yes, I was still doing estimating at that point. So I was meeting with customers, doing estimating. At that time, we hadn’t hired an administrative person. Phone calls were still coming to my cell phone. I was focused on future things, like generating business and continuing to build out consistency work-wise.

AUSTIN GRAY: When you hired an operations manager, what was his title in the beginning?

ANDY GARRETT: Technically, our COO. He runs our operations.

AUSTIN GRAY: And did you make that hire before you hired a sales estimator?

ANDY GARRETT: It was very close. We hired the operations person before we hired an estimator, but we hired an estimator within months. It was a quick, "Alright, we've got somebody to run operations. Now I need to transition sales a little bit or at least estimating so I can free up more time to build opportunities for the business."

AUSTIN GRAY: So you’ve got three different roles there at that phase. You've got a dedicated project manager who is separate from your dad. Your dad is field crew leader or, like, a foreman at that point?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, he was a foreman on a crew. He's kind of running his own crew, and we have—right now we run four crews. It just kind of depends on what we have going, but we run about four crews, and then we have a superintendent who oversees those four crews. My dad's a foreman on one of those crews.

AUSTIN GRAY: The agreement in the beginning was 50/50, and I respected the heck out of his willingness to jump feet first and figure it out and get those first few projects. There’s always been an appreciation for him from me because of that season.

AUSTIN GRAY: I don’t know many 62-year-old men, women, or whoever that would make a career change like that and go for it, and I respect him a ton for it.

ANDY GARRETT: As the business has grown and as we've continued to build out the vision moving forward, we've started to transition ownership partially because he knows he’s not going to be in it forever. We want to—there are some tax implications and things like that that we're trying to take advantage of, so we’re transitioning ownership over the next few years here, but he's still a significant part of the ownership team.

AUSTIN GRAY: I kind of joke because we’ve gotten him into the perfect spot where he’s semi-retired—he can show up when he wants to and do the projects he wants, and we can put our other crews and the rest of our team on some of the other stuff.

ANDY GARRETT: He’s the linchpin for our culture. He's got a big personality. He’s a good old boy. You think of an optimistic blue-collar worker. I joke that he's never really met a stranger. You could be at O'Reilly's talking to the cashier at the store, and you mention my dad's name, and they're like, "Oh, you know him?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's my dad." That happens all the time. Everybody knows him, and when he walks in, he lights up the room. Everyone's like, "Ah, Derby's here!"

AUSTIN GRAY: And his name is Derby?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah! You don’t know many Derbys, right?

AUSTIN GRAY: That's awesome, man. That’s so cool. Operating equipment is becoming a skill set that’s going to be a lost art, especially for the Millennial and Gen Z generation. To have someone like that who’s been in the equipment for as long as he has—I'm sure just has tons of tips and tricks because there’s definitely an art. Anyone listening to this who's ever been in equipment before gets it: each different piece has its own way of operating.

ANDY GARRETT: I'll tell you a quick story that encapsulates who he is. Earlier this year, he actually had an accident where he had a tree roll up on his leg and completely broke the bone in his leg. It was gnarly. He was out there with another guy, and the guy insisted on picking him up to take him to the truck to get him to the hospital. My dad army crawled to the truck, got into the truck, and realized that if he went to the hospital with his boot on, they would cut it off. He didn't want to lose his new pair of boots, so this man takes his boot off in the middle of the truck. I’ll spare you the details, but it was gnarly. I show up to the hospital about an hour later. He’s laying on the bed, clearly in pain, and when I walk in the room, he looks at me and goes, "Hey Andy, meet Wes. He’s the doctor who’s taking care of me." He had already talked to Wes and got to know him. When I walked in, the first thing he wanted to do was introduce me to him. I think that really encompasses who he is as a person—tough as nails but also gentle as a teddy bear.

AUSTIN GRAY: Sounds like you love and respect your father, and that’s awesome. I appreciate you sharing that. If you haven't signed up for the weekly newsletter yet, go to ownrops.com/newsletter. That's ownrops.com/newsletter. We summarize all the learning lessons from the interviews with the guests on the podcast. We distill those into short actionable tips, tricks, tactics, and strategies that you can use to grow your own local service business. Sign up for the newsletter at ownrops.com.

AUSTIN GRAY: Let’s see here. I want to make sure we don't dive too far off on this rabbit hole because I know you have an interview at the 30-minute mark, right?

ANDY GARRETT: Yes, we’re good.

AUSTIN GRAY: Okay, after we’ve covered project management and operations, the next questions I have for you—so as I was going through your website, it looks like you guys are kind of full-service excavation, right? It doesn’t look like you actually turn down anything related to excavation. I'm interested to hear your strategy on that.

ANDY GARRETT: Because, like a guest I just had on last week's episode, Brock Peele—he does only septics. It's him and two other guys, and they did like $2.3 million in revenue last year.

AUSTIN GRAY: I heard it. I was jealous.

ANDY GARRETT: I know, man. It’s hard not to be jealous. But at the same time, I love people like that—I’m like, he has the vision and sees it through!

AUSTIN GRAY: My question, though, for you is: you guys plan to do $6 million this next year. Doesn't sound like you turned down anything. What's the strategy behind that, or what was the strategy in the beginning whenever you launched?

ANDY GARRETT: After hearing Brock, I may change our entire business strategy! So I will share kind of why we branded ourselves as more of a generalist. We do a lot of commercial site development, and when we're bidding projects to general contractors, developers, or even property owners, they want that full turnkey service. They want the clearing, demolition, earthwork, utilities, concrete, and paving. What we've done is Garrett Excavating really only serves a few of those services. We are primarily earthwork and utilities; those are the things we have focused on. Those are the things our crews are good at. If we have a large clearing project, we subcontract that out. All our concrete and paving gets subcontracted out, but we’ve put it in one package because we know what our customer wants is to manage one contractor.

AUSTIN GRAY: Understood. I love that strategy. Does it have to do with the fact that you felt one of your strengths was building relationships and getting business, and you felt like you guys could build a network of subcontractors to simplify the process for everybody involved?

ANDY GARRETT: We were. Partially that, and then we started losing projects because other contractors were including concrete and pavement. So just from a competition standpoint, we were like, "Alright, we've got to make some adjustments to stay competitive." That was probably a little over a year ago—where we really started offering that full site development package. Like I said, we focus on a few good things, and we’ve been able to identify some key relationships with subcontractors that can come in and support us on those projects.

AUSTIN GRAY: Okay, okay. Now I’m going to jump around a little bit, but I want to cover these topics. Those first early hires—their roles, structures, or comp structures—has changed to better comp structures? I definitely want to hear about the best option for each role. My question specifically about that first project management role, the first operations manager, and then the first estimator: how did you structure their comp plan?

ANDY GARRETT: If you can share numbers if you're comfortable with it, great; if not, I’m really specifically interested in like—did you have salary plus commission or any sort of incentive-based comp structure for each of those roles?

ANDY GARRETT: To this day, they've always been salaried roles. When we started, when we hired our project manager, it was a competitive salary for the Cincinnati area; it was about $65,000 a year four years ago. Obviously, stuff has changed. When we hired that role, it was 100% salary. Even to this day, our estimator and operations roles are salaried. One of the reasons I haven't gotten into commission or clear bonus structures is that we’re still trying to figure out how to make sure we’re managing our projects profitably—that we are executing the way they need to be executed and how they’ve been bid on.

ANDY GARRETT: In our world, there are so many moving parts. Especially in all the scopes of work we cover, we’re getting there. I fully plan on offering commission and bonuses down the road here, but what I didn’t want to do was make promises that I couldn't confidently keep and then put the business in a situation where it couldn’t support what I’d put in place. If there are financial concerns, when you make a promise to somebody, then people leave because they’re not getting what was promised. I felt like until I get this organized and standardized and fully measured and accounted for, I'm just going to stick with salaries and hourly pay.

AUSTIN GRAY: So project manager at the time was roughly $65K. How has that translated to today's terms?

ANDY GARRETT: It’s gone up significantly, probably 15-20% since that point. As the company grows, that role becomes even more important with more responsibilities. I'm sure that role will continue to push forward. We’re in Cincinnati so we’re trying to pay people as competitive as we can from a salary and hourly standpoint.

ANDY GARRETT: We're not the highest paying company in the Cincinnati area either because we're focused on—like I said earlier—we're trying to build a healthy culture that people actually look forward to coming to work. We pay for all of our employees' health benefits; we cover vision and dental. We offer everyone in the company two weeks paid vacation. We typically take the week between Christmas and New Year’s completely paid vacation. We’re doing a lot of things beyond just the salary to try to attract the right people but also I feel a responsibility to take care of our team and give them the confidence, “Hey, you can support your family here at Garrett Excavating.”

AUSTIN GRAY: Cool. And then, whenever you recruited your operations manager, what's just the range for our listeners if they're in a similar situation? If they’re identifying that they are similar to you and want to run their business but need somebody to help standardize, what can they expect from a compensation range?

ANDY GARRETT: I would say it’s a wide range: $80,000 to $120,000 roughly. That’s in Ohio. Obviously, less skillset is probably closer to the $80,000 mark, and if they have decent experience or they’ve had a few years in that role and continued to grow, then you're probably looking at the higher end of that scale.

AUSTIN GRAY: And how about the estimator/sales estimator?

ANDY GARRETT: Our estimator is probably in the $70,000 to $90,000 range. That’s competitive for our area. The reality is hopefully down the road here as we get more clarity on financial tracking, we can also add a commission piece to that because he’s putting estimates together, and when customers have questions about the bids and technical details, he’s also walking them through that. There’s a significant sales component to that as well.

AUSTIN GRAY: Cool, cool. Alright, well I believe that has answered all my questions. What else do you have that you’d like to share with the listeners? Any advice for people jumping into the excavation business that you’d share?

ANDY GARRETT: I think the biggest thing is we built our business around just the idea that we are going to do what we said we were going to do. We're going to go above and beyond for our customers. We also realize we’re not going to be perfect, so when we make mistakes, we’re going to go back and fix them and make sure that we continue to build a brand—a name—that we can walk around in public and be proud of. So I think if you're getting started, the biggest thing I could tell you is put yourself out there, go out, take the projects—whatever you can get in the beginning—and just serve the heck out of your customers. Blow them away! Give them an experience that they have to tell their friends about. Give them an experience that they’ll write a five-star review about. Build it one customer at a time. I think if you do that long enough, you’re going to look up one day and you’ll be like, "Wow, there are a lot of people on my team now," and the projects are getting a lot bigger. So I think it’s just about being consistent, showing up, leading with quality, and taking care of your customers.

AUSTIN GRAY: Awesome! Well, I appreciate you sharing that. I have one more final question. Could you give us a brief overview of the org chart you mentioned? You currently have four crews. How many people are on each crew?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, so three to four-man crews, and then I sit in the president/CEO role. Then we have our operations lead, estimating, project management, and administrative support. Underneath the project manager, we have our superintendent, and then we have our four foremen and then their crews underneath.

ANDY GARRETT: Our business is seasonal, so it fluctuates a little bit. As we get into summertime, we’ll probably push north of 20—potentially touch 25 team members. Right now, I think we're just under 20.

AUSTIN GRAY: Obviously, that has its own challenges as the team grows, but we’re getting to a place where we’re building some consistency and stability in the business.

ANDY GARRETT: The four foremen—three to four—are included in that three to four-man team?

ANDY GARRETT: Yes. Our foremen are working foremen, and you know our dirt foremen—I went up to our site earlier this week, and he was in the dozer all day. He loves it! We bought a new D6N, and he thanked me repeatedly. You love that mindset from your people when they’re grateful for the stuff you’re doing and excited about where we’re going.

AUSTIN GRAY: So how to attract great field talent? Just buy good equipment, right?

ANDY GARRETT: Yeah, just buy bigger equipment. No, but there really is so much to operating equipment. If you just give them a clean, organized office that works well—that doesn’t have shorting microphones whenever you’re trying to start a podcast, you’re a happy operator, right? If you’re in some deadbeat piece of equipment, you’re probably going to attract people who don’t want to take care of that stuff anyways.

AUSTIN GRAY: Before I go too much deeper on that—four foremen? How many superintendents?

ANDY GARRETT: One superintendent/project manager—he currently manages those. We’re approaching a threshold where we’re going to need more project management support. But yeah, it’s the same role right now.

ANDY GARRETT: We’ve talked about potentially the next hire being a junior project manager to support him in that role. We’re trying to figure out—and you know how it is—it’s always like: when do we make that decision? You typically try to push it as far as you can, and then you make the decision, and you’re like, "Wow, we should’ve done that six months ago."

AUSTIN GRAY: For sure. And then project manager and superintendent are interchangeable, and then you have a director of operations?

ANDY GARRETT: Yes, director of operations/COO. He oversees project management. Our estimator technically reports to him, but I spend a lot of time working directly with estimating still, too.

AUSTIN GRAY: Awesome, perfect. I appreciate you sharing that. That’s super helpful. So now hopefully listeners have an idea of what an org chart looks like if you’re in those early days and know what you can expect to work towards if you do want to grow to that $5 million or $6 million mark. Andy, thanks so much for being on! Where can people find you and Garrett Excavating online?

ANDY GARRETT: I appreciate you having me. This is awesome! I love what you’re doing, and I think there’s such a need to help small contractors who are just spinning their wheels trying to figure out how to get to the next phase. If you want to follow along, I'm on Instagram, Blue Collar Andy. I post about what we’re doing in our business, and I try to be as transparent as possible. We’re actually firing back up our social media, Garrett Excavating Cincinnati, on Instagram. Hopefully in the next few weeks, you’ll see some more footage from us. We haven’t done a great job there. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, just look up Andy Garrett on LinkedIn.

AUSTIN GRAY: Awesome! Well, Andy, thanks so much for being on. Their website is garrettx.com, is that correct?

ANDY GARRETT: That’s correct, yep.

AUSTIN GRAY: Go check it out. They’ve done a good job outlining their website, especially if you’re in general excavation.

Listeners, thanks again for listening! We appreciate the support. Just like building a local service-based business, I believe Andy mentioned it—focus on delivering quality to your customers and do it to a standard to where they’ll leave you a five-star review. My goal with this podcast is to bring quality people like Andy on who can help you grow your business.

If you feel like we’re delivering five-star quality, I’m going to ask that you take 30 seconds right now and go leave us a five-star review on Spotify and Apple. If you’re listening on YouTube, we’d sure appreciate a like and subscribe. You’ll get notifications when we drop the episodes on Fridays.

Finally, we just launched a new OWNR OPS website. It’s ownrops.com. We summarize all these episodes on Saturday mornings, so we’ll send a newsletter recap. You can sign up for that for free at ownrops.com/newsletter.

Once again, thanks for listening! We’ll see you guys next week. Don’t forget: work hard, do your best, never settle for less.