Austin Gray: I'm interested to learn more about SMB. There's a community aspect, so there's kind of a feed where you can ask questions, a course on hiring offshore, because I've been hiring offshore since 2009. There's a CEO course on how to run a proper company, a tax-free wealth flywheel course teaching people how I have cash-flowing businesses and tax shelter businesses that reduce my tax burden to almost zero. Then there's a legal section, a finance and tax section, a buying a business section, and negotiation, and there's personal development.

[Music] [Applause]

Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS Podcast. I'm your host, Austin Gray. In this show, we talk all about starting and growing local service businesses. Our mission is to help 10,000 people start service businesses by 2030. All the smartest people in the world are competing in tech, AI, e-commerce, and that leaves a big opportunity in things like plumbing, HVAC, roofing, excavation. Stick around and listen to these episodes; you're going to primarily hear about us interviewing other owners and operators of these unsexy service and trade businesses.

But today, I have a very special guest. His name is Kriss Bergethon. I had him on the show in Season 1. He's a very seasoned entrepreneur. He owns a $15 million-a-year e-commerce business. He buys car washes for the depreciation on it. He has started multiple service businesses; he has an email newsletter business. He's just a serial entrepreneur. Kriss has come up with a system where he has put all of his knowledge about starting and growing businesses into a knowledge base.

He is calling it SMB University. He is giving you the MBA for starting or buying small businesses. I hope you guys enjoy it. How have you been?

Kriss Bergethon: I've been good! I've been working on this SMB Uni project, so that's super fun. I like being in creator mode and creating content, doing a lot of interviews like this, trying to build up a social media presence. You know how it is—there's a lot of stuff to do in the startup phase.

Austin Gray: So, tell me more about it.

Kriss Bergethon: It's basically an MBA for entrepreneurs. The inception was I was with Christian Ruff in November, at kind of a mastermind thing. We were talking about his coaching—you know he has a coaching business—and I was thinking, like, I get asked to coach a lot or mentor. Christian was like, "Yeah, you know, you should do that. You'd be good at it."

I was just telling him how I don't want to be beholden to my calendar, right? I don't want to have—because at the time, his day was just booked with coaching calls. That's how coaches work; they just have to roll calls if you're really going to make any money doing it, and I just have no interest in doing that. Time freedom is my number one thing right now.

So, it just sort of occurred to me that if we could do this asynchronously, I could build courses and do interviews like this, and then people could consume them on their own time. I could do live calls, live Q&A sessions, and then people would get the kind of the 80/20 of it, sort of a mentorship, and consume it on their own time. So that was the inception.

It's going to be $97 a month to start; lots of interviews. I just got off the phone yesterday with Bruce Marx, who is an SBA lender. His clients are literally putting like 2% down on their deals and taking down like $7 million plumbing companies, which is crazy to me. They have very unique traits and they have industry knowledge; these aren't bozos.

But it's really cool getting to talk to all these people, getting to talk to you, and all these people that are doing really cool things. So, it's an incredible project!

Austin Gray: So, tell me about what you've got going on, because I know in the winters, your normal business is Bearclaw. Just tell us what Bearclaw is, really quickly, for my listeners who don't know what you do.

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, for sure! It's interesting you bring that up because I'll get into the podcast too, which is something I'm really excited about. That's one of the most fun things about the podcast—just having an excuse to talk to people who are smarter than you and who you can learn from, or who think differently than you.

I brought you on as one of the first guests last year, and it wasn't because you were operating a business in fire mitigation like Bearclaw does, or excavation or snow removal; it was because you're a savvy entrepreneur, and I have respect for you. Building businesses is all relative. Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, I guess, especially someone like you.

So, I look at this and think, "Dude, what can I learn from Kriss and apply to my specific business?" That’s been sort of the premise for the podcast. So, you know, it's interesting you bring that up because it doesn't feel like work in any way, shape, or form, and we've got some really cool opportunities that I've monetized, and I've actually been able to get paid for the time that I'm putting in, but it doesn't feel like work at all.

Austin Gray: Jobber just sponsored the podcast, so that's really exciting as of this last week.

Kriss Bergethon: No way, man! That's amazing!

Austin Gray: This episode is brought to you by Jobber. Jobber is an all-in-one software management solution for home service and trade businesses. I've been using Jobber since day one when I started Bearclaw. We use it for things like quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and most recently, I've been using it for our snow plowing services.

I love it for snow plowing because we're able to create a job specific to the client's profile, and we're able to track visits each time we go out and plow. This is important because each visit is logged in the system, and it's ready to send invoices at the end of the month. So, I never have to worry about how many times we plowed a specific customer's account because Jobber takes care of all of that for us.

If you are interested in an all-in-one solution for managing your home service or trade business, look no further than Jobber. They're offering six months at a 20% discount if you use the link in the description below.

But to kind of answer your question for Bearclaw, it's funny where you and I are having this conversation because you were an integral part in me starting this business. I don't know if I ever told you that, but I had gone down the whole route of buying a business, looking into that buy-then-build sort of thing.

I looked at this one business—I grew up working in a construction business, and my dad has a concrete business, so I was no stranger to just physical labor. I came across this business that leveraged skid steers and chippers and all this stuff, and I'm like, "Man, that would be a cool business to buy."

I think you may have looked at the business with me, or we just jumped on a call to talk through it, and you were like, "Dude, you're wired to create. Just go start that business. You can do it in your own market." So, I did that, and here we are a couple of years later.

I think I just looked at the numbers—we've since started, and I believe we just crossed like $1.7 million in total revenue since starting the business. Since starting—it was last year's revenue—2024 ended just shy of a million, I think we finished at $980.

Austin Gray: Are you comfortable talking about your profit?

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, I mean, we operate kind of in between 20% and 30% margin.

Austin Gray: Wow, so somewhere around 200,000 to 230,000 in your third year. And that business is super seasonal. Like, it really stops when the snow flies, right? As far as the land clearing. And I know you’re doing some plowing too.

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, building a service business in Colorado or a town where you have drastically different seasons is a unique challenge in itself, especially in a mountain town where you get heavy snow.

Another business I had looked at buying at that time—when I was going to do the buy-and-build—was a snow plowing business, why? Because recurring sticky revenue. You know, you look at the economic cycles, and being a part of construction my whole life, you see the boom and bust.

So one thing I wanted to eliminate against was, "Well, I don't want to be a garage door installation business that is just installing garage doors on new construction." Right? You've seen Steamboat; you saw the ups and downs of Steamboat and other mountain towns, right?

So I wanted to be able to build a business that could offer services that are must-have, necessary services, and snow is that.

I'll take you back to the beginning—what does Bearclaw do? Let's answer that question. Bearclaw right now does land clearing and forestry work specifically for wildfire mitigation.

I don't talk a lot about this online; a lot of people just think we do land clearing for new construction, but our big market is wildfire mitigation. You see what's going on in LA right now—wildfires are a huge threat, and you know the climate. It’s an existential threat, it is.

The way that we solve that is through forestry cleanup work, and we leverage heavy equipment to do so. I started the business just because I was building a house here in Grand County and wanted to pay attention to where the needs were here throughout the build for the trades.

Very quickly, I had a homeowner or a property owner in a neighboring subdivision see that I had a skid steer. I was doing kind of the cleanup work on my lot. They asked if I could bring my skid steer over, because they just got this letter from an HOA asking them to do cleanup work.

There is this certification called Firewise certification for subdivisions that basically states they have done a certain amount of mitigation, aka forestry cleanup work, to meet these standards so that the insurance companies can confidently insure them.

So anytime insurance gets involved, my light bulb kind of went off—I'm like, "Okay, if insurance companies are demanding this, let's go do it."

So, I did that. It was like a $3,500 job. Long story short, I had created a Google My Business profile to set it up really quickly, and I got a call as I was leaving the first job from a guy in Chicago, and he said, "Hey, my real estate agent just referred me to you."

I’m like, "How the heck is this happening?" Long story short, the real estate agent had done a quick Google search for a tree contractor, and I had positioned my Google My Business profile in town on Main Street, right? And I popped up right next to her office.

So she just gave my business number to this guy, not even knowing anything about me, not even knowing who I was. This guy turns out to be a great friend to this day and is literally my first real client that came from an online lead. He's like, “We need to do clearing, and we need to do fire mitigation.”

So I went over there, and I'm like, "I don’t even know what to charge," but that one that I did was $3,500, so I charged this guy $4,500 and did that in like a day and a half.

You know, it comes down to this thing of not being afraid to just jump in and figure it out. I see a lot of people online who reach out, and I'm sure they reach out to you as well, saying, "Hey, should I start this business? Should I start this one?" I'm like, "I don't know your market, but just go try it."

So, that's what we did. We jumped into the market, and I just pay attention to where the needs are. I listen to our customers, and whenever they tell me they need a service, I'm like, can we offer that service with our same or similar equipment? If yes, let's do it.

Right? And what do you think you invested? Because you were renting the skid steer, I'm assuming. Did you own it, or did you rent it?

Kriss Bergethon: I was renting equipment all year one. So, I sent my first invoice in August, mind you; I'm building a house at the same time, and our first kid was due. She came in September, right? I was just winging it at that point, just renting the equipment as it came up.

I didn't even think about buying it because I had so much other stuff going on. Winter came, and I looked back at those first three months, and we did $60K in those first three months.

So I just said, "Am I going to do it or am I not?" I made a quick decision on December 30th to pull the trigger on a skid steer, and I had it lined up, ready to go for April of the next year. Then we went full-go the following year.

Austin Gray: So, $60K your first year; what was the second year's revenue?

Kriss Bergethon: $650K.

Austin Gray: I was going to say, so you can see that trajectory. You went from $60,000 to $650,000 to you're going to a million almost last year. Do you worry about that? Do you think about what kind of growth you're going to do or do you just kind of go for it, hammer down, and worry about the numbers later?

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, I set a goal for two this year, and it's backed into the equation. I think we can do $750 on the fire mitigation side, $750 in dirt, and then $500 on snow.

The way that we'll get there is we've got our ads dialed in on wildfire mitigation, so I've got a couple of bids out there right now that are multi-six-figure contracts in the Summit County area.

Wow, the easy expansion for us is to do Grand Summit and Eagle counties. My main guy just loves septics, and he loves dirt.

The way I’m thinking about this is like, “Look, you and your brother just go build the dirt side. We’ve already got some relationships with the builders here, and we've got some guys who have said, 'Hey, here are these amounts of foundations if you guys want to do this.'"

So I mean, it's pretty easy in the mountain towns to have six-figure foundation digs. So, really, all we need to do is six or seven or eight of those and then some septics along the way. I think that will be a manageable amount.

Then, on the snow side, like this year, we're getting our name out there, but we’re going to bid some larger HOA contracts next year, which I believe we'll be able to get.

Austin Gray: Nice!

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Yeah, you touched on something that actually I found—my first business was excavation in concrete. And the real estate agents, they are a huge lever to pull if you're in home services because they've got a $750,000 home that is trying to close a $750,000 deal.

For us, it was sewer excavation because you know they have roots in the sewer or whatever, and if we needed to fix that line, I could charge $10,000 on a job that was every other time I could probably only get six for just because everybody just wants it done.

“Just get it done. I need it done tomorrow so that this $800,000 deal isn't held up.” I could upcharge 30 to 40% if I could rearrange my schedule and get it done quickly. But it's also a way to tap into where are the gaps in the local service companies.

So, talking to an agent and saying, "What is the service?" Sometimes—when I first started, it was camera sewer line camera work. There weren't enough guys who could run a camera, scope the sewer, and that changed over time; eventually, everybody was doing it because cameras actually got really cheap.

But finding those cracks—people who are looking to start up or even buy a business—they're like, "Where are the needs?" Talk to the real estate agents because they're dealing with home services every day, and they know, "Yeah, I can't get a guy to service the swamp coolers," or "I can't get a guy to camera the sewer line," whatever it is.

And they're willing to pay!

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, 100%. I think real estate agents are key. And the other two I would add are property management companies and the local home builders.

The way we got started in dirt—whenever you're starting a business, I know there's a lot of people out there who are like, "Focus on one thing and one thing only." My mindset was like, "Man, I got this skid steer. Whatever service somebody's going to pay me for to get cash in the bank, if I'm confident I can deliver five-star service, I'm going to say yes to that in year one."

I think our focus is going to become narrower. We're able to say, "Hey, we do fire mitigation on our tree side, and that's what we specialize in." Then, on the dirt side, we’ll be able to focus on septics long term because I believe that’s where the opportunity is in our market based on talking with the real estate agents, the GCs, and the property managers.

But in the beginning, cash flow is king, at least the way I've seen it. And that's been my approach. If somebody's willing to pay me for something—when I was in the early days, and when it was just me and the machine, and I was doing sales and estimating everything—if I'm there doing their wildfire mitigation, and somebody says, "Can you do my driveway?" and I'm confident I can deliver that, you better believe I'm saying yes to that.

We sort of built and expanded into dirt based on hearing the fact that all of these three people—real estate agents, property managers, and builders—told me, "I can't get somebody to show up and do a driveway repair."

Those are nice $8,000 to $10,000 jobs. It’s just the larger excavation companies who have a big hoe, a big loader, or big dump trucks.

It's not worth them mobilizing for an $8,000 to $10,000 job, right? It costs them $8,000 to $10,000 to get their equipment there.

So they're like, "I'm not going to do it. I'm going to stay on the $50,000 to $200,000 jobs."

That’s kind of been our MO: just get the foot in the door, listen to the pains and the problems, and build a solution around that. Start getting the ball rolling. It’s just crazy how you get in the market and one thing leads to the next.

People start talking, word of mouth starts taking place, all the while you're doing your digital marketing, running paid ads, and doing Google My Business and getting five-star reviews. All that stuff just works in tandem, and your phone's just ringing like crazy.

Austin Gray: Yeah, we started off when I had that excavation company. We were licensed and bonded in probably seven or eight Denver suburbs, and we spent a lot of time driving job to job to job.

The way that worked, we had to roll jobs every day—was a different job, and it was just a ton of fuel, a ton of wasted time mobilizing. By the end, we figured out that the City of Denver was putting a great big camera down the main sewer line, and they could look up into the taps for the home lines that were coming in—the service lines that were going to each home.

If yours was misaligned—and they were all misaligned because they were clay; they were built in 1922—the City of Denver would just send a letter, and on one block, there might be 10 or 15 people who got a letter.

So I trained myself to look for that truck—that City of Denver camera truck. I would just wait about a week because it would take them about a week to get the letters out, and then I would just put a flyer on every door.

By the end, we were gathering. People would get together at the local coffee shop or the local bar. I would get calls from all the neighbors saying, "We're meeting this Friday night at the local tavern; beers are on me. We'll discuss what to do about this. I can save you a lot of money."

Then we could shut down the alley, and we could bang out four of them in a day.

Sometimes we could do six incredible. Where I was doing one a day, you know, and I was charging $4,000 or $5,000, now I could do four a day, and I would charge $3,000.

The customers were thrilled because everybody else was bidding four or five. So that's the snowball that you're talking about, and that's where you'll probably find that you're just banging out foundations—you're just going to go down the row.

Hopefully, you get a whole block of them, or whatever, you get a whole mountain worth of them. Your equipment just stays there all summer, and you're just knocking out driveways and foundations.

That's where the real money is.

Kriss Bergethon: Absolutely! Because the more you build that reputation, you get opportunities with developers, and you get the inside scoop on, "Hey, we're going to do this development next year," or "This is planned for 2026. Would you guys be interested in it?"

It's like, absolutely! Yes, we can dig foundations, and we will do 20 of them, you know what I mean? Those are the things that get really exciting.

But all this stuff takes time. I think it just comes down to getting in the market, being willing to start somewhere, and then figuring out your focus as you go. At least that's been my approach.

Austin Gray: Absolutely! I totally agree with that. You know, I think a lot of people would look at your situation and say, "Well, he got lucky that he's in a small town that didn't have an excavator, and in a city, there’s probably a hundred of those kind of guys."

But the city has 100 times more opportunity, and there's always these gaps in the market—there's not enough of this or not enough of that. A lot of times, the companies start out like you are, where they're doing $200,000 a year and then a million and two million.

Eventually, you may get to the point where those smaller jobs don't make sense for you anymore, and there's going to be a gap in the market.

Somebody could start that business with a small excavation company, so there's always an opportunity. You've just got to kind of find where it is.

I learned this lesson in the opposite way. Two years ago, a guy that was working at my car washes approached me and said, "I can't get a loan for dumpsters. Can you help me?"

He was just complaining about how banks would never give him a loan. Of course, my entrepreneur ear perked up, and I said, "Oh, you need some money, huh?"

He had kind of a trash business—he would go into an estate, a home that was foreclosed or being sold by a real estate agent, and it needed to be cleaned out. A lot of them were farm properties that had a barn full of crap or whatever it was, so it could be a week or two to clean this property up.

He could not find dumpsters for a reasonable price. Waste Management and Republic Services charged a fortune for these gigantic dumpsters, and they wouldn't fit in the space.

He was like, "I need these smaller, more flexible dumpsters. I want to just buy them, use them myself, and then offer them to other people."

I said, "This sounds like a pretty good business," and it was blowing up on Twitter. There was the dumpster guy that was talking about what a good business it was, so we bought them.

I didn't really do any due diligence on it; I just kind of trusted this guy because he was a friend. It turns out about 40 other people had the exact same idea at the same time.

Now there are dumpster rental places all over the place, and the market has been totally squashed. There's not that much demand for them anymore. It turns out that most contractors love the really big dumpsters because they can fit bigger stuff in them—like a drywall guy needs something that'll fit a bunch of drywall; the framer needs something that'll fit a lot of 2x4s.

I should have done more due diligence. I should have realized that there were four dumpster companies already in town that had five-star ratings on Google Maps and had capacity that my friend just hadn't called.

I assumed that he had figured out that these guys had no capacity; turns out they had plenty of capacity. That was a massive mistake on my part that I'll never make again.

Even though I only wrote a $50,000 check, I don't know that I'll ever see it again. It was a lesson learned, so I will always do the due diligence.

I will always Google it, call four or five of the top rankers, find out what they're charging, how much capacity they have, and just get a feel for the business.

I did this in Moab—sorry, I'm kind of rambling here, Austin—but I was looking at a self-storage facility in Moab that was for sale. I called the nearest competitor and pretended to be a contractor who needed several storage spots, and she said, "Oh, you'll have no problem finding storage spots here. They've completely overbuilt; there are three new facilities that opened up in the last year. There's way too much storage in Moab."

I said, "Thank you very much," hung up the phone, and never looked at that deal again.

Kriss Bergethon: Oh man, picking up the phone is critical!

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That's s-t-r-y-k-e-r digital.com.

To go back to what you were saying about other competitors and whatnot, there are definitely other contractors here. We have tree contractors, excavation contractors, snow contractors—the gap in the market that I found was that not a lot of people were optimizing for a digital presence.

As these businesses change hands, you know, everybody on SMBX or Twitter talks about how the baby boomers are retiring and businesses are for sale; go buy that business—which for the right person can be a great opportunity.

There's another type of person who are people like myself where it's like, "Why would I pay you a million and a half bucks and get an SBA loan for that when I can just start it and market to the customers because there's nobody who's optimizing online anyway?"

That was the route that I took, and I just believe that if you do that—like you were saying—that initial research to figure out in your market if there are other contractors or businesses in your industry optimizing for things like a Google Business profile. Check out their website. Is it clunky? Does it offer free estimates on the website? Does it have a phone number?

Look for those little things, and you can quickly find—

Kriss Bergethon: Do they answer the phone?

Austin Gray: Exactly. A lot of them—you'll call them, and the voicemail's full. I don't know how people operate like that, but a ton of them do! They just don't respond—there's zero response.

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, that's right. So that's where I think the opportunity is.

It’s like sometimes construction can just be a good old-boy club. That's fine. If you've got 60-year-old builders who have 60-year-old subs, if they’re up-and-coming GCs or property managers, there’s going to be a new wave of subcontractors because you have to look at it as a network.

The top players are going to use their older guy relationships, and the next wave is going to use the next wave of subcontractors because they can't get the older guys to show up on their projects.

If you just align yourself with the builders and the up-and-coming property managers or real estate agents, then if you take a long-term approach, over the next decade you’re going to be the one who gets all the business.

So that’s something I’ve been thinking about recently as we build this thing.

Austin Gray: And I think you hit a great niche that didn’t require... Did you have to get any kind of licensing with the county or the city for what you do?

Kriss Bergethon: So for septics, which is where I see another big opportunity and where I want to focus our dirt crew, we did have to get an OWTS, which is on-site wastewater treatment system certification, in Colorado.

You just have to have that to tie into the house, okay? But as far as fire mitigation goes, we do our best to stay up to date on all the best practices, but there is no specific certification that we have to have. Some of the guys in this industry will have ISA arborist certifications, but that's more for just climbing trees.

I sub all that work out. If we got hazardous trees, we just hire subcontracted climbers. That’s smart.

Austin Gray: Yeah, it’s very, very dangerous work. Don’t blame you!

Now that you’re really tapped into the builders and just the county in general, agents, everything, are there other niches or subcontractor niches that you see are underserviced that you don’t want to mess with but if somebody was moving into your county and was looking to start a business, you would say “Start over there because there’s nobody doing it, and I don’t want to do it?”

Kriss Bergethon: Well, I mentioned earlier, yeah, there are—I’m hesitant to because I have talked to a lot of other contractors who are selling their business, and I’ve signed some NDAs, so I want to respect their privacy and whatnot.

Yes, there are other trades. I would say if you go into any mountain town as a millennial or Gen Z right now, you're going to see the same thing across all mountain towns.

All the guys in the trades right now who have all the business are at least 60 years old, and they are tired and ready to go to Mexico and retire on a beach. It doesn't matter if it's drywall, septic pumping, or garage door repair—just pick one. There’s going to be an old guy there that’s almost at retirement age. I can guarantee you!

It really just comes down to: if you want to start as an owner-operator, where’s your certain skill set? What do you enjoy doing? What could you be good at doing in the field to go get the business off the ground?

Just go do some basic digital marketing, fulfill the jobs in the beginning, deliver five-star service, get some five-star reviews, and then you're off to the races.

Austin Gray: At one point, I think you called every general contractor in the county, didn’t you?

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, I have! Even right now, I still have one spot that I go to lunch, and I just—every day that I'm out working, I'm just thinking of who have I not contacted yet and who could I just call and buy lunch for today? Property managers, builders, other subcontractors.

Dude, talking to other subcontractors in your industry, you will get the lowdown on everything. Like, I just came across another dude who wants to sell 45 snow plow accounts for the value of his truck, and I'm like, “Yes, I’ll do that. I'll just buy your truck and claim the depreciation and go add the accounts to my list.”

It's awesome, man! It's awesome what you've built and what you're building with this pod, and I'm just—Austin, for my audience, Austin is just a doer. He really just goes and does it.

He built Bearclaw from scratch—a million-dollar company in three years. Incredibly impressive! And a podcast from scratch.

If anything you could take away is that he’s incredibly inspirational for you and that if you lack funds for an SBA deal to buy something, you can absolutely start it.

I don’t think we talk enough about startups, especially in home services. I know I'm at the point in my life where I’ll probably never buy another business.

I won’t say never, but it would be a rare case where I’ll buy one because I know how to start things, I know who to hire. The thing you touched on with your—I think it was with the septic guys: you hired one guy, and it opened up a whole new avenue for your business.

You trust him, and you've built a culture that he wants to stay in, and now you can just send him to the jobs.

He requires very little supervision, and it’s just a cash machine for you. That doesn’t mean there aren't headaches, there aren't problems— you certainly have to sell the work, you have to follow up, and perform the work.

But hiring that guy changed your business, right?

Kriss Bergethon: Absolutely! I would even add to that. Going back to the early days, whenever you and I were texting, you were sending me voice messages all the time. You were like, "Dude, just go find an office manager and hire them to do all the BS stuff that you don’t want to do."

That’s right! Make a list of the things that you want to procrastinate or you end up saving till the end.

For me, it was just like all the little stuff—managing your insurance policies, making sure your auto pay is set up. Those little things can slip through the cracks if you’re just a doer and want to go out and grow.

Right, the back-office stuff—anything that can be done from a computer—even just sending quotes and following up with the customer.

Austin Gray: Yeah, especially in invoicing—all that stuff. So I took that advice from you, and you reframed it in a way that it was possible for me because you were like, "Look, you need this person. But there are also people in your community who need this job."

At that point, it clicked—I was like, "I'm almost doing my community a disservice if I don't go find this person or offer this job."

And you were like, “There’s 1,000% somebody there who wants a four-hour-a-day part-time job at $25 an hour and can do this probably better than you can."

How did you...

Kriss Bergethon: I remember I went to every coffee shop, and I was like, "Here's what I'm looking for." And I just talked to the baristas.

Austin Gray: Yeah, you talked to the baristas! I love that!

Kriss Bergethon: Oh yeah! Because they’re in tune with everything, right?

Think about how many people come into a local coffee shop and spill their guts to that person behind the bar. It's like the old bartender!

I just said, "Look, this is what I’m looking for; this is our company; here’s our website; here’s what I’m going to pay; here’s what I’m offering."

Just so happens one of the girls who was working behind the bar was like, "Well, I’m looking for a part-time job."

I’m like, “Perfect!”

Austin Gray: Yeah, absolutely! I mean, baristas probably are making $15–$16 an hour, so when you said $25, their ears are like, "Wait a minute!"

Yeah, and then she ended up keeping her part-time job at the coffee shop and then started part-time with me, and it was great because you don’t need eight hours in the beginning!

Kriss Bergethon: No, no!

Austin Gray: So do you still have the same person or did you hire a new girl or what's your office person now?

Kriss Bergethon: I went to Hire LATAM. That girl was way overqualified; she worked at Bloomberg before. I knew I would only have her for a short time, and I was glad to have her for the 18 months that I did.

But yeah, I went to Hire LATAM, and in our SMB Uni course, we show you how to hire offshore so that if you don’t want to use a headhunter, you can just do it yourself.

Austin Gray: Tell us about that hire; that's amazing!

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, and I think the most important thing is hiring offshore really challenges you to put something down in SOPs. I’m a big fan of using Loom, so I have a Loom vault where I record myself doing something and I’m like, "This is how you do it, and this is what I need done."

Then in the recruiting process, I say, "Here's what I need you to do, and here’s an example of what a day would look like. Here’s an example project; do this."

Then walk us through—what is she doing? Is she answering the phone?

Kriss Bergethon: No, she’s not. I am still answering the phone, especially in the wintertime because I view snow as another startup. I just want to keep a pulse on the market; I want to keep a pulse on what people want.

Austin Gray: Smart!

Kriss Bergethon: So she’s handling the insurance; is she doing bookkeeping? I have a hired bookkeeper through my CPA, which is just—basically everything I’ve delegated is like website SEO, Facebook ads, content creation, social media posting. She’s more marketing then too.

Austin Gray: That’s great! Everything else—let’s see—bookkeeping, CPA. I’m just listing all the subcontractors I’ve hired out.

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I’m interested to learn more about SMB—Is it SMB Uni or SMBU?

Kriss Bergethon: SMB Uni!

Austin Gray: Yeah, I was thinking about SMB MBA, but that’s a little bit of a mouthful.

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, so we've got a ton of courses—I've got a course on hiring offshore because I've been hiring offshore since 2009.

We got a complete process on that. If you want to hire your own, you'll get free access, Austin, so you can come in here and check it out and participate.

There’s a community aspect, so there's kind of a feed where you can ask questions and things like that.

There's a CEO course on how to run a proper company, there's my tax-free wealth flywheel course, where I teach people how I have cash-flowing businesses and tax shelter businesses to reduce my tax burden to almost zero.

Then there's a legal section, a finance and tax section, a buying a business section, negotiation, and personal development—with things like how to win friends and influence people, and extreme ownership.

What I did was I had a developer build an AI book summarizer, so that any Kindle book I push a button and this AI summarizes the book, because most of these non-fiction books—even my favorite books—there's about a pamphlet's worth of real information in there that’s usable.

I was sick of reading a book for 10 or 12 hours that took me a couple of weeks, only to get to the end of it and think, "Oh man, I could have figured that out in about 15 minutes!"

That was the impetus for that. So, I have 20, 29, or 30 books summarized in there on every subject matter.

If anybody wants a book summarized—like there's another Gladwell book out, but I don't have time to read it—you just send me the title, and I'll have AI summarize it and put it in the member's area. Then we're summarizing podcasts too, because there's a lot of good ones.

I don't know if you follow Acquired; it’s sort of like the deep dive history of a company. Like they did Costco—it's a great podcast, but it’s three hours, and I don’t have three hours to listen to a podcast generally.

Some of the stuff on Rogan's is really good too, but it’s three hours, and I'm usually like 30 minutes in thinking, “I don't have time for this.”

So we have a podcast summarizer in there, all the courses, and like I said, there’ll be live Q&As. I'd love to have you on a live Q&A when we go to get some membership in there and talk about your story of startup and stuff.

It’s just a cool program for—I think there's going to be a lot of business buyers in there, or what I would call entrepreneurs who dream of buying or starting a business, and are kind of lost on how to do that.

And then there's going to be a lot of folks who are kind of a year or two into it, and are really in that stage where they're just completely overwhelmed and feel like they need some guidance, like, “Holy crap! What did I just do?”

Yes, they're like, "My god, I'm working 16 hours a day, and I should be working 24."

We’ll teach a lot of lessons about delegation and hiring an assistant like you just talked about, hiring people to take the smaller stuff off your plate so you can focus on the big stuff.

That’s kind of the impetus for it, and we'll launch in a couple of weeks here, and hopefully, people want it. You never really know until you do, but it’s interesting to have— even for me, right?

I’m in my third year of business right now. To have access to someone with your knowledge, skills, and experience—I believe is going to be helpful.

You've offered that to me as a friend. Just because you're a good guy, I'm sure it’s because it's like, "Hey, maybe I see some of myself in this kid, and I want to see him succeed."

I'm just going to share some of the learning lessons that would have helped me early on, and for that, I’m eternally grateful, Kriss.

I’ve told you that multiple times, but for any listeners listening to this: some of Kriss's advice has shaped the early success of the business.

Because if I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying to do quoting, invoicing, manage insurance, manage my email, do all this stuff, and then all of a sudden I get this government contract, and I got to be there as one of the guys, like foreman, project manager, and equipment operator with nine other guys going, “I mean, I was pulling my hair out for sure,” but I probably would have pulled every single strand out had I not hired that back office.

So my point with this being, you're charging $97 a month for this. I mean, that’s a no-brainer in my mind if you’re in the early days of either taking over a business or starting a business because I mean it when I say it—Kriss's advice has shaped the early success of the business.

If you're listening to this on the OWNR OPS podcast, go back and listen to the first episode that we recorded with Kriss because he tells his story.

He actually started in sewer excavation, sewer repair. He bought it with an SBA loan, right? But now he’s a serial entrepreneur and has multiple businesses and a $15 million a year e-commerce business.

You’ve done—I believe—some SaaS here and there. You've done coaching, consulting, car washes; you just have a widespread knowledge base.

This is really interesting to me, and I think what you're doing will have value. It’s just like, how do we end up getting the word out about it?

I hope that this podcast can bring us some people as well. I'll be doing a lot of podcasts on it, and I really appreciate you having me on.

Kriss Bergethon: I really appreciate you coming on for me too because I think your story is amazing!

I’m excited! You mentioned it was a no-brainer—that's kind of the point, to make it so that it’s a no-brainer so that people put it on the credit card and think, "You look at your monthly statement, and you think, 'That is the most valuable thing on the statement—the SMB Uni is the one I'm getting the most out of.'"

At this point in my career, I've been doing this for 22 years now, and I really only invest in projects that I see lasting 10 years or more, and that’s what I see for SMB Uni.

Everything I do has to have some sort of underlying purpose. That was one thing about the dumpster thing; it was just kind of a money grab. I was like, "There, I'll invest this money; it'll help a friend, but it'll also hopefully I'll make a lot of money with it."

When I’ve done that in the past without some sort of bigger purpose, it’s never really worked out.

The bigger purpose here is to help people get into entrepreneurship. I do think if you have the grit and the hustle to make it go, entrepreneurship is your highest calling for your career. It will give you more freedom and more wealth than anything else ever will.

I think there are a lot of people who can pull it off who are scared to death. Hopefully, SMB Uni gets you over that hump and helps you get to the point where you can do it and do it successfully.

That’s the reasoning behind it, and I’m excited about it. Thank you so much, Austin, for doing this today.

We kind of co-hosted, and this was really cool! I love our conversations.

Austin Gray: What’s the medium for communication and course videos and things like that?

Kriss Bergethon: It’s a platform called Circle. You know what Circle is?

Austin Gray: I had never heard of it until now.

Kriss Bergethon: Yeah, it’s kind of a cross between Facebook and a course in Udemy, or something, where you have these courses, and then you have a news feed.

So that'll be the platform for it, and hopefully people like it. I don't see any reason why they wouldn't—it should be valuable.

Yeah, I'll be in there, so send me the link, and I'll jump in.

Kriss Bergethon: Well, when’s the launch date?

Austin Gray: We’re looking at—let’s see, today is January 24th. I have a kind of an arbitrary goal for myself: I wanted the inception to launch in less than 90 days.

I had the idea on November 15th, and so I’m hoping to launch somewhere around February 7th or 8th—that's a Friday or Saturday.

Kriss Bergethon: Cool! Hoping—yeah, that’s the goal.

Austin Gray: We’ll time this episode up after you launch.

Kriss Bergethon: Okay! Love it man.

Alright, man! Well, it’s good to talk to you as always.

Austin Gray: I love our conversations!

Kriss Bergethon: Thanks, Austin!

Austin Gray: Yeah, man!