Austin Gray: Owners and operators, welcome back to the OWNR OPS Podcast! I'm your host, Austin Gray. I have a special guest, Brandon Dixon, joining us. Brandon is a former MLB player, and since retiring from the league, he has purchased a street sweeping business, of which he is now an owner-operator. Interestingly enough, he is managing this business remotely while living in Arizona, and the business operates in California. Brandon, welcome to the show! How’s it going?

Brandon Dixon: Thanks for having me on!

Austin Gray: Yeah, man, this is super exciting! I remember Ruff introduced us. He called me and said, “Man, you gotta meet this guy Brandon. He just bought this street sweeping business. He’s jumping straight into it.” So that was super fun when we got to know each other.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, he’s been super helpful for me. I reached out to him because, honestly, I had no business experience before this. It was all sports-related, and I was like, “Okay, I need to find someone who can help me with the problems I’m going to be solving and how to go about thinking through those and things like that.” So yeah, he’s been awesome for me.

Austin Gray: How did you come across the OWNR OPS SMB Community?

Brandon Dixon: So, a little backstory: I was playing professional baseball, and one of the big questions that I was super scared of was everyone asking, “So, what are you going to do after baseball?” Everyone knows you’re not going to play forever. You know, if you make it to 35, that’s a long career, and there’s a lot of life after that. For me, I never wanted to be in an office and have someone tell me what time I have to be there, what I have to wear, all those things. So I was just kind of looking for opportunities.

I stumbled into that. Early on, I was reading "The Almanac" and his thoughts on creating wealth and having assets. You know, I did the "Rich Dad Poor Dad," kind of that whole progression. Then learning about buying businesses, I found a podcast where Cody Sanchez was on with Eric Jorgenson, and she was just talking about buying businesses and things like that. It just kind of matched up with the lifestyle I was hoping to get to at some point after baseball. Yeah, I came across the SMB world on Twitter, and after that, I just tried to learn as much as I could. I’m still—there's still so much to learn—but now it’s kind of fun because I get to take what I learn and put it directly into my business, try things, mess up, try again, and do all that.

Austin Gray: Yeah, that’s awesome. Man, before we jump into business stuff, can you tell us a little bit about your backstory in regards to just playing ball?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, so I grew up in Southern California, played baseball my whole life. I was lucky enough to go to college at U of A. I was drafted my junior year by the Dodgers in the third round, and then I played the last ten years before this year professionally. So about five in the minor leagues, probably four in the minor leagues, and then I made it up with the Reds in the big leagues in 2018. I was sent over to the Tigers for 2019-2020. Then I had a year in Japan, and then came back for my last two seasons with the Padres. The last two years, I’ve been in San Diego. That’s kind of my baseball period, and yeah, it was a super fun career. Towards the end of my career, I was kind of like the 26th man type of guy who was up and down. My last two years, I think I moved between the Tri-City area, Paso, and San Diego. I think I moved my family more than ten times, and that’s a little bit stressful with a lot of moving parts. We had a few offers to play this year—some minor league ball—and my wife and I were exhausted. We were tired of it and ready to try something new. I had already bought this business last May. So yeah, that’s kind of where we are now, catching us up. Ten years of playing professionally and lots of fun, lots of great experiences from it.

Austin Gray: So you actually bought the business before you were done playing?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, so my buddy, one of my best friends, is my business partner. He had helped his first boss with this business probably, I don’t know, eight to ten years ago. It was his boss’s dad’s business. He’s a CPA, very financial; he’s currently the CFO of a company. He was working on this business a while ago. Well, the owner of the business reached out to him probably last April and told him that he had sold the business fully seller-financed, and the guy stopped paying him. So he had to come out of retirement; he had already moved out of state. The business was falling apart—the trucks weren’t taken care of. He was like, “Hey, if you want to buy this, like, you’ve worked on it. I know you did a good job when you were working on it. I’ll give you a great deal. We have some contracts in place, but it’s not what it used to be.” My buddy and I had been looking at different opportunities and things like that, and I was playing in San Diego.

When we closed, I was in the Padres' clubhouse, and my buddy called me and said, “Hey, we’re the owners of a street sweeping business in Ventura, California, so let’s do this.”

Austin Gray: That’s great! Can you talk to us about the structure of the deal? I remember reading one of your tweets about it, and it sounds like you guys got a pretty good deal on it, right?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I mean, to be honest, this wasn’t the typical business that you’re going to go out and look for. We weren’t really looking for a turnaround. So when he brought it up, we went through the financials, and it was losing money every month. He was doing maybe $15,000 to $20,000 in revenue a month—not actively growing, didn’t have Google Ads, and a lot of things like that. So we thought there was room for growth. We just kind of researched the equipment that he had. He had about two trucks that were running and in decent shape and twelve total trucks that had just kind of fallen by the wayside. Our yard was just a dumpster. It was tough. So we weren’t super interested other than, like, okay, can we for sure get our money back based on the equipment cost?

We offered him $90,000 fully seller-financed, and he was like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Within the first week of running things, one of the two trucks that was running had a pretty big issue—its elevator broke. Basically, that cost us an extra $15,000 right off the bat. We reached back out to him and said, “Hey, this equipment is not nearly as nice as you said. We’re having a lot of issues. Can we take off another $30,000?” The guy was like, “Yeah, just do whatever you need. I’m not worried about the purchase price fully seller-financed over five years. I just want this business to survive and make it.” So let’s do whatever you guys need to do.

Austin Gray: That’s crazy to have someone like that who’s willing to work with you, that’s almost unheard of.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I think he was 75 and having some health issues. He was having to run it from out of state because he had already moved out, and it wasn’t an attractive deal. I think I just looked at the month before we bought it, and he had lost $7,000. That was its net profit for that month, and so it was going to be a task to take on. We thought, “Okay, at a minimum, we could sell all of this equipment for maybe $120,000 if we’re lucky; more likely, $100,000.” So if we can just do typical investment advice, like if I can buy this for $60,000 and try and run it for a year. If everything falls apart, we’ll sell all the equipment, get our money back, and see what happens. So it was kind of my low-risk way of getting into a business and getting to learn the skills that I had no experience with. Taking on a huge SBA loan or something like that for my first shot and learning on my dime sounded really scary, and this was a good middle path of learning everything while also not taking a huge financial risk personally.

Austin Gray: Definitely. There had to be some conviction there, though. About, “Alright, this business is losing $7,000—or it lost $7,000 last month. What was the conviction of, ‘Hey, I think I could do this, or I could X, Y, and Z to get it back to either break even or profitable pretty quickly?’”

Brandon Dixon: Honestly, I was playing, and I had a good income. My business partner had a good income. We both thought, “We don’t need to make money for a little bit on this. We can wait it out.” There wasn’t a ton of due diligence to do; my buddy had worked in the business eight to ten years before that, and at its prime, the business was doing just under a million in revenue. So we knew that there was work out there if we could grow it and get some relationships, get some contracts. We just thought, I trusted him that there’s some opportunity here. It fit the bill of having recurring contracts. We looked around this area, and there was only one other company that we could find who was doing what we were doing within 40 to 50 miles. So we thought, “Okay, if we could just be the guy in this small area, we could get our revenue back up, we could get profitable, and slowly get there.”

Austin Gray: What were some of the first changes you made whenever you took over ownership?

Brandon Dixon: All of the basics. The former owner hadn’t raised prices in, I don’t know, four or five years. We raised the prices to—we just called around and asked, “Hey, I’ve got a project for street sweeping, what’s your hourly?” Everyone was somewhere between $165 and $195 an hour, and we were at $135. I think we were at $125 or $135, and I was like, “Okay, well, first off, we gotta raise our prices; we’re $50 to $60 an hour below.” So we bumped that up to $165 and then $185. That was a big one. We added minimums on the hourly rates, so we don’t do anything less than four hours.

Then we did a new website, a professional website. We started SEO services, Google Ads—kind of the basic things to be online and get some calls and traction. We started to see some success there and doubled down on that. Since probably January or maybe February, we started a lot of cold outreach, lots of cold calling. Anytime I’m in town, I come in, and I’ll just drive around and look for construction sites, hand out business cards, just start to meet other companies. I think we’ve sent out, I set up some cold email campaigns, and we’ve sent out probably 10,000 emails. We’re just kind of spreading the word to anyone who could be a customer and doing the basics.

Austin Gray: That’s awesome. I always say it—it’s like, since I played football, I always say that you’re doing the blocking and tackling. But for you, it’s like, what would that term be in baseball?

Brandon Dixon: I would just say, like, the fundamentals. You’re catching the ball, hitting the ball, and playing good baseball. You’re just doing the fundamentals. You have to catch the ball, throw the ball, and hit the ball. That’s the only thing you can do. You don’t have to make the flashy play; you don’t have to be diving or hitting home runs. If you can just make contact and put the ball in play, you have a shot. So that’s kind of what we’re doing: let’s make sure we’re hitting all of the basics that we’re learning, and then from there, we can see what opportunities we have. We’re in the process of catching up on some of the cold outreach projects that are coming up, and finally, some HOA contracts are coming up, just adding on the recurring side and then adding on the project-based side.

Austin Gray: I love what you’ve done, though. You had no experience; you didn’t really think twice about it. You just jumped in headfirst and said, “Hey, we’re just going to do the fundamentals well, or block and tackle very well.” You know, it’s like some of our listeners are sort of in that phase of just starting. Like, you heard Brandon just talk about it. He talked about a couple of things—he came in, called around, asked for fair market pricing, revamped the website, had a professional design the website, invested in SEO services, and then did some cold outreach. Since doing those three things, what has the difference been?

Brandon Dixon: It’s been, I mean, we’re growing pretty quick. I would say, for a sweeping business, I don’t know for other businesses, but the most recent month—we’re 14 to 15 months into this. We just started focusing on California in January. If we go back a little bit, we took some of the old equipment that couldn’t be registered in California because of all of the California emission laws and everything. We had old equipment; we were going to take it out to Arizona where we live and start a company there along with this business, and we did that for about four months.

We were just getting crushed by taking them into dealerships, getting the trucks back up and running. Every job we sent a truck to, something would break that cost us five grand. Within, I think, three months of doing that, we both looked at each other and said, “Okay, we’re profitable, or we’re close to profitable in California. We have contracts; we aren’t even focused on that. Let’s go there.” So we cut everything outside of California in December. We went from doing $177,000 the month before we bought it, and this last month we just did $75,000 in revenue. We’ve been profitable since January 1 since we cut Arizona. It hasn’t been crazy profitable, but as we build up the monthly revenue and the recurring revenue, each month has been a little bit more profitable. It’s been a fun transition to see and kind of wait it out to not really know if it was going to happen, and slowly it’s happening.

Austin Gray: That’s so awesome! I am unbelievably excited to hear that. You know, it’s interesting—some people who are listening to this who aren’t in the game of entrepreneurship, you know, it may just be like, “Oh, you guys just talk numbers all the time.” But to me, it’s just the scorecard in which you view your performance. Right? Am I putting in the inputs that are leading to the outputs that we want? And as former athletes, like, if you’re competitive in any way, shape, or form, if you’re getting into a professional business, like, it is just the scorecard in which you track yourself. So hats off to you for the growth! I'm excited to hear that! You’ll have to text me whenever you hit your first $100K month.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, that’s the next goal! Coming into January, it was like, “Okay, we got to get to a $50,000 month.” Then once we hit that, we were like, “Okay, $75 is the next goal.” July was our first time hitting that. So yeah, we keep kind of moving the goalpost, but it’s been a lot of fun to go on that journey and kind of see what it takes to get there.

Austin Gray: It always moves, but that’s the fun part of it. My question for you is: when did you first invest in a professionally designed website and SEO?

Brandon Dixon: That was our initial investment. When we bought the business, we rebranded it. It was Pacific Sweep originally. We were like, “Okay, there’s nothing—there’s no value in that. Let’s change things up.” We did Cleaner Streets; that’s the name of the company. We hired a guy right off the bat and said, “Hey, build the website.” We didn’t know much about SEO, but thankfully this guy did. He built it based on that, and he wasn’t doing a ton on the Google Ads or SEO; we didn’t really know the importance of that probably until January. We spent maybe $200 a month on Google Ads, and he was doing just a little SEO. We found a couple of agencies, and we started with a couple; it didn’t quite work out. Then we came across Striker, and we’ve been using them for the last three months, and they’ve been crushing it. They’ve just been killing it. We’ve had two of our last three months be our highest revenue, like back-to-back-to-back. It’s been really fun to work with them and see what they're doing. We’re letting the professionals take care of the things that I have no idea how to do.

Austin Gray: Man, I’m over here smiling while I’m on mute because I’m like, “Oh my gosh, you’re about to—if you haven’t already, you’re about to get it.” Those guys are incredible, and I think you’ve probably seen me talk about it, but the results we’ve gotten from them are just crazy. I don’t know what kind of wizardry they’re doing on the back end, but they’re doing something right.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and honestly, reaching out to some other people in the SMB who had used them, I was just like, “Okay, we—I actually ended a contract early and was paying for two months because I just wasn’t happy with what we were getting.” Our former ad agency—I found out we were getting calls from people asking for jobs, and they didn’t speak English. I couldn’t track the numbers; I was never getting where the numbers were coming from. Finally, they sent me a call log, and they had launched a campaign based just off of clicks. Slowly, I don’t know how it works, but slowly, we were advertising that we were hiring. I was spending money every month that we were hiring, and we weren’t hiring. When I finally got that, I was like, “Okay, you guys need to cancel this contract; this is what’s happening. I’m wasting money every month,” and I hit up Striker, and they took over everything. I’m really glad I did. It’s been good.

Austin Gray: This isn’t a plug for them, but they’re awesome. They’re doing great work, so it’s been really fun.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I love the brand, by the way, Cleaner Streets!

Austin Gray: Yeah! We saw it was available, which was a little shocking. There’s actually a big company, which we didn’t know about, probably an hour or two from us called Clean Streets. We’re kind of in the Cleaner Streets space, where we can offer other services as well, like pressure washing. We offer asphalt quotes if people call. We’ll do anything. We don’t do all the work, but I can find subcontractors or whoever. It’s been fun. The brand is like the foundation for a scalable company in this space.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and it’s just like, I mean, they were Pacific Sweep. It was great, but we were looking for something that could have a little bit of a brand and was generic enough to match some services but also very specialized. If you were looking for street sweeping, you were looking for a cleaner street, and it just fit.

Austin Gray: It definitely fits! You’ve got a beautiful website; it looks professional. Hats off to you for making that decision early on. Because as Bod and Andy probably told you, SEO just takes time. For any of you listening, the sooner you can make that decision and the sooner you can do what Brandon did—invest quickly in a modern design website and service pages and service areas—you’re doing everything right at this point. I'm just excited to see whenever this takes off for you.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and I think, honestly, with some of the results—I know you’ve done it a little bit with like the hot tub and power washing and kind of doing other business sites and getting leads—it's something that I’m kind of looking into for some of the ancillary services that we could offer and send out to other people. I’m probably going to pull the trigger on something fairly soon.

Austin Gray: Here’s the thing: once the light bulb clicked for me, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is a huge opportunity.” The hardest thing for me right now is not to go start a hundred of these. I’ve reeled myself back in because, I mean, once I saw how quickly Andy and Bod can, one, crank out a website and then, two, start ranking it, I was like, “Oh my gosh!” So to answer your question, yeah, we did that with a power washing site here in Colorado. We started getting leads pretty quickly, and I ended up selling that one to one of my friends or a friend of a friend, and he just did a contract with Sherwin-Williams for like 28 trucks the other day—just from a lead from the website.

It all comes back to this whole principle that I think we all kind of saw, right? Let’s find the unsexy business. But now, as Millennials, we know how we search for services or products. So if we can position our brands digitally in front of our customers, then those are going to be the brands that get elevated for the next one, two, three decades. For the people who are not doing it, I hate to say it, it’s just if you’re not online, you’re going to get left behind.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and when I first started doing research about this, I would just Google “street sweeping” in random cities and try and find anyone who had a decent-looking website. I came across a few street sweeping companies, and one of them—well, every one of them that I found that I was like, “Oh, they look like they’re doing a good job,” I just called them and spoke with the owner, asked what they were doing. The sweeping community has been pretty awesome. We have an association that I’m in. I’m one of, I don’t know, 70 owners who just do street sweeping that are in this association. So I just call one or two a week and just pick their brain on the industry. One of the first guys I found had been in the business for about 30 years. He was like, “Hey, a lot of guys just do word of mouth. That’s great, but you really got to spend some money on SEO.” For him to say that—I was thinking, “Okay, this guy’s got 30 or 40 trucks.” He had told me he sold his last business, which had 25 trucks at its peak, and he was back starting over again at three trucks.

It was like a light bulb moment of, okay, you can look a lot bigger and better than you actually are and hopefully get some jobs to get there. You want to look better until you can. It’s kind of a fake-it-till-you-make-it, and that’s what we’ve done. We had no idea what we were doing when we started. I still have no idea what I’m doing with street sweeping, but I’m slowly catching up on the operations side, and our online presence is really helping us get there.

Austin Gray: Let's talk operations of the business. First, let’s start with your business model. What is a street sweeping business, and why do customers pay you for service?

Brandon Dixon: Obviously, I don’t know every market and how it is for each state, but California is very strict on everything, especially environmental things. There are about four different ways that we can offer our services. So we have the basics of cities hiring out services. They just, you know, they put a bid on a website based on the curb miles that they have. Those are typically year contracts that get renewed for three to five years. We have one of those that came with the business. We bid on three or four others. Outside of cities, you have HOAs—any private community paying for their own sweeping. In our area, there are tons of gated communities, so we’re doing outreach to commercial property managers.

Then you have the other side of the commercial, which is parking lots that you’re doing after hours. This could be anything from your local grocery store to an industrial. Like, we do a cardboard manufacturing company, and they just have a ton of dirt—like, tons of cardboard and stuff. We go there two or three times a week. We have another one that’s a lot of manufacturing companies. So that can be parking lots that are just basic grocery store strip malls to industrial.

Then on the contractor side, any commercial project—any commercial construction project that dirt could be tracked off of the site—they’re responsible for cleaning up. Also, they’re responsible on-site; if it’s a big enough project, keeping the dust mitigated so it’s not blowing around and making a mess everywhere. They typically get pressured by the cities and counties by their inspectors to come in and say, “Hey, you need this service.” So that’s kind of when they call us; usually, they’re about to get a fine or get their project shut down, and we come sweep.

Austin Gray: Are those contractor one-off customers? If somebody calls you on a big development project, are you selling them on like, “Yes, we’ll come this week, and then we’ll come every two weeks?” Or do you have any sort of recurring mechanism to that?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, so we currently have a big home developer, and they have twelve communities that they’re building currently near us. We have them on a twice-a-week schedule for each one, and that’ll be for their entire project. Once they’re done building it, I’ll ask whoever they’re going to use for management to come in and upkeep it. Right now, we’re doing all the dirt track out with our construction sweeper—it’s a big broom that kicks up all the dirt. Once it’s done, we’ll do a vacuum sweeper that’s mostly just light leaves and debris. When a community is finished, what they would have—so we have quite a few on like a recurring weekly or twice monthly, but most of them are typically finishing up their job and getting offsite and need everything cleaned up before they close everything.

Austin Gray: How are you finding those?

Brandon Dixon: A lot of that’s been calling. I think the majority of them find us on Google. I’ve gone through—I mean, I’ve scraped hundreds of lists, but anything that relates to road construction. Caltrans is the name of our road services in California. So any project that comes up on CN Trans that’s somewhat in our area, I’ll look and find every single person who’s bidding on it, and I’ll call them and say, “Hey, if you have any projects in the area, we’d love to help you out.”

Any commercial site that I drive by—like yesterday, I was going to Starbucks, and they’re putting in a Chick-fil-A or something in this shopping center, and there’s a bunch of dirt and stuff. I just walked up to the guy and said, “Hey, you know, introduce myself. You guys are moving some dirt around—do you ever hire street sweeping?” He said, “Yeah, I actually need someone next week.” He gave me the number for my office, and we’ll book you next week. It can be as simple as that, or you know, guys calling in a panic.

Austin Gray: How do you bid those jobs?

Brandon Dixon: Those are all hourly. Those have been the easiest for me to bid because I know if it’s non-prevailing wage at $185 an hour, I know my costs; I know everything. We’re going to do a four-hour minimum—typically, they need us on for four to eight hours. I think our average one-time invoice is just under eight hours, about six hours. Sometimes it takes us an hour and a half, and we’re still billing them for four hours at another site billing them for four hours. When things are really cooking is when you have a few customers paying you throughout the day for travel time and stuff like that.

That’s how we do those for the other ones that are contracted on monthly recurring services; it’s a little different. You’re kind of doing it based on how big it is and what debris you’re going to have. With the vacuums, we don’t have a high dump; the truck can’t dump into a dumpster. It’s just out of the back. You have to take it to a disposal site. Currently, that’s when things get a little bit more expensive.

We’re at—they just went from $55 a ton to $95 last month—so our expenses have gone up quite a bit in that area. You’re just kind of trying to bake in all of that pricing. The hardest by far is the municipal contracts—okay, there are 20,000 curb miles a year that we’re going to sweep. How much time is that going to take me? How much disposal are we going to have? There’s a lot of guessing going on, but we’ve been able to be very close. We actually won one recently, but they took it away from us because of our experience, so I was pretty bummed.

I was in Hawaii when I got the call from them, and they said, “Hey, you guys were the low bidder, we’re excited to get going with you. Can you get rolling in seven days?” It was like a moment of sheer panic because I needed to buy four trucks, hire six drivers because we would be going overnight with two trucks. I thought, “Man, I don’t know how we’re going to do this.”

I called some sweeping owners I’ve been in touch with, and all of them were like, “Oh, no, they shouldn’t do that; they can’t do that. That’s not industry standard; no one could do that. Even the biggest private equity companies buying trucks for new contracts don’t just have six trucks waiting around.” So I reached back out with a little more confidence of, “Okay, this is what’s normal,” because this was my first negotiation. I shared that with them, and they were totally on board. “Okay, we’ll do September 1 start date.” Even then, I was like, “This is going to be hard.”

We started going down that process, and they were going to our references and gave our references two days to respond. We had three references, and only one of them responded, and it was our smallest contract that we had. So they basically reached out to us and said, “We aren’t confident that you guys can do this.” We technically didn’t fit the profile; we were supposed to have three years of experience with cities, and we only had one. So they ended up pulling it from us and gave it to the current vendor. Those have been interesting, and we’re getting better on that side. There are some exciting opportunities to grow on the municipal side, but for now it’s slow and steady where we’re at.

Austin Gray: There’s nothing like just shooting your shot. Then whenever you get the contract, having that “Holy crap! I got to go figure this out” moment, but you’re going to say yes, and I’ve got seven days or fourteen days or whatever it is.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I feel like those are the moments that really challenge you. I don’t know how you feel about this, but when that’s happened to us in the past, it’s the moments where it’s like, “Okay, this is pushing us to the next level.” Because it’s challenging us to think about how would I go get those four trucks.

One: where would I even get those? Two: how would I finance them? Or three: would I lease them? Four: how do I need to price them? I don’t know about you, but did it make you think through all those scenarios?

Brandon Dixon: Oh, yeah! So I actually—we had four trucks ready. We had financing already set up. We were about to pull the trigger on the trucks, and I was just waiting. I sent over an email and said, “Hey, we’re ready; we just need a letter of intent for this contract. I’m not buying these trucks until I know we’re getting this, otherwise, I have four trucks that I don’t have work for.”

So yeah, it was definitely that moment of, “Okay, if I do really want to grow this business, then I have to be able to do these city contracts. I need to be able to fulfill a four-truck, six-day-a-week service.” And if that’s the goal, why can’t I learn that now? Why can’t I just get there today? Operationally, I knew it would break a lot of things. It would smoke out the areas I hadn’t been paying attention to, whether that’s mechanically or, “Do we need a separate yard close to them so we save on travel time or whatever it is?”

We can start to become more efficient once we’re in that position where it smokes out what’s wrong with the business. That was how I looked at it. I knew we could have sweepers out there; we could figure out a way to get it done. It might not be perfect for a few months, but eventually, after the end of a year, we’ll be in a position to take over any city contract after that.

Austin Gray: What was the size of that contract? Can you talk about that?

Brandon Dixon: That was—we won it at $950,000 a year in revenue. The city contracts are different now because they’ve classified sweeping as prevailing wage, which I’m having to learn about since the beginning. There are obviously union companies and so many dynamics to that. Basically, the prevailing wage rate for paying our drivers and everything comes out to— with all of the benefits for these projects, they’re getting $77 to $80 an hour that the state’s mandating we’re paying. Yes, it’s insane. Our rates go way up on prevailing wage jobs; our drivers were going to make at least $150,000 sweeping five days a week.

I was pumped because I had guys who had been with me from the start, and I was like, “These guys are finally going to get a payday. This is sick. I love taking care of my guys.” We tried to bake in all of the costs. We tried to figure out everything that it would do. We were lucky the city had a disposal yard that we weren’t going to pay for, and they had a fueling area, so we weren’t going to pay for fuel. Two of the big variables I could just put away and two of my costs were taken care of. Now, it was just figuring out truck costs, wages, overtime because we’d be on Saturdays—all of that. Once we got that number, I put in a pretty good buffer—like I can still mess up and be profitable. Our only other competition is a huge private equity company, and we have a lot less overhead than they do. We don’t have the facilities or the managers or all of the stuff that comes with them, so we’re getting close to being an annoying pest to them.

Austin Gray: That’s great!

Brandon Dixon: Yeah.

Austin Gray: How much do those trucks—if you were to go purchase those, you mentioned financing. What would the term of those trucks look like, and how much would each of them cost you per month?

Brandon Dixon: We currently have—we were based off—we have two trucks financed. We’ve had to replace all of the equipment so far, so we’ve bought two off auction, and we got those at really good deals from the city of Scottsdale. We got each for about $17,000, which is kind of unheard of to get a working truck at that price, but we were going to get some nicer equipment that we thought could be more reliable.

So a few years used, those trucks were running anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000. We can get about a five-year term. Typically, you're looking at anywhere from 8% to 10% interest. I calculated, “Okay, if I have $200,000 worth of truck payments, I just put that into the bid. I’m making sure every truck on this project is getting paid for.” There’s still some risk there because I could win the bid and have the trucks on it for two years and then they could kick us off, and I still have those trucks. Their value holds pretty well.

You know, you can find 2015 or 2016 trucks that are in the $120,000 to $150,000 range. They hold their value, and I would have someone else paying off my truck loans. Those came out to be roughly $3,700 a month per truck.

Austin Gray: It would be just over $4,000—we had one truck that we could use, and we currently don’t have work for, so we were only going to have to get three for it. I think we would have had to replace it at some point during the contract. So that was kind of the plan: if we could keep truck payments at $4,000, I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but that’s like $12,000 a month, so if we could have three of those—we’re all set—we can make it work.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah!

Austin Gray: I love it. I love it. These are things I think through because, as you know, we operate heavy equipment in our business as well. I always like to have this conversation to see how other owners look at heavy equipment. There are so many different ways you can skin this cat. You can buy with cash; you can purchase under a finance agreement; or you can lease your equipment. This is something I try to extract from every very successful business owner because I feel like this is an area that can either make or break you.

I’ve looked at it in a very similar way: “Hey, this truck is going to cost me X amount per month, and then here’s my total equipment burden. I’m going to add this into the bid; here’s my wages.” But it sounds like you were going down the finance route and just thinking this truck is going to cost me roughly $48,000 a year in payments. If I operate that for several years, it’s still going to have some sort of value that I could resell for if everything hit the fan.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and it was, you know, buying equipment for a job that I have for at least a year—that’s pretty rare. We just bought one of our newest trucks for the construction side, so now we have two construction brooms and then two trucks that we send on the vacuums. They can do HOAs, cities, and they can do a construction site if they need to; it’s just not ideal. We needed something a little more reliable on the construction side, so I called out to each of these owners and said, “How do you know when to buy a piece of equipment? I need something reliable.”

I just had to—we just had one construction truck, and it broke. It broke a strange piece on the elevator that brings all the dirt up. A strange piece snapped in half, and it was going to take three weeks to get. I can’t just not service these guys. So we used our vacuum, and we just made it work for three weeks. But in that process, I was like, “Okay, we gotta add a truck.” One of these owners said, “If I have to turn down five jobs a month for back-to-back months, I know I don’t have enough equipment because I know five jobs I’m definitely making that payment.” I was at the point where I was like, “Okay, if this truck stays down, I’m going to have to start turning down jobs.”

We were able to make it work. Guys were working overtime, but we made it work. We decided, “Alright, let’s just purchase another truck,” and we went ahead with that.

Austin Gray: I’ve worked very hard to—I think every successful business owner I know, if they operate equipment, I always try to ask them, “What’s the answer there?” One of the business owners who I respect the most—he’s a great operator—he's here locally. I’ll keep the business private just for his privacy’s sake, but last week I was having this conversation with him, and he was like, “It’s just a gut feel. You gotta trust your gut.” I was like, “Thanks, man! That gives me a lot of confidence!”

So right?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and I don’t know if this is just being naive or competitive or whatever, but if I add a $4,000-a-month payment, I’m going to be working pretty hard to make sure that truck’s on the road. That happened: we bought the truck, we had our best month. This was in June or July—in May, we had our best month: tons of work, tons of construction. This truck is killing it. I was having two construction jobs going at a time, plus our recurring—I was pumped. Then June hit, and the construction jobs just ended.

We took a pretty big dip in construction, and I was fixing all of our other trucks, so it was a super expensive month. I was thinking in my head, “Oh, I made such a terrible decision already.” I started calling; I had slowed down on my cold calling. I had slowed down on our cold outreach, and I just started putting together the email campaigns and all of that, and then things started to get some traction. This last month was our highest on the construction side. We did $35,000 just in construction sweeping.

It kind of lit that fire of, “Alright, you gotta figure this out to make this payment.”

Austin Gray: So taking what you learned from that, how are you implementing principles moving forward?

Brandon Dixon: We now have someone overseas that’s helping me on the operation side. Eventually, I would like her—currently, I’m doing everything from the first call to booking the jobs to invoicing, all of that. She has now taken over the dispatching and communications with our drivers, getting them their schedules and all the details. I have her cold calling and following up with any past customers monthly, and then I’m also cold calling and cold emailing.

I have lists, and yesterday, she called 150 people. We got seven leads and two that want us to send them a proposal. We’re making sure we’re hitting, like, are we calling, you know, what is it, probably 500 people a week? If we can call 500 people a week, we can find a couple of leads that will eventually book outside of what’s already coming in.

Austin Gray: I love that, man. That’s awesome! Commit to the inputs, and then the outputs take care of themselves.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah. If it’s just me, there are times when there are more important things than making 500 phone calls. That’s kind of a thing, a little bit of an unlock that I’ve learned hiring her. Initially, I hired her just because I needed someone who could speak Spanish with my drivers. She’s out in Colombia, and I had a few drivers that had a ton of experience that I wanted to hire, but I couldn’t communicate other than Google Translate. I brought her on as kind of my translator and run operations, and now she’s getting into sales.

I think she closed her first job recently, which she was super excited about, so it’s been fun.

Austin Gray: Is she your only remote hire?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, currently she is. I have a business partner, so we’re 75/25. He’s got the finance background, and he has an accounting firm as well. They run all of our financials, so he has a couple of people overseas that help him with his accounting firm that also hop into our business.

Austin Gray: Let’s talk roles and responsibilities. You hired—well, you delegated first to let’s just call it a back-office assistant in the beginning. Is that fair?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, so that was the first hire. We haven’t gotten there yet, but I’m not in person. I come into town probably three or four days every month and check on things, make sure things are getting done how I want them. Other than that, we have no management in person, only our drivers.

We’re giving them a lot of accountability with taking care of the trucks, and we have a mechanic who works independently, and we contract him. He’s been amazing; he’ll drop everything to come help us. He can fix anything, so he’s a bit of a supervisor as well because when he comes to the truck, he lets me know if these guys haven’t been washing it or greasing the bearings or something like that. Then I get on them, so it’s me and the drivers, our overseas hire, and then my buddy and his back office team.

Austin Gray: What roles and responsibilities does your back-office hire handle?

Brandon Dixon: They’re doing all dispatching. Every day they’re sending out schedules. We’re on Jobber. Our guys have had a little technical difficulties with looking at their schedules—knowing which customer address is the right one, which one is their corporate headquarters, things like that. So I have her sending out maps, their schedule for the day. She’s booking the business once it comes in, invoicing through Jobber. She’s running about 100% on Jobber—everything in that, and then she’s doing the communication with our drivers throughout the day.

If something comes up, if a tire pops, an issue happened, she’s taking care of those issues with a little bit of help. She’s is kind of becoming the operator. Hopefully, within the next few months, I can think through what’s next or just do the areas that I enjoy. It’s been fun to learn that skill of delegating, managing people, and using leverage—having someone else working while you’re working on something else.

Austin Gray: How did you find her?

Brandon Dixon: We used San Passport with John Mater’s group, and she is well overqualified for this position. She was working with a company based out of Mexico, and she was managing over a hundred freight liners—big trucks—helping with any issues with the drivers. It’s a similar role like dispatching, that kind of thing. For her to go from there to two to three trucks on the road, I think there are times when she’s like, “Alright, I want to do more.” So that’s been fun because she’s growing as our business is growing.

Austin Gray: She’s been a big part of that, and she’s probably making more money doing less work with you.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, definitely. It works out for everyone.

Austin Gray: This, I believe, is the biggest unlock for U.S.-based business owners. I was even talking to my wife last night. I’m like, “Man, if I was still working corporate, I would just be that guy who gets slapped on the risk.” I would say, “Okay, I’d go get a software sales job, and then I’d just hire someone remote to do it, and then I’d go get another job and just stack the jobs together.” My wife was like, “You’re crazy.”

Brandon Dixon:

I’m actively going through making our first remote hire as well, and I’m glad to hear that you had success with San Passport. I have not actually met John yet. We’ve engaged on X back and forth, but I need to get him on the podcast.

Brandon Dixon:

I had Baird Klein Smith, have you met him yet?

Austin Gray: No, I haven’t.

Brandon Dixon: He’s a self-storage operator, and his whole team—basically, his whole business is run in Latin America or by Latin American talent. So he actually co-founded a company called Hire Lam. It’s a similar deal. What was the structure like whenever you worked with John?

Brandon Dixon: I think it’s a year membership that you’re paying monthly, and you get—they’ll go out and recruit six hires. A street sweeping business does not need six people right now overseas, but between his accounting firm and our street sweeping business, we probably could use four to five people at least. It fit what we needed, and we just used one hire for that.

It’s been great, and they also have a school platform where they put out a ton of engaging content that is operational or onboarding or any of the questions that you have with bringing on someone overseas, which we knew nothing about. It’s been helpful to have those resources for hiring, delegating, and managing them.

She’s built out our whole Notion platform with all of our standard operating procedures, onboarding procedures. She’s organizing a business that is not an area of expertise I have. I’m usually like a Google Drive guy, and things are just spread out. I know where to search for stuff, so she keeps me organized and puts everything where it should be.

Austin Gray: You and I are very similar in that regard. I’ll be interested to hear how she develops in her role and what roles and responsibilities you give her. What I want to do with the podcast is to bring people on a second time, like six months to a year later, and we’ll give people who are listening the ability to say, “Okay, Brandon was at this stage. Here’s what he was thinking about then. Here are the decisions he made.”

We can come back around in six to twelve months and say, “Okay, did those decisions pay off? How have you developed in your areas, like your responsibilities? What have you delegated?” Yeah, I’d love to hear how that transpires.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I mean, her hire was basically to get Spanish-speaking drivers, but my family—I have a wife and an 18-month-old. We wanted to enjoy it this summer. We did a big Hawaii trip—a three-week trip—because I have some family out there. The goal when I hired her was, “When I go to Hawaii, I want her to be able to manage things so I don’t have to be on my phone all the time and doing a ton of work.”

With the time change and stuff, I could wake up at 4:00 a.m.— which was 7:00 a.m. in California—and work from 4:00 till everyone woke up. I made sure things were running well, and then I could take off. She managed everything for three weeks, and nothing broke. It was our highest revenue-producing month, our highest profit. I realized that I thought so much depended on me, and it was a nice realization that I’m actually not that special; other people can do this job.

I was in Hawaii—on a beach—and my business was making more money than it had ever made. “Okay, this might be too good to be true,” but if nothing breaks and she’s able to handle things and I can just take phone calls, that gives me space to think through those thoughts of six to twelve months: What do we want to be doing?

Are we focusing just on sweeping, or we’re getting a lot of asphalt leads? Do we need to look into maybe buying a local asphalt company, or are we just going to sub out everything? It’s given me time back to think more than just what we’re doing—how to get better at it—and I’m going to keep doing that, but it’s giving me some freedom to think through what’s next.

Austin Gray: I’m laughing here again because I’m literally experiencing the same realizations of whenever you have a team in place. Not only can that team do things very well, but they can oftentimes do things better than we can, especially at their specific roles.

I think that was one of the hardest lessons I learned in the last year because, like you, I’ve only achieved any sort of success by how much effort I put into something. I think that’s the hardest translation to get from sports to business. The only way I would get bigger, faster, or stronger was to go to the weight room and physically just work.

For me, when I started the business, I was physically in the field. I’ve always equated just hard work to success. So, one of the hardest things for me to do has been to let go of the field as we’ve grown. I’m continually reminded of, “It’s not the best use of my time to be in the field.” Even though I still enjoy it and love being there with the guys, like, for example, two weeks ago, I went back into the field to help out, and I was operating one of our pieces of equipment, and the track slipped off and set the crew back like two or three hours. I was like, “This is stupid, Austin! There are a million other things that you could be doing to help this business grow, and you’re coming back into the field where we have competent people who are arguably now better than I am or ever will be at operating equipment.”

Yet, I’m going back and creating more issues for them to clean up. I thought, “This is stupid, and it’s terrible leadership. Focus on what you need to do to help the business grow, and trust the people inside the business.” That was literally a punch in the face, and it’s happened a couple of times recently, but it sounds like you’ve had the same realization: you can hire people, and not only can they do a good job, but they want to do a great job!

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, and I think I have a little advantage in that I don’t know anything about street sweeping. I’m not the expert, so from the start, I’ve had to depend on other people a lot more.

Austin Gray: Definitely. This has been super fun. Before we wrap up, I do want to talk about the transition from sports to business, so you mentioned this is your first summer. Is it weird not playing ball right now?

Brandon Dixon: It was in spring training when things started to ramp up. It was my first year of like, “Why am I not out there?” I had the opportunity to, but frankly, I didn’t pick up a bat after the season. I was solely focused on if I got an overseas job again, I would go play. If not, we were here to stay and work on business things. We didn’t end up getting an overseas job, so we were like, “Alright, let’s wrap up.”

It’s been strange early on; now, honestly, I forget the baseball season is even happening. I have a bunch of friends that I’ll keep in touch with, but a game will come on, and I’ll be like, “Oh yeah, I forgot that’s going on.” It feels like a lifetime ago already that I was playing, but I’m having so much fun learning these skills.

A lot of guys have trouble figuring out what they’re going to do after baseball, and I didn’t want to go just the typical path, so this has really been a game where you’re just picking up skills. It’s just like if I were going to go in the cage and hit and work on something with my swing. If I’m not hitting a curveball, I need to practice that and get that skill. Once I get that skill, maybe something else slips and I need to get that. It’s the same with running a business: I might not be the best on a sales call, so let’s learn how to close better. I might not be the best at doing my bids or managing people, so let’s learn these skills.

Let’s build up this skill set so that when a bigger opportunity comes—or even just this business—we can run it, and I’m not the issue. I want to get out of the way and give the team everything they need by being the best leader. I think just taking that curiosity that I’ve had from baseball and sports of learning, I was never the most gifted athlete. I wasn’t a natural hitter. I spent five years in the minor leagues and made a ton of swing adjustments and finally made it up to the big leagues and saw some success. I always had to be curious, and I’ve just kind of taken that attribute into this.

Austin Gray: Well, you obviously figured it out because you hit 22 home runs, is that right?

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, that’s my total. I think in my best year, I had 15 with the Tigers, and I led the Tigers in home runs in 2019, which fifteen’s not very many for a team leader. We were pretty bad, but I enjoyed it. I had a lot of fun.

Austin Gray: That’s awesome! So what are some of the skills that you have identified right now? Let’s say top three: if you were to take a correlation in baseball, like, “Alright, hitting was one of them,” or “Hitting a curveball.” If those were the skills in baseball, what are the skills in business that you’ve identified in this season of life—call it the next six to twelve months—that you’re going to focus on just putting in the reps to get better at?

Brandon Dixon: I think, kind of what we touched on, the whole leadership side of things. I think being a good leader is also being a good delegator and having clear expectations, communicating that well, and putting people in a position to do good work. Putting the right people in the right positions and things like that is one.

I think curiosity is huge; I’m constantly listening to podcasts, reading books. I just finished—I hadn’t ever read "The E-Myth," and that was a classic I just hadn’t got around to. So just constantly learning because the more I’m learning and the more I talk to guys like you and people in it, I realize there’s so much I don’t know.

Yesterday, I had Cody Sanchez and her team come out and interview us, and just asking her questions, I realized there’s so much I don’t know. She’s at whatever level six in owning businesses and running a team, and I’m on level three. I have a business; we’re now profitable, and we’re just getting going.

It’s just kind of a game of, “What can I get out of this? What can I learn, and what skill set can I take from whatever opportunities I have?”

Austin Gray: Definitely. Love him or hate him, I came across some of his content recently, and one thing he said that resonated with me is, “What’s the next boss that you need to beat?”

If this were a video game—I wasn’t much of a gamer growing up; I was always playing sports or outside—but I did play some Call of Duty in the dorms and whatnot. So it’s like, “What’s the next boss you need to beat?”

What is that in your business right now specifically?

Brandon Dixon: I think the next boss—I don’t know how many more municipal contracts are coming up around us, but I think the next boss I need to beat is continuing to have the growth we’re having while I stay out of the day-to-day.

That’s kind of the next boss I’m focusing on. Also, for me, right now, what is next? Am I going to do something online, like an online business? I’d like to do something related to this industry—whether it’s in a physical business or just helping other street sweeping owners. I don’t know how many there are, but there aren’t a ton doing over a million, but there are a few really big ones.

If I could help other owner-operators go from that $300,000 revenue to a million or do something like that, I’d really enjoy that. I haven’t really gotten there of what the next boss is, but I’m kind of in that phase of having some freedom to start to think through what that is.

Austin Gray: Cool! I will be excited to stay in touch and hear how it continues to go for you.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, I appreciate it! I’m enjoying watching your journey as well and keep sharing everything you are!

Austin Gray: Thanks, man! Running a business is not all rainbows and perfect every day; it’s hard. A lot of people online, I think, play it up. It’s difficult, and it can be a grind. So it’s fun to see people who are honest and open and share the hard things too!

Brandon Dixon: I do appreciate that! I mean, that was the whole mission in the beginning: even just starting this podcast. I was like, “Selfishly, if I can go interview people who are in the same boat—maybe two, three, or even fifty steps ahead of us in like John Wilson’s case—that’ll be great.”

When I had him on, he stated where I was at, and he said, “When I was at the million mark, here’s what I thought about; here’s who I needed to hire next,” and then that will get you to X. Those kinds of conversations along with you and I talking, I think you and I can learn so much from each other if we stay in touch. "Hey, here’s what I’m going through right now. Here’s what I’m trying to do. Here’s how I creatively thought about this. Here’s what worked and what didn’t."

Selfishly, that was the reason for creating the podcast in the beginning. Then in turn, I was like, “Well, if we just do that on air, I think other people could learn from that.” It’s been a fun journey so far, so I’m glad you are enjoying some of the content. Once again, I do appreciate you being on.

Brandon Dixon: Yeah, of course!

Austin Gray: Where can people find you online?

Brandon Dixon: I’m on Twitter. I’m a little bit on Instagram. I think my Twitter is Brandon A. Dixon, and I’m just sharing what I’m learning, sharing the mistakes I’m making. I’m basically building this in public and seeing what happens. So if you want to follow along, I’ll be on there.

Austin Gray: Sweet! Anything else you’d like to share with the listeners?

Brandon Dixon: No, I appreciate you having me on and taking the time!

Austin Gray: Awesome! Well, guys, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS Podcast. Notice how I mentioned OWNR OPS. I’m releasing an update episode. I just recorded it last week, but we’re going to transition from the Owner Operator Podcast to OWNR OPS, and the reason being is because the inspiration came from a supplement company called Mountain Ops.

Mountain Ops is specifically for backcountry hunters. When I saw this brand, it immediately made me think, “Okay, these are tools and resources that can help me succeed when I’m in the mountains.” Whenever we think about OWNR OPS, I want you guys to think about these tools, resources, strategies, and conversations with people like Brandon that can help you succeed as a small local business owner.

So once again, thanks for listening! If you’re enjoying this podcast, please take 30 seconds and leave us a five-star review. Just like building a service business online, Google reviews are super important. Same thing with podcasts, so if you don’t mind leaving us a review, we’d appreciate that. If you’re listening on YouTube, we’d sure appreciate a like and subscribe. Don’t forget to work hard, do your best, and never settle for less. We’ll see you guys in the next episode!

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