Austin Gray: You went from a coffee startup with negative cash flow to a profitable demo business. What did the Oregon branch do in 2024 from a topline revenue perspective?

Topline for Oregon was 964,000. We're going to try to hit 1.5 in Oregon. [Applause]

Austin Gray: Hey, welcome back to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast, where we talk all about starting and growing local service businesses. We’re on a mission to help 10,000 listeners start and grow seven-figure service businesses by 2030. In this episode, I have Kent Sheridan joining us. Kent was a former coffee entrepreneur turned demolition business owner. Kent realized that starting the sexy Millennial-inspired craft coffee business wasn't a great way to make money. When his in-laws offered him the opportunity to do a demolition project for them, he quickly saw a business opportunity. He has since run straightforward into it and grown it into a seven-figure business with multiple locations in Florida and Oregon. Stick around to hear Kent's story about how he transitioned from a coffee entrepreneur to an unsexy, profitable demolition business.

Kent Sheridan: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I've followed you on Twitter, and I like what you put out there—no nonsense. I think we're cut from the same cloth; I hope so at least.

Austin Gray: Would you pronounce the coffee business name for me?

Kent Sheridan: Voila.

Austin Gray: Okay. You made a six-year run at that, and then now you're in the demo business. Can you just kind of share your story about a little bit about starting the coffee business and moving into a more unsexy service trade business?

Kent Sheridan: Yeah, I think that it's a little non-typical for someone to come from the coffee startup world and then jump over to the trades. I thought it was pretty different as well. For about a decade, I was working in coffee—whether being a barista, building coffee carts, and then eventually working on Voila, which was creating high-end instant coffee. I thought that was really fun, cool, and exciting; however, it didn't make a lot of money. It got a lot of notoriety, and we were doing really interesting things. We ended up making the highest-scoring instant coffee ever made. I created a process to extract, freeze-dry, and package instant coffee. We were doing it for people all around the world: from Dubai, Malaysia, New Zealand, and all over the US. We were making instant coffee for people like Black Rifle and high-end coffee roasters like The Barn in Berlin.

It was a super complex business—food manufacturing and freeze-dry manufacturing in particular—super capital intensive. I mean, I would say the bare minimum startup capital needed is like $8 million to have a decent go at it. I didn't know that getting in; we did a Kickstarter and some early fundraising, and we kind of backed our way into that business a little bit. It was just a lot to manage with a small team, and we never really crossed that break-even point.

That taught me a lot about simplicity and the importance of simplicity in business and cash flow. Just having good positive cash flow is critical. At some point, I had to close down that business. We didn’t have partners funding the shortfall of our negative cash flow each month, and I had a little rocky relationship with some partners there. I ended up having to shut it all down without knowing what I was going to do next. Sure enough, my in-laws approached me—they had a remodel company—and they said, "Now that you're done with that fun coffee business, you should look into getting into the trade." I was like, "No way! Sorry, I was just in food and wine; I'm a little too cool to be in the trades. It's kind of not my deal." They said, "You're not making any money."

So they pitched me on demo. They were using some guy to do the demolition part of their remodels and said, "We have a need for this; that’s all we know—we have a need for demolition." Somebody to come in, do a good job, and we can give you the jobs that we have. I was like, "Okay, let me create a little financial model here; let me plan this out for this real simple business." I’m used to real complex stuff.

I made a one-year model, and I was like, "Whoa, okay, this actually looks pretty good; it makes some money." It looked really simple, and I thought maybe this is worth looking into. We made a little partnership with my in-laws; they trained me, put a little startup capital in, and got me a van, some equipment, and tools. We started there, and I just immediately fell in love with it. I love working with my hands. One of my favorite things about the coffee manufacturing business was working on the equipment and fixing it. I’m very physical and mechanical; I like that portion of it.

Starting in demo and having that work be right in front of me—my job was to go in, look at what you’re going to demo, and just start—was less conceptual. It was just so nice. It was so great to have a business that was straightforward: you go in, do a good job, get paid. That’s how I started, and it ended up being a really great decision. I’m very thankful for my mother-in-law trying to arm-wrestle me into considering demo.

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What about that financial model that you put together made you have that "aha moment"? What did that actually look like numbers-wise?

Kent Sheridan: This is really funny because I feel like I’m not great with numbers, but if I sit and focus on it, I feel like a lot of clarity comes to me through building a model. I just asked them a lot of questions, like, "Alright, how many guys does it take to demo a bathroom or a kitchen, and what is that going to cost?" Through building the model, I was able to distill what it took to hit $500,000 a year. That’s kind of what I came to: somewhere around $500,000 our first year.

I was like, "Who knows if that’s possible? But if we hit that, it looks like it has great margins. That would help me kickstart this new chapter in my life." I spent six years doing coffee and not making a dime from it. I mean, I paid myself a little bit, but it was kind of a moonshot type of business—either we’re going to be multi-million-dollar valuation or we’re going to collapse.

Seeing a model where, even from month two, there was profit was just not what I was used to. I was like, "That alone is worth giving it a shot." From the model, there weren’t a thousand different moving parts—there weren’t crazy payment terms and work in progress between different phases of production. That’s what I was used to, and it helped me wrap my mind around what I was going to get myself into and all the requirements.

I really recommend that to somebody who's considering a new venture. I’ve helped chat with a few people about getting started in a new business, and that’s what I always say: map it out backwards. The crazy thing about that model—which I don’t know how it happened—but I’d forgotten about it. We were about eight months in doing Swift, and I was like, "Let me just pull up where we are now and compare it against that model." Our bottom line was off by less than $2,000. Every month was either plus or minus a couple of thousand—it was dead accurate. I was like, "Oh my gosh!"

We ended up doing, I think, $480,000 that first year, from zero. It was great.

Austin Gray: That's awesome. Can you talk to us about what type of demo you’re doing? Are you using excavators and everything—like full-on demo—or are you going inside and doing stuff for remodels?

Kent Sheridan: It's not full-scale demolition; it's not full tear downs. It's called selective demolition or deconstruction. If you talk to people who are in the commercial game, that’s what they will call it. It’s fantastic.

When people are doing tenant improvements to commercial spaces—let’s say it’s a restaurant like a Crystals and they’re turning it into a bank—places are switching over, or it's a remodel of somebody’s kitchen or bathroom. We go in, we tear all the old finishes, prep it, and get it ready for the trades coming in after us.

Austin Gray: What did your first job look like?

Kent Sheridan: Tearing out a shower with my father-in-law because I didn’t know what I was doing.

Austin Gray: For our listeners, what do you need to go do this stuff? What kind of tools and what does your crew look like?

Kent Sheridan: You need a van and a dump trailer. You need a good amount of hand tools—hammers and pry bars—those are your best friends right there. Then you need a really powerful vacuum, a dust extractor vacuum. Other than that, what we specialize in is full dust containment.

Our name when we first got started was Swift Dustless Demo, so we kind of pitched ourselves as this high-end demolition company, kind of like a white glove service. We're putting up plastic protection, we’re doing negative air, and that’s how we were able to charge a little bit more premium price and position ourselves as a premium trade.

Typically, demolition is the worst part of a remodel—the part that blows your home up with dust. You have to be wiping down everything; it gets in your HVAC system and pumps out dust through the rest of your house. We pitched ourselves as, "Let’s start off your project really well and with a nice white glove service."

Our tools are really simple. I have a Google sheet of all the tools we need—like these are our favorite drop cloths, vacuums, and hand tools. Truly, it is really simple; I feel like you don't need much. Anybody could really start, at least on the residential side, if you have a mind for being thoughtful and careful—knowing when to utterly destroy everything and when to slow down and be meticulous. You can succeed at demo for sure.

Austin Gray: Man, I would suck at that! I like big demolition; I know I love watching what you do. I’d love to get into full-scale demolition someday, but it’s a crowded market for sure, especially in a larger city. There are a lot of guys who've been doing it for 20-30 years. But you know, when there are people doing it that long, there’s always room for a new player to come in and shake it up—take a new approach.

That’s the great thing about the trades: that generational shift. You have somebody new coming in wanting to treat their guys well and have a good workplace culture and branding—like Bearclaw.

Kent Sheridan: Thanks! I appreciate it. We share a similar mindset in that you see it too: people are phasing out of these services and trades, and it just opens up the opportunity. I know you mentioned branding is something that’s really important to you. Everything is shifting online. So my question for you is: how do you differentiate online between being a demo company that brings in big excavators to take down buildings and a more targeted, nuanced service?

Kent Sheridan: Really, it’s about being dustless. Not a lot of people search "dustless," to be honest, and with Swift, we’re mostly a B2B-type business. We’ve been hitting it hard online, starting to get many more people finding us who are homeowners who will use our service. But really, it’s just about hitting the pavement, knocking on doors, and calling remodelers.

In the coffee business, our big play was B2B, and I just have such an affinity for B2B business; I love it so much. Maybe it’s because I’m really bad at doing advertising and Google Ads or whatever. The way I got started was, in Oregon, we were in a small resort-like mountain town—not like Aspen but kind of like it—about 10 years behind it. Everybody knows everybody in that town, but there are some high-end homes.

I would just go door to door for these remodelers and say, "Hey, I’m new to town—or not, I wasn’t new to town—but this is what I want to do. If you want to give me a shot, I’d love to impress you and show you what I can do." That’s how I got my first business. I obviously worked for my in-laws in their remodel business, but we wanted to keep that on the down-low since I was going to be working for their competitors.

You land one account, and they could give you four or five jobs a month after that. The return on actually putting yourself out there—making the call, dropping off a card, or doing some pricing—is really high.

Austin Gray: I’m glad you brought that up because my second question was how did you get those first jobs outside of your mother-in-law's business?

Kent Sheridan: You sort of answered it right there when you said you went door to door to remodeling contractors, right? Is that your sole focus on B2B outreach?

For the first year, we only worked in residential to get started. That was our client; our customer was remodelers—either independent guys or remodel houses where they had a team themselves. It took me kind of getting used to sales again and getting used to rejection—calling people up and saying, "Hey, I’m sure you’ve got a great guy already; I’d love to just get you a good number. This is what I do; maybe it’ll help you. Maybe it’ll be a fit; I’d love it if you could give me a shot."

Austin Gray: Getting your foot in the door.

Kent Sheridan: Yeah, exactly. For anybody starting, you can’t underestimate how valuable it is to just ask somebody for that. Even going back two or three times into the same place, I can think of a few people who I walked into their showroom at their remodel company, and they were like, "Ah, we're good." I'd say, "Alright, I’ll check back in a month and a half." I’d walk back in, like, "Here I am again. Hey, checking in; I’m not going anywhere. I’d love to get one job under my belt, and if you don’t like it, that’s totally fine. Just give me a shot."

When you’re first starting, you feel a lot of impostor syndrome. I think as you break into new phases in your business, you’re always going to have some impostor syndrome—around, "Am I qualified to do this? There are guys who’ve been doing this for 10-20 years." But people really appreciate when you come in with transparency and honesty.

You just say, "Hey, I’m trying to get something off the ground, and I’m passionate about this." I think passion goes a long way. It did for the coffee business when I was pitching investors; that’s when I learned you got to paint the vision for people sometimes if you want them to believe and invest in your business.

The same thing happens in construction and demolition. If you’re a subcontractor or tradesperson, you say, "Look, I’m trying to get something off the ground. I’m going to give you 110% here, I’m going to learn, and I’m going to make sure your job is perfect."

After two or three times, people go, "Alright, let’s get you in on one." I remember one place in particular; they were pretty prickly toward me walking in the door, always shutting me down quickly. They’d say, "No, we’re good." Then I walked in one day, and the front desk person who usually protects the owner said the same thing. Someone else saw me and they kind of knew who I was over there. They said, "Hold on, hold on! Our two demo guys just quit today; can you work tomorrow?"

I was like, "You got it!" They ended up being one of my highest volume clients for that whole year because they were in a bind and I was there at the right time. You never know what you’re going to walk into, and it’s worth it. That was the third time I’d been in there. You kind of have that feeling in your stomach like, "Oh man, I'm bugging these people; they don’t want to hear this." But you have to get over that to get something off the ground because it’s worth it.

Austin Gray: What’s going to happen? They say no for a third time, and then you go home and spend time with your family. At least for me, you’re not thinking about that. It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day, and that was worth it for sure. They ended up spending, I don’t even know how much—$40,000 for a residential client. I mean, that's a lot in a couple of months—in like three months of $40,000 in jobs.

Kent Sheridan: That was worth that third visit; that was worth that uncomfortable conversation.

Austin Gray: Man, I’m so excited that you brought this up. It’s a topic I was talking with somebody about the other day—the reality is even if you get told no that third time, we get so in our heads as entrepreneurs and talk ourselves out of things. But it’s so cool to watch how you’ve pushed through that uncomfortable feeling because the reality is when you frame it that way, who cares if they say no? The other reality is that they don’t care, nor are they really thinking about that after you walk out the door.

They might make a joke about it like, "Oh, he’s here for the third time again," but they're not thinking about you when they go home. We make this big deal out of it, and it’s so cool that you pushed through that because they really don’t care.

So there’s no downside to doing it, and even if they say no for a third time, why not go back for a fourth? It almost just turns into an exchange at that point.

Kent Sheridan: If you can have that mindset—and it’s hard; it’s not easy to have that mindset—but exactly what you said, Austin: frame it as this is all a game. It’s the game of business. That’s what you’re there to do; you’re playing that role in the game of business, and it’s not personal. It may feel personal; it may hurt. You know, still when I cold call people—especially now I’m in Atlanta, I moved my family here and I’m starting from zero again as of last spring—I’m calling all new people again.

Still, I’m like, "Alright, let's dial this number." You get people on the phone who are pretty cold, and they say, "No, we’re good." You can totally let that hurt you, or you could just say, "Alright, I made the call. Check! I made that call; next!" I think that mindset goes so far more than almost anything else when you’re getting started. If you can have that mindset that you’re here to play—that’s what’s required of you—it’s just like if you’re playing football; you’re going to get tackled. That’s part of the game. If you’re scared of that, then you shouldn’t be playing.

Austin Gray: That’s exactly right. You still have to show up the next day, go to practice, and put in the reps. It's no different. I'm really glad you brought it up.

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Kent Sheridan: What does your crew size look like, and how did you think about building a crew when you got that first job?

Kent Sheridan: Quickly, I brought on one guy. I had a couple of interviews, but I brought in one guy, and you know—you’ve done hiring; it’s funny sometimes you can just tell right away if you’ve got a player on your team. That was the first person I brought in, Dan. From the second I saw him, I knew he had it. He wasn’t bringing baggage into work; he was just there to have a good time and put in the work. I brought him on really early, and he’s still with me today.

Just the two of us performed all the jobs together. He’s been with Swift for three years now. Other than me letting go of a few bad apples, I’ve had zero turnover in the business because I want to make sure people are enjoying their work. We’ve all been at workplaces that chew you up and spit you out. I wanted to create an environment where my employees could be honest with me.

That’s what I did with Dan. I brought him on and said, "Hey, this is what we’re here to do. We’re here to serve our customer well, and we’re here to make sure that demos are their favorite phase of the project so they look back and are excited to start their remodel.” We’re here before all the big problems happen before clients go back and say, "Oh, we need more money because we didn’t know this was here and that was there."

I started by interviewing people and casting that vision for what Swift was going to be. We started with one guy, and him and I were just banging out these jobs together, slowly growing from there—trying to fill the pipeline until, you know, two guys wasn’t enough, then bringing on a third, then a fourth. Right now, I believe we have six full-time crew members in Oregon. Then I have a commercial project manager who oversees and runs all of our commercial projects and then a general manager that runs the full show over there. Here in Atlanta, I have three full-time people working with me, but I’m still there full-time as kind of a project manager/general manager.

I’m also bringing in some temporary guys as needed. So yeah, we just grew consistently and slowly. My focus the whole time was—if we have, let’s say, two guys, just filling in the schedule to where that became too much—bringing in another one and then making sure we were taking on new clients each time we brought in a new crew member.

Austin Gray: That answers your question, kind of off on a little tangent. What does an average job size look like for you?

Kent Sheridan: Our average job size is around—in Oregon, it’s around $7,000 for an average job, and we’re doing pretty large jobs over there. For Atlanta, I would say the average job size on residential is around $2,000. On the commercial side, the average job size is around $18,000 in Oregon. In Atlanta, the average job size is about the same right now. Atlanta is a much larger market, and I think quickly our average for commercial will be more around $40,000-$50,000.

We’ve already done a couple that are over that, or right around there, and I think that’ll soon become our new average. It’s interesting; it’s two totally different markets with different rules and regulations, so I still have a lot to learn here.

Austin Gray: You went from coffee startup with negative cash flow to profitable demo business. This is awesome. I love it. How long did you build the Oregon crew before you moved to Atlanta to start that one?

Kent Sheridan: A little over two years. I’d love to stay there, but I have a wife and two kids, and I’m from North Atlanta, in Alpharetta. I wanted to be closer to my parents, and I really like the environment here. It’s a great place to raise a family and has a lot more opportunity here on many fronts. So I made the tough decision to relocate, and I knew, of course, I was just going to do another Swift here.

Austin Gray: What did the Oregon branch do in 2024 from a topline revenue perspective?

Kent Sheridan: 2024 was our first year without me completely. I kind of left. I left pretty early; I was fully phased out by the beginning of March. So it really only had me for two months, and those two months, I was training the general manager. Topline for Oregon was 964,000.

Austin Gray: That’s great! What do you think 2025 will be? Have you set any goals around it?

Kent Sheridan: We’re about to have our new budget meeting at the end of this month to set those goals. We’re going to try to hit 1.5 in Oregon. We’re going to have to start traveling outside our little tri-cities there to hit that, but those are kind of our goals. We want to become a crew that starts to play in the other larger metros like Salem and Portland. We’ve been bidding on a lot of projects, but it all starts to change when you step into those larger markets. You have other people—that is, at least on the commercial front—who are bidding aggressively. You need to press into the relationship side of things—build relationships, build trust. I think we’re on track to do that.

Austin Gray: That’s great. I do have a connection up there, actually. We did some work for a land-clearing project down here, and a consultant came down from that area. We can talk offline about that after this.

Kent Sheridan: Yeah, sure. He does a lot of big projects up there.

Austin Gray: You’re definitely in business, and you know for me—I don’t know if you’re religious at all—but for me, I just think, "Man, I know where I’m supposed to be." Sometimes God will just give you this little handout where it feels supernatural at that point. This person will show up in your life. I was talking to this guy yesterday, and he said, "Send me any of your excavation bids if you want me to review them. I’ll give you feedback on them." This guy’s got like 40 years of experience doing big civil projects all over the nation.

That’s a tangent, but we can talk offline.

Kent Sheridan: I mean, it’s like total provision, and you know, it’s like that little God wink. We’re on the right track for sure.

Austin Gray: So you have six guys on the crew up there, and how do you split? So let’s call it a million-dollar business topline revenue. Are you running three crews of two, two crews of three, or one of six? What does that look like?

Kent Sheridan: It’s like a three-in-three crew for most projects, but we divert resources where we need them. A lot of times if we have a large commercial job, say a $100,000 commercial job, and we’re going to be on it for two to three weeks, we have all hands on deck for that, and once we build momentum on those larger projects, we’ll break off two people to handle a quick bathroom turnaround over there.

So we have two crews and two sets of rigs that go out and have it tooled up for commercial and residential. We started with just a little sprinter and a mini dump trailer in the back. Now we have a box truck, F-250, larger dump trailer, and then we’ll do some roll-offs if needed too.

So yeah, just start chunking up the time and plugging the holes where we need to. It’s fun; sometimes it’s a little chaotic. We run a lot of projects; we’re cranking out jobs over there for sure. But that’s what it takes. That’s what it takes to hit the numbers we did with such a small crew. I mean, like I said, the first year hitting just under $500,000, it was just a crew of three guys—myself and one van and one dump trailer, just cranking non-stop.

That’s what it takes—being unafraid to kind of say yes and just put your head down and get it done.

Austin Gray: It sounds like you put a lot of sweat equity into that business in that first year. It’s funny because you’ll get some finance bro online who will chime in about an owner-operated business—like, "Well, that’s not the true cost." But it’s what it takes, and you have to hustle. Your time is what you’re going to value at the labor rate, right? You’re just going to be a $35-an-hour employee to move the business forward just to get it off the ground. Why? Because somebody has to do it, and if you don't do it, no one else will do it at that stage.

Hats off to you for pushing through that phase. Now that you’ve got the crews rolling, I’m interested to hear what your gross profit margin is on that.

So, you’ve got a crew of three, and are they probably getting paid about $30 an hour? Let’s just take a guess.

Kent Sheridan: Average, at least for that market, is $30.

Austin Gray: So, what do you run—five eight-hour days or four ten-hour days? How do you run your crews?

Kent Sheridan: We’ve always done eight-hour days. Demo’s not easy; it’s not easy on your body. That was the first thing we talked about and decided: man, you can really wear yourself out. I wanted to be intentional and careful and check in with my guys to see how they were feeling—especially when we’re running hot and redlining. I’d check in with them and say, "Do we need to schedule an off day?"

I wanted to be really intentional about not destroying these guys because you’re on your hands and knees sometimes, bent over pulling up tile floor. It’s brutal work for sure—you’re covered in dust.

So, I would say we’ve always done eight-hour days, and then occasionally, we pencil in an off day. Usually, how I like to set up the schedule is every other week or every other Friday. We would have a penciled in off day, a rest day in there, just to give everybody a break. If the schedule is totally full for that month—like complete max capacity—we would check in with the guys. If everyone’s on board to tighten their belts on that off day, then we’d fill in that Friday, and they all make a collective decision.

Austin Gray: You’ve got an average ticket size of $7,000 for a job. What does a $7,000 job look like from a time perspective? Is that a three-day job? Two-day job?

Kent Sheridan: It’s a two-day job I’d say. Okay, here’s the chase: our net profit in the first year was 30% bottom line. That was with me taking an income as well—around an $85,000 average salary there. I tried to make sure I was taking everything into consideration for that.

We worked hard. We don’t have a lot of materials. We don’t have costs other than dump fees, some gloves, some plastic. I really like that about the business as well: we’re not installing anything, we don’t need to purchase lumber ahead of time. It’s just show up, do the job, and get paid.

That’s what’s interesting: coming from coffee, where it was like okay, we have to order, and we have to plan six months out ordering green coffee because by the time it lands at the port in the US, it’s going to be two months later. Then we’ve got to send that to a roaster to roast. You’re planning for eight months basically of all this work in progress, all this money tied up, and then turning that to instant.

By the time you get it, it’s like man, your whole year is gone. Back to looking at that model, the clarity hit me: we just get a job, we do it, and we get paid. That really frees you up to build a good business because you don’t have to. There’s only so much you can hold up here. If you cut out all the complexity, it allows you to just focus on getting sales in the door or hiring better people, you know?

The levers of business are right in front of you. I’m about to put out a YouTube video kind of talking about these lessons I learned from closing Voila to opening Swift. That’s one of them: simple work is meaningful work, and it allows you to focus. It allows you to see the simple levers that are right in front of you to build something great.

Austin Gray: Dude, I love it!

Kent Sheridan: I’d love to collaborate; give any feedback on that video. I’d love to—do your video and then we should collaborate on that because I think there would likely be a lot of similar learning lessons that we’ve both taken away. I know all the things you're talking about right now are things that I definitely had "aha" moments on as well.

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People will reach out all the time and ask—just yesterday, for example, this one guy was asking, "Should I start an excavation business or should I start a pest control?" My answer is always, "Man, it’s up to you. I’m not going to give any feedback there because I think it has to come down to the entrepreneur."

If you want to start an excavation or a land-clearing business, you’ve truly got to want to start that, and you’ve got to have the experience and operations because, like my business compared to yours, yours is absolutely so much more simple. I’m secretly jealous of how simple that is because your operating costs—after you’ve got your dump trailer paid off, which is max what—a $10,000 purchase, right? Then you’ve got an F-250, or I think you said a 250, not a 350. I mean, it’s a truck, relatively small costs in the grand scheme of things.

Then you’ve got the labor, and you're doing high-ticket service trade jobs. It’s a beautiful business model that you were able to pay yourself a salary—something that’s important to a lot of people.

A lot of people reach out, and they’re like, "How do I pay myself?" It’s like, "Put yourself on salary for a reasonable amount. If you do that, you're going to at a very minimum make enough to figure out how to pay yourself out of that." That’s cool that you did that in year one, and then you hit a 30% margin.

So, rough numbers: year one, $150K of net profit after paying yourself a salary—that's awesome! The people listening to this—the point I'm making, the big epiphany I’ve had—is we’ve brought on shoveling services inside our snow business. It’s so funny when people ask, "What are you doing this winter?" I tell them, "We’ve got shovel crews rolling." They say, "Oh man, that must suck!" I say, "Dude, we have a shovel and labor cost—that’s all we have!"

I don’t have to buy a $10,000 truck. It’s so simple! To your point, focusing on the simple things—like where do I get jobs and who do I hire—amen to that. I could go off on this a lot longer than this episode, but just to speak on that—my development in this process with the coffee business, I had a full 180 with the coffee business. I had my own e-commerce brand, my own branding, and I was doing all sorts of side projects. I was putting out t-shirts and crazy stuff, and we were manufacturing things.

It was like I kept adding stuff that was cool. We just kept having shiny object syndrome take over, and I was like, "Maybe this will pop off and get us somewhere." It was my immaturity in business just going, "This is a vehicle for me to do all the fun, cool, exciting stuff I want to do."

It really resulted in nothing. I mean, it resulted in me learning that wasn’t important. But at the end of the day, it didn’t put anything on the table for my family. As cool and fun as this was, I wondered how much time I spent sourcing it, engraving the top, and getting the magnets just right. What did that actually do for me?

Why wasn’t I landing 10 more deals? The 180 for me is just realizing so many people I talk to who are looking to become first-time entrepreneurs or start a business—they have a big idea. So often, that idea is completely reinventing something. I wanted to reinvent instant coffee.

I did some great things, but man, why sign yourself up for that? Why not take something that’s tried and true, something that’s going to be around for the next hundred years? People are always going to need land clearing; people are always going to need a good tradesperson who does an excellent job.

It’s like, take something simple, then put your own spin on it. If your own spin is branding and marketing—if your own spin is you have great workplace culture and great guys—it just makes everything so much easier. You can go out and work on sales, work on, "Okay, we’re going to get 10% faster and more efficient," and do whatever.

It’s so much easier and so much less friction when your business is simple, your idea is tried and true, and you can just apply the basics to it. That way, if things go sideways for a month, you know hey, “Maybe there’s a different lever here I have to pull. Maybe I have to pick up the phone and call 20 new remodelers this month.”

Instead of like, "Let’s create some new glasses that have AI in the earpiece." Man, just keep it simple!

Kent Sheridan: It’s so true.

Austin Gray: How old are your kids?

Kent Sheridan: Five and almost three.

Austin Gray: How old are you?

Kent Sheridan: 31.

Austin Gray: Okay, we’re similar in age. Kids are an incredible motivator. What’s interesting is where the value is placed—it’s where the value shifts from wanting to launch this cool product to just wanting to make some money so that my kids have food on the table and a mortgage paid for.

Kent Sheridan: Yeah, that’s huge because my daughter was two when I started Swift. She saw kind of the coffee business when she was really little, and I was in the process of closing that business; it was pretty devastating for me and my family. I spent so much time—my wife had given so much emotionally and so much support to that business for so long. Six years is a long time to be hoping and dreaming, thinking it’s going to pop off one day, that we’re going to turn that corner and just make tons of money, and scrapping and saving to get to that point.

To close that—it’s funny; my next video is on this topic too, about being okay to try something and not being afraid if it fails because I had the most learning going through the process of closing that business down. Until that point, when things were falling apart, I thought everything was going to be over. No one was going to like me; I was going to have a bad reputation.

Six years of my life were going to be wasted, and then as soon as I closed it and told everybody, everyone was like, "Man, that was cool and inspiring! I can’t wait for what you do next!" It kind of turned out to be nothing. Then all the clarity hits. You know, people say when you go through a relationship and go through a breakup—you have all this new clarity of who you are and who you want to look for.

The same thing happens in business: I closed that after so long, and I was like, "Oh, I’m still here, still alive!" Now I have to provide for this family; I can take all of those learnings and say, "It’s not all for nothing!" I have a whole new toolset to apply to my next thing.

I had a great opportunity with my mother-in-law, who is a big visionary, and she was able to see that and convince me to do something like this. I’m so fortunate for that opportunity. But those lessons were so invaluable: "Wow it’s not for nothing; you can just start over."

Now look at what’s happened! I was able to build something way faster—ten times as fast as before—with far fewer headaches. One of the big things I wanted to do in starting Swift was create something that provided for other people in meaningful ways, a great workplace for people to come to and feel valued.

Their unique contributions matter as well; that was a big driver for me. I didn’t have employees in Falla; I had some employees, but I had to convince them to put their blood, sweat, and tears in without too much compensation. With Swift, it’s quite the opposite: we get to pay our guys really well, treat them really well, take them out, go shooting for our team bonding.

Swift has become like a cultural thing where in our town in Oregon, people at the land transfer station, at the dump, are saying, "Hey, can we work for Swift?" We have applications coming in constantly because they see how excited our guys are and how passionate they are. They rep Swift—their Swift hats and sweatshirts at the gym—and we have people coming up to us all the time saying, "I want to be a part of that."

That’s just so cool. I know I’m going all over the place on it, but it’s worth it going through what I went through to now being able to build Swift and have that impact in my town and for my family as well.

Austin Gray: It’s a lot better when your guys are actually getting paid better than fair wages, and they’re happy. They’re bills are paid, rather than trying to convince them to build the next startup and scrap along with you. There’s a harsh reality a lot of Millennials and Gen Z need to come to terms with: if you want people to stick around, just pay them well because as much as people say money isn’t a big deal, it’s a big deal to them whenever they can’t pay their bills.

Kent Sheridan: Absolutely. In these service and trade businesses, it’s so cool that you had this epiphany! I’ve had a similar journey as well, and we won’t go into that on this podcast. But man, these are necessary services.

Another way I’ve thought about it, too, is these transactions are happening whether you start a business or not. In dustless demo, somebody’s going to pay $18,000 to someone else tomorrow and the next day and the next day in your market for somebody to come in and demo something.

If you’ve got this skill of branding and B2B sales and all that stuff—for listeners out there—I’m so bullish on services and trades, and I’m thankful that you came on and shared your experience. I believe your story is going to be inspiring to a lot of other people.

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Is there anything else? I’m going to target this question a little more specifically. You mentioned the YouTube video about the learning lessons. What learning lessons can you share with listeners before we wrap this episode up about the learning lessons you’re taking from that first sexy business to your unsexy business?

Kent Sheridan: That’s a pretty broad question, but I'll target this to somebody who maybe you’re in something right now that you’re questioning—whether to keep going or whether to start something new. There are two components here, and they're kind of at odds with each other a little bit.

One is the time it takes to cross that edge to where you have wind in your sails and momentum behind you. What I haven’t talked about is how long it took to where I thought we were good in Swift. Even though in the first year we did $500,000 and in the second year we did just under a million—over $900,000 with a 33% margin—18 months in, I was still questioning whether Swift was going to keep going.

You may think that’s crazy: a year and a half in after having a lot of success going from zero to profitable $150,000, and we got a crew of guys. You’re still going to hit a dry season where nothing is working, and you’re making calls; nothing’s coming through, your calendar is empty. For me, I get calendar anxiety, and I’m sure a lot of guys listening probably feel the same way.

Before, I had different anxieties in the coffee business, but now I get calendar anxiety. I remember hitting a dry season and thinking: "Maybe this is it; maybe people don’t want demo. It’s not as good as I thought. Maybe I just had a few good seasons, a few good wins, and now maybe one client dropped me because they hired someone in-house."

It’s easy to get in your head and go, "Alright, that’s it; nobody's calling me. Nothing's on the horizon." What I realize going through that, and now going through that again here, is it just takes time. It takes time to prime the pump; it takes time to get the word out there about who you are.

I don’t know what it is, but sometimes it takes a couple of years to where that word of mouth spreads, and from one day to the next—one season to the next—you’ll eventually cross over to where you have word of mouth that starts to spread on its own.

No matter how good your branding is, how good you were doing two months ago, these types of businesses take time and effort, which is what separates the people who give it a try for a season and then quit—start the next thing until they hit their own Valley of Despair. If you really believe in doing what you’re doing right now, that’s a gift to push through that season.

On the other side of that is success. On the other side of that is resilience, perspective. It's all part of the game, and you have to be able to embrace that, and good things will come.

Austin Gray: Man, that’s such a good word! You hit the nail on the head. I still go through that every season, multiple times.

Kent Sheridan: We all do, man—multiple times. That’s hard, but you know what happens is the first time you go through it, it’s really tough because you don’t know what’s on the other side. Then the second time, maybe you’ve forgotten about the first time. By the third time, you’re like, "Wait, I’ve gone through this before; we’ll just keep going. We’ll see what happens.”

For me, I like to talk to my dad. Growing up, he owned a landscaping business, and landscaping can be pretty seasonal—especially in Georgia when it just starts to rain. He’d tell me stories about when we moved into our new house; we had that new mortgage, and it was a lot more than the old one. Well, it rained for two months straight, and he had no work.

He just had to hand it over to God and say, "This is in your hands." Sometimes you go through that, and the more you go through it, the more you realize it’s just a season. It’s just a window. If you’re starting out, it’s just priming the pump; you just have to get past that.

It can take two years, but getting through that is everything.

Austin Gray: Man, it really is. There are so many points you brought up in there that I want to dive deeper on. We should do this in a second episode because we’re nearing the end of this one. But remind me next time you come on, let’s talk about the Valley of Despair and Tailwinds.

I have this concept in my head, and I think you and I could likely flush it out. It’s like whenever you’re starting, you’ve got to go tell as many people as possible—spray wide—then whoever you get to say yes, all the focus goes to delivering five-star service—the absolute perfect job. Because if that person’s happy, you know they’re going to recommend you, especially if it’s B2B.

You know they’re going to give you the second one and the third one, but it’s going to take maybe another 30, 60, 90, maybe 120 days for that contractor to consider you again. Then you’ve got to go refocus on spraying again.

It’s a constant focus; this consistent transition between marketing and sales versus operations. As a first-time entrepreneur, you’re literally wearing so many different hats between marketing—getting someone hot. Then you focus on sales skills; you close them, and then you go into operations.

By doing that multiple times, you’re still spending money on marketing budget, or you’re still trying to... I mean, I’m still in this phase. I consciously wear a Bearclaw sweatshirt every time I do a podcast because I want more eyeballs on my brand, right?

We’re still in the "spray wide" phase. But over time, I’ve thought about this consciously. It’s like every single job we deliver on—a great experience with that customer—that person is going to hopefully tell somebody. But here’s the kicker: that person doesn’t immediately think, "Oh my gosh! Bearclaw just came in and cleared our land, and you guys should clear some land."

They have an interaction a year later with someone else, and they’re like, "Yeah, we’re looking for someone to demo," and it’s like, "Oh, I used these guys. Let me search my phone real quick." I think his name was Swift, right? Then that’s when the word of mouth happens.

It’s this long-term compounding effect, and I would love to unpack this. I really want to put it in a graph or a visual, like how they do with the Valley of Despair. But I would love to unpack that with you because I can already tell you’ve thought through all this as well.

What does 5, 10, 15, 20 years look like if you just stay committed to doing that—marketing, sales, focus, deliver? I think we both know the answer: if you deliver good work, you’re going to get the Tailwind effect.

But I don't know about you; I haven’t experienced this crazy Tailwind effect that you talk to a contractor who’s been in business for 25 years delivers great service—those guys’ phones literally ring non-stop.

Kent Sheridan: They just get a call saying, "I got another one!"

Austin Gray: Yeah, any comments on that or anything else?

Kent Sheridan: That's huge, man. We've got to articulate that because, you know, how many people at the end of year one when they hear about land clearing are going to refer you? How many people in year two? If they have a buddy talking about land clearing, how many people are referred by year ten?

It could be exponential: if 5,000 people mention land clearing, your name is coming up. That can’t be overstated how important that is. All those little things happening in the background, right?

Austin Gray: Sorry to cut you off; please finish if you have more.

Kent Sheridan: No, no; that’s huge! So then it becomes how do you stick through those valleys of despair? How do we not make rash decisions to go make some drastic change in the business and derail it from the current track, right?

It’s easy to do that. You have way too much time on your hands, too. It’s like you’re sitting there with no work. You’re thinking, "Maybe I do want to get into large-scale demolition." Now I’m pricing big equipment. I’m pricing some yellow iron.

I don’t know! One thing for those listeners listening to this—Brock Peele from Canadian Sanitation mentioned him a couple of times in episodes. I’ve done three episodes with him up to this point, and the dude is incredible at his focus. He said, "I’m saying no to everything but septic installs."

He’s great at saying no. These are the pieces of equipment we have, and this equipment works on nothing but septic installs.

For listeners out there, this is just a reminder. I listened to your recap yesterday where you mentioned Brock, and I was like, "I’ve got to go back and listen to that episode."

It’s interesting; with a crew of three, they’ve done $2.3 million in revenue in one geographic location, and his deal all the time is—it literally comes back to focus. So it sounds like you’ve done an incredible job of being able to say no to those large-scale demolition jobs—not going to buy yellow iron—to do big demo projects and focusing on your niche. I commend you for that!

This has been a fun episode. I think you’ve shared some insights for people considering starting a business or in the early stages that are unbelievably helpful, and I wish you the best of luck!

Kent Sheridan: Thanks, Austin! This has been super fun. Even just going back and having all this fresh in my mind is helpful for me. I really appreciate it; thanks for having me on!

Austin Gray: Where can listeners find Swift?

Kent Sheridan: Swift is at [Music] swift-cut as well because for 2025 that’s my goal. I just started a channel; I want to put content out there and build a brand around me that feeds into Swift—everything that’s on my mind to help other business owners and guide people on the type of opportunity vehicle to get into and how to make that successful.

I’ll plug that if that’s alright. It’s kent.FYI as my channel, and I should have a couple of videos up there by the time this comes out on these topics as well.

Austin Gray: Awesome, that sounds good! Well, listeners, thanks again for listening to another episode of the OWNR OPS podcast. If you are enjoying this type of content, would you mind leaving us a quick five-star review on Apple or Spotify?

We talk about this all the time on the podcast. I’m a big proponent of asking your customers for five-star reviews on your Google Business page, and the podcast is very similar. It’s no different than building a service business: reviews help us out a lot. So if you wouldn’t mind leaving a quick review, and then if you’re listening on YouTube, would you mind just liking and subscribing to the channel?

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