Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast called the Path to Warren podcast. This is episode five, and we’re going to dive into what happened after I sold. It is currently July 5, 2020, and I’m in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. Beautiful morning, walking on the beach. Just want to take a minute and say how grateful I am for all that is happening in my life. It’s hard to wrap my head around so many great things that are going on, but it’s so important for me to remember back to kind of what got me here. And after I sold this pine straw business in episode four, I shared how it’s it was after College, and I found a buyer through searching nine different people that were interested. And of those nine, I found one. And we struck a deal. Over the next five years. He was supposed to pay me a certain amount per month, and it worked perfectly for about two and a half years. He made all of his payments on time. He paid the correct amount on time. But then 2008 and 2009 hit. So after I sold the business before I sold it and got out of it, I was starting to line up my next job. I found this commercial landscaping company out of Blythewood that is no longer in business today. I’ll go into a little bit of that as to why I think it went out of business, but that helped to shape my career as well. Nothing like seeing what another company does and some of the mistakes that it might have made to help me not do that in my business. So here we are, right out of College. I was married or about to get married to Meagan, and this client was just buying all the pine straw that I could deliver and spread. He had about 40 employees at the time. Commercial landscaping Company. It was one owner. He had a project manager named Charlie and Gordon. I didn’t realize it until I was actually interviewing for him that Gordon was a fraternity brother at Clemson. So I was able to use that a little bit and put in a good word for me. Although we didn’t really get along much in the fraternity, we still stuck together, and he helped me get that job, I believe. But Charlie was my boss. I was going to work under Charlie and this company, a 40 person landscaping company, is really large for the Columbia area. Most landscaping companies or lawn services are two to five employees. And with this being 40 employees, I thought they really had something really nice going on here and something I could learn from. They were so big that they had two divisions, and this really intrigued me. I really wanted to learn more about the installation process. I wanted to learn about installing irrigation. I wanted to learn about. I saw them planting trees, landscaping trees. I saw them planting them with 18 Wheeler loads. Of trees at a time. I’m talking ball and burlap, you know, have to use a skid steer or an excavator to hook the boom lift to the top of the strap and lift these big ball and burlap bags that are way more than I did. Huge trees. They were getting truckloads of that at a time. They were installing pallets of sod, not one or two pallets. They were installing truckloads of sod a day, about 80% or so 85, maybe were Hispanic workforce. So the employees were going. They had several, I guess you could say legalized, legal Americans that were the crew leaders and the drivers and the Foreman, the superintendents, the project managers. All of those people were “documented”. They had driver’s licenses. They were able to talk to the customer and plain English. Everybody else were mostly Hispanic. It’s just the way it is. And I’ll never forget. When I got hired, my first project was to go to Sumter, so they needed a driver, basically. And I was white male, right out of College with a good driver’s license, sometimes hard to find, willing to work for $27,000 a year. I really wanted to learn so much that I was all in. So after I sold the lawn service. Excuse me, the pine straw business. I started working for this company and I was to drive for the first nine months or so. I had to drive to Sumter, South Carolina, which was an hour away, and we were landscaping Patriots Point Park was this huge development that was undergoing. I think they had, like, eight new soccer fields they were trying to irrigate, and we had won that contract. I was dropped off. I drove and was there by myself with three Hispanic. One guy was named Elias E-L-I-A-S. Elias, his brother, his younger brother Carlos. And there was normally a third guy along with them. I was supposed to be the Superintendent, but I didn’t know anything. I didn’t know anything about anything when it came to irrigation. And I was basically in the middle of this huge park that you couldn’t see from any road. It was just in the middle of nowhere in Sumter County, surrounded by huge trees and clear cut area. They were building a big cabana for the soccer games and baseball games and all the things that were coming. But our job was to take the water from the pond that they had built and use irrigation. So the big ol’ plan that was many, many pages. It was professionally laid out and it had like twelve inch pipes coming out of the pump and coming out of the pond. That’s huge twelve inch irrigation pipe. I’d only been used to like, drip irrigation around houses and one inch pipe, maybe an inch and a half main line. And here we are talking about a twelve inch pipe coming out of a pond with a huge pump, this massive system. So that was really exciting. I really was all in to work on that project, and I knew this was going to be a fun ride. Where else would I get experience like that right out of college? What was neat was we didn’t just irrigate it and leave. It wasn’t just an irrigation installation company. I was able to experience the whole project from the trenching of the pipe to putting in the irrigation, putting in sleaves. If you have an island, for example, in the middle of a parking lot, well, you got to get water and light and electricity sometimes in those Islands. So I learned that sleeves are kind of like the sleeve on your shirt sleeves are used underneath those roads and parking lots. I learned the value of putting in sleeves prior to the paving company coming in and grading out. And preparing for asphalt paving or concrete paving, there’s a lot of lessons there that could be taught, but putting in the sleeves, putting in the right soil. And I learned, I learned right off that you can’t take this muck out of Sumter County or out of most projects and put it back in the beds. The natural areas that you’re about to plant in. It was like putting mud back into the bed and expecting these plants to flourish. This company provided, like, a year, a one year guarantee on all of these plants and trees and sod. So there was obviously. And I need to make sure that we were doing the right thing because I’d have to come back and replace the plants and the trees and they wouldn’t look the same. They wouldn’t match. So there was a need to really make sure we did right. That was different, too. I had not experienced that. I didn’t know that most commercial landscaping companies like that provide a one year guarantee. So here I am, dropped off in this park and I’m in the middle of a trench. I don’t really speak that much Spanish. The three guys around me don’t speak ANY English. That the crew leader, Elias, barely spoke English. I mean, he spoke a few words that helped me figure out after eight ways of saying something, he helped me figure out what was going on, right? Nothing like being thrown in a trench with three other guys working hand in hand all day long, every day with these guys to learn Spanish. That was first hand Espanol and I had taken three semesters or three years of Spanish prior to working or prior to going to College. You know, I had to have three years in order to get to Clemson, but I really just did what I could to get by. I had, like, a fee in the class every year. I wish I had studied a little bit more of it, but it was weird. I knew I needed the Spanish, but I just couldn’t concentrate on it. I don’t know what it was, but I understood the basic principles and the theories behind conjugating the verbs and that kind of thing. It really helped me a lot when it came time to really being thrown into trenches and learning Spanish from these guys. I did take a semester at Clemson, but I was doing so poorly, and I think I was involved in partying a little too much at the time, but I dropped out of the class at Clemson because it was just too hard. So my Spanish and Clemson wasn’t much of anything. It was like a whole new level of Spanish. So fast forward. I’m in the trenches with these guys, and they’re helping me learn Spanish and irrigation and planting, and I committed to un palabra per dia. One philosophy is one word a day, and they love that I would be working with them. I would take a second and try to figure out one word, and I would say that word like, twelve to 15 times a day, and they really like that a lot. It’s like I’m trying to learn one word a day here. Guys work with me, work with me. And that was, I think, one way of showing humility to these guys, too. Here I am, an American with a College degree. It just helped a lot. So I worked at Springdale for probably three years. It got to where I was the Superintendent for about a year and a half. I was doing pretty well. We hired a couple of other younger guys to come in and be Superintendent, and I was able to work my way up to Estimator. So I started estimating these large commercial jobs. Boy, that was a project. I remember one job. I was so excited because I actually won it. I bid on it. I won it. We were the lowest bid. When you’re bidding commercial projects, all they care about is lowest price. I did not like it at all. All they care about is the lowest price. The second my boss realized that I won the bid to say that he flipped out was kind of an understatement. It was a big project, and he made me sit down and we had to go through the entire bid line by line, making sure that I didn’t miss anything. And sure enough, after he did the layout. Sure enough, I missed, like, 400 bales of pine straw because of how the design was the number of pine straw bales that it had listed on the spec sheet, as opposed to the square footage of area that we needed to put the mulch for two different numbers. It was like this push and pull inside of me like, oh, you did a great job, Matt. Good job for one in the bid, but, oh, crap. We won the bid. Now I guess we have to deliver. I don’t know what it is about that, but I told my boss, I don’t like doing this. It’s a no-win situation. It was a no-win situation here. I’m trying to do a good job. I took the numbers for face value, but I should have measured everything like, I don’t know, you only learn, I guess, by doing and messing up, but it’s a costly mistake. I enjoyed the residential side. I had a lot of experience through my pine straw business dealing with the residential client. I really got a kick out of doing a good job and that instant gratification from the client just being so happy that everything looks so good and also being able to gauge right away. If I wasn’t doing something that she liked or he liked, I could quickly adapt and fix it. If I could be transferred or change my job from commercial estimator to residential sales. I was getting a pay raise for doing this estimating and it wasn’t like I was going to get a pay cut by doing what I love. So I stuck with the residential. I really got a lot out of that. I was the guy that they would send on detailed projects where me and one or two guys would spend all day or all week on one or two jobs that detail pruning the detailed weeding of jobs or edging or planting of flowers, things that really took a lot of detail and attention. I loved that, and I was the one that got put on those jobs after that. So after starting out as Superintendent, I worked my way up because I knew what I was doing on the job. I worked my way up to the estimator role after doing that and realizing you worked so hard on all these projects to submit bids. And there was this effect going on too, that I think I should share. There’s this deal in commercial bidding of projects where you’re doing all this work just so that they can get, like, 20 bids to compare against the one that they already know in their mind that they’re going to use. There was a lot of this good old boy network happening that it didn’t matter what my price said. They were going to go with this company that they already knew. I remember estimating jobs for small fire stations that were being built. A lot of parks. I remember estimating for lots of roadway landscaping, like in the middle of Islands or off of exits. Those are massive projects that my boss was set up to work. We had the crews. I had a white dually four door extended cab that was a massive truck that I used to haul the crew back and forth down to Sumter also use it to pull big trailers to go pick up equipment and piping and move piping around the job, pick up skid steers and excavators. Learning how to strap those down is something that I really acquired a great skill for, but all of a sudden 2008 2009 hit. We were like I said, set up to be a commercial landscaping company that work these high dollar residential jobs too. But I was working nine jobs in Sumter, that were all parks. It was one summer we had to landscape irrigate landscape and then maintain. Shortly after we did nine parks and my boss, it’s like something clicked in his head. He realized he was in massive trouble when the economic downturn started to set in. There was major problems in the commercial landscaping world. When you’re bidding on these projects, 99% of the time we were bidding them to get the change order. So many times we were excited to get the job, even if it was under bid, even if we were below our material cost, which is hard to believe. Why would you take a job or commit to doing a job if you know, right off the bat, you’re under bid. Well before the recession hit, the change order was how all contractors on those commercial jobs made their money. So what happens on a change order is all of a sudden you’re out there landscaping and you hit a big rock or you realize that it really would be better if we put this over here or added another tree or because we get down so low that it’s full of clay and we really need to supplement it with some topsoil. Whatever needs to be changed. If it wasn’t on the original project that you bid, you could submit a change order and put pretty much whatever price you wanted on there because you knew that the owner was going to go with it. You’re already on the job. They’re not going to bring in somebody else to finish up this project. Change orders is where you make your money. Well, when the recession hit and we’re working, these government projects working in all these parks, the municipalities said no, just build it as we said, build it as planned. We don’t have any more money for change orders. Once the whole recession was in place and happening, there was no way to go up to federal government or state government and ask for more money. There just was no more money. The construction industry took a huge dive. New projects were not being approved. New projects weren’t even being thought about. People were realizing there’s a recession going on when the housing bubble was crashing. So the municipalities told my boss, no change orders. They told him out front, no change orders after he already had the project. So here we are with these nine parks and Sumter that were all. Every one of them were bid and won below the price of what it costs to actually do the job, as is. So we ended up really taking massive hits. And the only thing that was making money. And it wasn’t a lot not enough to support the company. The only thing that was making money were these residential jobs, these high end residential jobs that you could add on markup and margins and labor and really charge what you needed to in order to do these little jobs. But there weren’t enough of those to support a 40 person crew, a 40 person landscaping company. I also learned very quickly. It sounds great to give your crew leaders and give your project managers all credit cards. You would think that sounds like a smart idea, but I don’t know, there’s a lot to talk about with this, but what I saw and actually what I did, I’m not innocent here. If I was on a job and I needed something, I would just go to the closest place like Lowe’s and buy what I needed, plus a couple of extra. And that’s great, because I might need those couple of extra things. But because it wasn’t my credit card, I had no desire to make those returns. I had no desire to watch my spending, to try to get the best price to shop around. Well, to go along with that. There was a hardware store right in downtown Blythwood and this hardware store. It’s like a Blythewood Feed and Seed kind of place. We had an open account so anybody in the company could go up, and the guy behind the counter would ring you up, and he would just make you put your initials out beside whatever you bought. Well, people were putting other people’s initials. Nobody was cross checking these things, and people were spending like crazy. People were buying stuff for their house. People were buying stuff for their own landscaping projects. On the side, it was out of control. So between the use of credit cards by every person that was in charge of a crew and every person that was a project manager, you’d fill up your truck on these gas cards. People were filling up their old personal cars and personal trucks on these gas cards. On the credit cards, there was no checks and balance system for making sure that we weren’t overspending. When you couple the credit card and the gas card situation with the open account at Smith Turf Irrigation, the open account at WP Law, the open account that my boss work very hard to get at this hardware store. I’m sitting here watching all this happen because I’ve had my own business before. I had the pine straw business and the lawn service. I’m sitting here like, shaking my head like, what? You’re going to give me a credit card? You’re going to give me this access to go buy whatever I want at Lowe’s. Wow. And not just me. You’re going to do that for everybody in the crew in the company? Well, it wasn’t everybody. The people that weren’t driving didn’t get credit cards. But you couple those massive leaks in the bucket, as they say, the big holes in the bucket. You couple that with the loss of revenue from the recession, the poor guy, he had no choice. He had to start laying off people. There was a massive layoff. I’m so grateful that I was at a point where my job being the residential sales. I could see what was happening. I could see the sales coming in. I could see the expenses going out. I could see because of the meetings with the sales, the other estimators and my boss, I could hear that we were not winning the projects like we were back when I was estimating. Even before that, the projects, the quantity of projects that we were awarded and had to look forward to. We’re just not there. My boss had some serious equipment. We had two skid steers, a larger one and a smaller one. Plus we had a skid steer that was a wheeled machine. It had wheels instead of tracks. He had a really nice fancy Excavator mini excavator that was used on certain projects. He had a dingo that you stand on that you get in small places behind residential places. You could get through fences real easily. A small dingo. They’re at least $40,000 with all the attachments. We were very much heavy on equipment and heavy on labor, and I feel bad that it happened the way it did. But the company went out of business shortly after I left, but because I could see the writing on the wall and because I was being what I felt overworked and underpaid which I had a tendency to do. I later learned that that tendency to overwork and get underpaid was sort of a disease called under earning that goes along with the debtors anonymous program that I found later in life. I was signing up for a 40 hours work week kind of thing, but my boss ended up making us come in. We were already working 45 hours a week. Monday through Thursday. We work ten hour days. So we had to be at the office at seven and actually implemented a. 06:45 AM. Operations meeting. So I was working from 6:45am was when I had to be in Blytheood, which meant I had to leave my house at 6:15. Working the ten hour days. I was then required to come to the office on Fridays. If you were salary, you had to come into the office on Fridays and work a half a day. I was working 55 hours after I added it all up. I was just exhausted, and I realized that compared to my buddies out there from College, I knew I was making WAY less money than I probably should be making. But that was what the landscaping industry paid. I wanted the knowledge of planting and irrigating and doing things on a massive scale like that. That information that I gained was priceless, and I don’t regret it. I don’t regret that part of my life by any means because what happened was that allowed me to get this job. That was next. I was able to work for one of the largest vegetable producers in the whole Southeast. This company had 4000 acres of vegetable production that was all irrigated in South Carolina, not to mention farms in Mississippi, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, the mountains of Virginia and Texas. These guys were huge, and I would have never been able to work for that company if I would have not had two and a half to three years of experience doing commercial irrigation, planting large trees and massive amounts of sod and plants and taking care of it and learn about soil conditions and PH and watering and fertilizer and all the things that I learned at Springdale. I’d never been able to work for this company if I wouldn’t have had that experience. But one night I went through my entire LinkedIn connections and I went one after the other, and I looked at anybody that I might be any company where I knew somebody there via LinkedIn. I made a nice little list and I was set on getting out. I’ve got to get out of here. I knew I had to get out. I ended up cold calling one of my old fraternity brothers that worked there. He was a third generation farmer, but he worked in the sales and marketing side of it. I cold called him and left him a message where I actually used one of the lines that I learned working for the Time Management company I did for about nine months, but I use this line of, hey, you don’t know me from Adam’s Housecat. As cheesy as that sounds, it’s something that if you leave in a voicemail right off the bat, you’re going to catch attention and get listened to. I ended up getting that job as the food safety technician. I had no idea what a field food safety technician was. I never worked in food safety at all, but I knew I had to get out of landscaping and I felt like working for this farm. You know, it wasn’t like I was going to be driving a tractor, just like in the landscaping industry. I knew I didn’t want to just be cutting grass. I was far from cutting grass and just weed eating and edging. I only did that when I wanted to on my projects that I was maintaining. But in the farming world, it wasn’t like I was just driving a tractor. I was out there actually helping to keep . EColi and salmonella out of our product. So once I realized that I was able to get a job, by the way, I had to go through seven interviews to get that job on the farm, and I’ll go into that on the next podcast. But when it came time to leave Springdale Outdoor, I was offered the position of field Food Safety Technician, and I wrote my boss. a typed out letter. I wrote a letter and handed it over to him one Friday afternoon and just kind of put it on his desk and said, “David, do you have a second? I need to talk to you.” And he said, “yeah, what’s going on?” And I said, “Well, I got this little letter I need to give you”, and I let him read it. And in the first sentence or two, it said, I thank you for all that you’ve done for me and all that you’ve taught me. But at this point in my life, I believe it’s. The next best thing in my career at this point in my life is to take another position with another company. And I know he was upset, but he said “I kind of knew this was coming, Matt.” He said that he knew that this recession and the cutbacks and the hours that he was making us work and the sales that weren’t there. He knew this was happening. And he said it was just a matter of time before the straw broke the camel’s back and I had to get out of there. One thing that I messed up on it, and I think I really would probably do different is my direct boss, Charlie. At the time, he was not in the office. He was out doing something that Friday afternoons. He would always find a way to ride around and check on jobs, which was important. But it was also a way of staying out of the office. But he wasn’t there at the time that I needed to give David this Letter of Resignation, when David read it and I left his office, I know that he called Charlie to tell him what had happened, and Charlie was pissed. He was really upset. And at least I think he was because he never talked to me again. There was no more communication between me and him. We had really gotten along well. I really enjoyed working for him. He was such a funny guy. Really great to work for. Taught me a lot. Yeah, he got on me a couple of times when I would mess up, but that’s what any boss that’s good should do, right. But I don’t know, maybe I should have called Charlie right after I gave it to David. Maybe I should have given it to Charlie first and then let him give it to David. I don’t know. I might have done the order the wrong way there when it was time to resignate or give my resignation. I’d never done that before, though I never turned in a letter like that. I will say one thing that really caused me to leave and really caused me to kick it across the fence on. Should I leave or should I stay was one day I found on the printer in the office. Secretary office manager-lady Ashley. I found where she had left the print out of everybody’s salary. She left it on the printer like she hit print and then forgot about it, went home for the day. And here I am going to the printer to get something after I printed it. And I found a print out. It was two pages, and it had my boss’s salary information. It was the number that everybody was going to get on their check that day. And I saw how some people that I thought were making less than me were making more than me. I saw that my boss was only making, like, a few hundred more dollars or a few thousand. It wasn’t much at all, more than me. And I’m like, oh my gosh, this guy, my boss has so much more experience than I do. And he’s only making this much. It was an eye opener, just people that I didn’t think should be making that much money were making more money than I am. It’s something that I don’t wish anybody would find. You know, I don’t think it just changed my world. Not only did I have a lot of resentment in how they were paying people, but I didn’t look at those people the same after that. So I think that was a major point in my career where I was like, this is just not going to work. There’s obviously a ceiling here in the commercial landscaping world, there’s obviously a ceiling of how much money I can make. So I decided to leave. And once I decide I’m out, I’m out. I’m one of these all in guys that are all in one way or all out the other. And I’m so grateful that I was able to get this next job working at a large scale vegetable producer as the field food safety specialist. That next five years would be a fun ride. So stay tuned to podcast number six as I’m going to share about working on the farm. And all I learned was food safety, and they quickly got a job in the agricultural operations manager for the farm. So thank you so much for being along. If you like this podcast, please share it with a friend. Have a great afternoon and make a contribution. Thank you.
