Learnings and Missteps
The Learnings and Missteps Podcast is about unconventional roads to success and the life lessons learned along the way.
You will find a library of interviews packed with actionable take aways that you can apply as you progress on your career path.
Through these interviews you will learn about the buttons you can push to be a better leader, launch a business, and build your influence.
Find yourself in their stories and know that your path is still ahead of you.
Learnings and Missteps
Craftsmanship and Professional Pathways with Matt Kitzmiller
Discover the transformative power of lean methodologies in the construction industry with our insightful conversation featuring Mr. Matthew Kitzmiller, a professional shooter, journeyman electrician, and lean trainer for Rosenden Electric. Gain practical insights into the crucial role of discipline and communication in developing craft professionals, as Matthew shares his extensive experience and introduces a groundbreaking handbook for continuous improvement. With contributions from experts like Rob Light at Penn State, this resource bridges the gap between theory and practice, promising to revolutionize efficiency and culture in construction.
Embark on a journey through the unpredictable career path of an electrician, starting from an initial curiosity in the trade to navigating challenges and triumphs across various roles. From the elevator industry to unexpected opportunities in Building Information Modeling (BIM), witness how resilience and adaptability lead to alignment of passion and profession. Get inspired by stories of significant projects, learning new technologies, and embracing leadership roles, illustrating the importance of mentorship and technological adaptability in career growth.
Explore the critical impact of training and development on employee retention with a focus on emotionally intelligent workplaces that prioritize soft skills and cross-training. Through personal anecdotes, Matthew recounts the negative effects of outdated teaching methods and highlights the shift towards supportive environments that foster workforce satisfaction. This episode wraps up with reflections on life lessons and mentorship, where strong relationships and dedication become the foundation for success and fulfillment, leaving a legacy of positive impact in the industry.
Connect with Matt:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kitzmiller-229a378a/
Make yourself a priority and get more done: https://www.depthbuilder.com/do-the-damn-thing
Download a PDF copy of Becoming the Promise You are Intended to Be
https://www.depthbuilder.com/books
So when you teach people that, hey, man, you don't have to yell and scream, First of all, I'm right here. Second of all, I don't need to be yelled at. And third of all, your message. I don't even know what you're trying to say because your tone is so offensive. Discipline and hard work are supreme currencies that will always be there.
Speaker 2:You don't have to be as sexy as I am to be a plumber.
Speaker 1:I was drinking whiskey and Coors Light. From the second I got home to the second I went to sleep every day. So my relationship with my wife at the time was pretty rough.
Speaker 2:What is going on? L&m family? I got somebody here that's got some serious street cred. I just learned that he's a professional shooter, which is interesting. I think we'll learn a little bit about that. He's also an adjournment electrician maybe a master by now. He's in the learning and development space. He is a lean trainer for Rosenden Electric.
Speaker 2:Mr Matthew Kitzmiller and, if you can't tell already, some of y'all that have been here before some of you repeater fenders probably have an inkling now of why I'm so interested in having this conversation with Matthew. I got to see him present at LCI Congress in San Diego and he's had some major, major impact on training and developing and educating craft professionals, which is just the thing that moves my spirit, and so we're going to get to learn more about Mr Matt. And if this is your first time here, if you're a first timer, this is the learnings and missteps podcast, where you get to see how real people just like you are sharing their gifts and talents to leave this world better than they found it. I'm Jesse, your selfish servant, and we're going to get to know Mr Matthew. Mr Matt, how are you doing my brother?
Speaker 1:I'm good sir. A little bit of technical difficulties, but we got it done, my man, we got it done.
Speaker 2:Amen, man, we made it through that bad boy, which, of course, that's like just further evidence of you haven't spent time in the trades, because the tenacity that you displayed to do all the things that needed to happen for us to be on here, that's rare. I might've thrown in the hat myself if I was on the other side. So let's just get to it. I've talked about you being in training and development, or learning and development, and I suspect that you didn't do it cowboy style the way I did, and why? I suspect that is because I got to see your presentation in San Diego, and so there's this handbook that I kind of read about. What is it? What's that handbook of continuous improvement?
Speaker 1:So we have a handbook. Well, let me back up. So there's a couple of the people that presented with me at LCI this year we present with each other pretty much every year for the last three or four and one of those guys is a guy by the name of Rob Light and he works as a faculty member. He's basically a teacher at Penn State here in Pennsylvania, so he basically his job is to collect data, like one of the parts of working at Penn State is. They're a very big research institution, like probably one of the biggest in the world, so they do a lot of white papers and they do a lot of research and they're a very active bunch of people. I've been there to Penn State and presented in front of some of their PhD candidates once last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pretty neat, definitely different, but he was.
Speaker 1:He came to our Rosadin office and in Tempe, arizona, which is in the Phoenix area, and I basically he was handed off to me like hey, take this guy, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I took them and we went to a couple of jobs that looked good, a couple of jobs that didn't look so good, and kind of had the opportunity to compare and contrast and we shared a lot of information back and forth as far as you know what good lean products look like from the production standpoint and what's some that could use a little bit more, a little bit more in culture. So all of and he did that with several other organizations other than the one that I work for, rosendon Electric and he basically started putting together this handbook and used a lot of the research that he got from his site visit to putting this handbook together and it's basically it's a collection of ways that lean resources are applicable to actual trades. There's a lot of things in that lean sandbox that play well with perfect star alignment, but there's a lot of them that really lend themselves to actual trade work as well. So that's basically what that handbook is.
Speaker 2:Awesome, all right. Well, let me know what you think about this, because I have this debate. It's probably more of a complaint, or maybe even more of me just whining. But, gcs, this is me saying this out loud. This is not you, this is me. Gcs seem to believe that they need to teach the trades how to be lean.
Speaker 2:My argument is, if anybody understands and for clarity, folks, if you don't know what kind of lean we're talking about, we're not talking about losing weight and working people to death. We're talking about continuous improvement. We're talking about respect for people we're talking about. We're not talking about losing weight and working people to death. We're talking about continuous improvement. We're talking about respect for people. We're talking about developing people, which, for me, is the whole damn purpose of this lean philosophy, ideology, cult, whatever you want to call it. And so if anybody understands the value of eliminating waste and developing people, it is trade contractors. I think again, this is me a lot of what's in construction, because I haven't seen the same type of problem outside of construction. But in construction, most of the lean tools that are available are about organizing, coordinating, kind of higher level type stuff, and maybe blind to how these concepts can be attached to work at the point of installation. What do you think about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I totally agree. You can see it in P6 schedules, right? Or any of those tools, right? You can see that on this date the electricians are going to be on the site. On this date they're going to install gear. On this date they're going to energize and then, by God you know, on the fifth bullet point, they're done. You know? So all the stuff that takes place in between the predecessor and successor work to all of those things, those are the most important parts, right? Yes, right, yes, and that's the part that you know. When you look at most GCs, specifically like superintendents, you don't see a whole lot of superintendents that are electricians or that were previously electricians before they took their current assignment. So the likelihood of them understanding the intricacies of our work as electricians or carpenters or painters or pick your poison, the likelihood of them understanding that is not very likely, right? It's not very clear. So, when it comes to the education piece, yeah, they can educate on some things, but they're surely not equipped well enough to educate us on most things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and it's not because they're inadequate, it's a frame of reference. They haven't walked in it. I don't know if you know this, but and folks out there, this is a rare thing, so you might want to save this and share this with people as evidence. But before that we're going to do the LNM family member shout out, and this one goes out to Mr Lance Furuyama. Lance dropped me this note. He said I was fortunate enough to join the second session of the time management workshop and it changed the way that I look at my calendar.
Speaker 2:For those that know me, it looks like I'm a master of organization and planning, but what I didn't realize is that I wasn't. I wasn't allowing time in my calendar for myself or the things that I really want to do. So, lance, first of all, thank you for taking the time to hang out with us in that workshop and leaving this awesome comment to the rest of the L&M family members out there. Drop me a comment on the socials. Leave us a review on the wherever and everywhere, because that gives me the opportunity to celebrate you on the future podcast. I'm a plumber and so the reason I'm saying that is it's rare for a plumber and electrician to have a, we'll say, civil conversation. I know that was not going to happen, bro, I ain't got time to talk to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a fact, sir. You should have told me you were a plumber when we first met. I probably wouldn't be here today.
Speaker 2:That's why I kept it a secret. Yeah, and it's interesting that, like, the common point that you and I have is Henry Nutt. Right, he's a sheet metal guy Right, like what is happening out there, man, it's amazing. Yeah, all right, so when was it like sixth or seventh grade when you discovered that you wanted to be a lean leader and train and develop people in the construction industry?
Speaker 1:No, it was probably a 20th grade. I would say Something close to that. Yeah, yeah, I had no idea about the trades most of my younger days, as far as that being a viable path for me. Yeah, yeah, I had no idea about the trades most of my younger days. As far as that being a viable path for me, yeah, yeah, not at all. It wasn't at all something that was on my mind. I was. I was pretty hell bent that I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. That was my calling. 10-4? Yeah, I went and took a, took an ASVAB test in the 11th grade and did really well, and I had a an old, an old injury where one of my pinkies didn't close all the way. It kind of you can kind of see it, doesn't.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I see that blast, yep, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the interesting thing about that is that they basically the recruiter, the Navy recruiter that I was working with told me that you know, you can do pretty much anything you want in Navy Navy, but you're not going to be able to go to BUDS because you're not going to be able to pass a physical examination. So from there, you know, I kind of asked him a couple other questions like hey, well, what else prevents me from being in the Navy? And he started telling me you know well, tattoos and all these other things. And so, in my infinite wisdom, at 17 years old, I kind of took that as all right. Well, I'm going to start getting tattooed a lot, I'm going to show you people what's up and I'm literally like covered in tattoos present day.
Speaker 1:So from there I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I wound up dropping out of school. That was my 11th grade, the end of my 11th grade or going in my 12th grade. I dropped out of school and I didn't really know what to do. I had a friend that had an opportunity for me to go to this aircraft mechanics school and I'd met somebody. The next I don't know week or so, as I was kind of getting my paperwork together to apply for the school, I met this person that said hey, you know, my friend owns this elevator company, you know, and I know he's looking for people.
Speaker 2:So if you're interested, you know, let I know he's looking for people.
Speaker 1:So if you're interested, you know, let me know. And I was like, eh, I didn't even know people work on those things. And, yeah, this is, yeah, it sounds horrible. This is like in the South LA area where I lived at the time. So so, yeah, I took this job for this crazy, this Turkish dude named Ted, in the Long Beach area, and after I don't know probably three or four weeks, we were building residential elevators there and after about three or four weeks of being on these jobs, I started noticing that, you know, there was these guys that were, you know, a different trade and they always seem to be shooting the shit and having fun and carrying on. I remember asking my journeyman one day. I was like, hey, man, oh, don't worry about those guys you know. And I'm like, well, who are they, you know? Do they live here? Do they work here? Oh, those are the electricians. Bro, don't worry about those guys. You know, that's so awesome.
Speaker 1:So a short, a very short amount of time later, and I, as an elevator guy or elevator person I wouldn't really call myself an installer at that point in my career, but working in that craft, you do a little bit of everything. You do some electrical work, you do a lot of plumbing, you do a lot of everything, and I had already, like, kind of fallen in love with the wiring portion of my work, which is, you know, I was very new to the job so I did very little work, but they did throw me a couple of bones here and there, you know, allowing me to work on some electronics and some electrical stuff. So, yeah, probably the end of 1997, something like that, I went to work for an electrical contractor in the South LA area. I did that for probably two or three years. Then I moved to Central California. So three hours north of LA or three hours south from the San Francisco Bay area is an area called San Luis Obispo, California, which is one of the pretty much God's country, the most beautiful place I've ever lived, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Which is one of the pretty much God's country, the most beautiful place I've ever lived, yeah, yeah, I mean, if you imagine where a country kind of living in in the ocean come together, the Pacific ocean kind of come together, that's what. This place is just expensive to live there. But I made it work, figured it out. I stayed there for about five years. I moved to the Phoenix area and I'd been working as a non-union electrician the whole time.
Speaker 2:So did you go to like apprenticeship or you just went straight to work?
Speaker 1:I went straight to work. Yeah, so, so 2005,. I got to the Phoenix area, took a job in a similar kind of shop as I worked at in California some light commercial but mainly, you know, heavy residential, like custom home type stuff Got it. So I was working there and I was jackhammering this footing for this guy's garage that he had. It was like a I don't know a 20,000 square foot garage and the service was coming up. Yeah, it was a humongous thing. The service was coming up off the side of the building and there was a footing in the way that was kind of preventing my conduit to smoothly transition up the wall outside. So I'm jackhammering a little bit and I slipped and I hurt my back.
Speaker 2:Oh damn.
Speaker 1:My boss is hey, man, you know we still need to get some distances for and I need to buy wire, you know. So I need to get some distances from the actual street to this building. I'm like dude, I don't think you understand, like I can't even barely pick up my tools. Man, like, my back is pretty bad yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'm at that point in my life, I'm 25. So I'm not like overweight, I'm pretty fit. You know, I've always been pretty fit. So I mean, this is just one of those things that happens, right, Right. So he's kind of upset and I go through a worker's comp claim, miss a week of work or something like that, probably not even a full week, and when I come back they lay me off.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's yeah dirty, that's dirty.
Speaker 1:Arizona is a right-to-work state and there's some things going on there.
Speaker 1:But me coming from California. I'm like I'll show you sons of guns, you know, and I call a lawyer and they basically laugh at me. You know, hey, dude, that's not how this works. So so I called the uh, I called the local IBW, the local electrical union in Phoenix, and let them know my scenario. And they're like well, you know, and this was about two hours from where I was living I was living about two hours away from from Phoenix, in a town called Prescott Valley, prescott Valley. So so I basically let them know what was going on. They're like hey, you know, it's about a two hour drive to get here every day, but if you're willing to make the, make it work, you know we'll put you to work tomorrow. Damn, all right. And it was for like two bucks, maybe three bucks more than what I was making after, you know, I don't know, five or six years of being doing electrical work. So I'm like shit, dude, I don't care about that.
Speaker 1:I'm in, you know, so I got my little four speed, you know, toyota, and I started making the drive every day, wow, yeah. So I got there. You know, I was telling them how much experience I've had and you know, I thought, like most young people, I thought I had it all figured out and knew pretty much everything. But I immediately started working on a convention center, a brand new convention center in downtown Phoenix, and it was a pretty heavy commercial, like bordering, some light industrial work that I was doing there. So they told me, you know, we're going to put you through some school, you're going to take some classes and you'll be a journeyman electrician in no time. So I'm like, okay, you know, this is perfect, right. So I started dumping my money into these classes, right.
Speaker 1:A couple of years I start, you know, just putting more and more time in and all of a sudden, the program that I was a part of that gets me from being a sub-journeyman to a journeyman. It wasn't an apprenticeship, it was just some classes, right. That program was thrown away. The contractor that I was working for at the time they weren't accepting apprentices to work for them. So there were zero apprentices at this contractor because we were going to school, you know around one, 32 o'clock, you know, a couple of times a week. So they needed bodies on the job.
Speaker 1:So to basically say, hey, you know, this daytime school is bullshit, we're not going to hire any apprentices how do you like that? You know, I never met an apprentice, never heard anything about the apprenticeship. So I kept on going through these classes and going to these classes and then, you know, it finally got to the point. It was like you know what I I in my time on the planet. At that point I come to the realization that it's time to cut my losses, right, yeah, so so I joined the apprenticeship and started from scratch, you know, and took about a three this is what seven years into it now, yeah it is Ooh, baby, yeah, that's huge.
Speaker 1:So 2008, I took a I think it was like a three somewhere between a three and $5 an hour pay cut in the apprenticeship as a first year apprentice and it was horrible. It was another very close friend of mine. Current day. There was another guy in my class and basically had the same thing happen to him. But yeah, I graduated my apprenticeship in 2012 and went straight to it. Man, pretty rough way to get it done, but got it done. Kind of went to Alaska via Mexico. You know what I mean. I do.
Speaker 2:I think there's some critical points there. First of all, good on you for sticking it out, because I know a lot of people that would have said, oh, it's never going to work, the world's against me, and just floundered around. I think one important, really valuable point that I'm assuming has played forward in your life is sometimes you got to take a step back, to take a big leap forward. Apprenticeship folks, if you don't know, for electricians it's five years, isn't it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's between three and five years and it all depends on the frequency of your class date. So if you go to school one day a week, it might take five years. Two days a week, and so on and so forth. You get there faster.
Speaker 2:And so you've been in the trade. You signed up for this special program. You were taking classes to accelerate, to earn the journeyman license and status, and then you had to go back as if you had just graduated high school first day on the trade as an apprentice. That's a lot of, I'm going to say, humility and maybe an understanding or appreciation of the long game. So props to you.
Speaker 2:Now, what would you recommend to people out there that are interested? I want to be electrician or you know, maybe they want to be super cool, like for real y'all. You don't have to be as sexy as I am to be a plumber. I want to be clear about that. But would you recommend, if you knew, going back then, because part of the problem is they don't tell you this, right, they don't talk about the opportunities that are in the trades, and when I say they, I'm talking about the adults that young students are interacting with. Would you choose or recommend to say you know what? Just find an apprenticeship and start there, or would you recommend go out there, get some dirt on your boots and do a couple of jobs before you pick an apprenticeship?
Speaker 1:I think that working as a summertime helper or anything that you can do to kind of see what's happening around you and have the opportunity like maybe working for a general contractor on a cleanup crew or anything like that, you know, once again, this is good summertime work for a lot of young and you'll probably make more money than you could imagine. You know, just working as a summer helper, I think, seeing it and understanding it and having the opportunity to see the different folks and how they do what they do, I think a lot of times we think about, we think of plumbers and we think with those two things. You think about light switches and toilets, right, and it's a very small portion of our job, right? I mean, the very last finished product is that toilet or that sink or whatever fixture you're dealing with, or light switches or outlets.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whatever it is. Yeah, it's. There's a lot out there. You know, the term electrician or the term plumber or the term painter is open for interpretation, right, there's so many different alleys and avenues that you can kind of pursue within any of those, those, those different jobs, different careers. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean there's service, there's new construction, there's renovation, there's residential residential right and all those four. My dad's a plumber, that's how I got into it and he liked doing residential service. Plumbing man, I couldn't handle that, like cleaning out somebody's stuff. Laugh at me because I I gag right, you're not a real plumber, I'm a commercial plumber. I like new stuff or I don't have to smell the stink or see the stink. That's my style.
Speaker 2:I tried service for a little bit and the guy that I was riding with two days into it, he's bro. You're not a service guy. You need to go back to the construction side. I said no problem, cause I this sucks. I don't appreciate that. But the point is that there's a whole world, like a whole galaxy of work and experience to build in the trades, whatever trade you choose to go after. So you've given us some light. You went, got your, you got your journeyman license. You didn't give up on that, which is interesting. I want to come back to that. But you told us about your pinky and you also mentioned that you're like a professional shooter. How did that work? So I guess the pinky doesn't keep you from being a pro shooter huh.
Speaker 1:No, the irony there is, there's a lot of special operators, like a lot of SEALs and Green Berets and things like that in the competitive shooting world, and let's say that very seldom are their names on top of mine when it comes to the final pecking order after shooting matches.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, and I bet you love that huh, Like y'all didn't want me to play with you and I'm smoking you now.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I'll tell you to get to the shooting part. I'm going to. I'm going to go down a little bit further down the hole of how I got there professionally. That's a huge thing. So so I graduated my apprenticeship about I don't know, two or three months before I graduated my apprenticeship, my general foreman so my boss's boss he was keeping me in the job trailer. I was working at an Intel campus in Phoenix, arizona, big industrial complex with a semiconductor plant there. The jobs we were working on were kind of slowing down, so he had me in the job trailer running through all this leadership training that we had back then. So every day that's all I did, for it feels like an eternity and I was cussing him and telling him every day you know, I don't want to do this anymore, I don't care, I don't want to be a foreman, I don't want to do any of this and as an apprentice, one of the one of so.
Speaker 1:I couldn't even threaten him that I wanted to quit my job because he'd just laugh at me. You know what I mean. So I was learning how to be foreman, how to be a foreman and all the leadership stuff, and I was reading the foreman's manual that my company has produced. So when I graduated, which was in December of 2012, I was a journeyman on my tools for about four hours and they called me up and gave me a phone and an iPad, or a phone and a computer maybe, and basically told me hey, there's this new thing called BIM building
Speaker 1:information modeling, and I think you're going to be a perfect person for it. We're going to set you up, you're going to have a little crew and you're going to start detailing and learning how to do this. So I did that for probably two or three months and then they asked me to go and work in the corporate office and start doing the same thing. So I thought it was, there was going to be some training, but once again it was like hey man, here's some fire you know, throw you right in it, right, yeah. So so I'm learning how to use, you know, these, all these programs and learning how to model electrical equipment.
Speaker 1:I did probably, I'd say, about a week of training, very informal, you know a couple of people standing around me and kind of helping me from time to time when I got stuck. And then they gave me a job at the University of California, san Francisco, at a medical well, it's a hospital there, it's a specialty medical facility, but they were just, they were re-innovating it. And it's a specialty medical facility, but they were just, they were re-innovating it and that was my job. So I went to work every day in an office at that point and I basically I drew all the electrical systems and then I coordinated that, all of those systems with the other trades you know, on weekly models and making sure that you know we can all play in the same spot.
Speaker 1:So, building information, modeling, bim, basically your 3D model, all of the electrical equipment and all of the plumbing stuff and all of the framing, everybody coordinates it. You build the model and then once we're feeling pretty good that everything fits pretty well, then you start releasing packages to actually construct. It's kind of what that means. So I got two questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, shoot. The first one is why did they pick you for that job? Did they just flip a coin? Did they ever tell you?
Speaker 1:I don't know, man. So there's a stipulation or there's a clause, I should say in the inside agreement, so the union agreement for my home local IBW, local 640, that says that if you've completed your fourth year of school and you've exceeded 10,000 hours or something like that, on the job training which at that point I mean I've been an electrician for almost like 12 years at that point Right, so yeah, I'm like you know 100 million hours of documented time so if both of those requirements are satisfied, then you're allowed to not work under a journeyman anymore, so you can take work assignments directly from your foreman. So my foreman, who's still a very my foreman at the time, who's still a very good friend of mine, he was like dude, he's a great, he's a great big old dude that didn't take my shit for nothing, right, which is what we needed.
Speaker 1:as a youngster Right, I needed somebody that was going to take what I had and give it back to me. You know, 10, 40. And this guy did that. So I respected him a lot, to say the least. He just he ran me ragged with all of these new technologies. How to measure, you know, instead of using lifts, I'm using, you know, lifts and tape measures and reaching out, you know, way outside of this lift, I'm using laser levels and I'm using lasers and I'm measuring in different ways and I'm using, you know, the computer a little bit to do some of my math for some of my conduit. So they had they'd seen that I picked that stuff up pretty quick and that I was technologically savvy. And there was a couple of other like just random things that I had done here and there, but I think it was more. So, you know, I was young, they needed somebody to start doing this work and I was probably the best option at the time. I think is how they picked me.
Speaker 2:Got it and it's worked out well for you. Okay, here's a second question, because I remember when BIM like first hit the scene for me and at the time the company I was working with I used to work for TD Industries here in San Antonio we had added we bought up some electrical companies. This was back like the Enron fallout there was a big people went under. We picked them up Very expensive decision Anyhow. So now we had MEP mechanical electrical employment and so we're doing this coordination and I'm like, oh, this is going to be awesome so we don't have to fight anymore in the field. Right, I got there first and I'm guessing that you weren't this type of coordinator, but the guys that I was working with, we'll just say, in the first three years of BIM hitting the scene, the electrician's definition of coordination was they just needed from structure down four inches and from ceiling up 10 inches and their coordination was done. Please tell me you weren't that kind of guy. No negative.
Speaker 1:Okay, good. No, that's an approach. It's called zones and how you run a zone model is very different, yeah.
Speaker 1:And so this is all big conduit and big equipment. So this isn't any of the branch. So anything less than I would say an inch and a quarter or one inch tubing nobody cares about, right, Right. The only clearances that I needed to worry, I mean, those are things we'd figure out in the field, typically, Right, right, yeah, so this was all big stuff, all the three inch and the four inch conduit and all the you know all the Cable tray conduit and all the you know all the cable trade, right, right, got it, got it All right.
Speaker 2:So I cut you off. You're at UCSF, right. On the verge of starting to outperform Navy SEALs and special ops people shooting.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah. So I'm on this job, everything's going great, and then I get this call at seven o'clock at night on my work phone, which you know strong union person nine times out of 10, I turned my phone off, but I happened to, just I happened to have just left it on, so this call comes through.
Speaker 1:I take the call, it's my superintendent at the. It's not even a superintendent that I work for, but it's somebody that's very respected in my office. So I take the call and he's like hey, man, I need you to report to this new job. And I'm like, okay, when? And he's like tomorrow. I'm like, dude, I have a job that I'm working on you know what I mean in San Francisco. And he's like, yeah, I don't care about that, somebody else will deal with that. This is from the very top down that they you specifically on this job. And I was like, okay, well, I mean, you know I ride. I rode a Harley pretty much every day. I lived in Arizona, so that's kind of what we do there. So I was like dude, you know like somebody needs to bring my computer. You know I ride a motor. I don't care about any of that, just be there. This is the address tomorrow morning at seven.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I pull in, I'm looking around and it's like less than 10 minutes from my house, which is amazing, right? And it's when you try to search for this property it just says that it's first solar, right? Just some random, humongous hundreds of thousands of square foot, just huge space. So nobody knew what was going on. It was really crazy. I'll spare you all the drama. It was a company that was building glass, so this company they build these are all typically sapphire crystals on an iPhone, Okay.
Speaker 1:A cool lens is made out of sapphire crystals. So this company was contracted through Apple to build those sapphires, and by build them I mean grow them. So there's these ovens and all this stuff that they use, and I'll spare you the details. But it was a very hush, hush job. We didn't even know we were working kind of indirectly for Apple. The security was ridiculous. The guy who I reported to directly there, he made a humongous error and they fired him, which is pretty hard to do at my company. You know you'd have to work at it and be fired from Rosenthal.
Speaker 1:So they basically said, hey, this guy's out, you're in, you're the guy now. And I'm like bro, I just graduated the apprenticeship, like weeks ago.
Speaker 2:I feel like this is crazy.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. But I talked to that same superintendent and I'm like, hey man, how often? Like what are my work hours? And he's mad. I want you to be here every minute, that you can be here seven days a week, and I'm like, say, less, dude, I'm an hourly employee. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, so you're like yes yes, I was working at my apprenticeship at the time, part-time, but collectively I was working between 70 and 80 hours a week and getting paid for those hours and getting paid big money. Yeah, I'd never seen paychecks like that, but going back to some of the trials and tribulations to do something like that for me. I'd never seen paychecks like that, but going back to some of the trials and tribulations like to do something like that for me. I was drinking whiskey and Coors Light. From the second I got home to the second I went to sleep every day, I mean seven days. I would do it eight days a week if there was eight days in the week every day. So my relationship with my wife at the time was, you know, pretty rough. But it was a lot of sacrifices to do to work with that type of just nonstop chaos. So I did that for I don't know, probably a year and a half on this project and then I had the opportunity to work directly with Apple and a couple other different. You know I could stay with Rosendon.
Speaker 1:Of course I had some different options there to work with and I wound up taking this job through a sister company of Rosenden called Modular Power Solutions and they build modular electric rooms for the data center industry. So it was a little startup company that we had. So I went there as a design manager, took the job, basically worked there. There was like four of us that worked in the office and I think there was probably 30, 35 people that worked in the field at a factory in Sherman, texas, just north of Dallas there.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so I started making these trips back and forth. With a little startup like that, there's not enough people to do all the jobs, so everyone that worked there has 12 different hats, so I started making the trips. One of my hats was a deployment manager, so I would fly out wherever these products were being sent. These electric rims were being sent on trucks. They're humongous. I would be there to kind of help along the subcontracts with the people that are installing them the integration piece, making sure that they don't so you were selling them outside of Rosenden.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't just okay okay, gotcha, yeah.
Speaker 1:So this company that I worked for, they designed these electric rooms and then they subbed out the actual construction of them to Rosenden. So when we shipped them out to a data center, sometimes Rosenden would be the actual electrical company on site, but more times than not they were not. So the subcontract I'd have to kind of move that along, sometimes set them up, sometimes not so. So I'm traveling a lot, like in my at my highest I was flying. I think the most I did in a year was like 158 flights in a year. Yeah, a lot. So yeah, once again, I'm almost getting divorced before I'm even married.
Speaker 1:So I keep on, I keep on at it, I keep doing that work. Then I get to the point where we needed a second factory. Right, we weren't putting out enough work and we had a big job in Prineville, oregon, with Facebook. So they asked me if I'd be interested in running my own factory in Arizona and I was like, yeah, absolutely. So we jumped right in. In fact, my friend that was in the apprenticeship with me, that I said, had a similar story to mine where he had worked non-union a lot. He was actually the general foreman under me, one of the two general foremen that were under me and from there we started building them. There, man, we did. We had one humongous successful project at Facebook and when that was done they basically closed that factory and I went to work in an office and basically worked in an office for the next six or seven months. I had a guy. I know this is a long story, but I'm getting there. I'm almost to the shooting, my man, yeah you're good, there was a guy that worked for us.
Speaker 1:We had one guy that did all of the estimating and he had a terminal illness and he sensed that in his past. But Parker was the only guy responsible for all the estimating. So they asked me to go into the local Rosendon office and basically do a quick down and dirty apprenticeship with the chief estimator there in the Rosendon division of our office. So I learned how to estimate and it's one of those things that, as an electrician and as someone that's technologically pretty sound, it's something that I picked up in a very short amount of time yeah, very quick. So I pumped out some estimates, kind of learned that.
Speaker 1:But as I'm going back to this normal Rosenden kind of world, I'm realizing that I'm falling in love with the normalcy of the electrical business, as opposed to the chaos that I've been enduring for probably four years at this point. So yeah, I'm falling in love with it and there's 13 or 14 Rosenden offices in the country and I was very fortunate that our CEO worked out of the same office that I worked out of, so I would meet with him every morning. He was an early bird and I'm an early bird and you know I started. I would just have, you know, shoot the shit with them a little bit, having a little coffee in the morning times, and I'd ask them hey, man, I'm thinking about you know, maybe coming back to Rosendon you have any idea where all of my skill sets can kind of come together, what would make sense for me? And he said, you know, the QAQC area and training are the two places that I think you would really shine.
Speaker 1:So, I thought about that. I went back to my office at Modular Power Solutions and I just I went from, like I said, working crazy hours to now. My job was to sit in this room and put estimates together. And I mean my day I was working, you know, 30, 40 hour weeks. It was a normal thing.
Speaker 1:Well, my wife was in nursing school. I'm accustomed to nonstop grinding and I started shaving off a lot of the weight that I'd gained from drinking nonstop for several years. So I felt kind of I was at a shooting range and this guy kind of came up to me and he's hey, man, you seem to be coming here pretty regularly. And I'm like, yeah, and he's you ever think about getting out of this little box that you're shooting at a piece of paper and maybe doing some running and movement? And I'm like I didn't know that was even a thing, man. And he kind of turned me on to this.
Speaker 1:There's a weekly match on Tuesday nights in Arizona at a gun club called Rio Salado Sportsman's Club. It's called Tuesday Night Steel and it's just you show up with whatever you got and there's some steel and you know they start a clock and you kind of run through and shoot all the steel. So that's when I kind of started jumping in and, like I said, my wife was in nursing school. I have all these resources, I have all the time, I have all the money I need to do it. So, yeah, I started shooting pistol matches. And there's another event called Three Gun, which is rifle, pistol and shotgun, kind of the same, kind of squint your eyes kind of thing, but you're shooting all different guns.
Speaker 1:Now you know, I did that one time and fell absolutely in love with it and probably a year and a half later I had some people supporting me and, quote unquote, started my professional shooting career there 10, four, all right.
Speaker 2:So first, this kind of random question you connected with or seen the humble marksman on YouTube? No, all right. Well, I need to connect you with them because I've been able. He's in, the guy that runs that YouTube channel. He does reviews on guns and he's in the competition space. I'm not sure where he ranks, but I know he's got a heavy following and I've worked with him. He works for one of the companies that I was supporting or providing services to. His name is David Lenton, so maybe I'll connect the two of y'all because y'all have something like pretty, pretty similar or a shared interest.
Speaker 2:You've said it already, but, like the estimating, there's a level of detail there that people with brains like me cannot suffer. I just don't have that. Whatever it takes to stay in that space, I could do it, you know, for maybe a day a year, but not every day. Could do it, you know, for maybe a day a year, but not every day. And shooting, I'm sure there's a, especially like what you're talking about, not just standing there but your mobile movement, et cetera. There's a lot of things that you got to learn, improve, tweak and adjust to be performing at the level that you're performing. And then the big switches you've had some pretty significant shifts in trajectory in your career and all of that combined kind of comes to me and says highly flexible, highly adaptive and a rapid learner. Were you always aware of that? That's kind of like the meta skill, yes, like have you always been aware of that? Or when did you become aware of that little concoction of awesomeness?
Speaker 1:did you become aware of that little concoction of awesomeness? Man, I'll tell you that growing up in South LA area is a pretty rough area. It can be a pretty rough area. So, learning how to kind of chameleonize myself and kind of being able to jump in wherever I needed to jump in and kind of spooling up a little quicker than everyone else, I started learning different ways, man, where you know, you think about two dogs, you know before. They're best friends, they're smelling each other and sniffing around, going in circles, and then after a while, after a short amount of time, they're either going to fight or they're buddies, right.
Speaker 1:And I started, I started using those kinds of analogies and those kinds of metaphors in my head, of like, how can I shorten this process? And then you, you know, you add the fact that I'm literally covered in tattoos, right. So I'm not as approachable as the average person. I know a lot of that's changed, but I've just I've learned different techniques. Um, and when it comes to my career, what I noticed very quickly is that as soon as I diversified myself from all of the other people, I've, I've, I've lessened the pool that I'm in. There's less people in my pool. So anytime I had the opportunity when someone said hey, you want to try this new BIM thing? Absolutely, bro, I can't wait. Hey, what do you think about this new product? It's this new startup company that we're working in. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, dude, I'm 100% in. If everything checks out, I'm in. And I just kept on diversifying myself to the point where I don't know anybody that has the same amount of skill sets with me as I do anywhere around me. There's people that are very close and I'm not saying that I'm like this rare, special individual. However, when you look at the things that I've done and some of the areas that I've done them in, I don't meet people that are like me, and once I understood that, it made it very easy for me to see very clearly the path that I needed to be on, and training is a very interesting place now because it always changes and my customers now like one of my customers that I work with in fact, I just got done talking to their head guy over there just before I came on the show. One of my customers is the modular power solutions company that I used to work for, so there's people under our holding company, right. And now, like I said, there was four of us in the office and there was probably 30 or 40 electricians in the field or people in the field. Well, now there's 365 people that work in the field and there's a hundred people that work in the office. So that company is you know. I mean, I just went there and taught six classes two months ago or a month and a half ago. So, yeah, it's. It's funny how it all works out.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, the diversification if you're the same person as everyone around you which there's nothing wrong with that, right. If your name's Jill or your name's Sarah or Jim or Tommy or Luis and you're an electrician cool, that's awesome. And if that's where you're going to end your professional career, that's perfect. We need those people. But we also need people that step up and take some leadership positions and do some of the other things, and a lot of times when we're in the trades, we don't think about you know. We think about oh man, if I could just be a journeyman, you know, if I could just do that, man, I'm set for life.
Speaker 1:And then we stop the learning, right? Yes, the most foolish thing you know that you could ever do is to stop learning because you need it. You know, to your point earlier, you know continuous growth and continuous improvement and respecting people. Those are the most important things in my entire life. So having the opportunity to exercise those, those abilities regularly has really fulfilled, you know, on the career side of me it's fulfilled me a lot. You know helping people and trying to lessen that curve and teaching other people how to reduce the amount of time those dogs are, you know, kind of circling and sniffing each other.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. So you mentioned the fulfillment you get out of training and developing others. You also said that you deliver training to a different company. So my understanding is you have your full-time learning and development for Rosendip and then you go and deliver training, like on the side or as a part of the company. How does that work?
Speaker 1:So the company- that it's an interesting question. So, like I said before that company Modular Power Solutions they're under our holding company, so we own that company, so they're under the umbrella. Okay, so the people that work in the office the same business model or structure is still holding true. So the people that work in the office work for that sister company of ours, got it. The people that work in the field there are actual Rosenden employees, so that's never changed. So I'm still working for Rosenden and going and teaching a sister company and the electricians. If I can get field and office employees in the same sessions, that's like the best thing ever on the planet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because anybody who knows construction companies a lot of times. Field and office don't play well, and when I say a lot of times, I mean all the times, all the time, brother truth, yeah, oh, I love that so much.
Speaker 2:Okay, so what's fulfilling about training?
Speaker 1:oh, man. So most electricians and you can sub in any trade you want, but most electricians we. We start the job. Sometime after the job is started, we show up boots on ground and sometime before the job ends we leave. Right, we have these magical creatures that start these jobs and these magical creatures that finish these jobs right the top-notch people start them and finish them right.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you might have a couple of helpers, a couple of apprentices on the front end and the back end, but most, like the bulk of the people, are coming in when we need labor now right. So when you ask any electrician and I concentrate on field leadership because I don't have the opportunity to train every single electrician on the planet but when you ask them to do certain things so we can start the next job better than we did the last one, or we ask them to do certain things so that we can finish this job strong, and they don't understand the full spectrum of the electrical business, from requests for a quote to actual closeout documents or closeout work that we do. When they understand that full spectrum of our business, they're much more intelligent. Right Now, we're filling in all of these gaps of knowledge as far as how the business actually works. So when I'm asking them to do things so that this job finishes strong and they understand the why, then they're not making up their own why, right, they already understand it. So when I see them understand that, I think one of the most fulfilling things that I see is teaching somebody that I've been working side by side with, like when I go back to.
Speaker 1:I live in Harrisburg, pennsylvania now, so I don't see the people that I worked with in the field very often. I mean, I go to Arizona I'm there in three weeks from now and I'll see some of them again but when I first started training, I was training in Arizona and when I would teach these guys that I've been, some of them were my apprentice. You know, when I say my apprentice, I mean they were apprentices of mine at the apprenticeship that I was teaching at. Some of them were my journeymen, some of them were, like you know, my foreman and general foreman, and now they're in classes with me. So teaching them the full spectrum of the business and having them apply some of that stuff, or seeing the people that I taught at the apprenticeship class and seeing them elevate, you know, to you know, high level leadership people, that's super fulfilling man.
Speaker 1:And I've been beating my head like most of my earlier career. I'd beat my head against a concrete wall and somebody would kind of come up and be like, hey, you know, metaphorically speaking, they'd say, hey, there's a door right there, you don't have to keep banging your head against that wall. So I guess for me it's kind of sharing that information, and a lot of times we have that ability. We have that ability to share the information, but the ability to tell a story is something that we've lost, right, and the ability to share and communicate and get in front of people, right.
Speaker 1:These are things that terrify a lot of people and they terrified me initially. So going to LCI or going there's a couple other conferences that I speak at. I went to Finland last year, last June same thing terrified. You know it's hard, but you have a message that people need to hear and they want to hear. So sharing that message is very fulfilling for me. Having conversations like the one I had with you in San Diego when I came off the stage, where I hit the right note right, where you saw what you needed to see or heard what you needed to hear, and we connected in that sense. And that happens to me pretty much every time I speak and that's why I do it, that's why I continue to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's amazing. I mean I feel you in that being able to interact. I made a post I think it was last year, me and a buddy of mine, rick Mendoza. He's a production manager here in San Antonio for TD when he and I met, when we were sniffing each other out, it was the first time I was ever a foreman and it was a university hospital, four-story kind of training education facility, hospital, four-story kind of training education facility biggest project I ever had. And I was a foreman like six months at this point. Right, they gave me this big giant project. He was the piping foreman on the project. Anyways, we had our differences and it was awesome. We grew and then, looking back, now he's the freaking production manager of the whole thing. The guy that took the picture of us talking. He was an apprentice when I was a foreman. He was on my project and I kind of lost my mind a bunch but really wanted to contribute to his path. Now he's a superintendent and so being able to see people grow into leadership roles or take on more responsibility, have greater influence this is the ultimate and the only way you get that that I know of is to invest in other people, is to train is to share your story, is to share your message and, like you said, you were up there and it resonated. I'm like man, I got to talk to this dude because, yes, and you've had some major impact.
Speaker 2:Now, what's interesting, I've worked with journeymen, back when I was an apprentice. I remember the first journeyman that I worked with that wasn't my dad, his name was Oscar, and the reason I remember him is because he was a son of a bitch. I was my first job out of high school on a commercial construction site and he said go grab the snap cutters and cut that piece of cast iron. And I'm like what's a snap cutter? And he lost his freaking mind. He got cussed me out and gave me the plumb bob and said go upstairs and I want you to hold this plumb bob through that sleeve and hold it still until I call you. And he just left me there for the rest of the day.
Speaker 2:I needed to be taught. Instead of teaching me, he punished me right, and this happens more often than it really needs to happen. But I worked with some awesome people that were about training, teaching and developing. Now, construction. We talk a lot about this labor shortage, which I can't totally disagree, because we don't have enough people to do the work, but we ignore the leadership shortage and the training and development and appreciation shortage. And so you're in the learning and development space for Rosendin doing big things. Have you seen a connection between the training and development that y'all do and retention of talent training?
Speaker 1:and development that y'all do and retention of talent. That's a very good question, sir. I can't say that's a fact. I can't say that's happening, and the problem is that there's a couple of things. So quantifying the effectiveness of training is one of the most challenging things ever on the planet. It's extremely hard, and it's extremely hard when things are normal, but things haven't been normal for a lot of years now.
Speaker 1:Right, you have all of these roller coasters, all these sags and swells, but I think that the biggest thing to kind of counter that, the biggest thing that I see that's happening with training, is we're cross-training people. I'm bringing people in, and the time and place of yelling and screaming and all of that within my organization is like very, very rapidly being kicked out. Right, like emotional intelligence and teaching people. Like that I don't just teach regular formanship, like I teach a lot of soft skills, type things. Right, like emotional intelligence, I teach, I teach people. You know what they're. We use a couple of different tools, a couple of different surveys and a couple of different third-party organizations that help us with basically showing where strengths are within our employees so that they can capitalize in those strengths and actually invest in something that's going to return handsomely and return well in their investment, as opposed to, you know, being exhausted from working outside of their natural, innate abilities. You got it. So when you teach people that, hey man, you don't have to yell and scream, first of all, I'm right here. Second of all, I don't need to be yelled at. And third of all, your message. I don't even know what you're trying to say because your tone is so offensive. I'm not hearing you, bro. You know teaching people and it's an interesting thing, because teaching people that once you're actually like a grown, responsible person, you need to learn how to throttle up and throttle down your emotions at your own discretion, right. Most people can have them all the way shut, so that you're a robot, and some people can have them all the way open and you're just a waterfall right.
Speaker 1:Crying all day and being able to reside somewhere in the middle is a skillset that it goes along with a lot of the content and a lot of the curriculum that I teach and develop. So, yeah, it's an important thing, but I wish, I wish I could. If I had more time, I would look into how we can quantify that a little bit more. But it's hard, man, it's hard, but I do see more intelligent people. I do like when we're done training people, they are more intelligent than when before they walked in the classroom and they're asking right, right, they're hungry for more, they want more training. It's crazy. It's getting to the point now where training that we just offered to our office staff is being asked to be taught at our field level. You know and I mean I start that I'm going to alabama in two weeks to start doing some of that, some of that soft skill stuff with electricians. You know a big ass room of them and it's awesome, it's cool Hell yeah, well, I'm going to go out on a limb and just say yes.
Speaker 2:And because I worked for a company back in the days a long time ago where it was interesting, where we hired, we put a program together to recruit students out of high school. We started internships right out of like while they were in high school, anyways, sometimes right out of like while they were in high school, anyways. Sometimes they get to like their second year of apprenticeship and all of a sudden you know we were the evil empire and they needed to go work for a company that loved them more. Okay, I understand, Right Cause they're in the apprenticeship program, they're hearing about their buddies making 50 cents more an hour or whatever they would go. And almost every time, six months, six to 12 months later, they come back and they're like man, it was bad and I'm like we kind of knew that, but you had to figure that out on your own.
Speaker 2:And over the years I've got to work with tons and tons of craft workers across the country and it's like why do you like your company and they will credit training, they do all kinds of training. Everywhere else I've worked there was no training. They just yelled at me all the time. One of my clients that recently did. They hired me to do training for their leadership.
Speaker 2:And, over and over again, their new hires, the people that were new to the company we're talking about general contractors, superintendents, project managers they would say it's amazing to be here, I'm so grateful that they're investing in us, it's awesome that they're training us, and so all of those data points I take as indicators that and, if I like, really for real, think about the people that you love and the people you spend time with.
Speaker 2:They are people that have invested in you. They are people that have listened to you and taught you something, and so, as an organization, if you're not investing in your people, if you're not developing them, helping nurture some of their skill sets, like you're missing out because others will and you're going to lose the personnel that you have, and so applause to you for taking that on. As the next step, I got one heavy closing question that's kind of a not kind of it's a curveball. But before I get to that one, I want to ask you you've been down this windy road, which is amazing. You can chameleonize yourself and learn at an extremely rapid rate. What do you think the next big step is?
Speaker 1:That's a very good question, sir. So it's an interesting one in that I'm at a point right now where I'm still traveling a lot. I can travel probably, I would say, between I don't know between five and 10 days a month. I travel. My wife is a nurse. Like I told you earlier, she went to nursing school a while back. Now she's going through a graduate program to be a nurse practitioner Nice. So she's basically going to be a doctor here in about a year and a half.
Speaker 1:I have a daughter that's 19 months old. My wife is significantly younger than I am. She's almost a decade younger than me. So, yeah, so I have a lot that, that everything that's going on right now is pretty much perfect, like I couldn't ask for a better anything, like I couldn't change any aspect of my life and make it better right now. So I'm at a point where and that's kind of one of the beauties of not relying on my career as being my sole source of measuring of ability, you know so I still carry all my sponsorships, I still shoot pretty regularly.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's winter, it's literally snowing outside of my office window right now at home. So I think that by the time my wife is done and she's in practice, and it'll be about the same time that my daughter is probably starting school the next few years. That's when I'll probably start looking. I started putting my feelers out recently to a couple of superintendents one in Charlotte and one in Virginia and one in Maryland recently and kind of letting them know the same thing. I said, hey, you know, look, I don't know how, how or what I could do, or when I could do it, but I want you to know that at some point I'm going to need to sink my teeth into something back in the field.
Speaker 2:It's hard.
Speaker 1:It's once again. It's hard to. It's hard to take all the things that I know and what's something that's going to feed those things, because now I'm very particular about what I do and how I do it.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I've seen efficiency and I've learned. There's nothing else that the shooting world has taught me it's discipline. You don't become the top of a list of 300, 400 people by luck. Again and again you do it by discipline and hard work, and those are, like I said in San Diego, that's a discipline and hard work are supreme currencies that will always be there, you know they'll always be there.
Speaker 1:So, luckily, I've established a lot of good relationships within the organization that I work for and outside of the organization I work for. So I don't know, man, it would have to be something amazing for me to leave the best job ever on the planet, that's for sure 10, four.
Speaker 2:All right, man, you ready for the closing question? Yes, sir, All right Again. You've walked an amazing path and probably left it clear enough for other people to follow, and I know you dropped a lot of mental models and life lessons or principles that people can latch onto to straighten out their path right or take a big leap in their path. So thank you for that. And so here's the question what is the promise you are intended to be? That's a very interesting question.
Speaker 1:I think the promise that I'm intended to be is definitely the best father on the entire planet, a very close friend, someone that people can rely on, and in a teacher like I really take the mentorship piece of my career and both my personal and professional life. I take that very serious. So shortening the curve of resistance for people is something that you know I pride myself in having that ability to do. So I think those are all probably the promises that that those are also the things that move me and keep me happy and things that I'll be whittling on until I die.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I'd say all of those things, and they none of those are small things, which doesn't surprise me at all. Did you have fun, my man?
Speaker 1:I did man. I really enjoyed our conversation, oh yeah.