The Small Business Safari
Have you ever sat there and wondered "What am I doing here stuck in the concrete zoo of the corporate world?" Are you itching to get out? Chris Lalomia and his co-host Alan Wyatt traverse the jungle of entrepreneurship. Together they share their stories and help you explore the wild world of SCALING your business. With many years of owning their own small businesses, they love to give insight to the aspiring entrepreneur. So, are you ready to make the jump?
The Small Business Safari
From Financial Advisor to Deca-Millionaire Mentor: How Justin Goodbread Helps Entrepreneurs Build Exit-Ready Businesses
Justin Goodbread unpacks how concentrated focus beats scattered effort, why enterprise value matters more than income, and how designing for an exit creates freedom long before a sale. He shares the Deca-Millionaire framework forged through wins, losses, and relentless execution.
🎥 Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@TheSmallBusinessSafari
đź’ˇ GOLD NUGGETS (Key Moments)
· • The black dot metaphor for singular focus
· • Early entrepreneurship, hardship, and the mountaintop reset
· • Mindset rewiring and fitness as business force multipliers
· • Vision and values as non‑negotiables for scaling
· • One client, one offer, one outcome discipline
· • The 4% drives 64% principle for prioritization
· • Quarterly enterprise value reviews and execution sprints
· • Building a business that runs without you
· • Always be exit‑ready to maximize timing and valuation
· • Practical examples: productizing services, narrowing offers
đź”— Guest Links
• Website: https://JustinGoodbread.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justingoodbread
• Instagram: @justingoodbread
🌍 Follow The Small Business Safari
• Instagram | @smallbusinesssafaripodcast
• LinkedIn | Chris Lalomia
• Website | https://chrislalomia.com
Here's a picture illustration of how why most business owners don't do this. So I was about 16 years of age. My dad was, he had me working with him and he gave me a big heavy sledgehammer. Now, at the 16 years of age, I weighed 110 pounds. I was like soaking wet, little, little, little kid. And he said, Hey son, I want you to beat this wall down. I want you to knock this wall down. So, like most business owners, I grabbed the sledgehammer and I swung it with everything I had and hit the wall all over the place for about a minute and a half and it didn't fall. And he came over and he said, You tired yet? I said, Yes, sir. I'm pretty tired. He goes, Can't quit till the wall's down. Yes, sir. He said, He goes, I'm gonna show you something principle of life. This is where so many business owners miss the mark. Again, if you want to become a DECA millionaire and break away and be in the top 1%, if you want to get to that level, this is a principle that works every single time. Take it to the bank. Friends, this is it. What he do is he grabbed a can of black spray paint. And Chris, he reached down and he painted a little dot in the bottom right hand side of that corner and he said, hit that dot over and over and over. Okay, guess what? That wall fell down in about five minutes. That's right. Because as long as I kept hitting on that one dot over and over, the wall cracked. But we as business owners, we want to take our service or our product or our offer and try to get it to anybody and everybody. And so we just bounced against that wall like that, like I was doing when it tried to hit that wall all over the place.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the Small Business Safari, where I help guide you to avoid those traps, pitfalls, and dangers that lurk when navigating the wild world of small business ownership. I'll share those gold nuggets of information and invite guests to help accelerate your ascent to that mountaintop of success. It's a jungle out there, and I want to help you traverse through the levels of owning your own business that can get you bogged down and distract you from hitting your own personal and professional goals. So strap in Adventure Team and let's take a ride through the safari to get you to the mountaintop. No, he doesn't say it, but I do. Let's get ready to rock and roll. Let's get ready to learn something today, everybody. You're driving around your car, and if you're here in Atlanta, uh school is back in session, so that means you're perking and not driving. Uh, and you're stopping and not driving, and you're behind I love school buses. I love kids.
SPEAKER_01:I just do you like cars that have the student driver stickers all over them?
SPEAKER_00:Still my favorite. One of them pulled out in front of me again today, and I went by him. He was like a 45-year-old Indian guy. I'm like, you're not a student driver, bro. You're just not. And do you think that makes me drive any better? I mean, that's the question.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so I stuck one on your car.
SPEAKER_00:I know you did. And people weren't very nice to you. They were not nice to you. I was getting cut off left around. I'm like, what the hell's going on? And I went, Oh, Alan. Justin, if you see somebody with a student driver bumper sticker, which I think is a pandemic here right now in Atlanta. It's John's Creek. Oh my god, they're the worst. Yeah, they're the worst. If you see one, do you drive better, worse, or try to cut them off and get away from as fast as possible?
SPEAKER_02:I avoid them. I go the opposite direction. Right. How do I get away?
SPEAKER_00:I don't know what they're thinking with this, but it's not helpful. That's like baby on board. You know what? I'm just gonna hit you a little harder. That's all. I think I have car seats, they're fine. You can't say that.
SPEAKER_01:You can't say that. You shouldn't have said it, but you did. I did. Oh, that wasn't it. You know, your on-air personality is so much nicer and kinder than off-air, because you flipped me off twice before we hit the start button. But now you're talking about launching babies through windshields.
SPEAKER_00:No, not. I mean, because if they got the car seats, they're safer. I mean, maybe I should put those student drivers in car seats.
SPEAKER_01:They'll tumble down the highway.
unknown:Exactly.
SPEAKER_00:Oh boy, yeah. And that's why we're explicit, Alan. Great. All right. So that's what true crimes now that puts us in the true crimes um podcast genre. We have. All right, man. We got to get rid of the rock and roll, everybody. Uh we got Justin Goodread on today, and Justin has started, sold, started, sold so many companies we couldn't even keep it all straight before we got started going on this thing. But he also is out there sharing sharing his knowledge, and he's been gracious enough to come on this podcast.
SPEAKER_01:He seems like he's way better at it than we are. He is. He is badass. Yeah. He's got big muscles, too.
SPEAKER_00:And he is, yeah. And you know what? We're kissing his ass because we're afraid that he'll drive from Knoxville, get to Atlanta. Well, then he won't. Then he'll turn right around and go, Oh my god, I just went 200 miles in two hours, and I can't go five miles in two hours.
SPEAKER_01:You're saying the Atlanta traffic may have saved us from ass beating.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. If we say the wrong thing. Especially because he's like, he was laughing because he's like, hey, wait a minute, that's not funny. I have a kid in a car seat.
SPEAKER_02:I know my kids are way past car seat age. I've got them in college now. It's like, come on now. I I'm ready for kids in car seats. So grandbaby's coming about another 10 years, but not right now.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Yeah, don't don't don't be in a hurry for that one. I know Alan, Alan, Alan wants a grandbaby. I know that.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, like, we're on we're on grandbaby watch and we're excited. I know. I've heard. So we're all excited. All right. We're hinting a little too much, though. I've been talking about it. I bet we are. That's a shocker.
SPEAKER_00:Justin, give us a little quick background on yourself, and then we're gonna dive into some of these businesses and uh how you started and what you did with them.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely. So I'm born and raised in South Georgia, guys, down uh on the coast, Bronsway St. Simon's Island is where my I'm the only good bred, not in Glen County, Georgia. Everybody else is still Georgia, George, Georgia natives, and I still cheer for my Georgia Bulldogs. I gotta cheer for my dogs. But yeah, I mean, you gotta have the Bulldogs there, especially up here in Rocky Top area where they love the stupid song, you know, Rocky Top. It's worse when you live here. You gotta put gas in your car, it's literally paying at playing at you at the car pump. You know, it's like I've had enough of this.
SPEAKER_00:And that orange, I mean, tell me you wear that orange anywhere other than a football game or a volunteer game. Never.
SPEAKER_02:Well, no, no, you can wear the orange if you're from Tennessee. You can wear it to the football stadium on Saturday. On Sunday morning, you can pick up trash on the side of the road, and on Monday you can go deer hunting, all with the same color orange. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_00:It is versatile. So St. Simon's, we gotta do this.
SPEAKER_01:No, I got it. One more Rocket Top thing. The only way that my sons and I can deal with it when we watch Georgia, Tennessee is we have a bet on over-under on how many times they play it. And so suddenly you got a little skin in the game, then you can deal with it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Boy, I bet you it's gotta start, it's gotta start in the 70s.
SPEAKER_01:No, it's normally like 15. Something like that's like the whole thing. Yeah, the whole game.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god, it feels like it's it's abusive. I went I went to the Georgia, Tennessee game down here, and um my friend invited two volunteer fans, and uh boy, it was fun. Uh because they thought for sure this was the year they were gonna smoke Georgia. And uh man, that's all you heard. And like after the first quarter, you're like, I can't hear you anymore. Wait, where are you? You still here? You still at the game? And he goes, Yeah, I'm not having fun anymore. So, all right, St. Simon's Island. I learned a little something about that because in South Georgia they have a little bit different dialect than we do up here in Atlanta. And what is the main road that takes you onto St. Simon's? Uh St. Simon's Island Causeway? Yes, the Causeway, but it was named after a guy, and it was D-E-M-E-R-E.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, um Demry Road.
SPEAKER_00:Demory. Demory Road. I I I seriously, I've been in Atlanta uh since 2001, 24 years.
SPEAKER_01:Are we trying to be French with it?
SPEAKER_00:I know I was like Demir. Demery? No, they're like, nah, it's Demory. I'm like, Demory. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:As soon as you pass the sailboats come on to the island to Causeway, you it turns you onto either Sea Island Causeway or Demory Road, which takes you around to the uh to the um the fishing pier. So yeah, born and raised down there, man. Uh all right. So how'd you get out? Well, yeah, I started my first business when I was 15, scaled it rapidly. By the time we were 17, my brother and I are making more money to each than my mom and dad combined, and a little landscape company had a blast. Then my wife is from Knoxville, go figure. So we got married in the early 20s, sold the business down in South Georgia, moved to East Tennessee, and then um since then started and sold five additional businesses, became a share a major shareholder in another, took that one from mid-eight figures to a nine-figure exit a couple of years back, and now just having fun teaching uh business owners how to do the same thing.
SPEAKER_00:Hang on, Ellen's trying to we he ran out of fingers. Nine figures. I mean, that's that's a lot. That's a lot. That is a lot. That's awesome. Yeah. So uh obviously that the entrepreneurial spirit was in you. Was were your parents entrepreneurs? Where'd you get that buck?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, neither one of them were entrepreneurs, they came from what they called dysfunctional families. I would call it catastrophe. They anything that could happen to kids happened to my mom and dad. And they met each other at the young age of 15 and 16, fell in love with each other and said, Hey, we're gonna do something different. We're gonna raise our kids different than the uh dysfunction they went through. So they were working folk. Mom worked at the hospital, dad worked at the Georgia port down there loading boats so that we get all around the world. At the age of 15 or so, we had been homeschooled for a couple of years. We came back whenever I was homeschooled. This is decades ago. I mean, yeah, years of years ago, there were only 15,000 homeschoolers in the United States whenever I was homeschooled. Now there are, I mean, in Knox County, Tennessee, where our office is, there's 53,000 school age students just in Knox County. So back when I was a kid, we were doing homeschooling, and they said, Hey, we're gonna put your education around business. And so I literally had business people teaching me, teaching me business. I had doctors teaching us science, I had English professors at college teaching us how to write. And whenever all this education was happening before 15, Chris, what my dad told me one day, he said, Hey son, you're gonna be 15 this Friday, I think it was. He said, If you don't have a job by Friday, don't come home. Literally, those are the words. Now, dad meant what he said. He didn't miss words, he barely got out of high school, he could not read or write. He could just no country boy, you know, born and raised on a dirt road, just a country boy. And he said, son, if you don't have a job by Friday, don't come home. And he said, I'm gonna give you a little bit more rules. You can't work fast food, you can't work for the grocery store, you can't work for anybody I know. Now, it's not Atlanta, okay? We didn't have 10, 15 million people. We have 50,000 people, and I have a last name called Goodbread. There's not that many people who don't know the name Goodbread. So I would go out like, you know, like the Dr. Seuss book and say, Hey, do you know my dad? Oh, yeah, Alan, yeah, we know him. He's a good man. I was like, I can't talk to you. Long story short, after that three or four days, um, the very last day, dad comes home and the night before and he says, Hey, look, I'm serious. You don't have a job by this weekend. Come, don't come home. So the next morning, I get up before dad does at four o'clock in the morning and grab the push mower, went down the street and went door to door, knocking on doors and saying, I need to cut your grass. Do you know my dad? No, no, yeah, I know your dad. Grab the mower and kept him going to the next house. Finally found a guy's house who the yard, St. Augustine grass, was like seven inches thick. Knocked on the door and I said, Hey, sir, do you know my dad, Alan Goodbury? He goes, No, I don't reckon I do. I said, Well, sir, I'm reckoning I'm fixing cut your grass, so you can pay me whatever you want to pay me because I'm going home tonight. So I cut his grass, made$40 in about two hours back, you know, 35 years ago. And my dad came home from the port. I never forget this lesson, guys. Came home from the port, like most hard-working blue-collar Americans. He was exhausted. He was tired. He stunk. I mean, he just he had put a hard day's labor in. I am clean. I'd already had a shower. I'm looking good. I smell good. And he says, uh, so you're smiling. I said, I made 40 bucks. He said, Well, first of all, you owe me seven, you owe me like 17 because of rent and gas and everything on my mower. So I gave him the money. He said, Here's your rent. He goes, here's the principle. If you go to work for the man, you'll never be in control of your life. But you have what it takes to run your own business, learn business, and go start your own business. And that's where I learned to start business at.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful. Man, what a great lesson. His dad is Yoda. His dad is. I mean, I'll tell you what, we need more of that right now.
SPEAKER_01:We need a lot more of that. Yeah, there's so much bad parenting for just like the last two generations. And this guy's dad was amazing.
SPEAKER_00:I'll tell you, man, if you're watching on YouTube, you saw my eyes coming out of the side. Oh, you can't. There's only 50,000 people. The odds are it's gonna be pretty hard to find it. And he said, You found it. I mean, you found that lesson, and um, you probably learned more there again than anybody learns in high school. So there you go. And off you ran and uh never looked back, just kept going. Was there ever a time you're like, you know what? Maybe it'd just be easier if I went and worked for somebody.
SPEAKER_02:Um, no, I never had that one, Chris, but I had this magical epiphany. So we know I'm sure everybody recognizes the name Zig Ziggler. You know, he was a motivational speaker of late. I grew up going to conferences where Zig Ziggler and Og Mendino and Charlie Tremendous Jones and Les Brown and so many of these greats of yesterday would be on stage and they'd be pouring into it. So at the age of 19, I had his company, it's successful. We're making millions of dollars, no exaggeration, in landscaping in South Georgia, just me and a couple of teenagers. We're having a time. We learn business and how to scale companies. And so I'm at a conference with Zig Ziglar. It's about 200 people in the room, and he does something I never saw any other time he did. Now, somebody else out there, if you heard this before or you saw Zig do this, please reach out to me on social media because I've never seen him do it anywhere else. He stopped in the middle of his water pump example. You know, he's prime of the pump and he's telling everybody, hey, help everybody get everything out of life that they desire and you get everything out of life you desire. And he's priming the pump and he stops. He gets super quiet. And he turns around to the small audience. He said, I'd like for you to take out a sheet of paper. So all of us did, you know, we didn't have computers back then. So pull out a sheet of paper, get our pen out. And he said, I want you to write your wildest dreams down. Three things that you want to accomplish the next 20 years. So here I'm at 19 years old. I'm like, okay, by the time I'm 40, let's say, round it up because I can do that simple math in my head. Remember, I am from South Georgia. We got to keep things simple for me. So I said, number one, number one, I'm gonna marry. It literally says smoking hot girl. I'm gonna marry a smoking hot girl. Number one, priorities in order.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, one.
SPEAKER_02:I got the priorities down. So I'm like, I got that one. Marry smoking hot girl, number two. Now remember, I'm 19. I'm gonna ride a New York Times bestseller. Why? Because just two weeks earlier, my teacher at the University of Georgia had told me I'm dumb as a box of rocks because I couldn't spell where it's a flip. And I said, you know what? No, I'm not. I'm gonna ride New York Times bestseller. And she laughed at me. And that became like the moment like y'all were talking about before the cameras came on. It's like, no, screw you. I'm gonna show you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do this. So that became the second point. And the third point, I'm sitting in that room and I have my pen in my hand, and there's people all around me. I'm like the youngest, and I'm going, what's number three? Okay, I'm gonna have a$10 million net worth. Why$10 million? Because I had one more zero than a million. That's literally the way my brain was thinking. Well, if they can do a million, why can't I do 10? So, to your question now, that was in my mind at age of 19. I had this crumpled up sheet of paper, these three wildest dreams on it. At the age of 36, my wife was in my life. Thank God. She is beautiful, have three kids at this point. Life is amazing. And already sold three companies, but we had just gone through seven years of hell, seven years of tribulation. Anything that a business owner can go through, we faced it. From legal battles through death in the family, through miscarriages in the third trimester of my wife and I, suicide, my dad, my hero, died unexpectedly in the midst of all this stuff. Just seven years of hardship. And I find myself on a West Virginia mountaintop with a friend, and he makes this statement. He said, Justin, I'm broke. Now, I don't know why that statement did what it did, but it triggered my mind to go back 19 years or year when I was 19 years of age. And I looked, remember that sheet of paper. Well, Emily's in my life, my wife's in my life, thank God. But I had not written much more than a paragraph because of that stupid red squiggly line that appears anytime I type because I can't spell where it's a flip, and it's always there. These little red squiggly lines just drives me crazy. So I'm like, I had to never written anything of$10 million net worth. No, we had just come out of this tribulation. We were poor. We had like six O's between the P and the R. As we say in South Georgia, we were poor. I mean, we were broke, dude. So I'm like, how in my how in the world are we gonna do this? So that was the point. I didn't really come back and say, I want to go work for somebody. It was the opposite. How in the world am I gonna close this gap in four years' time frame? That was the calling.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful. So you took that challenge on. Uh, but I think you hit on something a lot of people love to hear, you know. So you talk about the zigs and the lesses and uh the the motivational speakers. Um, a lot of people want to just focus in on that success and what it looks like, and they think, oh my God, I you know, he's killing it, right? Everybody else is always tonning it. Oh, he's doing it. And people get on and talk about, and you you even said it too, you know, I have seven to eight million or figures and eight to nine figures, and everybody's like, Oh, I want to be like Justin. You're like, um, you know what? Uh it wasn't always roses, man. Um, so talk about how you came and turned that around.
SPEAKER_02:You know, there's a certain tenacity that I believe we as business owners have. I believe we have this burning calling in our life, if you want to use that word. We have this vision, if you will. We see a glimmer of something out there. And we know that as Zig says, if we can serve our audience properly, we can radically change our lives. The most business owners I know are not the mean or the narcissistic people that the media often relates them to be. They're the most caring and the most selfless people I know. They will sacrifice everything for their communities, for their for their team members, for their clients, for their vendors. They sacrifice so much. And so whenever I saw the hardship in that time frame, it wasn't a sense of, oh my goodness, woe is me. I've got to go, you know, eat some worms, as the old South Georgia song says. None of that nonsense. It was, okay, life sucks sometimes, but that's water ain't the bridge. What can I, what principles can I gather from that, change my focus and shift forward and look to the future? I believe this with all my heart. I believe that everything that we as human beings face in life is preparing us for what's in front of us. I believe that. I believe if we're walking this earth today, that there's something that only the three you can accomplish, only I can accomplish. There's this path that we're on. I believe that with all my heart. And so if I'm here on earth and by God's design, I'm sitting here, I'm walking forward, then that purpose has yet to be fulfilled. So everything is a lesson in the background. How do I apply it going forward? So am I at this crazy age of 36 and I'm sitting here poor with a lot of O's and I'm beat up. I mean, we're bloody. We had just gone through literally hell on earth for seven years. We took a million plus dollar paid-for house, no exaggeration, had to borrow against the decover lawsuit bills, and then moved my wife and three kids in a double-wide trailer in the country where we had to pull the trucks out on a regular basis because I got stuck in the driveway. We had rats running through the driveway through the house. I literally could shoot a BB gun and kill the mice in the house. People don't talk about the hardship of life. What they see is, oh my goodness, Justin writes for Forbes. Oh my goodness, Justin has two best-selling books. Oh my goodness, Justin reached some sort of net worth statement. Oh my goodness, Justin's on stage. All the hardships, whatever they may be. Hardest one is my dad passing away, killed me. My wife walking out of the hospital whenever our third child, third one, guys, in the third trimester, we are preparing for a baby. She walks out and her shoulders are slumped. I mean, I can't even slump over that much. And my bride, my beautiful, my everything to me is broken in that moment. People don't hear about those because it's not glamorous and it's not sexy and it doesn't get the hook on the sizzle reels. But that's life. But in that hardship, there are lessons that, as we teach on our show, it's called the Deca Millionaire Way, the Decamillionaire decoding. What I notice with hyper-successful people, however, you want to define success, either by finance or by fitness or by notoriety, hyper-successful people take those hardships of life and they fuel them. Those hardships are there as internal jet fuel to push them forward to their ultimate destination. So on that mountaintop, that principle that I just described is burned inside of me and it's burned in the people that I know who are the most, quote, successful, whatever, however, you're going to describe that. On that mountaintop, I'm sitting there broken, tired. I've been a business owner for 20-something years, dude. Poor with a bunch of O's. It didn't happen overnight. And I remember sitting there and my country friend, he said, How are we going to close this gap, dude? He was a little older than me and he was looking at retirement. He can't retire because all this wealth is in his business. How are we going to close this gap? I said, I don't know, but I know how to find it. He said, What are you going to do? I said, I'm going to go find somebody who's been there, done that before me. And I'm going to pay them whatever amount of money they want me to pay them so they can show me the fastest way. Because here's what I learned as an early child. Wealth loves velocity. See, most broke people will trade their time, their finite for the infinite money. We trade our time for money. That's not the successful. The successful will go out and take money, the finite, the infinite thing, and trade their money for their time. So what I looked at is I said, How in the world can we take brokeness, mentally, spiritually, physically, emotionally, broke, just broken down? How can we radically change our life in four years? So I did what most successful people do. I found somebody who had journeyed on this path before me, and I met with this guy, South Georgia. If I called his name, many people would recognize it because he's now since gone, but he's a good man. And he told me I never could tell his name, but I can tell you this very successful. He's sitting down by a spool guys in South Georgia and he's smoking a cigar. And I sat down and met with him. I said, Hey man, I want to accomplish this. He goes, How bad do you want it? I said, I want it pretty bad. He goes, No, no, not pretty bad. How bad do you want these two things? Do you want to ride a New York Times seller? I said, more than anything. He goes, You want to be worth$10 million in four years? I said, Yes, more than anything. He goes, How bad? I said, dude, I can taste it. I'll never forget the conversation. He goes, Okay. I'm going to charge you$10,000 a month. And if you listen to what I say, you'll accomplish it. Now think about this. We broke. We live in a trailer, man. Our trucks are stuck in the driveway. We don't have a pot to pee in. I mean, it is, we are poor. I said, okay. How am I going to get$10,000? He says, that's for you to figure out how bad you want it. Within 90 days, I had what I convinced my people to do is I said, I'm going to pay this guy 10 grand. I went out and found five people that I was going to take what he was teaching me and I was going to teach them, and they were each gonna pay me$2,000. I was playing on the house's money within nine days, 90 days. Why? Because I wanted the outcome. That's what those hardship lessons taught me. That's what those things in life will teach you. Whenever we all go through this pain, it's how do we apply it? How do we accelerate? For me, it was finding somebody who'd been there, done that, and saying, No excuses. This is what I want. I'm gonna charge hell with a water pistol until we get it. And guess what? It wasn't it wasn't hard. It was, I mean, it wasn't easy, it was stinking hard. Yeah, stinking hard.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I can say, yeah, yeah. So uh so you do that you found the way to fund it. Let's talk about some of those first lessons because you gotta implement them. And I think for a lot of us, I agree with you, you gotta have tenacity. I mean, one of the things, you know, 3 30 in the morning when I'm curled up on the couch going, what the hell did I just do to my family? What have I done to myself? I can't believe I just did this. And then, you know, the alarm clock goes and it's 7 a.m. and you're still not sleeping, and you're like, Oh, you guess what you gotta do now? Go solve some problems, get it all taken care of. So you gotta have the tenacity. But what are some of those because a lot of people talk uh you know a lot of times I think it's a lot of like flowery big things. But for for me, what's always happened, it's the small little things and the accumulation of them that works. Where were some of those small things you learned right off the rip?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so I'll walk you through the exact saying. So I don't mind this is what we now teach. This is what my new book's gonna be is coming out about early next year. The very first thing my coach did was he spent six months working on, as I say it, my noodle. He would literally listen to the words I was saying, he would dissect every word and say, Hey, Justin, you have scarcity thinking, you have victim thinking, you have this mindset does not look in abundance. You're looking at principles here that's never gonna allow you to reach it. And until you actually physically internalize what that's gonna look like when you reach that destination, you're not gonna go through the hardship. So literally six months, not of the technical stuff, not of the tactical things that we all want to know as business owners, six months, 60 grand. Now, this is over a decade ago. And remember, we're poor, like lots of O's in between, right? He's sitting here talking to my noodle, man. Six months of this. So everything I would say, he would kick back and say, Nope, you're not there yet. So not only was he working on my noodle, the second thing, and you guys are picking on me, you know, because I'm physically fit a little bit, but he hired me hire a fit coach. He said, if your body is not at peak performance, you're not gonna be able to accomplish this in business. Your body has got to be at peak performance for you to hit what you want to accomplish in your business. So I hired a fit coach. It was a green beret. I had a dietitian. I heard a dietitian. We're drinking bourbon.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Here we go. I can handle bourbon. So I'm not gonna get there, but I am gonna have some fun getting there. Maybe there's another way, Chris. Yeah, I you know what? I'm gonna challenge you back. I'm like, you know, nothing wrong with a little bourbon. It's not got sugar in it, you know.
SPEAKER_02:I like me some bourbon now. Yeah, so no, he had me hire a fit coach, he had me hire a dietitian, he worked on Monday for six months, and then we walked through what I call now the Decamillionaire framework. He didn't teach me this exact framework, but it's what I wrote about. And literally, I started recording a podcast when he was teaching me. Everything he would teach me, I'd turn around and record it into a microphone and just teach it to whom everyone to listen. And so after three years, we had millions of followers. It was crazy to see what would happen. So the very first thing he taught us was is that you have to clarify what do you want. So many of us, I ask this question to business owners all the time: what specifically do you want to achieve? Well, I think, or and people can't see it. So he taught me that basically to find something I want. So literally, I would say this pink beach house example. This is the tactical nature of what we deal with. So whenever I say, Hey, I want to buy a pink beach house, then y'all might say, Okay, cool, where do you want it? Well, I want a Florida panhandle. That's a big, that's a big area. Where specifically, I destined area. Okay, you say you want a pink beach house, and just you know, yeah, I want a pink beach house, three stories, and put the car neath the front that has a pool in the back of the house, the second floor. You know, so if I get super detailed, you can visualize and see exactly this pink beach house. The more details I give, the more visually it becomes to you. It's interesting when I talk about the pink beach house, there's only two on A1A down in Florida. And whenever people hear it, they literally text a page, take a picture of it now and they text and they tag me on social media because I talk about the clarity of a vision. So the very first thing he taught us was hey, you've got to have crystal clear vision on what you want to accomplish.
SPEAKER_00:And that's the heavy lifting right there, right? That's hard, that's the hard part. You gotta have clarity right up front. You're like, Yeah, well, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. So, Justin, should I start a landscaping business? Well, hang on, big boy. I mean, let's uh let's back up. What do you want? Yeah, what do you want? That clarity. I would say that's that's been my biggest uh growth success at my company was closing my eyes and saying a year from now, my office should be looking like this. You're sitting there, I'm sitting here, you're sitting over there, she's sitting there, it looks like this. Wednesday mornings we have training. And I remember when I had that, and uh, if you come see our training here in Atlanta, which we just got then hosted another guy uh to show it off, you know, he he's like, Hey, when did you have that? I said, No, I had I had this vision um 14 years ago. I've been at this for 17, but it's that third year in where I was like, uh I just don't see it because I was working sublis from a guy, had a little spot, cubicle, a little of that. You're right, but that that is uh that is so hard to work on. And look how long it took you to get there. You talked about six months working on the noodle. Maybe the pink house came pretty quick, but uh I it takes a minute.
SPEAKER_02:Well, whenever you find your vision, then here's the hardest exercise that most business owners don't deal with that causes more problems in year two, three, four, five, six, whenever you start to scale a business. And that is many business owners don't take the time to identify the values that they have, the ethos in which they operate, the non-negotiables they have for their life. Because if you don't identify those the values that you're gonna operate your company off of, then whenever you have a misalignment, what we often do because of our tenacious type of attitude, and because we can roll up our sleeves and get to work, we jump in and we jump right back into the middle of the problem and we fix the problem as the business owner, which is the opposite of what we should do. And the danger is that if you take the time on the front side and align, what is what are your non-negotiables? What is a business owner are you going to do and not going to do? And why does that matter specifically to you and your vision? So in the very first phase, we spent a lot of time talking about our vision, our vision, our vision values, those two things. Then we shifted to the second phase, which was examination. We walk, we walked our companies through an examination loophole every 90 days. What we are specifically were looking at is what is the enterprise value of our company today? Because remember, I wanted a goal of a dollar figure. Some people might not want that. I wanted a$10 million plus valuation so I could be a DECA millionaire within four years. So our measuring point, our chief KPI, or what I call critical success factor, was the valuation of our company. So every 90 days, we had a metric in which we would value. That means that anything that goes in our third pillar, which is execution, what I call relentless execution, when we begin taking those small baby steps every 90 days, every action had to move that one thing. And so the singularity of and the simplicity of what he was teaching me was contrary to what I had done my previous 20 years. My previous 20 years, I've done what the most business owners do. If it can, if they can fog a mirror, come on, they can be a client of mine. Oh, you want me to serve you with this? You want me to give you vanilla ice cream and chocolate and Rocky Road and put a swirling machine inside here as well? Absolutely. But we'll give you whatever you want. No, Justin, what specifically are you going to do for them and how specifically you're going to serve them and how singularity and approach can we get? So we broke it down to one client. We called him Frazzle Frank. Frazzle Frank had one offer. One client, one offer, one pain. We can move our client from his pain to his payoff. And if he followed this process, it would yield every single time. That is so vastly different than the mass majority of business owners out there. We want to get our hands in everything. We have that squirrel moment and we run off and we chase it. He was saying, no, get stupid simple. Get stupid simple. And then what that led to was our fourth thing was always have your business ready for a buyer. Always. You never know. If real estate's about location, location, location, the business is about timing, timing, timing. There will be come a time when me, the ultimate control force. Freaking my business will want to leave my business or be offered to leave my business. And then finally, freedom. How do I get the freedom I desire? So those were the things he walked me through over that four-year journey. Get stupid laser focused, stay focused on my vision, mission, values, serve one client, one client good, simplify the offer, and then deal with all the nonsense that happens with it.
SPEAKER_01:You ready? I noticed that he's really good with his back against the wall. Yeah. I mean, his dad can dig out of a hole. Yep. And then this guy, you know, 10 grand. The guy on the mountaintop, you know, I'm poor. And it's like when your back is against the wall. He he I love the fact that he doesn't look for excuses, he doesn't look for somebody to blame. It's like, I gotta get out of this. Where do I need to go? How am I gonna get there as fast as I can?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And that again goes back to it. Sounds simple. It is simple, but it's so hard to execute. Just do one thing really well. Back to Frank Frazzo or Frazzo Frazzo is what he said. You know, it's that it it's it's easy to say it.
SPEAKER_01:It's so hard to do it. I mean, you hear that a lot, and I don't know if I see that many examples of people doing just that.
SPEAKER_00:No, you really don't. In fact, I you know, I I think I was as he was talking, I was doing some self-evaluating, and um, you're right.
SPEAKER_01:I know I got into uh because you're not gonna work out and you're kind of a big whore and you'll take business from anybody. And I mean, we've covered all that stuff over the last four years.
SPEAKER_00:Well, and I do, and I I'll offer all kinds of ice cream to everybody. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Oh, you look for a handyman? I'm your guy, baby. Um, but no, but it's it's hard, it is really hard. I'm pretty proud of myself in some things, but other things you're like on the fringe, you're like, yeah, probably not there. You know, we're really good at handyman and doing that, and we think that's a good niche. But I started doing remodeling, and that's why I just was on a podcast telling somebody else, I'm like, don't do it. If you're in remodeling now, don't think you want to be a handyman because doing both of them, you're it's hard. And that's what I that's what I found out in a very bad way.
SPEAKER_02:Uh that we're well as you think about that, here's a here's a here's a picture illustration to how why most business owners don't do this. So I was about 16 years of age. My dad was he had me working with him and he gave me a big heavy sledgehammer. Now, at the 16 years of age, I weighed 110 pounds. I was like soaking wet, little, little, little kid. And he said, Hey son, I want you to beat this wall down. I want you to knock this wall down. So, like most business owners, I grabbed the sledgehammer and I swung it with everything I had and hit the wall all over the place for about a minute and a half and it didn't fall. And he came over and he said, You tired yet? I said, Yes, sir. I'm pretty tired. He goes, Can't quit till the wall's down. Yes, sir. He said, He goes, I'm gonna show you something principle of life. This is where so many business owners miss the mark. Again, if you want to become a DECA millionaire and break away and be in the top 1%, if you want to get to that level, this is a principle that works every single time. Take it to the bank. Friends, this is it. What he do is he grabbed a can of black spray paint. And Chris, he reached down and he painted a little dot in the bottom right hand side of that corner and he said, hit that dot over and over and over. Okay, guess what? That wall fell down in about five minutes. That's right. Because as long as I kept hitting on that one dot over and over, the wall cracked. But we as business owners, we want to take our service or our product or our offer and try to get it at anybody and everybody. And so we just bounced against that wall like that, like I was doing when it tried to hit that wall all over the place. Whenever I got laser focused on that one thing I could serve, that one person, that one problem I could fix, and how my solution would radically change our life. Whenever I broke through the wall, then they literally lined up. Now, here's what's crazy I was in the most regulated industry in the world building this business, a financial services industry, the most regulated. We had literally dozens of qualified clients begging to come work with us. We applied the same principle whenever I re-launched my coaching business. In less than a year's time, we're at nine months now, we're already at seven figures and rapidly growing. We're gonna break an eight-figure income in the coaching business in three years' time. How? Radically attacking that one point. Now it's contrary. It's contrary to everything we think about because we see Fran Flintstone over here and Barney Rebel over here doing their thing. We want to follow them because they look good on social media, this, that, and the other. That's the noise that so many in the millionaire status get stuck with, and the DECA millionaires say, no, no, no, no, we're gonna fast, we're gonna get hyper focused. That's what my coach was teaching me.
SPEAKER_00:Huh. How about that? He's right. I mean, you think about it, niches bring the riches, you say what you want. But uh, and I've said this in marketing too. You know, when I ask people who are trying to get started, I'm like, so what are you doing to bring in business, right? Because again, cash is king, but you know, sales is what brings the day, right? So in marketing, you know, I just had somebody say it again. Um, yeah, I'm just looking for homeowners. I'm like, yeah. Um, how do you think you're just gonna find homeowners like that doing that? I mean, especially here in Atlanta where we have six and a half million people and you have uh, you know, millions of houses. I see you can't do that, man. You've got to get yourself focused in. Or I mean, yeah, you could spend millions and millions of dollars on marketing and never get anywhere. Back to the point that Justin brought up about the whole wall. You got to find that one spot. And then, you know, and again, A B tests and marketing is one thing, but you know, it's focusing on that one problem for that one guy at that one time, it changes the way you think about marketing and bringing in biz.
SPEAKER_01:So I sit here and I I imagine myself being somebody in a truck uh driving down the road, listening to this podcast, and they're like, a painter, house painter, and they're like, How what does this mean for me? I mean, I I understand the whole visualization of where you want to be. I want my boat, you know, and I want it on this dock. But how do I differentiate myself when I have that kind of a business? What is what does laser focusing on one thing mean? Well, I'm gonna ask you.
SPEAKER_00:Justin, that's right.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, great question. Fine, great question, Alan.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, shut up, let's go. Yes, we keep track. Yes, we keep score. Yes, we're competitive. Yes, he got a good question in. Thank you, Justin. I'm down one-zero. All right. Well, before we go any further, what bourbon are we pouring everything? We're doing Jefferson's. Jefferson's, yeah, and bought it just outside of Athens, found a new place for us to go because I've got a division up in Athens. On the way back, my uh my manager said, Hey, you gotta stop at this place and get uh get some bourbon. And sure enough, man, great prices, good selection. So we're drinking of that. Cheers. Cheers. All right. Now you can answer Alan's great question.
SPEAKER_02:So the the reality is our wildest dreams, whatever they may be, is on the opposite side of the resistance that we're gonna face. So, what is specifically what is the payoff that we want? So, for some, they may say, I want to work 180 days a year. For some, they may say, like I did, I want to have a bank account that would put me in a freedom position where I never had to work again in my life. That may be some. Others may say, I want to visit all my kids' sporting events. Whatever it is, if you get stupid clear on what that what that becomes is then you backwards analyze if you're in business, what is the one thing that matters most? So I no doubt you had somebody, y'all have heard of yourself. If you're listening to us riding down the road in Atlanta, pay attention to the road because it's psychotic down there. But um, you've always heard the rule of 80-20, 80 percent, 80-20. You know, you get 20% of your input regenerates 80% of your output. Here's something you may have never heard before. What if you 80-20'd your 80-20? Now, here's a little bit of math, so I'm gonna do it for you. You're in your head. The 20%, if you 80-20, your 80-20. So the 20% becomes 4%, the 80% becomes 64%. 4% and only 4% of your business input produces 64% of its output. You can run this through your client list, it's the exact same thing. I've done this thousands of times with business. That's not an exaggeration. I literally have walked hundreds of business owners on how to double or triple the value of their company, and it works every single time. Take your clients, 4%, your top 4% high of your segmenting, does roughly 64% of the revenue for a healthy business. How do you break through the wall? What service to which client, which avatar generates 64% of the output? I can promise you that if you have three or four or five different service offerings, let's say in the construction world, you have three or four or five different service offerings, there is a service. Now, it may not be plumbing in the sense of, hey, I'm only gonna replace toilets, but it may be an offer, a simplified offer that you can offer that key clientele, and that particular offer will generate 64% of the revenue. So whenever we have a client who says, How in the world am I gonna achieve my wildest dreams? We come back to what is the wildest dreams? Number one. Number two, look at your business and what service or what is it that your audience, your current clientele, is looking for that they're engaging. We can dissect that out. We use 256 points of metrics that we can examine a business on, and you can determine what that service is. And then you put everything toward that service. Every single thing. Here's where most business owners lose. We take our money, our talent, our team, we take our money, our talent, our team, and we spread them thin. Whenever I take, let's say I had$10 as an example, and I was gonna use my$10 to accelerate my business. If I put all$10 behind one particular initiative, and all my clients behind all my team members behind one particular initiative, and all my structure, my systems behind one particular initiative, I'm gonna kick your tail. Here's why. Most business owners want to put all 10 things on 10 different initiatives. And so they spread hyper thin and you don't get the penetration into the market and you don't get the recurring revenue that you need no matter which business you're in. So the simplif simplification is find the 4%.
SPEAKER_00:That I was typing that down as he was talking. I just sent that to Cindy. I said, remind me of this one. Because again, again, it's not like playing roulette wheel, right? If you go down to roulette, if anybody's ever played it, you can put your chips all over the table, but that's for fun and gambling. But if you want to be successful and do things, you're gonna have to find those one. And you know what? You find out pretty quickly if that was the wrong one. Because that's my big question. You know, is you're right. If I took all 10 and I did um, hey, I'm gonna uh offer this maintenance program, and I found out it just didn't work. Uh, you know, people weren't willing to buy proactive maintenance in their home just yet. Um, but if I offered the handyman for a day, it blew up. And uh, but it just took us a little while to figure it out. And I think that's a practical example of something I learned, and that's why all of our uh advertising and marketing is going all around handyman for a day, handyman for a half day.
SPEAKER_01:So that really is taking off. It is that's really cool. Yeah, so design like a beta test or something back in the day.
SPEAKER_00:You work, absolutely. Uh, and we've really figured it out.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I loved it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, people say, but if I turn around and say, look, for uh$19.99 a month or you know, uh for a couple hours service, I can put you on our home service program. I'm not getting that one.
SPEAKER_01:I'm so tired of being dripped to death.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's what I'm hearing too. Subscription services, especially thinking about your home in a proactive way. Most people don't do it. But when I say handyman for a day, get your wife off your ass, you fuck it up, we fix it. I mean, it's handyman for a day. That's been killer. We sell more of those in handyman for a half day than anything else in our company. That's fantastic.
SPEAKER_02:Yep, that's awesome. That's the representation of the four percent roll.
SPEAKER_00:That is, yeah. In fact, that's why I said remind me of this, because I'm gonna go back and look because uh you don't know where that four percent is coming from. That's the thing. I think what's the uh adage in advertising? 50% of your money's wasted, you just don't know which. Yeah, right. So that's that's the killer on that one. So uh Justin, we're coming to the end. Uh, but I one of the things I wanted to talk about, you said it at the end, is that you should always be thinking about the exit of your business to make sure that the business you're running is good. I mean, that's the way I interpreted. Talk a little bit about how you do that while you're actually running this thing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so let's let's talk about some statistics and the reality first. For small business owners out there, whoever you may be, more than likely your business represents the vast majority of your net worth. And the reason for it is because unlike our W-2 counterparts, you probably haven't been saving in your 401k. Every bit of money's been pushed back into your company so you can get off the ground. And now you perhaps at this point are making some income. But when you look at it statistically, you're way behind on the amount of assets you have outside your business. So the Exit Planning Institute does some studies and they show that for most service-based business owners and most, which is 30 million plus people in the United States, that we have 80% of our net worth in our business. That means that this lifestyle that we're used to living is only going to continue if we build the business where it can operate without us, or somebody comes in, they're gonna fund the business and pay us for what it's worth. So when we fast forward to what we truly want, oftentimes when I'm talking with business owners, their desire is hingent upon the business being capitalized, either by an internal employee, an external person, a competitive buyer, et cetera. So the goal around business is to treat it as your best asset. If I had a rental property and a pipe's busted, I would fix it. If I had a rental property and my cap rate was below market, I would adjust it. If I had a rental property and the renter inside the business was tearing it apart, was tearing the house apart, I would kick them out. Most of us in business, we don't see that the day-to-day activities that we do as owners actually affect the valuation of our companies and it affects its readiness and attractiveness. So our job as business owners is to build a business to where it's all the time attractive to somebody. Typically, you will hear that it's an employee. Oftentimes I don't hear anymore that children want to come. Most of our kids don't want to buy our business. They've seen how stressful we are. They don't want any part of it. They so you're more than likely looking at a key employee or a competitor or some type of a bolt-on to another company out there that wants to buy your company. So why would they buy a business that is stressing you out? So when we think about the exit in mind, what we're accomplishing as the ultimate control freaks, because that's who we are as business owners, I'm right there with you. We want to have control of everything except for our exit. So if we really build a business to where an investor wants to come in and give us some cash, ultimately what we built was a business that's not dependent upon us, which then gives us the freedom we desire, anyways. So when you think about your exit, you're accomplishing, you're killing two birds in one stone. You're building a business where it can operate without you simultaneously, the less, the more that it can operate without you, the higher the enterprise value is for a buyer out there to come alongside. So if we if we realize that most of the lifestyles that we live as business owners are going to require either an annuitization, the business to be able to operate without us, or a buyer to come alongside and buy the business, then it behooves us to understand valuation and how what makes a business valuable to an outside buyer. Most of us don't think that way. Most of us think how do we increase our income? And that's very rookie. And that's why most business owners are broke. If you want to become a decamillionaire, you've got to build a business to where it is going to thrive without you and be attractive to somebody on the outside. That's why we think we start with the exit in mind at the beginning. So if you even hadn't even thought about your exit, today's the day. You're like, I'm 40 years old, I don't give a flying flip. Today's the day. Because as I mentioned earlier, real estate's location, location. Business is about timing, timing, timing. You don't know when somebody in the in your particular industry is going to come alongside and they got some family business money out there, some VC money, venture capital money, some private equity money. And they're like, hey, we want to give you 5x what your business is worth. That's what happened to me. Because I had my business built properly. Whenever my wife was laid up sick in the hospital, my coach was pushing on me, and I and he said, Justin, what is the one thing that you want to do? And I said, Man, I'd be on stage, I'd be writing books, I'd be talking to business owners. There's a way in order for you to achieve your wildest dreams. He said, Then why aren't you doing it? So because my business isn't worth 10 million. He said you passed that a long time ago. What? That's why it's important.
SPEAKER_00:I think that that you you hit on the thing, it's it's hard. You got to let go uh as a control freak. Um, but you got to empower people to be able to make those decisions. And that's one of the reasons I got this podcast. I get to sit here and do this uh during the business day or towards the end of the day, and you know what? Uh the the cha-ching cha ching is ching is going because I got sales guys out there selling, I got remodelers out there making projects happen, I got handyman making things happen. And um, but it was hard to do it, but also we've got it now. You know, you've got a process, you've got to develop it. Uh, it's a lot of hard work, and it costs you a lot of flipping money. Oh, brother.
SPEAKER_02:A lot of you each you find out what type of leader you are when you go through that, as you know, because most business owners, we know how to work hard. We do, we know how to do the hard work, we don't do the difficult work. The difficult work is letting your hand off the wheel and trusting somebody else for your baby. Yeah, and that's why most people are broke, most business owners.
SPEAKER_00:Justin, how can everybody get a hold of you? This has been Dynamite. Let's talk about your podcast, your books, your coaching programs. Let's let's hear all about that, and then we're gonna get to our final four questions.
SPEAKER_02:All right. So, yeah, so the Decamillionaire Way is our podcast. We teach you literally, sorry, sorry, Decamillion Decoded is our podcast. We literally decode the exact steps that every person, every business owner needs to do in order to reach a decamillionaire status. You can find my last name, Goodbread, on any social media. I'm the only one out there. You can look at me in any social media, YouTube, et cetera. Connect with me. I love Instagram because that's where I live my life. I'm gonna be elk hunting in a couple of weeks. You're gonna see photos of me elk hunting and mule deer hunting. I'm all the time offshore fishing. We live a life that is fun because I have a life of freedom. If that's what you're looking for, hey, connect with me there. As far as our books go, I've written two books. One's called The Ultimate Sale, end up selling millions of copies internationally. Not as many here in the United States, but Your Baby's Ugly was my second book. It ended up number one on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list. Um, it's a lot of fun. It talks about why your business is not attractive and why you're not going to cash it out, how to fix it specifically, as it goes to the technical. We coach around the DECA millionaire way. There is a framework. I walk through the high level. There is a framework that if you follow the framework, it will take it to the bank. It will help you radically grow your business. When I say radically grow, I'm talking about you realize you could double or triple your net worth in as little as 18 to 36 months. It is extremely possible. How do I know? I've done it too many times, not myself and other business owners. We took an eight-figure business and doubled it to a low nine-figure business in 18 months. It can work on every level, every structure, every size. So we teach around the decaminaire millionaire way. You can check it all out at JustinGoodbread.com.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful. All right, guys, go out there and do it. He's taking you up on it. You just got a little taste right here, gives you an idea. And I think if this is the place you want to go, you want to hold yourself accountable, go make it happen, you got to go check out Justin Goodbread. And again, he's right. Goodbread is a unique name. Here I thought La Lamia was a unique name, but no, it's good bread. All right, man. Let's get to these final four questions. So, sure, what is a book you'd recommend that's not yours to our audience?
SPEAKER_02:I read five books a year. I've done it for over 25 years. The first book is, I believe, I read the book of Proverbs every year. It's a lot of wisdom in the book of Proverbs.
SPEAKER_01:Powerful book. Okay, powerful book. A lot of business wisdom. You're right. A lot of business wisdom.
SPEAKER_02:I like to read Robert Kiyosaki and Dave Ramsey's book in contrast because they think differently. You know, Rich uh Think and Grow Rich. I'm sorry, Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and The Total Money Makeover at Dave Ramsey. I think it gives us two bookends for the financial world. I like Napoleon Hills, Think and Grow Rich. I literally, every time I get in the car, my children, we play that, we play that nonstop. And then the fourth one is George Clausen's The Richest Man in Babylon. It's the principle of paying yourself first. As a business owner, pay yourself first. Build a business that pays you first. Now, there's a lot of runners up, but those are my five books that I've read for over 25 years now.
SPEAKER_01:So when you say you read five books a year, you reread five books a year.
SPEAKER_02:I'm sorry. Thank you so much. Yes. I reread those five books. I read a book a week. I have read a book a week for over 25 years now.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful. Love that one. All right. What's the favorite feature of your house? I'm thinking it's say it one more time. What's the favorite feature of your house?
SPEAKER_02:Because I mean it's being built right now. So as of present, my favorite feature is inside our home we have um uh rustic floors. We have barn wood floors to the whole house. I literally built my house myself after the lawsuits ended, took uh six months off and built a house with my own hands, and we have barn wood floors to the whole house. But right now, I'm building the three-car garage with a studio over it and a swimming pool in the backyard, and we have 200 acres with no neighbors. So the Shelby Cobra is going in the garage, the the Raptor R is going in the garage, my other hot rod's going in the garage, and I'm gonna enjoy that feature living out in the woods with deer and turkeys and no one else.
SPEAKER_00:Oh man, heaven, love that. Oh my god, that's cool stuff. In fact, I just did an estimate for guy who had a Raptor R. And my uh tech is the one who pointed it out to me. He goes, That's a Raptor R. He goes, Rich people have one letter on their cars. I'm like, oh wow, thanks for telling me that.
SPEAKER_01:All right, let me go jump in my MDX.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, I've drive my Chevy Silverado out there, but uh, that's awesome. All right, one of the things that uh Alan and I talk about, we haven't talked about it much today, but uh really, but we are customer service freaks absolutely into it. What is a customer service pet peeve of yours when you're out there and you're the customer?
SPEAKER_02:Whenever somebody represents a service and what they represent and what they deliver are two different things. It irks me beyond measure. If I if it's a bait and switch and they put something out there and they said, Hey, this is what you can you're gonna expect. Maybe that's expectation by delivery time, maybe the expectation of showing up on time, maybe it's the expectation of treating whatever the service is with respect. I I fired a contractor. He told me he's gonna be at my house at 7:30 in the morning with his team members. I was I canceled a$10,000 appointment to meet him there. And he called and said, I can't make it. I'll meet you at 3:30 this afternoon. Like zero respect. Nope, get out of here. Don't have time for that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Woo, it's so hard, especially in our world where you get a break. Uh, you do in the in the world of tradesmen and what we do, we get a break. So you and we still still find ways to screw it up at my company. But um, again, we we always reinforce that you just can't do that because that makes you better than everybody else. When you show up, you're on time, you're early this morning. That job I was talking about with the Raptor R, we were there 15 minutes early. Uh, we were waiting for him to uh do whatever. I don't even know what it was because we were uh doing something that took a lot of technical expertise. So I was out there, I had my little thermal camera and everything else. But um, you got to do it, you gotta show up on time, guys, and you gotta underpromise and over-deliver. And that's something in our world, especially in tradesmen, that you can do. All right, I gotta get to this one because you built your own house. I know this has happened. I want a DIY nightmare story. Don't tell me about a contractor. Yeah, I want to talk about something you did, and you're like, fire, floods, pestilence, bugs, something. Because I've done it, that's why these fingers are all screwed up. I want a DIY nightmare story.
SPEAKER_02:Um, so the DIY nightmare story is has to do around the stairs. So we we hired a general con we hired a framing crew to frame our floors, and in wrong in Knox County, Rome County, Tennessee, where my house is, there was a bend in the stairway. So you had to come up two steps, turn, and go up the rest of the steps. And this particular um, this particular inspector had something that he must have ate bad that morning because he was angry. We, my daughter and I spent four days custom building the stairwell. Hand, hand, I mean, worked on my hand-hued American chestnut wood. It is gorgeous. We spent three days. She was about 12 years old, she was helping me. He comes in, he he took his tape measure out, and he measured, and there was a quarter inch variance between the bottom step and the top stent. It was it was within the regs, but the quarter-inch variance was off for that particular code. And he looked at me and he said, You've got to either redo these steps, and when you redo these, you've got to raise your top floor up a quarter inch or lower your bottom floor up a quarter inch, which made no sense to me because he would think he was a moron. And I'm like, What? So yeah, my DIY, because of my ignorance, cost my daughter a lot of tears and me a lot of stress, and three weeks of tearing that stairwell out and getting it down to where there was not a quarter inch of variance. And I had just ignorance, didn't have a clue.
SPEAKER_00:You know what? We've talked about this, and I don't think we brought this one up. We've talked about fire, we've talked about flooding. Love that. Or impaling.
SPEAKER_01:We've talked about inspectors.
SPEAKER_00:Well, we haven't been, we have not talked about making your daughter cry. No. Wow. That one would be a killer for me. In fact, I will take three more nails through the fingers, which I've done plenty, uh, than to have my daughter cry because of something she helped me build, and I blew it because I didn't get it right. I'm gonna say you blew it, you're right. Uh, quarter inch is well within, man, three-eighths is the uh is the code. So um I but I know what you mean. It's just tough, but you did it. That's awesome. You know what? Take some pride in that house that you built because that is awesome. I think I'd be I'd probably be more proud of that than I am, you know, doing the stuff you've done. But you can tell that Justin Goodbread is out there for you trying to make shit happen, trying to help you get better in your life. You can tell it through his passion, man. Alan and I are just sitting back. I was actually taking more notes today than I've taken in a long time. I noticed that. Woo, dog, I got some work to do. My boy from South Georgia. Go, dogs, it's gonna happen again. Oh, yeah, might be triple. Uh-oh, don't know. Go, Rocky Top. We gotta go make this happen. Hey, if you didn't learn something, man, it's on you, man. If you didn't go out there, follow good bread. Go out there and check his shit out, man. Go go see what's going down. Make it happen. Keep making those steps up that mountaintop because we're all gonna get there someday. Just keep going up that mountaintop and let's make it happen. We gotta go. Cheers, everybody. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Small Business Sephari. Remember, your positive attitude will help you achieve that higher altitude you're looking for in a wild world small business ownership. And until next time, make it a great day.
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