Successful Projects are Built on Clarity with PJ Antonik

Reece Barnes sits down with PJ Antonik of Oak Development to talk about the real difference between “having a gut feel” and actually knowing your job costs. PJ breaks down how he audits past projects, tightens his funnel, and uses budget vs actuals to catch mistakes before they wreck cash flow. If you have ever felt unsure whether you can safely spend what is in the bank, this one will help you get your confidence back. Subscribe and share this with a builder friend who is still estimating off vibes.

https://oakdd.com
https://www.instagram.com/oak_development

Show Notes:
00:00 Intro
03:03 Who is PJ
06:29 Picking the right jobs
11:52 Deal breakers and filters
13:44 Red flags and fit
18:01 Process improves over time
21:12 Cleaner back office
26:16 Finding missing costs
31:04 Stop pricing on gut
35:27 Setting sub numbers
37:07 The Nantucket case
46:09 TV shows and brand
50:04 Final advice and wrap

Find Our Hosts:
Reece Barnes
Matt Calvano

Podcast Produced By:
Motif Media

Transcript

0:00

I started my business 12 years ago, and it's taken me 12 years to get to a point where I feel confident, like we made a ton of mistakes. We pissed a bunch of people off. It's the nature of our business, and it just takes time to perfect your process every time I make it that much better. Welcome to builders budgets and beers. I'm Rhys Barnes and I started this podcast to have real conversations about money in the building industry, the wins, the mistakes and everything in between. I believe builders deserve to feel confident about their finances, and that starts by hearing from others who've been through it too. This industry can be slow to change, but the right stories and the right tools can make profitability feel possible. Let's get into it. Do thanks for coming on the show, dude, thanks for joining What are you drinking? Drinking a cloud candy is one of my favorite beers. A little cloud candy. That's definitely a popular beer up here. I've heard of that for sure. I love it. So where's it from? Mighty squirrel brewing. I don't even know where that is. God, that's a hell of a name. Waltham party. Apparently we're gonna be going to Waltham to drink some beers. Drink some beers at the old mighty squirrel. I'm down. That was our thing with my podcast. I got to get it going again. It was half in a tool bag. And we did you drink beers and talk? Are you gonna call back? Still? Are you gonna do half into a bag? Still? I don't know. I kind of want name. I also don't want it to be about beer. So it's like, it is a good name, dude, my podcast has beers in the title. And I haven't drank a beer on this thing since, like, episode three. I've been getting hounded that I need to bring it back. It's just like we got, we got a little crazy when we we did one at a brewery, and we had four back to back, and one was Ken Casey from dropkick Murphy, and that one was great. You guys should watch half in the tool bag? He's still find it, and it's about, his was about running a rock band through a pandemic. Dude, I'm looking this up right now. It was so good, and it's so like, he's so like, forthright about all the issues they had during the pandemic and everything. Anyway, we were asked, still wagon brewing, and by the fourth one, we had way too many high vault, you know, high end, what do you call that? High octane, yeah. And I was, I was like, basically just loaded one, yeah, it was not good. It's definitely still on here, half in the tool bag. Podcast, yeah, PJ and ally, sit down. You want me to go on where I'm way too, I'm way too I had way too loose on that. I'm sorry I don't listen to it. This is great. Ken Casey, that's awesome. Okay, but actually, let's give some context. If the listeners haven't already picked up. Your name is PJ, PJ, tell the listeners who you are, what you do, where you're from. My name is PJ antonic. I own oak development, a design out of the South Shore, Massachusetts, just south of Boston. We're based in a town named Hingham. Hingham, Hingham, and not Waltham. I build, not Waltham Hingham. I build single family homes, basically from Milton to Duxbury, all the way down the south shore, east of the highway. We're entertaining some stuff Metro West as of late. I don't know if it'll happen. We'll see. Purely because of traffic, I don't really entertain it, but if it's a good enough job, I guess I won't say no. And then we skip the bridge and go to Cape Cod, and we do stuff in sandwich osterville Falmouth, not that much down there, very selective because of the distance. And then we hop the boat and we do some stuff in Nantucket. So we're kind of spread a little thin geographically. I'd like to kind of narrow it down a little more, but, you know, you go where the money is, right, yeah, but you're a thriving business owner. And I've heard, I've heard good things about Nantucket. Rumor, has it? There's, there's quite a, quite a quite a lot of money down there. Big projects, cool projects. I heard rumor that, yeah. I heard rumor, yeah, there's I heard somebody say, one day that people go to, I'm gonna get this wrong, but it was really funny. It was people who go to Nantucket love great food and hate money. Yes, exactly. That makes sense. Yeah. Wait, so actually, does their food suck there? No. It's like, Dude, I've never had been working out there almost two years. I have never had a bad meal. Yeah, the food is outrageous, because the thing is, you're on an island, right? Yeah, and it's all luxury vacation. People that expect really good food, and if you don't have good food, you go out of business, like you're. One, right? And so, yeah, great. But yeah, so we build single family homes, new construction renovation, historic renovation, modern New England, you name it. We build it. We don't really. People always ask, like, what's your style? And I would say on some of our spec homes, we definitely have a little bit of a familiar style to them. Okay, we like to call it modern New England. So it's, you know, homes that fit in in New England, but have a slight modern touch to them, so they stand apart and are a little more modern and unique, sure. But we also, excuse me, we also don't lean into the modern too much, because then people hate them. Understood, yeah, yeah. And Cape Cod is a very classic style. A lot of tradition, yeah, New England in general, just Yes. And we have a lot of historic houses, a lot of old houses, so we have to really lean into that when we need to. I've done one contemporary as a spec home, and we did great on it, and it came out, awesome, but it was in a very specific spot. It was right on a marsh in a neighborhood that didn't have any architectural kind of consistency, and I could make it work there, but like, if I tried to put that in Main Street. Hang on, like, forget. I would be ostracized, yeah, for sure. So you just got to be careful how far outside the box you go in that specific spot. 100% okay, that makes sense. You made one comment earlier that I do want to dig into, just for the nature of, like this being kind of talking about Project financials, we can just get out of the way for the sake of the episode, you mentioned that if a project makes sense, you would go and do it, specifically referencing working in Metro West, talking about traffic a little bit. How do you how do you decide what makes sense and what doesn't? Is it just like, as easy to say it's gonna have sick margin on this job? Or like, how do you determine that? It's a great, great question. I think there's a lot of things that go into answering that question. Number one, is it a cool project? Cool? Okay, straight and simple, like, money aside, like, is it unique? Is it interesting? Does it help my portfolio? Does it make me excited to go to work? Is it good for social media? Because I, I rely so heavily on it, like the all those things kind of play a part. It's less about the money up front. It's more about, oh, is this a cool project? Are the clients cool? Are they a red flag? Do you want to run the other direction? Right? So those are all things you're evaluating right out of the gate. Um, and for me, I've taken, like for example, good example. It's close. So not a perfect example of what you're saying, but I got a random call from a guy in town that needed help assembling a large prefab post and beam bar. Okay, never done. One always thought it was cool. Don't have a clue what I'm getting into. Yes, I'll take the job because it's interesting. We're gonna learn. And I think the, you know, not the wave of the future, but one thing that I'm really focused on right now are ADUs and pool houses. I'm doing a tunneling right now, and this would, this might be a really interesting way to get them done cost effectively. So I'm all about doing it to just try it right. Totally, it's gonna be two weeks of work at time and material. I typically would never take a job like that, because we're just too busy. But this is cool, sure. So it's not about the money, it's about the experience and learning something new. And it's gonna be great for the grant, of course. So at the same time, I've had people offer full multi million dollar builds in Provincetown, and I'm like, No, I'm not. I'm just not. I just don't have the staff to go all the way to Provincetown, right? How do you work? Do you vote from hanging up. No, you drive. You drive, really, yeah, and it's, I know I grew up like a two hour business. Yeah, I know people who live in Chatham that won't go to Provincetown because it's so hard to get back and forth in the summer. Now, if we had a larger crew on Cape, and I had a pm that lived on the cape. Okay, maybe I would entertain that, but to manage it from Hingham in the South Shore, no shade, it's just not possible. So Prime example, it's not about the money. It's like, stay in our lane and not get distracted. Now, people are probably hearing that and say, well, aren't you going to Nantucket? Yes, but that's a little different, because it's such a unique environment. The dollars are big. It's super risky because it's spec, but it's interesting, and that could be a really good market for me for the future. So it's also a little bit of a gamble in. In learning how to build on a very complicated Island, and seeing if we could get something else to stick out there. Okay, then maybe I hire an on island. PM, right, so all these things play mix. Then, of course, the cash flow, right? The money's got to make sense. So Nantucket, if we sell it for our number, is going to be a great cash flow item. Hopefully we do. But if this goes well, maybe then, I guess someone that wants me to build them a house out there, and I don't have to front the bill, and then that's super profitable, right? So it's all about investing in the future and creating more opportunity, right? But yeah, the so Metro West is a good example. I think I've set for us. We've set a couple, I guess, parameters around the types of jobs we take now, okay, we basically don't take any builds, any full bills under 500 grand. I grand, that's just our number, and we do that to weed out the ones that are unrealistic on budgets and to make sure that we're turning the proper profit to support our cash flow. And we, we do take smaller jobs now, but I subcontract the project management out on them. But even those i We've decided nothing under 150 grand, because we're just spinning our wheels and we're not making enough money to support the business, right? And especially because I split my project management fee with the guy I subcontract that management out to. So when it comes to full oak builds, kind of 500 is around our threshold, and we hold firm on it. The other thing that we say is, you can't live in the house. How? Makes total sense, yeah. So those are kind of our benchmarks of what we're willing to look at on a larger scale. As far as Metro West, I think we would definitely consider it, as long as it's, you know, a full build so we could sink our teeth into we don't need to be there every day, like we could be there two, three times a week, but those small jobs you got to be at every day. And so to take a $200,000 kitchen in Newton for me would be an absolute nightmare, but to take a full job where I can have subcontractors, kind of self managing and acting as my site Supers, it works. That makes sense. What does that criteria do to your funnel? And I asked, because I was just in Chicago at the contractor coalition Summit, and that was a huge topic of conversation, was getting the right clients in the funnel and having like rigidity and understanding of who is your right profile. So what does your criteria do to your top of funnel, and how well does that work for you? So I have, I have different funnels, right? So I have pre sale spec homes as one model. So if I do spec homes moving forward, I'm really, really trying to make it so that they're at a price point that I know I'll pre sell. So for example, right now, I just closed with some partners on a deal in Hingham, and before I even closed, I had a buyer lined up, right? Awesome. And those, those buyers are definitely, you want to qualify them. They have to be able to afford it, obviously. But then, are they people we want to work with? Are we getting red flags from them right out of the gate? Are we saying to ourselves, like, Are these people really going to be a pain? What are some of those red flags? I think contextualizing this is good for the listener. Yeah, you're just like, dude, this guy sucks. I'm not going to work the gut. The gut feeling like, if you're saying yourself, dude, this guy sucks, you're married to him for a year. And guess what? In the state of Massachusetts, you're married to them for five years after they move in, right? Because you can say you have a one year warranty, but 93 a consumer protection marries you to them for five so you want to make sure that whoever closes on that house is going to be awesome to deal with afterward, because if they're not, you're going to have problems, right? So, so that's number one. You know, there, there are all sorts of red flags, but you know, you need to understand your process, trust your process, and then move forward knowing that your process is solid, and if people are kind of getting in the way of that process working, then that's a red flag, sure. Okay, I think, and I think that's like, that's, that's good tactical advice is, essentially, is like, follow your gut, but your gut is going to be giving you signals based on how that individual fits into your process. So essentially, your process, right? For example. Like we're really good at pre sales. We're really good at putting together a solid spec sheet and and a design presentation, and then giving the presentation to a prospective client and having them sign off on it, and then building the house. Like we have a really good process. And one of our deals is that we select everything, and that's by the way, not just for spec houses. We select everything for every job, all the custom builds we do, our team sources and selects all the interior finishes, the hard finishes, the faucets, the lighting, the colors, the interior moldings, the door styles, the handles, the hardware, the bath hardware, the toilets, the vanities, like everything you see and touch inside the house, when you move in, we select now the reason we do that, number one, we select it on budget. And number two, we select items we know we can get on a timely manner. And number three, we control the process, which allows us to move faster, right? Because beautiful in these pre sold models, we don't get paid until it's done. So we got to control the process to move efficient, efficiently. Now, if a client comes in right out of the gate and just says, No way, I have to select everything that's an example of a red flag. So yeah, because that that's against our process, right? And so that's different for everyone. We're very abnormal. Not a lot of people do it that way. A lot of people use outside designers. A lot of guys prefer that those clients pick everything and they just give them allowances, and that's great. That's their business model. So a red flag for them would be the opposite. Would be somebody that's really wishy washy has a really hard time making decisions and doesn't have any vision, is going to have a really hard time picking things, which is going to delay you it's they're going to have a really hard time finding things that are on budget, because they don't understand that the Dolomite marble from Italy is five times expensive than a different marble, right? And so that would be a red flag for that can that contractor, because then what's going to happen is they may have a$10,000 allowance for, I don't know, we'll say tile, which is a high allowance for a normal house, but still say it's 10,000 for tile. And then when the client goes and they pick$25,000 worth of tile, then they're mad that they didn't give them a proper allowance, right? That you and I both know the allowance was fine. They just picked really crazy. And so as a result, it creates, like, a contentious environment, and that is not good for anybody, so that that would be the opposite of us, but a red flag in that direction, does this make sense? Oh, it totally does. It totally does. And I think that's like, I think it's, it's the clarity and knowing of what you're trying to produce allows you to set expectations and move the right person through the funnel. And listen, I started my business 12 years ago, and it's taken me 12 years to get to a point where I feel confident, like we made a ton of mistakes. We pissed a bunch of people off, like, yeah, you know, we've had clients that don't like us at the end, like, it's the nature of our business, and it just takes time to perfect your process, right? But now, after learning from all those mistakes and understanding where I could have been better, I just every time I make it that much better, and I still learn every time, and it just takes a lot of experience to kind of get to a point where you trust your process and but, I mean, even today I was frustrated, right? So it is what it is. There is, I don't think there then there. I mean, this is just like the most obvious philosophy and rule of life is like, there is no finish line. And I think so many people, they think of this as like, Oh, I've got the perfect process. I've got it dialed. It's down. It's done. It's like, No, you're gonna be iterating on this thing until you're done. Five years ago, I said I'm never doing a custom build for anybody that is crazy. I don't want to deal with the people. I'm only a spec house builder. Well, guess what? I lost my shirt on two big houses, and now I don't want to sign a personal guarantee totally. So I don't really want to do spec houses anymore right now, right? Unless they're pre sold, yeah, or unless I have a partner that's going to sign the personal guarantee or pay for the whole thing, right? I just don't want the risk. And so all of a sudden, now I'm doing all custom. Five years ago, I was like, running for the hills from custom, but now I've kind of like developed a new process to deal with the custom client, and it's going great. Like we're crushing it right now with the customs. It's going really well. So beautiful. You know, if you I've learned that, like, if you are rigid in your thoughts and are not willing to Flack. Or be flexible with your business model, at least for me, it does not prove to work well, right? I think one of the reasons we've continued to be successful is that we're a little bit of a chameleon in the sense that we ebb and flow into and out of spec and into and out of custom and our systems adapt to both really well. I've talked about this on Nick's podcast, same subject about how our process started as a spec building process, but then we adapted custom building to it, and we're able to kind of bounce between the two, and it works, and your systems have actually helped us tremendously, yeah, with being able to create a back end that allows us to do that right, like we use quick I love this, but then we use you guys to help, kind of keep it all on track, integrated with QuickBooks, and it's totally, you know, not, I understand. We're on a podcast for adaptive, but that's not why I'm here. I'm not here to, like, broadcast sale, selling adaptive, but it has helped us tremendously, kind of fine tune our process, so that we feel confident, right? Totally. And PJ, most people that come on the podcast haven't listened to the podcast, so I don't expect you to have tuned in before, but you'll know if you did that. I'm like, pretty anti plug. But with that said, I think talking about adaptive on a financial podcast is fine, and that leads me to ask you, I'm curious, like, what about adaptive has allowed you to add to your more chameleon like business? Is it just the clarity and or the confidence that you're going to have the clarity on the project. Whether it is a customer, it's a spec, is it visibility? Is it just takes stuff off your plate? What is it that adaptive helps you? It's so I have a really robust estimation Excel sheet. It's like multi tab. It's very long. It captures every single item in a house, and I'm very in tune with how I estimate and my numbers with that, we have a very complicated class structure of our expenses, right? And so we've been able to utilize adaptive to take those class structures in. Class codes, I'm not an accountant, yeah. Class codes, class codes, whatever, yeah, bring those in and we're able to record all our receipts and do all of our billing, all our bill intake and and process all of our invoices that we have to pay through adaptive and sync it with QuickBooks. It has made my office manager and my CFOs job so much easier. They spend half the time they used to spend inputting everything into QuickBooks. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, it saves me, personally, at least two to three hours a week of approving things right? So it saves me time. It makes us more accurate in our invoice flow, therefore my my reporting on my actuals at the end of the job is more accurate, which then results in more accurate estimating correct. It's a full cycle. So at the now we're still, we still haven't perfected it. In fact, we are still working to work out kinks and how Rochelle is entering things versus the way that I estimate it, and it lining up in the Budget to Actual report. And a lot of you guys might be like, What the hell is he talking about? And probably throwing out terms of some guys don't even like, yeah, a lot of guys work off the back of a two by four, and that's fine. And a lot of guys you know, don't understand technology as well, and that's fine. But for me, it's allowed. And by the way, using your software, or any software, whether it be job tread or builder trend, or you or whatever, it's not that hard to learn. It's all about learning it and then actually using it correct, right, correct. And so that's why we didn't end up continuing to use builder trend, because it was really expensive. We weren't we weren't really using it because we weren't consumer facing, correct? I don't need to talk to myself through a platform, so it just didn't make sense for us, right? But adaptive, we started using two years ago, and I legitimately use it every day, and so we're using it, and it's helping us. And so for me, back to your question, what it's done is it's allowed me to streamline everything we do in the back end so that I could be more confident in my numbers, I could be more accurate with my estimating, which is why I'm 15% under budget in Nantucket, which everybody that like blows everyone's mind, right? You. Was because I estimated right at the beginning, right? And so running your numbers, run out of interest reserve because we haven't sold it yet. Well, guess what? I have 15% construction savings that I can pull and use for my interest, right? So it's a long, long circle of saying, like, the more garbage in, garbage out. Okay, totally. If I'm just doing this with my estimate, yes, that's garbage in and as a result, my budget at the end is going to be blown. I gotta be over budget, and either I'm losing money, or my clients can be pissed at me totally, totally and even just like so go ahead. Nope, I'm good. Go okay. I think there might be a little bit of lag. We're good though. I was literally just having this conversation, because essentially what you're saying is like, because adaptive is making it easier, and you're spending less time on understanding your numbers, understanding your cost, understanding your income, stuff like that, that you're now able to make better decisions because you have the data. The example that you're using is you have better estimating data, because you know legitimate costs and how they're being categorized. Just having this conversation in Chicago, two guys in Florida, and I'm also finding problems correct, which problems? So, like two days ago, I ran a Budget to Actual and I was going through, and I was like, there's no, there's no actual costs for windows. The windows are on site, and I know in my head they were $38,000 why are they not on here? Turns out they were classed to the wrong job, bang. And turns out that the client hadn't paid for him yet, bang, right? Because it just got to the wrong job, which wasn't a cost plus job, right? And so by running that report and going line item by line item, which pains me, I hate doing it, I put it off for weeks, but I was up at five in the morning one day. I was like, You know what? I'm just going to go out to the office. I had a cup of coffee, and I sat there with the spreadsheet, and I went through four jobs. It only took 45 minutes. That's the other nice thing about it, is it's fast, and I found all sorts of problems. I also found a bunch of money. Was like, Oh, this was a contract bid for $38,000 under bid, under budget, bang, bang, bang, bang. That's what we like to hear, 3838 grand that I can utilize in other areas, right? And it's like, without that reporting, that would just be in my bank account, and I'd be scared to spend it, because I'd be worried that if I spend it, I'm gonna have a bill that comes in, and now I can't pay the bill, and now I get behind, right? So it's all about cash flow, and I owe it to my sister, Cindy, my CFO, like she's so Cindy, yeah, shout out to Cindy. I mean, like, I couldn't fucking live without her involved, because she's so good at managing our cash flow, but she doesn't run jobs, and so she's dependent on me to tell her, Okay, this is where we're at, and we're on budget, or, Hey, we went over budget 20 grand or 100 grand, or whatever. That is, right, right? And so I was able to call her and say, Hey, I just found 38 grand. Yeah, all because of the reporting out of adaptive, right? And for those of you listening like if you're scared of spreadsheets and you're you're scared of everything we're saying, it's really super easy. You just download it, and I do a manual process. I mean, a lot of people do things much more sophisticated than me, but I just go line item by line item, and I add a column that says over, under, and I just kind of like, I don't go into every single penny like some guys might do, but I'm like, Okay, well, we were 15 over on this, but I know that I had 15 under steel, and we didn't end up buying any steel beams, so it's a wash. So I know I'm on budget with my framing, and then I go down the list, right? So it's just a great way to kind of give yourself a gut check. Totally, totally. It goes back to make so much of this business is gut right, and so much of the guys that are good at this game lean into intuition, their gut feeling, right, all these like emotions and just things that they're considering and making decisions based on, like I was saying with these guys in Florida, they had a conversation. They sat down at the end of a job, and it was essentially, like costs that they were going to bill their client for. But there was, like, some variable, some emotion tied to the conversation that said, Do we bill them or not, or do we just eat it? Right? And they decided to eat it, which is fine. It happens all the time, and I'm not even here to say that, like eating costs as a builder is the wrong thing to do, right? I don't think it's that rigid or that binary, but what I do think is, if you're going to be making those emotional gut decisions, you owe it to yourself to have the data. Yeah, to add to that gut decision, meaning that if I'm sitting at the end of a job and I don't know that I'm actually at a 7% net as opposed to the 10 that I thought I was going to have, and I make the decision to eat cost, and that's going to throw me down to a six or a 5% net, as opposed to a nine or an 8% that I thought I had. That's a really big deal, right? And if you know your numbers and you're making those gut decisions on what do I eat, how do I move? How do I make this decision, you might make a different decision just with that little piece of data saying, dude, like you're actually at 11% this is cost that we're considering eating that's going to drop us down to a nine that's still going to be a really profitable job for us, a good job for us. So we're going to eat it, keep the relationship and move on. But if I'm sitting there and I don't have that information, and I eat cost and it jumps me down to a 5% you're like, Dude, that's a really risky job that you're not going to make reasonable return on. Well so you bring up, so let's talk about gut for a minute, right? I only when it comes to pricing jobs. I only trust my gut if I'm throwing numbers casually, otherwise, I look at that, because so many guys get in trouble when they're sitting there with their notebook and they're right, okay, I think framing is going to be 22,000 I think plumbing is going to be 20,000 and that's how they do their estimate, right? Not a good idea, yep, just not a good idea. You got to audit your jobs and understand what you spent on previous ones. Now, everybody does it different. There's not a perfect science. The way I do it is, I do all of my price comparisons on square footage, even like exterior trim. If I know I'm replacing all the exterior trim of a house, I do it by square foot, right? And it gives me that benchmark. Now, it might not be dead on, but it gives me a gut check, right? It gives me a starting point. And what I do is I've created a spreadsheet. And you and I talked about this when we were at our dinner not too long ago. I created a spreadsheet, simple framing, exterior trim, interior trim, and material and labor broke it out. And then I went through, I used adaptive and I ran a report every single job for the last two years. And then I sat there all day on a Saturday, and I went down the list, and I manually plugged everything in, right? And I did that for two reasons, manually on purpose. Number one, it's making me physically look at everything. And I found all sorts of shit that was wrong. Class wrong. Processed wrong. I found money. I found things we lost money on, like it was a way for me to audit everything we've done. But then also it's allowing me to, like, visually, see and understand what I'm spending my money on. And then what I did was I classified the first couple as renovations, and I classified all the others as new construction, and I average them, great. So now I know that my electric on a new construction is 11 bucks a square foot. I just love it. Know that number, right? So when I'm pricing a new construction in my list, I go 11. I hit my number, and then maybe I'll call my electrician. Be like, Hey. So what do you think of this? It's blah, blah, blah. Give them the rundown. I'm like, I'm at like, 38,000 like, what do you think of that number? And he'd be like, yeah, that's dead on. Or maybe my lumber rep would be like, Oh, dude, prices just went up. Like, you're off by five bucks a square foot, right? Like, it allows me that gut check, yes. And so relying on your gut to price a job you are asking to lose money, because there's no way that you're going to understand everything top of your mind. It's just impossible. And so my best advice is it doesn't have to be that complicated. Just kind of like average out all your last jobs and just have that number of what that is to start your bids at, so that you're confident, so that you know, like you're close, right? Totally. And again, Every job is different, so every category is going to kind of shift and change. There's no perfect science totally, but that, that's what's worked for me. And again, everybody does it differently. Dude, I love it. I think, I think there are going to be plenty of listeners that that can empathize from you, and that will take away from that, because it just doesn't have to be that complicated. And again, like you we, I could sit here and be like, dude, PJ like, we got to get you to use this and adaptive or this. There's this way to do it, but it's like, at the end of the day, as long as you can get the. Information you need, and you're using it in a way that's palatable to you. Again, going back to using the data, using the software, that's a win, right? And if I can have a builder that is building an extremely competitive, extremely desirable part of the country, doing extremely high end work that is going into conversations and future work, saying, I know that my electrical is 11 bucks a square bang. That's a win. That's a contractor. You know what else it's done, right? So, like, for example, my finished carpenter crew is amazing, like, one of my best subcontractors, I trust him explicitly, like, I don't even manage what he does on site anymore. I just give him some inspiration, and he does it, and it comes out unbelievably good. Oh, wait behind you, I know, get your life back on there it is, and it's gotten to a point now with like my plaster guy, my interior trim guy, my tile guy, where I just know my numbers. Run the number on my spreadsheet. I see the number on my spreadsheet, and I call up my plaster guy and say, Hey, I've got this job. Go walk through it. I've got 42 grand. Let me know if that's good. Walks through sends me a text, Yep, looks great, right? So I'm determining the pricing now, love it, which is like a whole nother step, right? Because these guys don't, they don't have the time to deal with it then, and they just want to know that they're going to get paid. Get Paid. Yeah? So like, my, my finished guy on my job at Duxbury, we walked through and I said, Listen, I've got 45 grand. That's what I've got for my number. What do you think? And he's like, Yeah, I can make it work. Sounds. Love it, right? And, you know, it's a big custom house, it's a lot of work. But he also knows that even if he's not killing it and making like an absolute home run, there's another job right behind him, totally, right? And he knows it's consistent and he's getting paid on time, right? So it gives knowledge is power, right? And so knowing your numbers allows you to be more negotiable, and it works totally, totally. I love it. I love it. Okay, enough financial talk, I think, because this was just great, I want to hear more about the details on the Nantucket job, because I've been following on Instagram and it's pretty sick. First off, where do they find you on Instagram. PJ, so my Instagram is Oak. Underscore, development, if you just search oak, dd, also find us through the website oak. Dd.com, everything. My social is pretty, pretty robust, so you can't not find me if you Google oak. Development, but yeah, so social media has been I mean, that's a topic into itself, but we'll go to Nantucket first. We'll start with Nantucket. Go ahead. Yeah. So basically, I grew up at Cape Cod, so I understand what it's like to build in a vacation town. It's a very niche thing when it comes to spec building and building as an investment property. It's not normal. It's not like building in Hingham, where you if you put up a $2.2 million spec house, it's gone in a day like it doesn't work, like that vacation areas, the buyers are slower to the punch. They're very picky. You need to have the right amenities in it. It's very different then Nantucket. It's like a whole different level of I'm sure, not only to build but just the buyers and what you need to do to get people interested. I have not cracked it yet, clearly, because I haven't sold them yet, but it's just a different ballgame. And so I had always, I've been to Nantucket so many times in my life, and I always joke. I always say, I hate that. I love Nantucket, but it's awesome out there. And so I have a friend of mine in town that I met at Starbucks randomly, that's a very successful guy, and he had always said, Hey, I really want to invest in one of your projects. Was like, anytime, like, we're always looking for investors. And he said, No, but I want to do one on the island, not Nantucket. I'm like, good luck trying to, like, not gonna happen, yeah? Well, sure, shit. He shows up six months later, and he's like, Hey, I found our project. And I'm like, Alright, so that Monday, I got in a boat and I went out there and I looked at it with them, and it was a absolute disaster. And he did not see it at all. And I was like, Ah, this is great. We can make money here. Let's go, yeah. And, you know, two weeks later, we raised a bunch of money with a bunch of partners, and all of a sudden we were buying a house on Nantucket to flip. And that's when I say flip, full massive gut historic renovation in downtown Nantucket. I mean, you can't, you can't pick a harder project to start with on what did you have? Like skid steers in the shell, and there was, like, foundation stuff. I remember seeing. Of that stuff is like, you're like, moving sand and like putting like structural shit in. Like, yeah, I mean, I'm on a contract. I cannot tell you. First of all, getting the approvals from the HTC was was challenging, and I'm not gonna bang on the HDC at all, because they were doing their job and we were not presenting well. And it's our fault that it took forever. If we had, honestly, if we had hired the right architect, we would have got done twice as fast, but we tried to cheap out and use somebody inexpensive, and we got burned, fully admit that, but now that I've done it once, and I understand all the players, and also, I think the people in the HTC respect us for being so tenacious and pushing and pushing and pushing, and the building department supports us. Everyone out there has been phenomenal. I cannot even say how great everybody in the town has been to work with everybody out there. They're on an island, and everyone's there for the same reason, and everybody wants to support everybody. Like, if you're a good person, you treat people nicely, and you pay your bills and you smile and say thank you. Everyone's there to be helpful. Everyone other contractors. It's been awesome. I thought other love contractors were gonna hate having us there, and everybody is, like, embraced having us there. It's been so great. Now I got to sell them, but yeah, long story short, like working out there is great. Like, as long as you're organized and you have a process and you're thinking ahead and you're ordering two days ahead of time and not last minute, you're fine. Even staying out there, like I just rented a small apartment for the guys for almost two weeks for 2200 bucks. It wasn't terrible, insane. Yeah, right, yeah. And so if you think ahead, you bring guys out, you hire the right local guys, and you negotiate, and you know your numbers. It's really not too bad working out there. And so, yeah, so my buddy John brought me the deal. We raised a bunch of money, and, yeah, we built it. We've been there. We closed on it in February. In February will be two years. Interest is getting kind of heavy. We used a private lender of private local lender, Grossman, to help us with it. And New Boston is the name of their firm. They do great, great financing for these types of things. If you guys are looking for loans for Massachusetts or locally New England based, like big renovations, like new Boston's been awesome. Dave leross mins, the owner, his dad and him started the company. They've been awesome. They've been great partners. So we use them to finance it. And I can't, yeah, it's been an awesome project. It's been really great dude. I love it. And again, if for you guys that are listening, you got to go to PJ's social, because it is, it is a very cool Nantucket, just perfect, exactly what you would expect project well, and what's interesting, right? Like, the reason I've been under budget, there, honestly, is good negotiating with vendors, but a lot of sweat equity myself. Like, I haven't touched a hammer in eight years. I run heavy machinery a lot, and I do stuff that doesn't slow people down, but I don't swing a hammer anymore. There are way more qualified, better people at it than me that get it done way faster is not worth me doing. But on Nantucket, when you're stuck there, you can't go anywhere, and the prices for local vendors and local contractors are through the roof. You're like, well, 25 grand to install two small kitchens. Like, I'm just gonna do it myself. And I brought all my tools out, yep, slept on an air mattress, yep. And I put two kitchens in, which I haven't done in eight years, 10 years, totally. And I save myself$25,000 yeah, totally, right, because I'm there managing the cruise and, like, having meetings and running the lumber yards anyway, and I can't leave, so I might as well be productive. So I built the fence myself. I put kitchens in myself, all this stuff. I I dug the foundations myself. I instilled the inside of the house myself. Like, why not? Because I'm there. And so it's allowed. It's been fun because it's brought me kind of back to how I started the business, and I've been like, that's heavily involved. Again, it's been kind of cool and enjoyable. Like, put the headphones in, put airplane mode on, and just dig a foundation and ignore the rest of the world for a day, and have a great dinner at pi and go to sleep on an air mattress. Like, what more vacation. It's like you're making money on vacation. Sort of accepted. The only thing everyone says, like, will you keep doing Nantucket? The only downside is I'm away from my kids too much and my wife, yeah, yeah, that's the only thing that sucks. I've missed my son's first touchdown. You. Right? Kind of sucked, yeah, kind of sucked, yeah, right. But listen, it's gonna be really profitable. It's been enjoyable. I don't know. It's very risky, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's not for the faint of heart. But I mean, just like spec building in general, is not for the faint of heart, especially when you throw in calibers of projects like that, in locations like Nantucket. Yeah, we're listed between all of it for 11 million bucks. So it's, you can imagine, the carry cost is through the roof and but you know, what do they say? Big risk, big reward. I'm not sure, but yeah, until I sell it, I'm stressed, but it's my only spec project right now that is not sold. Yeah, it's been a great project. You guys should definitely come on and check out my Instagram. I'm trying to put it on there a lot, totally, but, yeah, it's been, it's been fun. I love it, okay, and then so I do, so we don't have to, like, just cut, like, abruptly, because I do want to talk about your new show and any other, any other fun stuff that you have going on in the background. I got a lot of stuff going on so as I don't know if people may have heard of our show and stuff, but we had a show on necn and NBC Sports Boston, we had 56 episodes called Heart of oak. You could still watch it on Roku. You find it on our website. It was a passion project that kind of turned into a marketing animal, yeah, and it worked out great, like I was producing a TV show, hosting a TV show, selling a TV show, and and it worked out great. It helped me build my brand, and it itched a passion for me to be on on camera. I love being on camera. And we actually got nominated for an Emmy our last season, which was so cool, so so cool. We didn't win, yeah, but it's still fun. We nominated an Emmy Awards. It was awesome, yeah, but what's interesting is that has now landed me in two separate new opportunities. One, I've been working on a new show, pitch for a national show called devastation renovation that got greenlit by Roku as a Roku original, sort of, in a way, it's hard to just hard to explain. Yeah, we're in the midst of raising money for that. I'm hoping it comes to fruition. It sounds like it may. It's a little bit in limbo. And if anybody knows the entertainment industry, you don't count on anything until you're on set, right? But then the other one is even more interesting. I just got approached by the team at dining playbook on nessen The Sports Network, Billy Costa, Jenny Johnson host dining playbook. And Jenny is starting a new show called New England blueprint, and they approached me about maybe hosting some stuff on that show. So that's pretty exciting. Love it. Yeah, again, I'm not on set yet, so we'll see how it goes. But it's gonna be pretty cool. It's gonna be aired three, four times a week, advertised on the Bruins and the Red Sox, because it'll be a NESN owned show. Let me just tell this guy. We're gonna call him back. Yeah, and so that's exciting. It would air this spring. Weird, yeah. So we'll see, dude, I love you. That pans out. I don't know. Wait, do you have the trailer? Is the trailer public for now station, neither of them are public? No, unfortunately, but okay, well, you guys have to follow, yeah, you have to follow PJ along until so when he drops it, because it's, it's pretty it's pretty sweet. It's fun, yeah, I mean, it's nice to be recognized for the hard work I put in, and hopefully it pays off for another hosting gig. I love hosting TV. It's really fun. It, you know, people always ask me, like, does do you get off on people recognizing you? I'm like, No, I just, I just like that. People enjoyed what I spent so much time doing. And like, totally, you know, I put my heart and soul into that show, and the only reason we stopped was I was tired. Honestly, all my sponsors wanted me to keep going. I get approached, I don't know, once a week, twice a month, from random people in the grocery store asking me why we're not on TV anymore. Like that's so humbling. It's great. So they'd be really fun to do more stuff on camera again, and then I do some social influencing for some some of my old brands. I'm still waiting for adaptive to ask me, but they haven't asked yet. Well, it's never out of the question. Several other question, TJ, never other question. You should always have the conversation. Yeah, but noted, I think this is great, um, you know, even aside from, you know, all of the, you know, all of your your knowledge in social media and and and TV presence, I think you're looking at business a pretty solid way in terms of how you're like, looking at your numbers as a business, where can we make money, what works, what doesn't, if you have anything. That you would leave the listeners with, what would it be, find your niche and stay in your lane, right? Yeah, I've fallen victim of coming out of my lane, and it's bit me and know your numbers, that's the biggest thing. I've learned, some hard lessons last five years. Also, like, as hard as the failures are there, it's so cliche, but you always learn from your failure failures. But even if you're really down, like, way behind and having trouble paying your bills, like, just grind through it, because you'll get through it, as long as you grind through it and believe you can, and then on the backside, you'll be a better person. You'll be a better dad. You'll be a better mom, whatever. Like, you just got to push through it. And don't be afraid to ask for help either. Like, ask, like, talk to other contractors, talk to you, to Text me, email me, like we're all here for the same reason. I don't really believe in competitors. I believe that we're all here to lift each other up and create a better economy for all of us. Obviously, if someone talks shit about me, then yeah, I don't like you. But that's I mean, honestly, like all of my what you what most people call competitors in town or on the south shore, we all text each other. We're all friends like, yeah, we're all passing information around. We're all warning people about clients to stay away from like we're all here for the same reason. So don't be afraid to talk to other people and ask for help, because everyone here is willing to share their failures to help you become more successful. Totally. I love it. PJ, thank you so much for jumping on the pod, and I'm looking forward to our next round of beers, whenever that may be. I know you're busy. Once I land one of these shows, we'll have to jump on and do it on locations. 100% Well, yeah, we'll have to do an in person Podcast. I'm working on getting my studio set up to accommodate that better. You're certainly well on your way. But yeah, we'll get together for sure. And yeah, I might, I might start half in a tool bag again. I've been Dude, I don't know why you wouldn't. You're four episodes in. There's a hell of a name. You've got way more like 2830, episodes, if you look, that's just a category within the show. Those were like, late editions. Okay, yeah. Okay, dude, you told me to pick this back up. Load More episodes. There they are. Yeah. You just learned how to use the internet. Good job. Yeah. Just the tech cut tech guy over here. One of the best episodes, by far, if anybody wants to listen, is a Ken Casey episode of half in the tool bag. It's awesome. You gotta listen. I'm gonna listen to it on my walk home today. Home today. I love it. Please do. But hey, Reese, thank you so much. Let's grab a beer. All right, yeah, appreciate it. We'll see you. PJ Bye, man. Bye.