Joining Podcast Host Taylor White for a truly inspiring conversation today is Mike Simon, Founder of Dirt Perfect, an excavating business in southern Indiana built upon the rock solid foundation of commitment to family, community, and helping others. A lifelong tradesman turned YouTube star known for his hands-on approach and construction expertise, Mike shares his fascinating journey from the field to social media fame, including his transition to specializing in excavation and the unexpected success he has found online.
Throughout the interview, Mike offers candid insights on running a small business in the construction industry, and discusses the challenges and rewards of working in the trades, the impact of social media on his field, and how he balances work with family life. Taylor and Mike also delve into the evolving landscape of construction equipment, including the rise of automation and electric technology. Packed with relatable experiences and practical advice, this episode is a must-listen for everyone, especially those passionate about a career in the trades. Don't miss out - tune in and gain valuable perspective from a construction industry insider!
Topics:
- Mike Simon's journey from a lifelong tradesman to YouTube content creator
- His transition from construction to focusing solely on excavating in 2018
- The role of social media in modern construction businesses
- Balancing work, family life, and personal passions
- Insights into managing a small, profitable business
- The pros and cons of old versus new equipment
- The future of automation and electric equipment in the construction industry
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Episode transcript:
Taylor White: What's your favorite piece that you have? Because you have some really cool, unique stuff.
Mike Simon: Yeah. So my favorite piece of equipment I own, I got a soft spot for a little bit of John Deere 655 tractor because the family bought that years ago. Whenever I was in middle school, I kind of, if you want to say maybe a stretch, started the business, grading driveways, clearing snow. Still got the tractor yet? Today, we still use it on jobs, run our straw blower, and grade some driveways and stuff. It still gets used. But my big piece is by far my 120 John Deere excavator. That was the first bigger piece of equipment I bought. Bought it at Sight Unseen out of Seattle, Washington. Bet the bank on this thing, and it's got 13,000 hours on it now. And I've bought two machines to replace it. Ended up selling both machines and keeping the 120 just because it's– I don't have a whole lot of sentimental value to most pieces of equipment, except for that one. I mean, when your back’s against the wall, that's the machine. It always seems to pull through and dig in a hole sometimes literally.
Taylor White: What's your highest hour machine?
Mike Simon: Probably the Volvo haul truck. It's up around 27,000 thousand hours.
Taylor White: We have a Komatsu 450 loader with 42,000 hours on it. Original motor.
Mike Simon: Original motor. Damn.
Taylor White: It's a 99.
Mike Simon: Yeah, those old Komatsus. They were workhorses, they were good machines. So that Volvo, we've only had it for about five years. I bought it at auction. It needs some repairs, didn't make some good videos, but it's been good. I don't know if it's the original motor or not, but it's been a good machine.
Taylor White: What about some new stuff then? Do you utilize any GPS or anything on your job sites or your laser level?
Mike Simon: We are mostly laser level just because– So we plow a lot of field tile. And I've been leaning towards running into some GPS on that just for the mapping as much as anything. But we do very few jobs that are modeled, and so 90% of what we can do, we get by the laser level. And half of those jobs I can run with my eye anymore just because we got it. I can go plus or minus a half inch. So if you can get within an inch across the 300 yard dam, you're in pretty good shape. But we're pretty much dependent on laser level, we've dabbled. I've had a lot of opportunities through sponsors to get into some GPS stuff, but we just don't– Other than the tile plow, we just don't really have a need for what we do. I steer away from pretty much anything commercial anymore. One, you can't really film commercials because there's so much liability involved. And two, it's time sensitive and it's a headache. So staying out of the commercial realm, we did get great control on what they called MG machine guidance on the new Hyundai machine. It comes in handy from time to time. I'm getting ready to upgrade a small dose, and we'll probably put laser two GMG on it or MC machine control on it. But the stuff's awesome. Like, I have no– The efficiency and the things you can do as an operator without as much skill. It's endless. I'm 100% for it. We just don't have the need to invest, I guess. Be the best way to explain it.
Taylor White: Welcome back, everybody, to the CONEXPO-CON/AGG Podcast. I am your host, Taylor White. Podcast is brought to you by our good friends over at Komatsu. We appreciate them. With me today, I have somebody who, I don't know, I should probably ask if he'd sign an autograph and send it over to me, maybe come and move some dirt for me. Guy who's got his kind of hands in everything, and a world traveler at that. I have Mike Simon, the founder of Dirt Perfect, with me here today. Mike, thanks for being on.
Mike Simon: No, man. Thanks for having me. It's a joy to be here. Appreciate it.
Taylor White: I know we've been trying to line this up for a little bit, and I'm super pumped because I got to say, I've been watching you, and I've known of you for a very, very long time, and I'm excited to talk about what you have going on. But I think for everybody at home, if you could kind of– I always ask people to give– Let's say no one's ever heard of or seen you. What's your 62nd kind of like, “Hey, this is who I am and what I do.”?
Mike Simon: Yeah. So that's a great question. I'll try to condense it the best I can. But pretty much been in the construction industry my whole life, lifelong tradesman, and damn proud of it. I mean, there ain't nothing wrong with being a tradesman. There's nothing wrong with earning your money with your hands and getting dirty. Been in actual construction for a while, always wouldn't be an excavating business. Kind of transitioned over in 2008, and I've been in the excavating business in some capacity since then. 2018, I shut down the actual construction business and focused solely on excavating and had this harebrained idea to start YouTube. Post all my mistakes on the Internet for the world to comment about. And it's been a wild ride, man. It's been a wild ride. Sometimes you wake up, pinch yourself, and you're like, “How in the heck did I get here?” But here we are.
Taylor White: Yeah, I love it. You're very humble with it. I mean, how many subscribers do you have right now on YouTube?
Mike Simon: Oh, man, that is a great question. I used to keep track of those things like they were pennies in my pocket. And honestly, I'm 2215 ish. If I had to guess. Somewhere in there.
Taylor White: That's wild. So in 2018, you said that you got out of construction and focused more just on excavating. So when I say what we are working construction company, but that's essentially what you do as well. So what do you mean that you got out of construction and just into excavating?
Mike Simon: So to back up a little bit, in 2008, I officially went out on my own. And that was when the housing market kind of crashed. Bad time to be in business. And I got into putting in foundations for a contractor, digging basements, job site for our home site preps. And that turned into being a GC. We ended up sticking around. We specialize in a product called ICF, which is insulated concrete forms.
Taylor White: We have that, too. That's awesome.
Mike Simon: Just thought that was a really neat process. And we took it a step farther. Instead of just doing the foundation, we'd go all the way up to the rafters, build the entire house that way. Well, I couldn't find nobody come in and frame behind me. Nobody wanted to mess with this stuff as space age stuff as far as they were concerned. So that turned me into a GC. So we ended up building. I don't know, we were building 10, 15 houses a year. Had a crew of about 30 guys, won a couple international awards for some houses we built. But if you're going to build high end houses, you need high end help. So I was still doing all the excavating business. I was still doing all the excavating for our jobs with my own business. I had a partner in the construction business and my kids are getting older. I was getting tired of the rat race, honestly, I just made a decision to do what I enjoy and stop caring about money. It's the best decision I ever made.
So whenever I shut down the construction business, actually building homes and structures, I decided to have no employees. Just do it myself. I thought I had all this free time in the world. My neighbor has been doing YouTube for years longer way. He'd been on my butt to try it. I'm like, “You know what? I'll give it a try.” And not to go off the rails on you here, but my dad got killed in an accident 20 something years ago. He's an operator. And I got all kinds of pictures of him on equipment and all this stuff, but I have no videos. And the drawing point to get me on YouTube was actually being able to document my life. So if something ever happened to me, my kids could go back and see what I did, see my mannerism, see how I operated, see my tricks, see all that stuff. I never did it for the money. I never did it for fame. I never did it for any of that stuff. And, I mean, I guess if I want to toot my own horn, one part of it is I thought we did some cool stuff, so it was nice to be able to share that. But, yeah, started down the YouTube route. I think we started about the same time, didn't we? Weren't you in that same neighborhood?
Taylor White: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I started right around when you did as well.
Mike Simon: Yeah, because I remember you popping up. I think the first video I seen in yours was paving a driveway or something.
Taylor White: Yeah, that was a big one for us.
Mike Simon: Yeah. And I started it and just kind of never pushed it, never intended on it to be anything. Just kind of started posting some videos, and I don't know, man, it blew up somehow. I still don't know how I got to where I'm at. It's went gang of busters and haven't quit. So here we are.
Taylor White: I think exactly how you're saying it is why it is successful is because for you, it's not about the fame. You weren't necessarily starting it to be like, “I want to be a Youtuber.” You were starting it. And I love this as well, too, because people always ask. I definitely like long term plays, and for me, I have all my footage from 2018 to now, us growing the business over those years. And for me, I relate to what you said was it's more about having that on video and film so that down the road, my grandkids, great grandkids, they can see and it's documented, like, the journey of the business, and it's important.
Mike Simon: It's crazy now, just five or six years later, to look back and see how much has changed in your lives and the way you do business and the type of projects you do. And it's wild.
Taylor White: Do you look back on some of your older stuff and you're like, “Oh, man. That's crazy how that's changed from what I'm doing now.”
Mike Simon: Yes. Of course I look back on my older videos and I'm like, “Damn, I'm getting old, man. Got more gray hairs.” Maybe a few more pounds. But I have pushed really hard. I've done business in so many different capacities that I've kind of– I'm done proving myself. You know what you're going to get. Take it or leave it, I don't care. And I've really just focused on my bread and butter lane. So the type of work we do and the projects and the scale and all that stuff is the same, stayed pretty familiar. We've got some different equipment that comes and goes and stuff like that. But, yeah, it's, it is kind of neat. I've had a couple different helpers that come and go. It's kind of fun to think back of those, it's the same but different, I guess, is the best way to describe it. I purposely go out of my way not to grow my business at this point. I know this sounds completely counterintuitive to what most people think, but bigger is not always better. And I don't want to get big enough to where it justifies my time getting there. I'm perfectly content with all that.
Taylor White: That's awesome. And I love hearing that. So to dive deeper into that, like why? Explain more of that mindset, because I have the opposite mindset and I love having this difference.
Mike Simon: I guess to give some more context to that, I have worked for, got my hand in a stadium company, which is, this is one thing we never YouTube or never post on social media, but I've traveled the country working in. I see 19 different major league stadiums, 10 or 15 football stadiums, several college stadiums. We take seats out and sell them for memorabilia. So when we've done these massive jobs, we took 67,000 seats out of Busch Stadium in 2004, in 17 days. Had 500 some people working bars. Whenever we were in the construction business, building houses, we had several different business models, from doing everything in house with our own employees to subcontracting a lot to a mixture of both. And you got a lot of friends in business. And this is just my take, but I think you may be able to relate. if you are somewhere between, let's just say, 1 in 5 employees and you can still work yourself, you can still be part of the crew, you can still be out there with your guys, I think you got a good chance of being mega profitable. You get somewhere between that 5 to 7, maybe up to 10 to 30 guys, where all you're doing is running around managing crews, and you got to have full time office guys, and you're 100% dependent on those employees and people, your revenue does not go up high enough to compensate for all the mishaps and inefficiencies of those guys. And the revenue goes to the roof, but profit margin just stays flat. So why am I going to stick my neck out and have this and have nine times the liability, nine times the headache, if I'm making the same damn money?
Now, eventually you get over a threshold, which I think it's somewhere around 50 guys and probably $5 million in revenue a year. You get over a threshold to where there's enough revenue to overcome those inefficiencies. Because nobody's going to run that business the way you run that business. So you're going to overcome those inefficiencies, and the numbers just work out back in your favor again. And the profit margin starts following the revenue line. But there's no man's land in there. And that no man's land is, to some, and it was to me is like jumping the Grand Canyon. It seems impossible. Either you really got to just go in with both feet and invest up to your eyeballs and hope for the best, or walk into a second or third generation company, or there's always exceptions to the rules, I guess. But I found out that I am much happier in life to back it up to where the revenue and the profit margin split is the percentage I want. I have a whole lot less headaches. I have a whole lot more time to spend with my kids. I have a whole lot more time to take random trips to Sweden. Life’s short, man. You got to enjoy it. You know what I mean? Very passionate about what I do. But you know, at some point, if you make $1 million dollars a year, if you make $1.5 million a year, that $500,000 really makes a difference maker, whether you're happy or not.
Taylor White: I love everything you're saying. What it is, is you just have different types of personalities, right? It's, do you want to do this or do you want to do this? Do you want to grow and stay the same and you know what money you can make and you're happy with that? Or like you said, are you two feet in and going? And you mentioned you're walking into a company, second or third generation and ultimately I did both. I came into a second generation company, which was my dad, and now I'm third generation. And my dad was much like you. “Hey, we have five guys and I know what we do every year and that's great. And this is all I want to do.” And you know, there's conversations and for me it was two feet in because I had this opportunity, the company, my mindset is growth. I love it. I love the stress, I love the headaches. I love it. I feed off of it. I love chaos.
Mike Simon: So let me ask you this. Do you enjoy spending more time in the office or on the job?
Taylor White: On the job. Oh, yeah. I'm a tool guy.
Mike Simon: Hands on.
Taylor White: Oh, yeah, 100%. We joke around the office, they call me psych guy. But to your point. And it's crazy. And I love these conversations because you said relying on people, essentially. And you're right. So three months ago, my head of operations quit, started his own business. That really sucked. Actually two weeks ago, my head estimator left. He, today, just literally 25 minutes ago, today was his last day, he walked out. So it's hard when you rely on those people because now I can't do what I like doing which is being at the pit, loading trucks, making sure that the pits are running efficient, going to the job site, helping out. I got to get in a skid in the dozer. I'm in the office doing stuff that I don't want to do. But I know that it's short term, but it's really interesting about the money because you're right, you do get to that to grow. It takes so much capital and it's ridiculous. The amount of money. But you can make more money as you grow and stuff gets paid for and paid down. But you're right. Your overhead, it is crazy. It's just two different mindsets, I think.
Mike Simon: But to take that back, and don't take this the wrong way, but if you were starting from absolute scratch with a pickup truck and a few hand tools, even if your dad had a small company, that's still a huge, that's a generational jump to– I know you've taken it a lot farther, and I've seen other companies do similar. Don't get me wrong. You're taking the leap and you're putting the effort in, but any head start you can get a big damn deal.
Taylor White: Oh, and I think, Mike, that's what I'm saying is that I realize the– What's the word that I'm looking for? People say it all.
Mike Simon: Situation or opportunity?
Taylor White: Yeah, I realize the opportunity, the privilege. That's the word. I had a privilege. But, Mike, I say this to a lot of people that growing up, I got ragged on my whole life about silver spoon, this and that. It was never like that. Trust me. If anybody knew my father, it was actually quite the opposite. But it's difficult doing it both. But I realized the opportunity, and I realized the privilege that I did have, but I didn't want to just go to work every day and then just go home because I love working and I love my work. I'm a workaholic, so there is massive sacrifice on my end as well just like if somebody was starting from zero. I miss family stuff all the time. I'm not really a friends guy. I don't have many friends because of that. So I think what I'm trying to say is I think that there are pros and cons to both, and it's just a mindset thing.
Mike Simon: No, you're exactly right. And to elaborate on what you said, I started in business the same year I got married. And I tried to explain to my wife, everybody on my mom’s side of the family are self-employed. I knew what I was getting into. But you don't have hours. If you're awake, you're working. And it drove my wife crazy for years. What are you doing today? I don't have a clue. The phone's going to ring and that's the direction. I got a plan, but I guarantee you that's probably not what I'm going to end up doing by the time the day's over. And it's 100% a lifestyle.
Taylor White: How do you manage business and family?
Mike Simon: My daughter's 14, son’s 10. And I'm not saying I've got it figured out now, but it has taken a while to find a balance. What makes it worse is my wife's a school teacher, so she's off during the summer, which is my busy time. I'm slower in the winter, which is her busy time. So we got colliding of schedules there. But over the last couple years, especially in 2018, my kids are getting involved in sports. I make a point to make most of the games, even if I got to stop working and do what I'm doing. We do a few family trips a year, and my shop, which is where I'm at now, is actually attached to my house, which is really nice, because now, if I'm working out here in the evenings, even if I'm mechanicing on a piece of equipment, the kids will come out and hang out with me. Which, yeah, there are some cons to it, but that, bro, just trumps everything. So, we live in a small, tight knit community, so that helps, too. I tried, I'd say, 90% of my work within an hour here, so travel time is not a huge issue. And we’ll get into this later, but social media has actually freed up some of my time because I don't have to chase every job. I could if I want to, but I say no to this, that, or the other and chase the more profitable jobs. Chase the ones that video well, chase the ones that I know will provide me opportunities to have more time with family. Man. I'm content, I'm happy. I don't want to complain.
Taylor White: I love it. Honestly. There are days where I think the exact same, where I'm like– This year has been the most craziest year of business ever in my life and it's taken a toll on my body, mentally and physically and my relationships. And I talked about that in a personal podcast coming up, but it's crazy. You got to have good support at home. But I think a lot of the time, too, that maybe it'd be nice to settle back and maybe dial back the business and just go back to the basics. So I'm actually very jealous of where you're at because that sounds awesome. But I have a three year old and a one year old, and so I got young family, and we're just getting going on that.
Mike Simon: You’ll be good for another couple years, and those kids start getting involved with stuff, that's when it's going to get– You're going to have to make a decision.
Taylor White: Yeah, 100%. I know. But until then, it's just kind of head down. But I like where you were going with social media because for us in our business, that's what actually drove us and helped us to grow with finding clients. But as well, when you grow, like you were talking about earlier, finding good people, whenever you had your other business was hard to find, maybe some trades or some good employees, quality people.
Mike Simon: I had the same problem you do. You get somebody in there for three years, you train them up to the point where you don't have to babysit them no more, and then they think they can go off on their own, which I don't want to fault anybody for better than themselves at all. I never got mad at anybody that left, but they would leave for a better opportunity or start their own business or whatever it was. And then here you are starting right back at zero again. But after about, I don't know, three or four cycles of that, we tried different things to change the pattern, and we still have the same result. So the next option was to eliminate that from the situation. And don't get me wrong, I still depend on a– I got two employees. One's in the office and one helps me on the job. I got in there a part time estimator. But if I have to, every job I get on the books right now, I can do 100% myself.
Taylor White: That's a good feeling.
Mike Simon: It is, it is.
Taylor White: Yeah. That awesome feeling. Would you advise somebody to do YouTube, do. Do Instagram, do social media? Put your business out there. Would you advise it?
Mike Simon: Yeah. But I think you will agree with this. There is just like anything else, there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Potential pros from it, I think, greatly outweigh the cons. But most people that have issues in the social media space bring them on themselves. Being keyboard warriors, or thinking they're bigger than what they are when they're behind the screen, you don't see how many people that reaches and then how it spreads like wildfire behind the scenes. So if you're going to put your business on social media, keep it professional. That's my number one advice. Keep it professional, whether it's in the comments, the posts, no matter what you do. But yeah, it is great to advertise, find jobs. It's great to advertise, find help. It's great to advertise, find suppliers. The number one, it's great to network with other people, because what it can do is connect you to people that do the same trade as you that is not competition. So you're more open to share ideas and techniques and maybe even learn something from somebody doing the same thing you do on their side of the world, which you're not going to get any other way. So I never shun anybody away from starting YouTube or starting whatever platform you want to get on. I don't care what it is, but just you got to remember to keep it– If you're operating a business, you got to keep it professional.
Taylor White: Yeah, I would agree 100%. And you know what? I would say that I love sharing the journey of being living proof of that. So when I started, this is just my little tangent, six years ago on YouTube, or five years ago on YouTube, I'm not good at math. Don't pretend to be.
Mike Simon: Thanks to you, obviously.
Taylor White: Yeah, it's just crazy how the evolution of what I would have put on there versus what I put on now. And just in the past year, how that has changed significantly now that I have kids and if they're watching the videos. It's crazy because now, we actually bleep out our swear words, which a lot of people are listening to now. If they haven't seen it a bit, they might think that that's crazy. But we never used to do that. It used to be F, F, F, all these swears because that's authentic to who I am, but doesn't represent the company very well. And my YouTube channels, Ken White Construction, it's not Taylor White. That's the fine line you have to ride. And I'm glad that I was living proof of learning of that, but I would totally agree with you on that, is keep it professional. Remember that your YouTube channel, if it's about your business, it's your business and your reputation. It's not you personally.
Mike Simon: Right. Absolutely.
Taylor White: That's a key factor on that. Would you tell people to start YouTube or Instagram? Because they're like, what one? Or what? TikTok?
Mike Simon: YouTube is where my biggest platform is. I think Facebook, second. I'm around 150,000 on Facebook. I think that depends on your personality and what business you're in. I think with our business, if you can do it right, long format plays better. Because in what we do, needs explanation. If you're just doing nails or makeup or I don't know, style or something like that, I think the short format is better for you. So I don't know if there's a blanket answer for that. I mean, in the construction industry, there are guys that have some success with short format stuff, but it's a lot harder to make money on short format stuff versus long format stuff. So if you could be successful with the long format, it's easier to go backwards to short format.
Taylor White: Revenue wise, has social media– Were you kind of surprised at– Do you do ads and stuff?
Mike Simon: I'm only monetized on two platforms by choice. It's Facebook and YouTube. And I don't want to get into the details of it, but I got, I don't know, $1.5 million, $2 million of the equipment. I'll make more money with a $300 camera.
Taylor White: Yeah, no, 100%.
Mike Simon: Yeah. The ROI on that GoPro is insane.
Taylor White: See, that's awesome. And it's crazy because– And for the viewers listening when we talk about should you start social media and stuff, I was the same. When I first started, I had a GoPro. That was it. And found success just with the GoPro. You don't need to go out and spend thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars on gear and equipment, editing software and this and that. Keep it simple.
Mike Simon: Yeah. So my neighbor, Logger Wade, was on axeman with the History channel, talked to Bobby, gets in a little bit, and then through the Volvo connections, I have some connections with the Gold Rush guys and all those production crews tell you the same thing. You got to tell a timeline, you got to keep stuff in chronological order. You got to have some polished edges, but you can't take it too far because you don't want people to think you're professional. They want to be able to relate to and want to be able to think, “I can do that.” So, I mean, I don't want to say keep it crude, but if you keep it on, if you know where you are– I'm not a professional production crew. I'm never going to be. So don't try to be one. Stay in that lane. You know what I mean? Stay in that space where you belong.
Audio is the biggest deal. We're actually on the job site working. You're the same way. You don't have, I don't have time to deal with wireless mics. I got a job, do reigns at your back, suppliers, customers, whatever, it's click and go, get what you can. And I've critiqued some stuff over the years with some media mods and GoPros and some tricks and have been able to get pretty good audio for being on the fly. We do use some wireless mics for like some more important videos with sponsors and stuff. But my whole theory whenever I filmed is you're coming to the job site to hang out with me. So if you were on the job site hanging out and I had to scream at you to communicate, I'm going to scream at the camera the same way. You know what I mean? It's, “Come hang out with me.”
Taylor White: Is your main focus now when you talk about your job and you're at a point where maybe you could think about when you're looking at jobs, estimating jobs, what one's going to film better that. Are you more in your head focused on what is going to be better on YouTube or what is going to be better for the construction company.
Mike Simon: So right now it's probably 50-50 just because I've been doing it so long. I got a lot of really good clients that probably picked up 50% of my schedule.
Taylor White: I'm really shocked at that. That's awesome.
Mike Simon: Whatever those clients need is what we do. Whether a video is good or not, the other 50% of the time, it's a combination of both what profit margin and how does it feel and where do they like. We used to do a bunch of septics. I don't do any septics anymore. They suck at film and they suck to install. Money is okay. So we're actually, we're doing one today just because it's for a builder we've worked for for years and we'll throw one in. But no, we like doing the cool, random stuff even. Even before YouTube, we were always kind of known as the guys that if you can't, nobody else wants to do it. We'll try it. And that stuff usually makes good videos, so it works out pretty good.
Taylor White: What I really enjoy about your content from what I could see, you're not going out and buying a lot of brand new stuff. You have a lot of unique pieces of equipment.
Mike Simon: From day 1, I've always been in the mindset of I don't need to spend millions of dollars on brand new stuff. I just soon take that money and divide that money up against– Instead of having one fancy new piece of equipment, take that chunk of money and buy multiple pieces of equipment because it opens me up to a lot more different jobs. I have run a lot of new equipment. There is some really nice new equipment, but that stuff built from the late ‘90s to about 2004 to 2005 is some of the best equipment ever built. They had all the clerks worked out, but they didn't have the emissions yet. So if you get stuff in that timeframe, as long as you can still get parts far, it'll go forever. I also enjoy working on the equipment. I'm a mechanic by trade. That's what I went to school for. So I have all the equipment I've got. I bought one piece brand new, and that was a Hyundai excavator. And not to go into details on it, but they're a sponsor of mine and I do like the machine. And they made a deal to where it made sense. You cannot pay me to say words, that's not going to happen. I do have to like your machine. I do have things, good pieces of equipment. I'm not going to be bought, but I do like the machine. And they made an arrangement to where it made a permanent stay on the channel. But I think after that, the next closest thing I got would probably be that 850 and it's a 2010 model. And I'm perfectly content with my old stuff. I've never been the guy that's like new, shiny, flashy, look at me stuff.
Taylor White: And I get that. And I think that's what honestly makes you so relatable and watchable online because I love watching it too, because I mean, we have a bunch, we have new stuff as well, obviously as older stuff because the older stuff helps pay for the new stuff. But I love it. I think it's awesome. But you made a great point. You're a mechanic by trade. If you either have parts or payments. Because the older stuff breaks more, the newer stuff still breaks, but you'll have warranty or the service calls are free and they fix it and whatever. So you either have parts or payments. Now what I like is this winter was slow. My payments didn't stop. But when you don't have payments, the part stops when it's slower. So you're not carrying a bunch of overhead. So that is key. And I think you need to highlight that. That older stuff's great, but you need to be able to work on it or else you're going to be paying a mechanic and service calls.
Mike Simon: Yeah. So to give you a point, I'm not going to mention names here, but we had a demo piece of equipment from a manufacturer, had 110 hours on or whatever and we were trying to finish up his job. We had weather coming in, we were pushing hard and blew a hydraulic hose way up in the belly pan. Nothing easy to get to. So call the company. They call three different dealers. Nobody gets there for four days. And so what do I do? I'm like, “Sorry boys, jobs got to get done.” We go home and drag out the OD4 with 10,000 hours on it. And it is what it is. Jobs got to get done. You know what I mean? Well, the next day it blew a hydraulic hose, hour and a half later we're up and going. You know what I mean? Because I'm not relying on anybody else. Nobody can tell me I can or can't work on it. Nobody can tell me I'm voiding no warranty. Now that's a rare random scenario. But it's not a control thing. But it is a control thing because I am never going to be a large enough customer to any dealer to where I'm priority. I'm not faulting them for that. I understand that. So I need to position myself in a way where I can make myself the priority. And I enjoy working. I don't enjoy working on other people's stuff, but I truly enjoy working on my own stuff. That's kind of the way we operate. And knock on wood, I'm going to jinx myself. But we don't have a lot of downtown.
Taylor White: Don't say it.
Mike Simon: I know. We just don't have a lot of downtime. We really don't.
Taylor White: Well, that's good. You probably are your biggest asset. Well, you definitely are your biggest asset.
Mike Simon: I am also running the majority of the hours on the machines. Not saying I'm a better operator either. Well, then I noticed something. I can catch stuff where it's going bad just because I'm not in tune with the machines. Where other guys, no fault to them, but they're not as familiar with them, so they don't know if that's normal or not. And the next thing you know, you got a major issue. But I mean, we have breakdowns, don't get me wrong, but we do pretty good for as many hours as we run.
Taylor White: Yeah, no, it's interesting. I have a buddy of mine, he's in Indiana, big contractor. He was always talking to me about parts over paint. And he always bought, used, bought, used, bought, used. But because he's so large and because he has so many pieces of equipment that are older, he couldn't find a good enough mechanic or enough mechanics to keep going. So he's kind of forcing the situation where he actually went out and bought two brand new excavators. And he's like, “Honestly, two years ago I would have said that I would never do this.” And here he is doing it. So it's different with the comparisons of size.
Mike Simon: Yes, no, and you bring up a great point. People ask me this all the time, too. I have structured my business to my strengths. So however you structure your business needs to be structured to your strengths. So if you have no mechanical ability whatsoever or no interest whatsoever, then you don't need to structure your equipment fleet to have maintenance and issues. You know what I mean? So that's what works for us. That doesn't mean it's going to work for everybody. And that probably needs to be said out loud, I guess.
Taylor White: What's your favorite piece that you have? Because you have some really cool, unique stuff.
Mike Simon: Yeah. So my favorite piece of equipment I own, I got a soft spot for a little bit of John Deere 655 tractor because the family bought that years ago. Whenever I was in middle school, I kind of, if you want to say maybe a stretch, started the business, grading driveways, clearing snow. Still got the tractor. Today, we still use it on jobs, run our straw blower, and grade some driveways and stuff. It still gets used. But my big piece is by far my 120 John Deere excavator. That was the first bigger piece of equipment I bought. Bought it at Sight Unseen out of Seattle, Washington. Bet the bank on this thing, and it's got 13,000 hours on it now. And I've bought two machines to replace it. Ended up selling both machines and keeping the 120 just because it's– I don't have a whole lot of sentimental value to most pieces of equipment, except for that one. I mean, when your backs are against the wall, that's the machine. It always seems to pull through and dig in a hole sometimes literally.
Taylor White: What's your highest hour machine?
Mike Simon: Probably the Volvo haul truck. It's up around 27,000 hours.
Taylor White: We have a Komatsu 450 loader with 42,000 hours on it. Original motor.
Mike Simon: Original motor. Damn.
Taylor White: It's a 99.
Mike Simon: Yeah, those old Komatsus. They were workhorses, they were good machines. So that Volvo, we've only had it for about five years. I bought it at auction. It needs some repairs, didn't make some good videos, but it's been good. I don't know if it's the original motor or not, but it's been a good machine.
Taylor White: What about some new stuff then? Do you utilize any GPS or anything on your job sites or your laser level?
Mike Simon: We are mostly laser level just because– So we plow a lot of field tile. And I've been leaning towards running into some GPS on that just for the mapping as much as anything. But we do very few jobs that are modeled, and so 90% of what we can do, we get by the laser level. And half of those jobs I can run with my eye anymore just because we got it. I can go plus or minus a half inch. So if you can get within an inch across the 300 yard dam, you're in pretty good shape. But we're pretty much dependent on laser level, we've dabbled. I've had a lot of opportunities through sponsors to get into some GPS stuff, but we just don't– Other than the tile plow, we just don't really have a need for what we do. I steer away from pretty much anything commercial anymore. One, you can't really film commercials because there's so much liability involved. And two, it's time sensitive and it's a headache. So staying out of the commercial realm, we did get great control on what they called MG machine guidance on the new Hyundai machine. It comes in handy from time to time. I'm getting ready to upgrade a small dose, and we'll probably put laser two GMG on it or MC machine control on it. But the stuff's awesome. Like, I have no– The efficiency and the things you can do as an operator without as much skill. It's endless. I'm 100% for it. We just don't have the need to invest, I guess. Be the best way to explain it.
Taylor White: Well, especially when you're the one doing it. And if you're really good on the machine, then there's really no need for automation. IDo you see automation as a concern or is it an opportunity, you think, for maybe people to get into the trade?
Mike Simon: Both. I think on what I'm going to call controlled job sites, like a mining operation where you got set areas and you got set routes and maybe a big highway project or something, there's definitely opportunity for remote operating or autonomy or automation, however you want to say it. But your bread and butter is excavating, nothing's ever going to replace eyes, ears, feets and boots on the ground. It's just people argue with me and say, “Well, surgeons can do surgery from miles away and that's more tedious.” But yeah, you're pinpointing on a little bitty spot, you know what I mean? With the job site, you got to have the bigger picture. He's not going to make a wrong– He may make a wrong swing of that knife and nick something he shouldn't. But with a machine you can wipe out the power or a water line or the infrastructure to a major city, you know what I mean? There's just too much risk involved. So whatever the farming industry does with automation and autonomy, we're going to do five to seven years later. So if you want to know what we are going to be doing, just check in with the farmers.
Taylor White: I really like a billboard that I saw. I think it was on Instagram and someone took a picture of, it was like, “Hey, Siri, build this building.” Oh, wait, but it's true. I mean people are like, “Well, AI didn't build this building,” and there'll be aspects to it down the line, but–
Mike Simon: It’s just like my take on electric, it has its place, but it's not a blanket fix. That's what it's going to come down to.
Taylor White: What do you think of the electric excavators and dozers and stuff that they're coming out with?
Mike Simon: Oh boy, we're going to go down this road, huh?
Taylor White: Technology's not there, right?
Mike Simon: No. So application based is the key phrase with that.
Taylor White: Interior work, commercial site, maybe a little electric, miniacs.
Mike Simon: One unique thing Volvo has going on is they're teamed up with Rallycross, so they're traveling, I don't know, was it five or seven continents? And they're building all these racetracks in these cities with 100% electric equipment. Keeps noise down, keeps pollution down, blah, blah, blah. It's short runtime days. It's working great, application based, but you're not going to take that same machine and load a truck with it all day where you are. It's just not going to happen. They got those little, I think it's the L20, I call it a yard loader, loading mulch or rock in a landscape yard. That thing's awesome. In an eight hour day, it probably gets ran three hours out of the day. It's quiet, easy to hop on, go. But you can't give me a 200 or 20 ton excavator, send me out the sticks, tell me I can work six hours, and then want me to charge for 12 off a diesel generator. You know what I mean? At some point, common sense has to enter the equation, and I don't know who's going to be the person to interject that common sense, but somebody's going to have to raise their hand. And I think society is finally realizing that it's not a blanket fix because there's been a lot bigger push for hydrogen here in the last year or alternative fuels in the last year, whether it be straight up hydrogen, what they call it hydrogen fusion, where they're generating electricity with the hydrogen, or you go, hydrogen internal combustion, which would be a form of hybrid. But I mean, I'm all for the planet and I'm all for all that stuff, but I'm going to get way off in the weeds here. But at some point, we can't forget that we have to maintain what we have. We won World War II because we were an industrial country and we could produce what we needed to at a drop of a hat. And we need to be able to make sure we still have those abilities to do such things.
Taylor White: I think also what is a big issue, and I'll speak for Canada at the time, like Trudeau, he wants to push by 2035, it's going to be all electric vehicles up here. And it's like, okay, great, but our infrastructure is not there. I don't know about the states, but it's not there. I took a Tesla to Quebec City, which is seven hours away, and I had another guy in a Cadillac Escalade driving up there, and we showed up three and a half hours after him because we had to stop and charge and go out of the way. But also just the power draw that it takes as well, too. It's not there.
Mike Simon: No, it's not. It's not here either. California, which is really implementing some strict restrictions on that. They're having all kinds of issues over there, but it's not Canada. It's not the United States. I was just in Sweden. It's the same problem over there with all these electric vehicles. The infrastructure is just not there for it. And the carbon footprint it's going to take to build the infrastructure is something that nobody wants to talk about, but it's massive. I think electric always needs to be an option. It needs to be in a tool in our toolbox we can go get. But we need to keep focusing forward on other options as well. We need more tools in that toolbox to get from, to apply to whatever situation or whatever job we got or whatever the application is.
Taylor White: Also a really big part of it, which I don't know if a lot of people talk about this, but my big part of it at least is we're from a small town. I employ a lot of farm kids, a lot of farm guys. My guys would way rather run our 1998 450 Deere that when you fire it up and you give it a good grunt, the smoke hits out the stack.
Mike Simon: Turbo whistles a little bit.
Taylor White: Exactly. Or like the tractor, a nice straight pipe tractor hitting the jakes on it. To me that's fun as well, too. I don't know if that's just a guy thing, but, I like that. Electric would not hit the same.
Mike Simon: No. Again, we were just over in Sweden at Volvo headquarters, and they had a lot of the bigger electric equipment over there. It is different. I mean, it operates nice, it performs well, but it's a whole different experience.
Taylor White: So I would like to touch on– I know you're kind of like, “Hey, you know, this is where I'm at. I love doing my YouTube, I love my business. I love the size that we're at. I got time with family and this and that.” What's the outlook for Dirt Perfect? Where do you want to go with it? With business and then social media.
Mike Simon: As far as what you guys see on YouTube, as far as the excavating business, it's probably going to stay status quo. About the size it is now. I'm not going to hire a bunch of people. We're not going to be doing multiple different jobs. I also learned that I don't like being on a job site for more than about two weeks. So, I like the smaller stuff. What a lot of people don't see off camera is we're investing in property and other things that are going to generate revenue later in life as far as retirement goes down the road, revenue generating assets, I guess, is the best way to describe that. As far as the channel goes, I think one thing that makes our channel somewhat successful is the variety of content. You never know what the next video is going to be. We may be working on the river, we may be working in a shop, we may be digging a pond. We might be doing who knows what. So the variety is going to stay there. Five, six years down the road. I think it's going to transition a little bit of less job site videos and probably more of special products, projects in the shop and maybe some turn around seeing some other cool stuff going on. But I don't have nothing major groundbreaking or any major changes coming up, but we always try to do a little something just to keep it fresh and keep it going. I'm to the point now with all my social media stuff, I can't handle it all myself. So I'm trying to convince my wife to kind of be my social media manager because my growth is really handicapped by my own time, and I don't trust just anybody to start winging stuff out there with my name attached to it. So I do like having multiple audiences on multiple different platforms because if you're 100% on YouTube, love Google to death, but if one day they wake up and say, enough's enough, and pull the plug.
Taylor White: Also, people with TikTok. They're banned.
Mike Simon: Yeah, they're up in the air. So I do think it's important to focus where your bread and butter is at. For me, that's YouTube. But that doesn't keep me from working on audiences in different places just in case something would happen. But, yeah, man, for the next five years, probably, it's going to be chugging along, just kind of doing our thing. Kids start getting a little bit older. If they start showing interest in the business, that could take us one direction. Somebody shows up one day with a bunch of money, wants to buy it, that could take us in a different direction. Everything's on the table to some extent. Hell, I never thought I'd be here five years ago. So who the hell knows where we're going to be in five years?
Taylor White: I love that. I genuinely love that. And I think that you're just such a cool, calm, collected, chill guy, and you're like, “Hey, this is who I am, and this is what I'm doing, and this is what I'm gonna put out there.” And I really respect that. And I really respect you also. I know we've been lying this up for a while, but taking the time out today and dropping some knowledge on for us and chatting–
Mike Simon: No, no problem. Appreciate. I apologize. I get to this– It's been a little bit of a–
Taylor White: It's fine, don't worry about it. I got stuff on my end, too. It's all good. Honestly, I love it. I'm glad I got to actually chat with you.
Mike Simon: Yeah. Absolutely.
Taylor White: Awesome. All right. This podcast has been brought to you by our good friends over at Komatsu. Thank you, Mike, for coming on today. I appreciate it.
Mike Simon: Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been a lot of fun.