Are you playing it safe in your business? Taylor challenges the conventional wisdom of saying "no" to opportunities that seem too big or too risky, revealing the game-winning mindset that separates stagnant businesses from those experiencing explosive growth.
Many entrepreneurs believe caution is key, carefully avoiding projects that stretch their capabilities. But what if that hesitation is the very thing keeping you from your next breakthrough? Taylor breaks down a real-life case study where he took on a commercial job his team was completely unprepared for. The lessons learned from that single decision to say "yes" transformed his company's trajectory and can reshape your approach to risk and opportunity. Don't miss the powerful insights on how to push your team, build unwavering client trust, and master the art of being a leader who drives action.
Topics:
- The success mindset
- The power of "yes"
- Dealing with "slowness" and pushing your team
- Client trust: the key to construction management
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Episode transcript:
Taylor White: Welcome back, everybody, to the CONEXPO-CON/AGG Podcast. I am your host, Taylor White. As always, tonight, I am coming to you live. I am not live; I am live right now. I am coming to you guys from Louisville, Kentucky, and I have here the bourbon to prove it.
I am at The Utility Expo tonight, which is super cool. Tomorrow will be our first morning attending. We got in late today, so we are just kind of taking it easy. But I wanted to remind everybody that CONEXPO is March 3rd to the 7th, and it is coming up in beautiful Las Vegas, so please hurry up. I cannot tell you guys enough. Use the code “PODCAST30” to get 30 percent off your tickets right now. And hurry up because that code is only good until December 5th, and then you cannot use it anymore. And then guess what? Then you are paying full pop. So please, “PODCAST30,” use the code, get your tickets now. Over 2,000 exhibitors, three million square feet of space. It is going to be awesome. I am going to be there. I cannot wait. Join us.
Shout out to the sponsor, John Deere Power Systems, for taking care of us on the podcast and sponsoring this amazing podcast every now and then. You guys are fortunate that you get to sit here alone with me tonight because tonight I want to talk about the game winning mindset of success. And I was thinking about tonight when I was like, “Okay, I am going to do another solo podcast. I am going to be in Louisville. I am going to be having this opportunity to meet new people, to go to a new place, new adventures, do new things.” And it kind of got me thinking about the mindset because I had a friend that I was mentioning this to and he was saying no. He is like, “I would not go. I do not need to go. I do not see the value in going.”
And to me, I just feel like when you have an opportunity in front of you, I do not feel like that is the game winning mindset of success. I feel like you need to say yes. A lot of the times, I feel like people tell you to say no and, “Do not go do this,” or, “Do not over,” what is the word I am looking for? When you over, you overpromise somebody something, right? And then you let them down. It is not the way to go about things. And here is where I come from with that, is my whole life from when I first took over the family business like six or seven years ago, and I remember I was just saying yes to everything. And I remember I still say yes to everything now. And I remember a specific time when we got asked to take on this commercial job, and it was crazy how much it was outside of our realm of what we normally would do or what we could handle.
And I remember when our estimator at the time was pricing it and he is like, “Dude, we do not know how to do any of this stuff. Like, we do not even have guys out there that know what they are doing. Nobody in the office can manage it.” I remember being like, “Look, if we get the job, I will make sure that we can get it done.”
And we bid the job, you know, we hit send, and I remember freaking out being like, “Okay, that was the largest bid that we ever sent out.” And it was like two weeks later, I get a text being like, I do not know, it was a Friday night. Big jobs, by the way, always seem to come to you on Fridays. I do not know why. It was Friday night, and I remember getting a text being like, “Hey, we heard back.” And I responded back, I am like, “Okay, great, what?” We got the job. Holy shit. Okay, that is crazy. Those were my expressions at the time. Okay, that is crazy. And then immediately my brain went to, “How are we going to execute this and make money or at least come out of this project at zero after we have paid for everything and we are still going?” Because I knew that even if we came out of this project at zero, that we would still gain the opportunity to show people that we can handle a job of this scope.
And that is what we did. So the first thing that we did was, hey, we said yes to the opportunity. We said, “Hey, we can do all this.” Next was, “Okay, we need to find some people that can help us get this thing.” And I remember searching, it is so hard to find people. I mean, that is a whole topic on its own. But I mean, look, finding talent right now is really hard, especially A-type personalities, because A-type people are either doing their own thing already and do not need you, or they do not need you because they are already working somewhere else and they are getting paid enough and they are happy. So when you do have an opportunity to hire an A-type person, definitely do that. Definitely pay them enough so that they do not ever want to leave, because you can make a lot of money with an A-type person.
So we hired some people. We hired some good people. We executed the job, and it was tough, man. We took on more than we could chew. And I remember we were over on hours, we were under on some materials, but overall, the job ended out, you know, being pretty much sub-even. But what it did was it showed people that we could take on more, and it showed ourselves in the office that we could also take on more as a business, not just, you know, to future clients or anything like that. And the fact that there was the willingness to say yes is probably key in the situation. And I would say that saying yes is key to taking on more and finding success in life and doing things that push you outside of your comfort zone and doing things that make you maybe cringe and go, “Oh, I do not know if we can do that,” or, “Oh, I do not know if I want to go and do that.”
Like coming here to The Utility Expo. I wanted to come here. I am very excited to go here. But let’s put it, you know, in a different perspective, right? Let’s say you are sitting at home right now and someone goes, “Hey, I got two free tickets and we are going to go to Georgia.” Great. What is in Georgia? I do not know, let’s pick something, some business venture. Okay, business conference in the industry that you work in. “I do not want to go.” Well, by saying yes to going to that, you could possibly meet somebody that could change the trajectory of your life. And that sounds crazy saying that, but that is honestly true. And I honestly think that too, especially like when I go to these places or I meet new people, you never know who you are talking to. And I remember sitting down beside a bar at this last thing I went to, and I was talking to this guy, and he was the head of some massive company. And I am like, I would never have gotten to talk to you if I was not here and if I was just sitting at home doing my own thing. So I think what we lack in today’s world is a willingness to say yes to stuff. And I think that we normalize the feeling of saying no.
And I do not think that it is wrong to say that. I just feel like more people are saying no these days, and I do not know why. And we need to push people to make themselves feel uncomfortable, to do things that make you feel like you, you know, you should not be doing them in business. And it is a good place to be. Put pressure on yourself. Putting pressure on yourself is important. I have a friend, you know, he has a son and he is like, “Hey, like, you know, I really want to push to do more and, you know, I do not know what to do now.” And to me, it is just it is really interesting because it is like a really tough scenario to be in when you have somebody sitting in front of you that you love and, you know, you want to push them and motivate them to do more, but you really just cannot, and it is really hard.
And this week, specifically in business, one thing that during this week I was like, “I really want to talk about this on the podcast this week,” was relying on other people and the mindset of slowness. Slowness in the industry, relying on other people, waiting on other trades to give you answers. Right now, that is my life with PriTec. Right now, I am constantly sending follow up emails to people saying, “Hey, where is this report? We need it for a submission.” “Hey, where is this site servicing package? We need that for a submission.” “Hey, can we have your comments to send back to the city for this submission?” “Hey, this contractor is tendering out our project and he needs you, engineer, to state or to approve shop drawings,” waiting on them.
I do not have the answer for it, so I am not going to try to pretend like I do. But man, it is so difficult, especially in the general contracting world, building a team around people. Like, I really strive, and I think the biggest success from the general contracting business that we have found is building a team around people that you can text personally, like the CEO or the president or somebody at least very high up, the ownership level, being like, “Hey, your team really needs to start crushing it right now because I am really hurting right now,” or, “I am waiting for a response and I have not gotten anything back.” And that for us is, for me personally, actually, has been huge. But there are still a few trades, and it just mind-boggles me. And I do not know what the fix is. And again, looping it back to what I was just talking about, I think people just do not have that mindset of, “Okay, yeah, like I can do that.”
But then I feel like there is a couple of people that I am working with right now that have that mindset of saying yes, but they say yes too often, now they cannot perform or they cannot follow through on their obligations. I really struggle with that because I am having a really hard time pushing people. And, you know, I would love to know your guys’ feedback as well, too, of just figuring out how to push people. What I have found as the best success for pushing people is, like I was saying, like reach out to the owners and sending a text or follow up and just kind of like being able to have that personality of being a little bit stern. That takes a skill, being an asshole without being an asshole. It is a really hard thing to try to perfect. Most of the time, I am just an asshole.
It honestly is probably one of the best things that you could try to perform as someone who is in an ownership or management role, because what you are essentially doing is being able to push somebody and give them a hint of like, “Well, maybe your bill will not get paid this month if, you know, you do this.” Or you have to have something on somebody, not in a bad way, but in a good way, of being like, “Look, you were four or five points ahead of the next guy in pricing, but we still went with you. Please follow through on this next thing, and we need this by next Friday.” But I would be curious to see what everybody else thinks because that is one thing that I have been dealing with lately that I do not have the fix for, is dealing with people. Waiting on other people is just my life right now. And I say ours because like the team that we have built there with PriTec, it is brutal. It is insane, man.
But things are going really well there at PriTec as well. It is just like a life update now. We posted for the first time on YouTube and I was talking about this, but it is just crazy how life, you know, shifts. And I am sure listeners right now are listening to this, you know, you started this and maybe you ventured off into a different business, and this one is self-sufficient, and now you are waiting for this one to go or, you know, you are focused on this one. And that is kind of where I am at right now, is I am really focused on PriTec and getting these projects off the ground. And I am so close on two of the major projects. Another one will be spring next year, and then I just got an email today confirming another one that will be starting as well. But there is just so much going on, but I want to see, like, get a few of them through the idea stage to shoveling ground to, “Here is your key,” to the client, so that I understand the process 100 percent, so that I can pass that knowledge down on to somebody else. Because that is what I did wrong with Ken White Construction, was it was nobody else’s fault but mine, 100 percent mine, was I was like, “Okay, great, people are managing and running Ken White, the guys, the finances, the invoicing, the quotes, and I can just focus on, you know, look ahead and what is coming ahead.” And it just did not work out that way because I did not fully understand what they were doing, and they had no idea what they were doing.
It is my fault, not theirs. I just threw them in this position of being like, “Hey, we all now manage a company that does X amount of dollars, and we are all underqualified to do so.” Mind you, Dad was a part of this process as well, too. But everything over the past six years kind of just went poof, you know, like, excelled super, super fast. Anyways, and then through management changes, we then perfected it, obviously, to get to where we are now. But I take that lesson of, I let my business get away from me when I needed to bring it back in. And that is how I am with PriTec, and that is how I am starting things off with it, was I need to understand the business. Most importantly, I need to understand how the business makes money before I can delegate and hand it off. And that has been the most valuable lesson that I have learned. And I learned the hard way, right? We went through years of net loss and, you know, you run into cash flow issues, you know, maybe you need to sell off some stuff to get a little bit of cash. We were fortunate enough to where there was just enough work going on that we could sustainably float ourselves. It obviously got really tight and crappy for a little bit, but that is just part of life and business, especially construction cash flow issues.
But with PriTec, I wanted to make sure that I got off on the right foot and really understood what I am doing before I hand it off to somebody else. Not that I want to hand it off to somebody else, I do not think. But what I really want to do is delegate what I am doing, which I guess is project management, I guess. I mean, I have a CFO that looks after finances. The only thing that would be left with a construction management business is project managing, managing the project at the highest level possible, which is what I am doing. Maybe there is a different word for that role. But that is what I am doing. I would like to find somebody to do that role. The problem is you need somebody that has their foot on the gas constantly. We are taking site plan applications where a normal GC or CM business might say, “Oh, we are two years away from site plan approval.” I am getting site plan approval in a year or less right now on standard site plan applications. I do not need a GC listening to this in Ottawa being like, “Okay, yeah, well, I am blowing up a building and putting up a 70 story skyscraper.” Okay, that is complex, for sure.
I am talking a regular standard site plan application should not take more than a year if you have all the engineers in place and nothing crazy pops up, environmental stuff. But you need to keep your foot on the gas. And that is the biggest thing, finding somebody that also wants to put their foot on the gas. And, you know, it is hard to find people that want to do that. Again, going back to our first conversation, finding people that will say yes to a new opportunity and finding people that want to have that mindset to drive and push. And, “Oh, it is 6:00. I will answer that email in the morning.” No. You know how many times answering an email late at night actually sped up a process? Because I have found that dealing with city, municipal, federal, you know, whatever, people in those roles, you send an email either really late or like super early in the morning, you are generally the first email on their list when they get in the office at 8:00 or 9:00 AM.
So I kind of found this sweet spot of when to email people so that I would land on the first top of their list and they would respond and email to me first. But you need to have that push for it. You also, another thing with construction management or general contracting is to build that trust with your client. We were talking about that just at dinner tonight with my dad and we obviously would not be anywhere without our clients. Clients are what make you money. Our clients feel like they get value from us and we feel like we get value from them, obviously. Value has to go both ways in a relationship like this to make it work. And for us, trust is probably the underlying word to describe everything. They have to feel like you are being transparent and honest. And that is why I like construction management as a business because it is, “Here is somebody’s bill and here is our percentage on top of it,” and here is some, you know, if I add any time supervising it. It is a good business model in the sense of building trust with somebody.
GC, I feel like in the general contracting world, now I have not done enough, I have done a couple projects so far, general contracting is one person or the other generally feels like they are being screwed. And I could be totally wrong with that, but as the contractor, if the job is not going well, and you see your margins going down and down and down, you are like, “Dang, I am getting screwed.” Or as the client, if, you know, the GC was telling you, “Oh, this is going to be a nine month build,” they do it in six. You are like, “Well shit, how much money could I have saved because you priced to do it in nine, but you just did it in six.” Whereas with construction management, you kind of start and through the whole process, it is, “Here is your bill and we put our percentage on top of it,” whatever percentage that is. There is a going rate, there is no this or that. It is, you know, what is best for you and your business and the client, and it varies. But I feel like it is just the most transparent, honest way to build.
And behind me, I was noticing that there is so much construction going on here actually in Louisville. And it is interesting to see these different pockets of the economy that are kind of booming and expanding. I mean, Ottawa is really busy. There is a lot of stuff going on where we are. But I would be curious to see about you guys and where everything, how busy it is where you guys are, because it is an interesting year, I find, but I feel like there is a lot of opportunity out there in the world right now. And we were just talking about that with Jimmy Starbuck on the last podcast, and he was talking about how much opportunity there is out there and all the different things that, you know, are going on even in Australia. And it was really interesting hearing how it relates from Australia to Canada and the different relationship in their economies, even though we are so far apart, and even in the policies there, actually, as well, too. That was pretty interesting. We had some of the same policies, actually, like even newer ones as well, too, which is pretty interesting. I am actually just looking at pictures of horses right now, and I forgot that Kentucky is known for the Kentucky Derby. Churchill Downs, right? Yeah. That is pretty cool.
I am curious to know if anybody has been to The Utility Expo. Has anybody been to The Utility Expo that listens to this? This is my first time. I am super excited to go there tomorrow. The weather is looking great. At first it was not, but now it is looking way better. I got some new fresh gear to rock to it. We are doing a bourbon tour in the afternoon, me and Dad. We are both big bourbon lovers, so we are going to go check out Angel’s Envy tomorrow afternoon at 2:00, just for a quick hour and then back to the show. But we are going to be at the show all day tomorrow. And it was actually a really good flight here, too. So I would advise people that if you want to come to a really cool show, check out The Utility Expo.
Again, saying yes to opportunities, saying yes to going to CONEXPO. Again, “podcast30,” guys, please use the code “podcast30” for your tickets. I say please because for your sake, save 30 percent and let the people know, “I was listening to the podcast and I know that I can save 30 percent.” So use the code “podcast30.” I was talking to a buddy, we are bringing down 10, 11, 11 people with us this year. No, 12. We are having an even number. 12 people. We are bringing down 12 people this year to the show for the whole time, March 3rd to the 7th. And I am really excited and I really want to start like feeling that hype about CONEXPO. So if you are listening, I want people to reach out to us on Instagram and be like, “Hey, I heard the podcast, I am going, it is going to be awesome.” I want to know what booths you are most excited to see, what vendors you are most excited to see, or influencers that are going. I know there is a lot of really cool people going. I just sat on a panel with some really cool people that are all going as well, too. People that have been on the podcast. It is all on their website as well, too, if you wanted to see some people.
But yeah, I feel like this is going to be one of the best shows, if not the best one coming up. And I do not know, it is just something about Vegas, something about that time of year, March. Everybody has time with work to get away in March generally because a lot of the wintertime is kind of slower. So you have that free time to go and talk. And I promise you that the value you get from it will be super valuable. I do not know if invaluable is the right word to use, but it is going to be awesome. And I am really excited to share that with everybody. And I want to make sure that everybody knows how excited we are at Ken White Construction for the show and all the people that are going down. I am going to be doing a live podcast. I am going to be on a panel as well. I will have all those times on the next podcast to list to you guys, but I am going to be doing stuff. I am there for a long time. Me and Jake, Jake, my filmer, he is going to be there. We are going to be filming. I am filming this thing actually, too. Make sure to check out The Utility Expo on YouTube. It is probably up by now. But I am going to be filming down in Vegas. We are going to make a whole video about it. I am hoping to get in a chopper and ride over the strip at night. Yeah, that was sweet. We had a good time doing that.
And yeah, super pumped. So I just want to make sure everybody, go get your tickets, please. And I am here in Louisville, and I got my bourbon and we got water and I am probably going to go to bed now and get ready for the show tomorrow. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you, John Deere Power Systems, for sponsoring the video. We will catch you guys on the next one. Take care.
