This week, Taylor White sits down for an informative and inspiring conversation with Nic Parish, VP of Contracting and Operations at Burns Dirt Construction, and a key player in FORGE Your Path, a nonprofit dedicated to encouraging the next generation to explore careers in the trades. In this fascinating episode, Taylor and Nic dive into the importance of trades education, the challenges of running a family business, and how to create pathways for young people to develop meaningful careers in construction.
Nic shares his journey, from growing up in the family business to helping launch programs that teach essential skills like operating heavy equipment and leadership. He and Taylor go on to discuss the evolution of construction work, dealing with the pressure of running a company, and the need to instill leadership qualities in new generations to fill the growing skills gap. Alongside that, our special guest’s passion for mentoring the next wave of tradespeople through FORGE Your Path and the Burns Built Academy shines through as he recounts the impact these initiatives have had on his community and industry. Nic’s dedication to empowering young people, supporting mental health, and fostering a culture of continuous growth is on full display here today, serving as a powerful reminder that investing in people is the key to long-term success in any industry.
Episode topics:
- Challenges of running a family business
- Importance of leadership and mental well-being for success
- FORGE Your Path: nonprofit introducing students to trades
- Burns Built Academy: technical and leadership training for employees
- Continued education to close the construction skills gap
- Supportive, growth-focused company culture
- Addressing mental health in leadership roles
- Emphasizing leadership development alongside technical skills
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Episode transcript:
Taylor White: VP of contracting and operations. So essentially you're looking after the business on the day to day and at a higher level.
Nic Parish: Yeah. So kind of, I think a fun story and this is a fun story for small business and family business and I think a lot of people can relate to this. But in 2020, when COVID started going down that in March, my grandfather came in and told my aunt who has run the finance and HR side of the business and I've run the kind of the field stuff. He came in in March of 2020 and said, “Hey, I'm going to the house piece. See you.“ And so he has kind of been real inactive the last few years. And so we kind of got thrown right into the flames, right into a kind of a crazy time in the business, not really knowing what's going on and tried to make decisions about equipment purchases and how to bid things. And I feel like we were taught well and we've made some, we've made good decisions over that time period. But definitely there was a couple of times where I called my grandfather and said, “Hey. What do you think we should do here? And he's like, “I don't know what you all are doing. It is way different than we were building house pads back in the ‘80s. I have no idea.” But yeah, that's kind of my general job is overseeing everything from pre construction all the way to close out and maintenance in our fleet. And we have a pretty large trucking division and a roll off dumpster division. So it's really the construction and then logistics and waste.
Taylor White: Yeah, there's a lot going on there. Where are you guys out of?
Nic Parish: So we are headquartered out of Columbus, Mississippi. So what I always describe is that we are in the perfect middle triangle. If you drew a triangle from New Orleans up to Memphis to Birmingham. So that core deep south. Like you just draw a big circle in the south, we're almost dead center.
Taylor White: Nice. Cool. Are you getting affected by any of this hurricane stuff or that's not your way.
Nic Parish: Yeah. The last one was east of us and this one, Milton, south of us too. So we've dodged the hurricanes this year so far, but that's normal.
Taylor White: Do you try to look up any– Because a big thing right now, I got some buddies in the States is like some of the disaster contracts or something like that. Is that something that you guys look at or you're just like, “You know what? We'll let the guys that deal with that deal with that.”
Nic Parish: Not really. We don't chase that work. Now, when a tornado comes through, if it's locally, we try to jump in there, but we try not to get too far out of a hundred miles or so. And a lot of that stuff is just going out and trying to help get trees off people's houses. It's more never been paid to do it, you know what I mean? But the big FEMA cleanup and that kind of stuff, I think a lot of folks, there's companies, particularly in the south, that they just chase that work, and that's pretty much all they do. And they just sit and go for a situation like this week to happen.
Taylor White: Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Talk to me about Forge Your Path. What's that? What do you got going on this?
Nic Parish: All right. So Forge, I think, is something I'm super proud of and it was born out of complaining. And so about 5 or 6 of my friends that run other construction businesses locally, back about seven years, I think this was 2018, is really kind of when this conversation started. We were all kind of complaining about not being able to find folks. There were two groups of us. There was myself and a mentor of mine who ran an asphalt company here locally. We were kind of complaining, I can't find anybody. We actually were on a job one day, and we were prepping the base for his company to come in and pave behind us, and he was coming to check it out, and one of our guys was on one of our road graders, and he kind of my mentor kind of bumped me a little bit. And he was like, “How many guys at your company do you have that can run a road grader?” We probably had 50 people at the time. And I was kind of joking, I said, well, one and a half on a good day, you know?” And he was like, “I bet they're both over 65 or over 55 or something like that.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, most definitely.” He said, “Well, they're going to be gone soon” “Yeah.” And he questioned me. He goes, “What are you going to do about it?” And nobody had asked me before that moment. We get into these conversations and we complain about can't find anybody, the next generation, yada. The same thing that we hear in our industry over and over. And the old timers gripe and everybody gripes about this. But nobody says, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” It was the first time and I didn't have an answer. I said, “I don't know.” And he said, “Well, think about that.”
And so we got to talking to our local community college about building a heavy civil program to teach operator training and that kind of stuff and just started pulling threads, trying to figure out where we could get some help. Well, at the same time, we had some friends that were really more in the general contracting space that were doing the same thing. And somebody had challenged them to do the same thing, like, what are you going to do about it? And they plugged in at the high school level, whereas we were plugging in at the community college level. And somebody just said, “Hey. Do you know that these folks are doing the same thing over at the high school?” And so we got connected. And we all knew each other, but we didn't know each other was doing anything. And so we just got together and kind of hung out a couple of times and was like, “Let's do something about this.” So fast forward to now seven years later and we, we do all kinds of events. We're a few days away from being official 501(c)(3). We've been functioning under the umbrella of a community nonprofit the last few years.
Taylor White: What's a 5 501(c)(3)?
Nic Parish: Oh, yeah. You're Canadian. I feel like this is it. So that's like your official nonprofit corporation status in the States. So yeah, before we were working as a project for a nonprofit. And I really always point that out because I always want to leave this conversation challenging people to do something about it. And you don't have to go out and start a nonprofit to do good. We're just now seven years later an official nonprofit. But we do all kinds of events and we do two things. One is we try to expose the current generation and the next generation to careers in construction. And then the second thing is we work alongside educators to help provide the education for those folks. And so you can't have one without the other. You can get out. And there's groups out there that do a great job of recruiting and telling the industry about things, but somebody always seems to lack that piece of like, well, who's going to train them? And so we do those two things. So, the great example of the way we do that is here in a few weeks we have what we call the Forge Your Path Expo. This is our big kind of Super Bowl thing that we do. And what it is, is a two and a half day hands on career expo for kids. And it's 8th graders. And so we bring in 8th graders from, I think last year was about 19 different schools. There were over 2,500 8th graders. And they come in and they get to pour concrete, get to climb on machines, play on simulators. Last year Husqvarna bought a remote controlled demo robot and they all got to put it on. This year Husqvarna is bringing a coring rig, a remote controlled coring rig. So actually get to like the core into a manhole. They get to tie, rebar, all kinds of stuff.
I mean, you're talking about kids that have probably never held a hammer getting to run a remote controlled demo robot. So really impactful. But now we do that strategically because in Mississippi, in the second semester of your 8th grade year, you choose your education track for high school. And so we get there right into the last moment and we show them how cool construction is. And then they come back from Christmas break and they're like, “Oh, I want to go down the construction engineering path.” And then we help the high schools actually do training and work on their programs and their curriculum and do field trips and all that kind of stuff. But that's Forge. That's how I can summarize it there.
Taylor White: That's really cool, man. I honestly agree. Before and during COVID, conversations where there's not enough people, and everybody just kept saying that, myself included, there's not enough people, not enough people. Okay. Well who's training them? Who's doing something about it? And I like that because you guys are actually doing something about it. And it's nice because you need that because a lot of the old timers they're like, “Ah, next generation. They don't know how to work, they don't want to work.” And that's just really not the case. I think that they just need proper guidance and shown that stuff. I got my love for blue collar and working in the industry by doing exactly that. But not because a nonprofit pulled me out and we're like, “He. Here's a shovel.” It's like I grew up in the business with my father and I learned how cool it was at such a young age because I was actually doing those things. And it's really cool because you're giving that experience now to those kids to get that in their brain going, “You know what? That was a lot of fun. It's really fulfilling and you can go outside and it's a really cool career path.” So that's really neat that you're doing that.
What's, I guess, the success of it so far? Have you seen a lot of great success from it? Has it been long enough where you've seen somebody go from grade 0 to 12 and then it's like, hey, now they're out actually in construction.
Nic Parish: This year will actually be our first year that students that went through our first 8th grade expo are graduating from high school. So we're hoping to see those returns now. But that's just off the expo. Kind of that second piece about building education programs and working with educators, we already are seeing the fruits of that labor. And we do probably eight or nine different programs. One of them that is my favorite one is this heavy civil certificate program at our local community college. And it's a 15-week program that anybody can go through , a fresh graduate from high school can go through it, or somebody that's been working in the industry can go through it. And it is 15 weeks of learning how to run all kinds of equipment. We have several simulators, so they get tons of simulator time. So they really build that muscle memory. But they also get a survey of how water, sewer, storm, drainage works, how asphalt works, how concrete works, how compaction and earth work happens, all of those. And they're not getting anything close to a civil engineering degree, but they get to understand that compaction is important and here's how optimal moisture roughly works. And so that program, we have gone through about five cycles of it. And we have roughly half a dozen students that have come out of that program that came to work for us. They've gone to different places.
That program was designed to accelerate students in their career. So they don't come out of that program knowing what to do. But we have seen over and over with each student that comes out of that program, they, in their first six months of working at our company, it's almost like they've been in our company for two or three years. Because you think about this, when you get out, if you've never worked for an earth moving company, and what's the first thing you do? Well, you get on the shovel and then eventually they let you get on a skid steer and then eventually you get on a mini excavator or a roller and you kind of work your way up. We are baking into these students how an excavator works, how a dozer works. Because it's really hard to teach a student how a dozer works on a job site. It's almost impossible because it's this battle between education and production. We are taking production out of play and putting it pure education and they just get reps. And so it's awesome because we're not a huge company. We don't need 30, 40 people every single year coming through this program. But if we can pick up two or three every year and they're cutting off those early years of eating glass in the field, it's a massive impact. We're now kind of changing that program into having a more leadership aspect to it in a second semester and that kind of stuff. So hopefully, we'll accelerate them into leadership as well. But yeah, massive, huge impact.
Taylor White: That's a great point. And I love the fact that you're teaching them leadership because I truly believe that with the right training and leadership you can make an incredible asset as a human being out of that training. I do a lot of reading on the side. the self-help books and leadership books and how to be a better entrepreneur, how to be a better father, how to be a better boss, like all these books. And I take all this and I just think like if I could instill into my brain how I'm thinking about how other people are perceiving, okay, there's confrontation, go towards the confrontation, don't avoid. If I could get my foreman's and my crew leads and my supervisors all on that same page of thinking like that, we would be an unstoppable force. And those people would make so much more of an impact at their work which would result in them having a better quality of life because they're going to get paid more, they're going to excel at their career more. I truly believe that teaching people, I love that you're doing that because leadership is so important.
Nic Parish: Really in our industry, there's skills and there's knowledge. There's understanding how things work and that can be extended to how people work, how communication works. We have this problem that I feel like we have to acknowledge in our industry is that 10, 20, 30 years ago, the folks that advanced upward had that upward mobility in a company, it was because they were the best dozer operator or they had been here the longest. It's the Peter Principle. There's a book about it from the ‘50s, and I could send it to you for reference. But it's this whole idea that in corporate America, we promote people to ignorance just based on tenure, the longer you're here and then you stop getting promoted when you're not any good at your job anymore. And then all of a sudden we start losing performance at our company. We have to change that thought process in construction that we can't just promote the guy that's been running the dozer the longest. We have to actually promote leadership. Well, someone's got to teach them leadership. And so, yeah, I'm with you 100%, is that we have to think more than just skills now. It's more than just operating equipment. It's more than just the knowledge of how does concrete work work. There's another knowledge base to that.
Taylor White: And especially even stuff that we do. I grew up for three generations, my family has been fed and supported and my employees and their family's been supported by the work we do. So excuse my ignorance, but we aren't building a rocket ship when we're doing construction. We're putting pipes together. There's a lot and a lot of stuff to learn. Do not get me wrong, it is difficult work, it's grueling, you're out in the weather, it's savage work. But we're not building a rocket ship or sending something into orbit. So I truly believe that leadership is more important than skill. Because if you have the right person that grabs onto leadership, generally, they're going to have the mechanics or the being able to function their body to be able to understand. Okay. This is how this pipe has to go together. You got this and this. Okay, great. We can figure this out. This machine, you're supposed to manipulate it and move it this way. That's how I think. I truly think the leadership aspect to it is so more far important than skills. Because I could put a guy on a dozer tomorrow and I could see him run it, and within the first 10 minutes, I can tell if that guy's going to have it or not.
Nic Parish: Yeah.
Taylor White: I grew up in the industry. You can tell in the first 10 minutes, is this somebody who's going to get onto it? Some people's learning curve is slower than others. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying after 10 minutes, “Get out of there, you suck.” But you can generally tell by looking at another guy that's got it and say, “This kid has it.” Or, “This kid doesn't.” Leadership is so important.
Nic Parish: Aaron Witt gave me a copy of the book Everybody Matters, one time, by Bob Chapman. I don't know if you've ever read that book. But I read that book and then I had a conversation with Aaron about it, and he pointed out something that has stuck with me forever that is just in this vein of conversation, is that we all build the same thing. The way you all build projects in Canada is entirely not that different than the way we build them here in the Deep South. And we use the same tools. Caterpillar make the same thing. Komatsu makes the same. All of our tools are the same. We differentiate ourselves from our competitors by our people. The people move the sheet, the machines, and the machines don't move themselves yet. But we have to differentiate ourselves by improving our people, because I can only make that bulldozer work as much as possible. Good people make good machines effective. But yeah, I mean, I'm totally with you that leadership is easily has been forgotten. We've got to focus on that more. I don't know that educators, the public education does a great job of that. And so we work really well with our educators here through Forge, but we have learned that they have been programming public education to teach skills, whether it's multiplication or it's heavy equipment operation. They can teach something out of a book to these skills. As an employer, when we get them, we've got to focus on leadership. We've got to focus on the human and soft side.
So Macaulay Whitaker, who's our VP of Talent and Culture, but she came on board with us about two years ago. And so we have been working on what we call the Burns Dirt Academy. And that is the continuation of education once they get to our company. And so at Forge, we try to catch them young and introduce that, hey, construction's cool. And then in high school, we try to get them to find out all the different parts of construction. You may think being an electrician is cool, you may think being a plumber is cool, you may think running a bulldozer is the coolest thing ever. I just happen to be that guy that thinks big iron is cool. That's not for everybody. But if you pick that, okay, then we're going to get you the next piece of that education. And that's kind of the certificate program that I talked about. Well, then you pick a company you want to go work for. And when you get to that company, hopefully us, we try to bring you in and mold you into the soft skills. Communication classes are what we're working on. Leadership, we've talked about book clubs and all kinds of different things of trying to bind together. But we have to start thinking about education as a runway. And it's not just a, you go do this thing, you check a box And the four-year universities and those types of things, that's kind of like your end of education and then you go to work. Well, when you're here, we want to continue. Whether you came through a four-year education in the engineering program or you just graduated high school, we still have to pick up where you left off and continue. And so we've been trying to work on those and build classes. And we're kind of, it's weird, we're building this school at our company. And people think that's crazy. And my grandfather, he gets it, but he never dreamed that that was necessary back when he started in the business.
Taylor White: But it is now, and that's what I'm curious to know from you too. These 8th graders, you have 2,500 kids come in or even the high schoolers. What are you seeing in the next generation that is, I guess, different from us, from our generation? What generation are we? We're Millennials?
Nic Parish: We're millennials. Yeah. We're young millennials.
Taylor White: Yeah. So then Gen Y or X, whatever they're calling them, what are you seeing different from them to us? Do you see a difference? Because everyone's, “Oh, they're lazy. They don't want to work, they just want to be on their phones or this or that.” What's changed? What is changing? Are they all lazy? Are there good ones? Are there bad ones?
Nic Parish: I think it’s the difference in gratification and the timing of gratification is the core part. It's not that they're lazy. I think technology, social media, TV, whatever, over the last several generations, and you can see it in us. We're one of the first because the Internet really rapidly changed this instant gratification thought process. It's become even worse this next generation is so connected from a communication level, from an information level that everything happens so fast. And so what I see differently now is that they want to experience more, faster. And so I think you can probably sympathize with this. And a lot of people in our generation grew up really fast. We had this desire that– I knew when I was 22, I was trying to be a millionaire. That's what I wanted. And I wanted to be partner. I wanted to take over the world. And I worked my 20s away.
Taylor White: Amen to that.
Nic Parish: I think about it all the time. When I was in college, I was still working 60 hours a week taking a full load of classes and I'm proud of that now. But it was this thought process that subconsciously I needed to grow up as fast as I could and progress through life. And if I wanted to get what I wanted, I needed to get there as soon as possible, not it was going to get there. Well, that has become even more exaggerated now. And so we have to, as employers, think about it differently, that we have to give rewards often and it's not participation trophies, it's we have to acknowledge it more. And so they want to learn more skills faster. And so I see with this academy that we're building that there's a much more appetite for education at that level. And if we provide it, they will show up to classes. We had somebody to come in and talk about mortgages. Well, the 20 year olds were the ones that came. And you may think, well duh, the 40s probably already have a mortgage. That's not true in our industry. Homeownership is way lower in our industry than it is in a lot of industries. But the young kids coming into our company, they want to learn the technology. They're hungry for, oh, we'll go to the machine control classes. Yeah, I want to go to the class to teach retaining walls so that I know how to do it. They're doing it so that they can advance through life faster. And many people look at that as a negative thing. And if we can figure out how to leverage that high level of desire, then you can accelerate them through life because they do want to learn, they want to grow, they want more, they want more responsibility, they want more authority. And you just have to leverage that.
Taylor White: And I agree with that. And do you think that is because of social media and because they see so much success online and it's comparing to other people? Because for me, that's what it was. That's what it was for me. I was the same. As soon as I got out of high school.” Dude, I knew that it was like, “I want this. I want to be able to go on trips with my family when I'm older. I knew what my 30s were, what, when I'm 30, what I wanted. I want a Corvette. I want to make sure my family– My wife drives a Tahoe. I wanted all those things. So you're right. I worked through my 20s, but I did that also because in partial, I saw online all this success from these influencers because we came up in this era where all of a sudden there were influencers making millions of dollars. And you had Logan, Paul. And guys like that buying Lambos and stuff, and you're like, “Man, I want all this too.”
Nic Parish: Yeah. So I think it's natural human progression. I think that the Internet has accelerated it. But let's go way back in time. It used to take a lot more effort for us to get food. We either had to roam the planet and then we added agriculture then we went into agriculture and we started doing that. It was not very long ago, as a species that we spent every single waking hour of the day gathering food. A hundred years ago, there's still people that they spend a lot of their time just trying to meet their basic needs. I think about it– Are you familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow was a psychologist back from the 20s or so, and he developed this thought process. And it's a pyramid. And it's that as humans, we have levels of priority of needs that we want to obtain, and so food is number one. If we don't obtain food, we don't live. The next thing is safety and shelter. And I'm going to oversimplify this real quickly, but the next level is safety and shelter. We need food, and then we want to be safe. And then the Next thing is community, love, finding shelter and safety is more important than finding a spouse. If we don't have food, we don't have shelter, we're not reproducing.
And so then the top of it is self actualization, and that is feeling good about ourselves and all of that piece. And so the thing is, is that everything has become cheaper as society, as our civilization kind of advances. It's easier to get food, it's easier to get shelter. And now what the Internet has done has made it so cheap to find community. You can communicate with people, you can find what feels like love. And very quickly that self actualization can be found kind of in a pseudo way. It’s that, “I posted this picture on the Internet and everybody liked it. So I feel good about myself.” I'm not Jake Paul, but I got 200 likes on my beach photo. And that's self actualization. I mean, that's self esteem and self. That's the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And so what it is is that we have a generation that it was so easy to get food, shelter, and community, that they don't know the order of the priorities. And that's getting worse. And so we have to break it back down. And Macaulay and I talk about this all the time. That a lot of times what we are teaching, primarily young men, is that you have to focus on making your truck payment. And then we've got to save up and we've got to get enough for a down payment on a house, and then we got to get a mortgage. And we're more parenting as employers a lot. The Internet accelerated it, but it kind of took those hierarchy of needs and flipped it upside down. And it just made it so cheap that now we're having to fix the bottom again and show them how much work it takes to feed yourself.
Taylor White: So, what I say about the next generation is that they lack patience, which essentially is what you're saying is.
Nic Parish: Yeah, it's cheap. It’s cheap.
Taylor White: Exactly. So what I find interesting, though, is that, like I always say, I run a daycare for adults. And obviously, I'm exaggerating when I say that. I got an awesome team. But some days it's, okay, this person's angry, this one, this one. This guy's upset because of this. But I find it interesting that you are taking it upon and you actually give a [EXPLETIVE]. And it's pretty crazy. I think you care more than like me, which makes you a better person because I lack the patience as well with some of these guys. I just find it really interesting how deep you get into this and you're setting up a school, why do you do all this? Why do you care so much?
Nic Parish: And I've asked myself this question a lot over the years and I have a story that I can tell, just like everybody has a story. During COVID when I took over a lot of that responsibility for my grandfather from the field, after a little while that pressure got to me and I got into some pretty rough mental state and started to feel trapped that I couldn't do what I wanted to do. It's that whole classic, do you run your business or does your business run you? And the business was definitely running me. And I got into where anxiety was so crippling. I got into suicidal thoughts thinking that suicide was the only escape from this trap And I took some time off in the summer of ‘21 and I was able to get away from work for a while and just go radio silent with my family. And during that trip, just getting away from everything, I realized that I was crippled by the thought of I'd kind of calculated the amount of employees and their family and it was this number around 300. And I was, man, there's 300 people every day that rely on my decision making. And if I make poor decisions, I could negatively affect their lives And that was this crippling thought that, man, they rely on me for their well being. And that was scary. During that trip I realized, gosh, I was looking at that wrong perspective. I'm looking at it in a fear perspective that I'm scared that I'm going to ruin their lives. Instead, I need to look at it as an opportunity that I get to. And so that's my self actualization.
When I look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, my food's taken care of, I run a business, I have a good income. My shelter's there. I have a loving wife and daughter and a great community of fantastic friends. My self actualization is that I feel good about what I'm doing and I want to be a good leader and I want to feel like I want to go to sleep every night and go, “I gave it all and I impacted people positively. I'm changing people's lives for the better.” And so that kind of seems like a bunch of hogwash, but it's also that I think maybe I'm just wired in a way that I feel guilty. There's still some remnant of that anxiety that I feel guilty if I'm not putting people first and I tied that back. My grandfather and I were having a conversation about this a couple weeks ago, and I told him that I wanted to leave the business better than I found it. I watched him when I was a kid grow this business and fight really hard every single day, 14, 16 hours a day, trying to build this thing essentially with his bare hands, him and his brother. And now my brother runs operations with me and we work together every day. And there's this conversation in our family that we really want to leave it better than we found it. And the way that we seem to do that is not necessarily through growth in size. In some ways it is, but a lot of it is that we want people to go, “You know what? I love working for the Burns family. They're a great family to work for. They really care about us.” And that makes me proud because my grandfather, he's a great man and people brag about him all the time. And I'm like, “Man, I'm living in this shadow. How do I live up to this great dude?” So maybe there's some inner family rivalry. I've got to treat people better than my grandfather. Maybe that's to that extent.I don't know. I think a lot of it is guilt driven. I don't put it that I got it all figured out. There's a lot of it. It's heavy to care that much.
Taylor White: I think that it's really interesting. And can people stay up to date with what you're kind of doing with Forge Your Path or online and stuff like that?
Nic Parish: Yeah. So we're pretty heavy on Instagram and LinkedIn with Forge and it's the same stuff in both places. So you can see them in both places.
Taylor White: And then your construction company, they own social media as well too.
Nic Parish: Yeah. So we're Burns Dirt and we're on all of them. So Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, you can see us everywhere. And we kind of pile everything into Burns Dirt real heavy.We've got a full time social media guy, Charlie, that just kills it. He kills it. So plug in. And the thing with Forge is we are exclusive to the state of Mississippi and we're proud of that and we try to focus on that. But if you want to be involved in Forge and you're not in Mississippi, we will teach you how to do it. We are 100% open playbook. Come to us and we'll help you do your own version where you're at. And that's kind of our call to action is you got to do something about it and you got to do something about it where you're at. And we would love to help. And there's plenty of folks out there that are doing it. Let's just. Everybody will tell you the secrets.
Taylor White: I love it. You're doing some big things and I can't wait to stay up to date with what you're doing. Thanks, Nick, for coming on the CONEXPO-CON/AGG Podcast today.
Nic Parish: Appreciate it, man. It's been good.
