Business Innovators Radio - Episode 45 : Beyond The Practice – Building The Business You Actually Want with Pete Fowler

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Part of The Construction Executives Live SeriesIn this episode of Beyond the Practice: Building the Business You Actually Want, we sit down with Pete Fowler, founder of Pete Fowler Construction Services, a firm serving clients across all 50 states with offices in California, Nevada, Texas, Oregon/Washington, and Florida. Pete shares his insights on helping construction business owners discover their “why” and align their operations with their true purpose. We dive into the critical question every owner faces: Should you grow and expand, streamline for simplicity, or maintain the status quo? Pete also discusses strategies to protect your business from the risks of construction litigation, drawing on his extensive experience in construction management and dispute resolution. Tune in to learn how to build a business that reflects your vision while safeguarding its future.In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-45-beyond-the-practice-building-the-business-you-actually-want-with-pete-fowler

Welcome to In the Zone and Construction Executives Live, brought to you by U.S. Construction Zone, bringing you strategies for success with construction innovators and change makers, including In The Zone peer-nominated national award winners. Here's your host, Jeremy Owens. Welcome back to Construction Executives Live. I'm your host, Jeremy Owens, owner and founder of U.S. Construction Zone and three generations improvements in sunny, northern California. Yes, I'm in Folsom. Yes, everyone says, oh, that's where Johnny Cash went to prison, yada, yada. I get it. I've heard that story. Folsom's great and growing. Please don't visit. Please don't move here.

That being said, thank you for being here. We have another great show for you today. It's funny how I keep getting guests on with topics that I'm struggling with. Isn't that unique? But we have another one, a great one today. We are sponsored by two brands. One, build12.com. automate your construction business into a revenue generating machine with a Build12 system.

Check out Build12.com. Ask for less. Tell them I sent you over there. Great CRM, great automations, really helps your small business grow. I would really say small, medium-sized businesses really need to create those automations and efficiencies to make your business grow without having to hire people. So check them out. Also sponsored by BuilderPayPro.com, the construction payment platform that It saves you time, money, and gets you paid fast, pay zero percent credit card processing fees, accept ACH payments, and utilize state-of-the-art invoicing tool that integrates with QuickBooks. Check out BuilderPayPro.com, and we will show you a free demo. All right, today's show is called Beyond the Practice, building the business you actually want with Pete Fowler.

In this episode of Beyond the Practice, you actually, you know, we want to sit down with Pete Fowler. He's a founder of Pete Fowler Construction Services, a firm serving clients across all 50 states with offices in California, Nevada, Texas, Oregon, Washington, and Florida. Pete shares his insights on helping construction business owners discover their why and align their operations with their true purpose. We're going to dive into critical questions every owner faces. Should we grow and expand? Should we streamline for simplicity? Should we maintain the status quo? We're also going to discuss strategies to help protect your business from the risk of construction litigation, drawing on his extensive experience in the construction management and dispute resolution space.

We're happy you're here to learn a little bit more, work on your business a little bit today, and let's introduce Pete Fowler, who is a construction consultant, professional cost estimator, president and chief quality officer at Pete Fowler Construction. and he has a BS in construction management from CSU Chico. I've been there many times. Mr. Fowler has published articles in national magazines, has been invited to speak by the most important groups in the building industry, and has composed and delivered hundreds of educational programs on building inspection,

testing, estimating quality, and construction management. Wow, that's a handful. Pete has experienced- A lot of words. A lot of words. A lot of words. Expert witness testimony, including in federal. to roll court. Please help me welcome. Pete Fowler. Pete, thank you for being here.

Thank you, Jeremy. Yeah, you're so welcome. We had a chat a while ago, and one of my biggest things that we talked about in the beginning was your love for music. You were in the 80s rock band, so I wanted to start with the most important thing. Tell me a little bit about that experience. Because I was at home in Carlsbad, and the guitars are on the wall. I'm in Vegas. I'm in Vegas now. I live here just over half time. And, but yeah, so rock and roll, it was my first, it was, it was the best education in entrepreneurship that I could have had, right? We had to, we had to make the product. We had to sell the product.

We had to deliver the product. You know, we had to continuously improve the product. Right. It was a, it was a super fun time. And, but I didn't have any native talent other than I'm not shy. and I'm a decent dancer for a white guy. So I was the bass player in that band. I left and went to the prestigious Chico State when my mother said,

hey, you know, if you don't go to college now, I was 21, then I'm not going to pay for it. I was like, oh. So I knew, you know, I didn't, again, I didn't have native talent. I knew I was never going to be able to buy a home and raise children and put them in college on my, on my musical ability. I went off to college, not knowing that I could even get a degree in construction management. Took me a minute.

First, I was a journalism major. Okay. And eventually figured out that I could get a college degree in construction management. Because I had started digging ditches when I was 16 years old. I loved the whole process of watching a building go up. It just was a magical thing to me. Right. And so, poof, I became, I became, you know.

But so, you know, the construction consulting part, I'm not a good writer compared to good writers, but compared to construction guys, you know, having been a journalism major, I'm a great writer, right? I want to, I want to compete where competition is soft, right? I'm glad I didn't go to law school or something like that. So I got a monitoring computer information systems. I got a bachelor's science and construction management. And that made me, you know, oh, and low performance anxiety. So when I testify as an expert witness, you know, I don't get flustered. You know, when you've had beer bottles thrown at you, you know, at a, you know, when your band's playing, you're like, oh, you're being mean to me. You know, you're being mean to me. It's like, I don't care.

You know, unless you're going to actually hit me in the face, then I'm fine. That's great. I mean, the other thing, too, about being a musician back of the day is you guys had to grind and hustle, right? It's a little different now with, like, the YouTube thing and everything's online. But, like, back then, you had to get some windshield time. You had to hustle. And so that's the other thing that I like. It's almost like door knocking in the remodeling industry, you know?

Yeah. You know, it seems to me, you know, certainly there are people way maybe Justin Bieber got, you know, I mean, because he was really, really, really talented. But I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of folks who through hustle and grit are succeeding in the music business today. I don't know most of them because I'm not, because I'm in a pop culture coma. Sure. But I, you know, I live in Vegas and I see these folks come through that I've never heard of that, you know, when I look into them, I mean, these people are making millions of dollars a year. Sure.

And they don't get on to my radar, but they have a niche market. that they have cultivated and they have, you know, taking good care of. They're that just like, you know, I've tried to take, I still have my first clients from, actually both of them came over from where I worked before.

Gotcha. And both of them are still good friends and clients, you know, because it took good care of them. Yeah. Take good care of your customers, you know, that's,

I'm not sure it's, you know, certainly that the tools are different. Yeah, right. Tools are different. But my tools are different. Yeah.

And different every day now. I mean, so after your degree, tell me a little bit about that other part of construction. How did you get to Form Pete Fowler Construction Services? How long were you in the industry before you got kind of started with that? So I was, my couple of forays outside of construction included, you know, when I was 12, I was cleaning carpets with my uncle. When I was 14, I was shining shoes in my mother's barbershop. And one of the guys whose shoes I shined got me my first job digging ditches. and I actually ended up going back to work for him after college

and ran his small construction business. But that business wasn't as good as this side thing he had where he was an expert witness. So literally I wrote a business plan for that and we ramped that from a little thing to a much larger thing. And at some point, it's kind of a bloody story, so I won't bother telling him.

but it is it is on the record somewhere in a deposition for okay all right you know the you know the the you know the the the hero's journey is uh is supposed to be exciting right yeah right so uh you know if there's not a little blood in the water then it's uh it's not a great story so um but but so i left there and uh and and and started this business in the in in in the in in the in in the in The idea for me from the beginning was I just wanted to do great work with people I loved and have an interesting life and be able to. I wanted to be most, I assume most of the listeners are your age and might not remember the TV show, Leave It to Beaver.

Oh yeah, we remember. Come on. I just wanted to be the rock and roll version of Ward Cleaver. I wanted to raise my children. And I wanted to come home and hey kids, right? So becoming a consultant rather than a traditional contractor where I had to be on site at 6 or 7 o'clock in the morning was appealing to me so I could take them to school. So I, you know, I work bankers hours. And I mean, when I started the business, I was, you know, working 70, 80, 90 hour weeks because I'm a crazy person and I wanted to succeed.

And I didn't know any other way to do it other than brute force. You know, force of will, I just worked. really, really hard to gain my mastery. But I wanted to do it with tremendous integrity. It's a thing I had. It's a quirk I have. It's a quirk I have. I can't.

I'm a terrible, I'm a terrible liar, and I want to stay that way. Yeah. So, and the work I do is interesting, right? We now do a thousand projects a year, and there's always something wrong. Right. So it started out. There was a lot of construction defect, let it. And as much as lots of people in the construction business argued that construction defect litigation was just plaintiff lawyers stealing money from contractors and the insurance companies.

And some of that did exist. But there was always some problems. There was always real problems. There's usually real problems. Sometimes I represent innocent people. But another old TV show called Perry Mason where at the end of the show, it always came. He's a lawyer. And he represented people who at the beginning, they looked,

very guilty. But in the end, they were always innocent. But that's not how our clients are. Our clients are often guilty. You're often guilty. But they're usually not a million dollars guilty. They're usually like a hundred thousand dollars guilty. Right. We can fix that. So we still do traditional construction management work. Right. And some of it comes out of those projects that the other people say it's a million dollars to fix. We say it's a hundred grand to fix. And we'll fix it for a hundred grand. Right. If they wanted to. Yeah. Awesome. We also mentioned that you're an avid reader. So on this kind of journey to creating this business, you're obviously, you're on the grind. Were there some businesses, some mentors, some people that really helped kind of get you over

that hump? Because a lot of us, as you know, like, you can go to college for construction management, but until you're doing it, you're kind of like learning by fire most of the time. 100% and by the way i'm not even sure i would recommend people go to get a college degree in construction management unless you want to testify as an expert witness because i could have learned all that stuff just by if i if i read the whole family of aIA contracts you know any one of the primary families a ia 101 yeah 201 and all of the consensus docs family of documents them you know the prime contract the subcontracts all that you know payment applications and all that stuff it's not that complicated. If you're smart, there's a lot of smart people who don't go to college,

especially in construction. But so certainly the worst mistake I made was not finding mentors as early as I should or could have. And I do that as much as I possibly can now. I love it. I created a one page, here's my 10-year thinking, one-page summary. This is my 10-year business plan on one page. And I had it, I took a long time to make this one page stupid thing. But I wanted to be able to hand the smartest people that I could get in a room with or have a coffee with and say, what do you think of this? And the first thing, I'm 57 years old. So the first thing they say is, are you sure you want to do this another 10 years? The answer for me is yes. So not enough mentors, but what I did do, what I made up for for that, I read a lot. I read all of the best business books.

at the time. And finally, they started all sounding the same. So I was able to take a 10-year break or so of reading the business books. Yeah. And I'm back on it. So I keep a whole collection of them next to my desk. I'm actually not, I'm remodeling my, my unit in a skyscraper in Vegas. So I'm in my buddies, I'm in my buddies unit.

So I don't have all my books right next to me. I feel a little naked, but I keep all the business books, the books that influence us. Yeah. next to me. But, you know, all the best business books. Read the one-minute manager first. Yeah. We still, that's my number one book.

We make everybody read it. Yeah. And it was written in 1980, and it's just as applicable today as ever before. Right. And then traction is probably number two. Yeah. And then read my book, Drama Free Management as number three. Okay.

That's a good order. I mean, I like it. So a little bit, I mean, you talked about integrity. I think that's such a, a huge quality in an owner just because it sets yourself up for success instead of those giant litigation failure type situations. But how did you come up with your why? And obviously, a lot of us are still trying to figure this out. So I understand that this is like a moving target, just like your tenure plans, moving target. But how did you kind of come up with, you know,

what am I doing? Like, where am I going? Like, how did you figure out? That's what you wanted to do? So I'm a good writer. So I learn best by writing. For construction. What's that? For construction. That's right. That's right. That's right. So that I learned by writing. Other people, I think the, you know, one of the most, Peter Drucker was, is like the godfather of management thinkers and writers. So read, you know, read the great, you know, whatever the greatest hits. There's, there's some books that try to summarize his work. But read as much of Peter Drucker's work as you can. But Peter Drucker said the most important thing that a knowledge worker needs to do is to learn how they learn.

So learn how you learn. And however you learn, it's not, there's no one way is not better than the other. In fact, my way probably is the long way. There's lots of people. So, so, but also, you know, from a, from a business vision perspective, there's a lot of great, writing on the subject. Jim Collins, who wrote a couple of my favorite books, built to last, good to great. Also wrote a couple of Harvard Business Review articles about getting together with your leadership team and deciding what your vision and your values are and what's your vision

value strategy, right? That's what the leadership needs to decide in a business, right? There's a distinction between leadership and management. I even call it, I call leadership and management dash delegation. Right. Right. So there's the mission and the vision and the values and all that stuff that that the leaders need should decide and write down. You know, in all the best business books, you know, the ones talking to people who are building businesses. Right. You got to have this. You got to write this down. And it's great if it's on one page. Right. One page, one page summary is great. but then translating that to action management delegation is translating the vision right so for me i don't you know it i don't care if i'm doing a most of our work are problem projects and we have a process

for that right and but our but our process for doing a construction management project or doing a construction cost estimate for a just a traditional somebody hires a professional estimator to do an estimate for their work. Right. Right. Right. It's not litigated. We have a different process for that. Right. So, but, but, but, but, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, but the, what's the same and what changes? What should, what should, what should be the same for 20 or 50 or 100 years? Yeah. What should be different making those decisions, I think are important. Yeah. Because it resonates for people, right? And if you say that out loud to people,

if you have a compelling vision, right? Like, like, some people, um, um, um, um, um, Like Nordstrom, the customer is always right. Right, right. Pete Fowler Construction, the customer is not always right. Right. Sometimes they're terribly wrong, and we have an obligation to dissent. We have to tell them that they're wrong. I mean, we're not mean to them.

Right. But it's like, oh, goodness, I'm so sorry. Right. We can't help you. This is not like, who, yeah, you were wrong. And you've been sued and you should be sued. Now, if they say it's a million dollars and you want us to say, you're innocent, well, we can't do that. We can tell, we can convince them that it can be fixed for the right amount.

Right. So that's, but my point is that our sort of being truth tellers resonates with the right people. Right. That work here. Right. So Nordstrom, the customer is always right. Pete Fowler Construction. Customers often wrong.

And my protection of my people. and our values is more important than any customer. Right, no doubt. So how did you find your leadership? Because that's another thing we really struggle with as an industry is, A, well, a lot of us are control freaks. I'm one of them, right? So you have a hard time with that trusting someone to take over things,

but also like, you know, with you having that thought in mind, integrity forward, how did you go about finding your team? Obviously, you want them to be smarter than you if you can find them. But how did you find it? This was, so in any system, there's a bottleneck. And in most small businesses that want to grow, the bottleneck is the owner.

Yeah, 100%. And certainly that was the case for me. I got to about 20 people, and that was as much as I was leader enough to manage. Right. And it was the book, the book that I co-wrote, I didn't mean to write a book. I mean, it's not, it's a little presumptuous of me to write a book.

We have, you know, around 100 people running around. It's not, this is, this is very presumptuous. I only did this because I was invited to write a chapter by my, by a mentor of mine. And then it ended up two chapters and then three and then we designed a book cover. Yeah. And it was my title because, you know, I want to operate in a low drama environment, but I'm naturally a high drama leader. Right. My management style naturally is this.

You kids got a little bit. Shaken baby. It's a terrible strategy. And it held this business back. I knew everything I needed to know to run this business now. I knew it 15 years ago. I just wasn't emotionally mature enough. I wasn't the leader that we needed.

I couldn't attract the right leadership team because I was an asshole. Yeah. Right? When something would get screwed up, I would get so emotional. that I caused everybody else emotional harm. And it was just emotional immaturity on my part. And whatever, I am who I am. And I'm certainly a lot better now than I ever was.

That's still one of my weaknesses that I work on all the time. Right. So attracting the right people. I have a couple of people who've been hanging around over 20 years, but only a couple. And I have a bigger contingent that have been hanging around over 10 years. Yeah, right. And I got a bunch now who've been here between five and ten. But it took a long time to find not only the people, the right people, but the people who could put up with me at first.

And then I had to then, so now I have managers. I don't manage anybody anymore. Right. I'm one of the members of the leadership team. I deal with the vision and the strategy. Right. They deal with the execution because they're better with people. but they appreciate that I'm really good at the strategy part.

And I write about it. You know, I write these long memos like Amazon.com does. Sure, sure. They have, they write these 5,000 word business plans and then have a silent start at the beginning of meetings. We do that. So I write thoughtful memos about what we should do and how we should do it. And they recognize that that is a special gift of mine. And I recognize that they have special gifts that I don't have.

And that is the execution part. Right. So, I mean, some of the best businesses in the world have been partnerships. When I was a young man, I was, you know, I just wasn't agreeable enough to have a good partner. Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a common story for a lot of us, honestly. Like, so finding that team obviously was huge for you. Was it hard for you to let go of the reins a little bit?

No. No. No. Nice. I mean, so it, I knew what I want. Right. So we have this diagram we keep around here about continuous improvement. Right. So this is this is where we want to be. Okay. And this is where we are. Okay. And this is the next target condition. This is like where we think we can get. And then we just experiment from here to there. But I always knew where I wanted to be. I always wanted to be at least where we are now.

Okay. Okay. And so I knew I had to, in the book traction, they call it letting go of the vine. Yeah, you know, in order to swing like Tarzan, you got to let go of the flying behind you to catch the one ahead. Yeah. And so I always knew that. Frankly, I just didn't have the managerial acumen to inspect what I expected and regular enough intervals. So people would go and screw stuff up and I wouldn't catch it for a long time. Right? That's what you got to build in systems.

when you delegate to somebody, you've got to be very clear about it. This is straight one-minute manager stuff. What's the one-minute goal? What's the scope budget schedule of what you're asking somebody to do? And what's the mechanism to inspect what you expect? How do you quality control that and not let it run downstream and cause problems? Yeah. No, it's kind of like a great segue into why you, is that why you wrote that book,

drama free management? Because like you kind of said it's like a distinguishing between the managing and leading kind of the problem that we typically have. Is that kind of what started that, that kind of thought process? So I wrote in 2019, I was going to send by operations manager off to Lean 6 Sigma training. So that's, you know, quality control stuff.

That was our bottleneck at the time. But I realized there was something going on that was more than just, you know, checklist discipline or something like that, right? We had all the checklist. We had written procedures, but no, but we didn't have enough people following them. So, so I, so I, I came across this concept of organizational maturity, right? I had already realized that, you know, there's the emotional maturity part that I was, you know, growing. And, but there's organizational maturity also. So if you just have a genius with helpers, that's not a mature organization, right?

Right, right. So you got it. So even so if you get, you know, you have five geniuses and 50 goofballs, things are going to get screwed up. Yeah, right. So everybody has to get more mature. You can't go from level one maturity to level five maturity in, you know, three weeks. Mm-hmm.

You've got to build it up slowly over time. It's like a crab walk, you know, it's like cash flow where you know, you can only grow so fast. You know, you can only build so much muscle in the gym so fast, right? Right, right. So I wrote this thing in 2019. This was my working hypothesis with my team. And I presented it to my team. And they're like, yeah, yeah, this is smart.

So let's do this. So, you know, I sometimes only do one or two really smart things a year. And, you know, if you were to just Google Pete Fowler, organizational maturity, a bunch of people have actually picked it up and used it in their writings and in their stuff. Nice. I don't even know how they found it. But I just put it on my website because. You know, I wanted to not lose it and make sure everybody in my office could find it.

So that helped us to move from where we were, which was lower organizational maturity and to get the whole organization up to some level, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, how do you, how would you kind of answer the question? I mean, we have a common problem in our industry. I'm sure it's every industry, but we get busy. We get stuck in a certain spot. Usually, you know, they talk about $5 million, $10,000, $20.

Like they talk about these tens where you kind of get stuck in this area. And like you said before, when you get the 20 people, you kind of get stuck because you're like, you can't envision the next step because it means more on your shoulders. And so how do you kind of, how would you kind of guide people through that? I mean, obviously some people want to grow and some people don't. And that's where, you know, I struggle because when I go to conferences, it's all about rah, raw, let's get to 250 million or whatever the number is. It's all about this revenue thing.

And I kind of check out, to be honest. Like, not that I don't want to grow, but my why's a little different. So like that, that kind of doesn't speak to me. So it's a, so I, in 2009, I started getting divorced. And this completely screwed up my, my wanting to be rock and roll Ward Cleaver. Ah, yeah. Yeah. And it got very messy.

I paid two lawyers to punch each other in the face. You know, for two years, I had a custody battle. You know, I gave away everything I had except my business. You know, I decided to keep the goose and give all the eggs away. And it was a good decision, but it was very painful. Sure. But I wrote a one-page vision of what I wanted my life to look like. And it's, in my life now is fascinating.

similar to that 2010 document. I've updated it, but I still have the 2010 document. It's in Google Docs. So by the way, use Google Docs, right? Because it can save all your stuff. Yeah. So it's fascinatingly identical to what I envisioned.

And I called it my daily meditation, although I don't read it daily. I should read it more, but whatever. I'm having a great life. So it's, you know, but I look at it. I turn to it a lot. Okay. And so, so that I think that's the most important thing, you know, because, you know,

the last thing you want to do is like trip and accidentally start a business. Right. Because I think it's, I think it's harder now than ever, right? Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a super pain in the ass until you get, until you have a human resources manager who deals with all of the complaints before you ever hear about them, that's going to continue to be, I mean, it's still, there's always a bottleneck in every system.

and if you're going to continue to thrive, right, you're either languishing or worse or you're growing and thriving. Right. So, I mean, certainly people can have a small business that is functionally a practice, the same way a dentist has a practice. And if the dentist doesn't show up,

there's no need for the secretary or the even the hygienist for, you know, it's not going to stay very long, you know. So having a practice that is a small business, it's great. Right. And there's people making, you know, certainly making seven figures doing that. I know that. I know some of them.

It was never what I wanted to do. I wanted to understand how to create a human organization. And I suffered for that, for, for, for that compulsion of mine. And I, and I certainly could have just had a practice and made a lot more money and been retired by now. So if it were my goal to just get retired, I should have done something different, but that was never my goal. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Everyone's wise, a little bit different.

So I like your idea of like starting with that one pager in like, hey, this is where I envision my life to go. That way so you can kind of check it against what your business is doing. And, you know, when do you, you said you kind of reached out to mentors and things maybe a little bit late, but when would you advise, you know, wrapping in a consultant or a mentor that can help you get to the next level? This afternoon. Yeah, this afternoon. Yeah, right. Totally. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, write on one piece of paper your plan and start asking the smartest people you possibly can. I have always been a fan of peer learning, peer-to-peer groups. Like I was when there's an organization I was there last night called Entrepreneurs Organization, EO. It's a great organization. They used to be called YEO, Young Entrepreneurs Organization, but that's when I joined them. when they had the courage to kick out 40-year-olds. But they lost the courage to kick out the 40-year-olds. So they let old guys like me join.

So I was a member in California, 23 years ago is when I joined. I know because I logged on. I didn't realize that I had a log-on from 23 years ago. And it's like, you've been a member for 23 years. No, I haven't. I wasn't a member for like 15 in the middle. I'm a member again in Las Vegas. Fantastic organization.

But I've been in a bunch of different peer learning organizations. In Orange County, the Service Corps of Retired Exchevents. executives runs a peer learning organization that's a lot cheaper than EO or if your business is large enough you can join and you're young enough you can join young presidents organization that's another one there's Vistage it's expensive but it's you know smart you know so that is a I did that the minute I because the the qualification back then was you had to be able you had to do a million dollars in revenue before you could join. It's still a million dollars.

in revenue. But, you know, 23 years ago, a million dollars in revenue was a lot of money. Now it's so, right? So it's easier to join now. But that's the first place I started. So I was just dealing with peers who were wrestling with the same problems I was. Trying to hire people. You know, we were all family guys. And in that, you know, I mean, that's the 23 years ago in Orange County, California, it was all white, mostly white guys. I mean, not, whatever. Almost all guys, almost all white guys. Sure. Now, you know, fast forward to Las Vegas now, and it's super diverse.

It's, oh, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. It's just, you know, the diversity of people's human experience is so educational. Right. It's fantastic. Right. Our workforces are diverse. It's, it's, these are, these are, these are good things, not bad.

Yeah. Yeah. I know I like to start with peers. I mean, it's obviously a good starting point. And then from there, ask. hey, how did you do that so that you can really kind of help get to that next level? Because I see so many of us kind of stuck. I'm kind of in that same, that middle area of, you know, five million a year.

And like, you're just kind of going, all right, I'm going to really need to step on it to get to the next level. And so that's kind of where I'm at mentally, which I think is a common spot for a lot of us in the remodeling space. My experience in the world is that the more successful people get, the more gracious they are when people ask. them for a little bit of time to get mentorship. And it's, you know, almost nobody tells me no. You know, I get meetings with such smart, wonderful, successful people. And when they see what I'm doing, they, they see the glimmer in my eye. And they're like, oh, that's the same glimmer I had in my eye.

Right. And so they want to be helpful. And they'll turn you on to the best people, right? I mean, the co-author of my book, she's still a paid, a paid mentor. She's a, she was co-hosting the group, so she wasn't a paid mentor. And in that group, she couldn't sell to the people in the group. So when we started, when we wrote the book together, she left being the leader of the group. And I hired her that minute.

Right, right. Yeah, you saw. Yeah, you saw. Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes total sense. So, you know, you kind of said the peer group, but, you know, the other part we struggle with is taking time to work on the business as opposed to just getting stuck inside of it all the time. So how did, what was you, how did you kind of get into that?

Do you time block? What did you do to kind of like start to kind of create that like, oh, I can see the, the forest of the trees kind of thing? I started this because I knew what I wanted. When I was working for somebody else's business, when I was billing clients, he paid me like, whatever it was, 60 bucks an hour. And when I was working on the business, he only paid me like 30 or 40 bucks an hour. And I still worked a lot on that business,

like half time. Right. Right. Because it was for me. I wanted to understand. When I, the day I got out of college, I was,

you know, essentially, you know, the general manager of this, you know, business that was repairing, uh, buildings after the,

earthquake in the San Fernando Valley. And I said to myself and to everybody else, I'm going to learn how to do every single thing that this back office needs for a construction company. So literally, I went and sat, I drove 60 miles and sat with the bookkeeper, while the bookkeeper typed things into QuickBooks. So I learned how to use QuickBooks. I knew I became an Excel master. Right.

So I learned every single part of running a construction business other than the hammering, which I knew a lot of already. But I learned everything there was to do. And then I delegated my way out of a job. God, that's the key one right there. You replaced yourself. Man, that is a tough one for a lot of us. So that's cool that you didn't have that struggle, but a lot of us do, me included,

where we have that little bit too much control, kind of feel like we can do it better than anybody else. You probably can, by the way. Yeah. You probably can. So if you don't, if you're, I mean, unless you're, you know, I watch all these CEOs on social media and they're, you know,

they talk about hiring people who are better than you. And that's fantastic if you're private equity backed or if your venture backed or if you're Google and you can afford, you know, or if you're meta and you can give somebody a hundred million dollar contract. We are not. So you just got to make peace with the idea that you might be anywhere from two to five times more productive than the person you delegate to. And frankly, if you need a genius level owner in a position, then you haven't organized your work properly. We're in construction. It does not require genius. And so, you know, if we chunk things down, we create a system and a set of checklist and we inspect what we expect, you know, you don't have to have geniuses.

But you've got to have people who are open to learning and open to doing things in a systematic process and dotting eyes and crossing T's. And if they're not, they're just not the person for you. You don't got to, you know, punch them in the face. You just got to invite them to go work for your competitor. And shake them first. Try to not do that. It does not help, I promise. I tried that for many years.

It's so, it's, you know, the, what's the old saying? The beatings will continue until morale improves. Right? It's funny because it's so dumb. And, you know, that was my primary. Somebody actually said that to and about me once. And I was like, oh, that's funny because it's so dumb and it's exactly what I do. It's so, it was so dumb.

I just couldn't stop myself for a long time. gotcha for a long time yeah i would like to i have to be very nice to young pete fowler who was really quite a dipship well do improvement that's that's great that you see it you know a lot of people was stuck in the same spot you know so don't get stuck it right when you're the bottleneck just you know be peaceful about it you know i i also early in this business i you know it was i didn't i didn't have money saved up and i had i literally had to learn to meditate So that I didn't cough blood, right? I mean, I literally learned to meditate and I did it.

I've done it. I'm more of a crisis meditator now. I don't, you know, I'm much more peaceful now, so I don't need to do it every day. But I used to get up in the morning every day and meditate because it was making, like I was, I had rosacea break out of my face. I was very stressed out. And I knew exactly what was going on. It was like, oh, my God, this is, you know, I'm stressed out. Right.

So it's. You hear about that in. instruction quite often too, don't you? That stressed out and never fix it and then you turn to drinking and drugs and before you know it's it's it's done so. It's a dangerous game, right? I mean, it's pay attention to feedback, right? This is, it's the world offers feedback. We don't, I don't, you know, I don't like it either. Right. But, you know, I mean, it's literally, my picture of it is the same way. I never, I never worked out. I married a gal who was a workout person. And so I work out now. And I like in the I mean, whether it's physical or it's emotional or it's intellectual, you've got to push to

failure, right? Right. And it's in, and pay attention to, you know, what, what, the feedback that you're getting, you know, or did you have, did you have an emotional blow up about something? That is super important information. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It's super important information. Listen to it. Also, I'd like to talk a little bit about the other kind of the topic that we really wanted to address is that we build these fantastic businesses. We put all of our blood, sweat, and tears into it. But a lot of us struggle protecting it, you know, whether that's open yourself up to litigation because you're doing crappy work or whether, whatever that may be, bad insurance, all of those things that you have seen. Kind of talk a little bit about through what you have seen in the past, maybe what's improving. And just help us avoid these giant pitfalls, right?

So pay attention. I learned at my children's Taekwondo class when they were like five. The ABCs of risk management. A is avoid potentially dangerous situations. B is be really good at what you do. And C is cover your assets. Right. So if you do bad work, you deserve to be sued out of business.

Yeah, true. Sorry. So be good at what you, you know. So I'm sorry. A, we're in construction. It's everything's a potentially dangerous situation. So then you just got to be good at what you do. Right.

Right. Like you can't avoid safety. Right. If people are getting hurt on your projects, again, you deserve to be sued out of business. Right. You've got to pay attention to it. It's just a must. And more so than ever before.

And then C is about insurance. And for sure read the article that I wrote called Insurance Basics for Construction Professionals that I published in the journal like construction. It's on my website. But again, insurance basics for construction professionals. But I argue in there that you're a good construction insurance broker might be even more important than your lawyer. And you're talking to a guy who's got two lawyers on speed dial who I call all the time. Right. I call them all the time.

And, you know, you got to find a lawyer who won't nickel and dime into death. Right. You know, and this is finding the right relationships is, you know, it's like finding a spouse, right? I mean, I also wrote a blog post called Basic Due Diligence in Hiring that I highly recommend. You know, doing the proper due diligence is the difference between failure and success a lot of times. And certainly it's the difference between squeaking by and super. super success. Right. Who is hanging around is the most important thing in any business. So having good, you know, first you got to have good team members that you trust. Then you got to have

good advisors all around. Like I said, one of my key advisors, we wrote a book together. We can pull up our book and go, oh, yeah. So she's mentoring all my new managers. Right. Here's the book. This is what we think about this. Yeah. Right. And so, but insurance, if you, in that article, I say if you are, if as a construction professional, you think you know enough about insurance, you're a danger to yourself, to your family, and to the community. Right. Nobody in construction that's listening to this podcast is ever going to know enough about insurance, myself included. Right. Right.

Right. So you've got to get people who that's their life. Right, right. And you got it. It's like your priest. You just open your kimono entirely. And, you know, even if it's cold, right? It's like, oh, you got, they got to know what you're doing.

And, you know, and certainly understanding the contracts enough that you, that you're not a danger, that you're not put yourself in bad situations. Right. So, you know, defining the scope and the budget and the schedule very clearly, communicating. the scope and the budget and the schedule to your clients, to any trade partners you're working with, whatever role you're in, you got to know, you got to know what you're signing. You got to know what you're asking somebody to sign. And you got to have good project documentation, right? Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. So now with all the technology coming at us, I mean, back in our day, right, we didn't have video, we didn't have cell phone. We didn't have any of that crap. So now we have like job site cameras. We have all this technology that can help. us obviously that's kind of like a little additional insurance for you. Are you recommending that? I mean, obviously kind of depends on the type of project, but what are you seeing out there?

We, I mean, so you see me shaking my head, no, but we own two Matterport cameras that we use regularly. But I mean, that is no. So I've been saying this same phrase over and over and over again for months. Okay. And I'm going to write a whole series of books that, you know, that drama-free management, like many other aspects of professional practice these days, including cost estimating, including construction management, including project management generally. These are collections of practices and deliverables that evolved over time and have ultimately been engineered into these collections of practices and deliverables. and deliverables, that if you execute them with discipline, they will lead to predictable and positive outcomes. So it's a lot of words. But there's this collection of practices. So in construction management, and we call them the boring but important fundamentals. So drama

free management, the subtitle is called the boring but important fundamentals. And I'm going to write a book called, I'm in the middle of writing a book called Drama Free Expert, which, because that's what we do a lot of. Right. And the subtitle is going to be, surprise, the boring but important fundamentals. The next book after that is drama-free cost estimating, the boring but important fundamentals. And the book after that is drama-free construction contracting.

Okay. Boring but important fundamentals. So the boring but important fundamentals have not changed. Right. Don't try, don't, you can't not do the boring but important fundamentals. Right. And they haven't, you know, I went, I graduated in college in 1994. I started there in, you know, 1989. And we were literally using colored pencils to do quantity takeoff. Right, right. But the boring but important fundamentals have not changed. Right. They haven't changed. Yeah. And so, you know, teach everybody the boring but important fundamentals. You know, in basketball, it's dribbling and passing and, you know, taking a shot. Yeah. Right. You're not going to teach anybody to. be Michael Jordan, but everybody needs to know how to dribble and pass.

Right, right. So let people become the Michael Jordan on their own, make sure everybody's doing the boring but important fundamentals in a way that they all interlock together. You can't have three superintendents who all do their daily log however the hell they want. Right. Right. And even if somebody just won't do it, you have to break up with them. You have to have the current, you know, it's like Donald Trump.

You're fired. I mean, you want to do it with kindness and let people have dignity when they leave you. Sure, sure. It's like, yeah, yeah, you have to leave. So are you afraid that some folks are going to try to replace some of those boring fundamentals with technology? Yeah, no, they do, right? I mean, that's what, you know, certainly the salespeople on the technology side, and they can't be, they shouldn't be blamed for it.

They'll tell you, well, you know, it's the fundamentals, you know, if you do a process, a process flow chart for your business, which I highly recommend, you have a process flow chart and checklists for it. If that, if your processes, you know, can be, if they can be made to be, to take less time and to, um, increase in quality, then use that tool. Right, right. Absolutely. Right.

Right. But it's just not going to replace the boring but important fundamentals. You still got to have, you know, daily, you've got to have a daily log of some kind. Should we be writing it on paper and drawing pictures and pencil? No. Right? Should we have a lot of photographs that we didn't have, you know, in 1995 when I wrote

my first superintendent's manual? We didn't take that many pictures, but we wrote out a daily log. Should that be, you know, an iPhone driven or a tablet driven, you know, where you can just talk to it? Yes. Right. Right. So if it makes it cheaper and easier to do the same thing, you've got to have contemporaneous

documentation of what went on on the job site, right? Everybody knows the five Ws, who, what, when, where, why. But I think there's eight Ws, who, what, when, where, why, how many, and how much. You've got to know that every day on a professionally run job site. Yeah. And if you don't, start there. Right, right. It's a boring but important fundamental.

Yeah, no, I think you're totally right. I mean, obviously you kind of mentioned get that good insurance person, but what are some key kind of considerations that we should be prioritizing to to really safeguard our businesses? I mean, you've seen a lot of litigations and claims over the years. What should we really be focusing on? So again, do good work, right? Do good work.

And to me, you know, especially if we're doing residential construction work, really any construction work. the physical, the three-dimensional physicality of construction work is not that complicated. Right. I mean, it is a little bit, but, you know, everybody should try and understand the three-dimensional physicality of the work that you're delegating to, you know, to a window installer or to a frame or whatever, so that you can show up and recognize whether or not it's going to cause a problem downstream. Right, right, right.

And you get that, and you start building that up into your scopes of work. Right. And when you're doing your estimating, you should be writing scopes of work. That should be the first pass on your writing your scopes of work for all the trade contractors, right? Right. Because if you're a general contractor and you have a prime construction contract with the owner, you're probably going to have a bunch of trade contracts. So everything that's in that prime contract has to be in one of those contracts, one of those scopes of work for one of those contracts for a trade contractor. or it's in your self-performed scope of work. Either way, 100% of those scopes of work should add up to the prime contract scope of work. Right, right.

And over time, you can have that templated. You know, if you have a good system, you can have that templated where that gets faster and faster and better and faster and faster and faster and faster. So if you're doing similar projects over and over, we do a different kind of project type. We do every kind of project type. But our, what we have in common is we investigate in exactly the same way, no matter the project type. Right. So we have pattern recognition. If you're doing remodeling of kitchens over and over and over again, 50% of the activity is going to be the same on every project.

Right. Right. And then, so then you're just doing the exceptions. What's different? What kind of countertop are we doing in this project? We're always doing lower cabinets. But, you know, whatever. There's always stuff you're going to do.

So the stuff that gets to. done over and over can be systematized and so you only have to think about the exceptions. Right. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. So in your 25 years of industry experience or plus, I guess now, it's 41. I saw, I, I, I don't know how I got 20. It's 25 years in your business. I start digging ditches when I was 16 years old. Oh, that's right. It goes way back further. Yeah. I'm 57 years old. Now I'm getting to be old fella. You look great. You look great. So what's one piece of advice that you would give us, especially those who are struggling to align their business with their personal and professional goals? It's, if you're the business owner, I mean, I don't, I tell people to say, oh, you're so lucky to own your own business.

I'd be careful. Don't trip and accidentally start your own business. Be very mindful about that. It's not even inherently the fastest way to a good retirement. True. Yeah. I mean, it's really hard work. It was a compulsion of mine. So I didn't have any choice in the matter. I mean, it was just, it was a compulsion of mine.

You know, if somebody would have just sat back and let me do all of the dangerous things on their dime. So whatever you want to do, you know, my son is a tattoo artist in Portland Oregon. And he wants his own shop. And I plead with him, go run somebody. else's shop. That's where you learn all of the fundamentals, right? Go do it on somebody else's dime. So if you don't already have your own business, do it on somebody else's dime. And if you do have your own business, you know, so in drama free management, in the introduction to the book, I say, this is how to use this book. You know, I still, by the way, I'm, you know, I have a minor

in computer information systems. I've had an IT guy on staff for 20-something years. I still keep a, I carry a journal around. Yeah, yeah. Carry a journal around and write down the things that irritate you the most every single day. And at the end of the week, survey that list and the thing that irritated you the most, look through drama free management and read the chapter you think might help solve that problem forever. Yeah, nice. Right?

That's your bottleneck, right? What is it? What's causing me the most suffering? If you already have a business that is not going out of business this year, you are a super success. right right so take a minute and go oh most people go out of business so any suffering i'm having any any stress any whatever i'm in the top you know i'm certainly in the top 10 percent because most people are going out of business right so just look at your look for the bottlenecks in your business and then read and ask i mean you can add many of these things you can ask chat gpte crazy yeah i know

i know right and work on that and work with your team to figure out like how do we we solve this permanently? And if you solve something permanently once a week, your life is going to get good. Right. Soon. Now, it's just like the gym. If you, after three weeks, you're like, well, nothing's better yet. Well, I'm sorry.

Yeah. Yeah. It's really, it's just like the gym. Yeah. Right. So solve something permanently. Right. Every week.

And your life will be, you'll fall in love with your business. I moved to Vegas because I was tired of my business. I thought I was going to sell it. Taxes in California are crazy. But I fell back in love with my business because I became a zealic for, I became the chief quality officer. Our business, we solve problems mostly permanently every week. It's like we sit down and we think about it every week.

And I fell back in love with my business. I got no intention of retirement anytime in the next decade. That's for sure. Right. Right. Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time, Pete. this is a wealth of knowledge, really help me, and I'm sure it's going to help a lot of other folks. How do people stay in touch with you? Do you put all your books on your website, all that stuff?

Yep, pfowler.com. It's, you know, all roads lead to Rome, right? So that's, so that's, you know, if you send me a message there, it'll get to me. Okay. Awesome. Then you put your blog posts and newsletters and all that stuff. It's all, it's, there's a lot of stuff there. So all the articles, you know, there's a learn tab. There's a, you know, and then there's a contact this. And if you send a message, say, I'm looking for Pete Fowler, they will, they will forward it to me. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. And, you know, we'll stay in touch.

I'll probably be checking your brain. You do, you do this very well. Some people can't keep me on track. You did a great job. Thank you. I honed you in, didn't I? You did. You did a great job. Thank you. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Bye. Bye. Thanks again, everybody, for joining us on another episode of construction executives live. I'll see you next month. Actually, we're going to be having a consultant in this space next month. So really, if you're thinking about maybe adding some more team members or getting to the next level, next month, we're going to dive into that. So thanks again. We'll see you next month. Bye.

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