Business Innovators Radio - Episode 46: The Tenacious Pursuit of Peace with Madeleine MacRae

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

Part of The Construction Executives Live Program The Tenacious Pursuit of PeaceInspired by Madeleine MacRae’s powerful book, The Tenacious Pursuit of Peace: Where to Go When Success is Not Enough, we will dive into the raw, real journey of finding fulfillment beyond success. Madeleine will share vulnerable stories and actionable strategies to help high-achievers, entrepreneurs, and dreamers navigate life’s challenges, heal past hurts, and unlock their true potential. Through heartfelt conversations and practical insights, this podcast will guide you to examine your life, embrace your inner strength, and pursue a peace that transforms your soul and legacy.In The Zonehttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/in-the-zone/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/episode-46-the-tenacious-pursuit-of-peace-with-madeleine-macrae

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-founder of Three Generations Improvements and U.S. Construction Zone out in sunny Northern California. Thank you for being here.

I appreciate all the people that they come back every month. For those of you don't know, we do this show live monthly, and it's all around subject matter regarding construction, remodeling business ownership. And we had another great show today. First of all, we are sponsored by the great brand build12.com, automate your construction business into a revenue-genering machine with the Build12 system. I've spoken about it many times.

I've used their CRM for now a couple years, and it's been very efficient to myself and my team, trying to replace with more automations and less people. It has been a great system. So check out Build12.com. Reach out to Les over there, and he'll give you a free demo. Also sponsored by Built or Pay Pro,

the construction payment platform that saves you time, money and gets you paid fast, pay zero percent credit card fees, pass all of those fees onto the client. they could accept ACH payments, a state of the art invoicing tool that integrates directly with QuickBooks. Check out Builderpaypro.com for a free demo. And thinking about today's show around our pursuit of peace, it made me think about my own personal journey and I'm definitely not where I want to be and I'm getting help, including

with Madeline, to get me to the next level. And really, it's odd. It makes you think about your own personal journey, what success means to you. It makes you kind of dive deep and figure out what do I want? Because I feel like I'm in this stuck spot and I feel like I could be in this spot for five, 10 years, no problem. Like with a blink of an eye, it would be ready for me. So take the time to work on your business, think about your business and think about what do you want.

And that's what we're going to talk about today. The title of the show is The Tenacious Pursuit of Peace, inspired by Madeline McCrae's powerful book, The Tenetka. natious pursuit of peace where to go when success is not enough. We're going to dive into the raw, real journey of finding fulfillment beyond success. Madeline will share vulnerable stories and actionable strategies to help high achievers, entrepreneurs, and dreamers navigate life's challenges, heal past hurts, and unlock their true potential.

Through heartfelt conversations and practical insights, this podcast will give you the time to examine your life, embrace your inner strength, and pursue. a piece that transforms your soul and legacy. Madeline McCray is a speaker. She is an author, and she is definitely a serial entrepreneur. She always brings thought-provoking, practical, usable content that accelerates implementation and sparks inspired action. She loves the grit and determination of business owners in the home service and

improvement industries and has dedicated her career to helping them and their teams. Please help me welcome Madeline McCray. Madeline, thank you for being here. Hey, thank you for having me on the show. So, delighted to be here today. Awesome. Thank you. So let's start with the, at the top. Tell us a little bit about your journey as a high achiever. Obviously, you don't, maybe you're born with being a serial entrepreneur, but at some point you get to this spot. You know, what, what kind of made you start your consulting businesses and kind of what struck that passion of entrepreneurship for you? Yeah. So certainly wasn't born, a serial entrepreneur.

I was born in a very blue-collar neighborhood outside of Detroit. My dad was an airplane mechanic. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. And I didn't even know that small-to-misize business ownership was a thing. That didn't even cross my mind. I stumbled into the world of the home service, home improvement industry. After my college time, I had gotten a degree in English literature when I planned to be an editor, wanted to work at a fancy magazine,

wanted to write very highfalutin literary stuff. And then I worked at a newspaper and hated it. Absolutely hated it. But we stumbled on a really well-written ad for a company in the hurricane protection industry. It was down in South Florida, so very apropos for where I was. And when I dove in there,

I discovered that I have an extreme passion for small to mid-sized business owners and specifically those people who work on or in or for people in their homes because it's a, it's a different type of heart of service that attracts a very specific caliber of individual who's willing to put in the sweat equity. And I became really curious about success early on in that story. I went on to found a company. I kind of just let it go when I got recruited into my corporate career.

And after a really stunning corporate career where I was the most quickly promoted person, in their corporate history and the youngest member of the executive leadership team, being mentored by the CEO of a billion dollar company personally, I set out on my consulting career because I wanted to help close the gap between how these big companies looked at business and thought about business and planned and executed and how small to mid-sized business owners just really winged it hard. And so I've been iterating various consulting firms. and start off with Eminem McCray coaching and consulting,

my private consulting firm, which I have till today, I have ProQ systems, which is for those high achieving, $3 million plus business owners who really want to take their business to, you know, 10, 20, 30 million and beyond. And at HomePro Toolbox, which is a digital content library, that kind of fuels everything. Yeah, awesome. That's quite a journey.

So let's start with that topic of success. I kind of said in the opening that I'm kind of struggling with that me personally. I don't really know what it means. And so tell me a little bit about the connection between money and success. So I have a podcast too. And I ask this question, you know, do you consider yourself to be successful on my podcast every time? Right. It's my one non-negotiable.

And what I have found is that people who have not achieved success, by their own standard, focus on money. People who have achieved to their own standard of success don't focus. on money, right? So having not enough money and being in that survival band is going to generate a specific type of action. But when you're beyond survival, that success band is very, very, very deep. Right. You can be barely succeeding or you can be wildly succeeding, right? It's a very, very deep when we're talking specifically about money. Right. But there's a level where more money is just more money, right? Money doesn't actually make you happy. And that's kind of a lie that a lot of people chase.

Well, I'll feel successful when I have a certain account balance. I'll feel successful when I buy that fifth property. But you just keep pushing the line again and again. Success is not an external metric. It's an internal game. And how do you go about finding what success is to that individual? Is there just a list of questions that you ask? Because you nailed it with me.

You kind of figured it out. and I think I need to go back and listen to our podcast because I forgot already. That's right. So I believe that we all know it's just how far have we shoved it down. The constant settling for mediocrity, you said in the opening, you know, I could be here for five years and just thought the blink of an eye and I've kind of settled for five years just because I just did. That sort of consistent behavior. of not stopping to consider what do you truly want, what really matters to you, is what actually shoves that voice deeper and deeper and deeper. We all know what we actually want, but it's just how

much have we shoved it down because of the tyranny of the urgent, because of other priorities, because it's not cool to be introspective, because we got to hustle and grind, because of whatever other thing. But if you take the time to get quiet, and and just ask, what is it? I'm open to hearing it. I'm open to hearing it. Usually what pops right in is what is really, like, by the second time you ask yourself or the third time,

what you hear inside is what really does matter to you. And sometimes it's like, throw that over the shoulder. It can't be that easy. And yes, I can. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah, so what inspired you to write the tenacious pursuit of peace? Well, the very first thing that inspired me was I had someone come to me who wanted to co-author a book with me. And I said, well, I can't co-author a book until I said what I need to say first.

I don't even know what I'm talking about. Like just a whole bucket of ideas. Like, that's not really cool. And so I just, I hired a writing coach. I hired all these people to help me understand what I needed to say. And ultimately, this is really what my soul long to share. And it is not the business book that I set out to write originally. I was going to write something really practical and tactical. I'm very systems and structured and all that. But this was just what my heart needed to say. And it's about that, you know, it's the tenacious pursuit of peace, right?

Peace is not something that is just freely given. It's not like a little candy dispenser, put in a little money, get out piece. Right. You have to look for it and you have to work for it. And you have to consistently, persistently show up for yourself to, be able to find it and to hold on to it. And I didn't expect that to be what I needed to say, but this is what many people wait a really long time in their careers to do or to pursue. But what I have found is that the absolute highest achievers do this work first. And when you can

prioritize this work, which let me be clear, is hard. Sounds fluffy. It isn't, right? You have to confront yourself. You have to confront your past. You have to confront your choices. And sometimes it can be very confronting. You're like, oh, oh, shoot. Right.

Oh, dang it. Right. But that's what I have found. And I think that's why it came out first because this is the work that so often people wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, and then do later. But you rob yourself of the joy of the journey because you didn't do it first. And you will go further faster if you pursue.

transformation before you pursue achievement. Interesting. I mean, what is, so we talk about peace, right? What does that look like in a high stakes, high stress industry like construction? Because I think a lot of times you would say that and people will be like, yeah, you know, I'm happy. Yeah. Happiness and peace are not synonyms. Okay. Right. Happiness is something that is fleeting. a really nice bowl of ice cream can make you happy. Right? But once the ice cream's gone, you know, a minute on the lips and 10 years on the hips, whatever. Trying after.

It's weird. Yeah. But so happiness is a very, I look at it can be really like a mirage, right? You think it's going to get, this is going to make you happy. This is going to make you happy. This is going to make you happy. But I think that happiness is like a cheap second sometimes. Peacefulness is an inner.

disposition, not an external disposition, right? You can be really peaceful amid a crisis, right? Think about it like you're the ocean, right? The storm on the top of the ocean is throwing the boats around and is raging and there's wind. But if you go a little bit deeper, the water's still. That's peacefulness. Being able to have that well of stillness inside of yourself that no matter how chaotic, no matter how stressful, no matter how urgent things are, that you can always get quiet and find. Yeah, and you were kind of saying that the highest achievers maybe realize this early on. When I think of high achievers, I typically go to money. I think a lot of those do, right?

And those aren't the same people, right? I mean, obviously, if you're just chasing money, you're probably not thinking about the inner peace component. Yeah. So money is a measure of success, but it's the cheapest measure, right? Anyone could have money. You could be a really, really bad person and be wealthy, right? You could be sex trafficking and have lots of money. That's not going to bring you peace, my friend. So, you know, you can win the lottery and have money. That didn't make you successful. It just made you financially wealthy, right? There are so many ways that you can be wealthy outside. of just money. And those inner riches will give you more than any external measure of success. Think about someone like, you know, Mother Teresa, no money. Like incredibly poor. Right. Massive worldwide impact that lives until today. No one would look at her life and say she didn't have a successful life. Right. Right. Don't confuse success and money. Success is just a measure of,

I mean, money is just a measure of success and it's the cheapest measure, right? So many other inward component parts to true. So peacefulness is true deep satisfaction and alignment with all of who you are and what you're doing on the inside and the outside. The more fully aligned you are, the more peaceful you will become, right? And you can be fully aligned and bold and ambitious and going and making money like crazy. I mean, I'm extremely ambitious. I love to make money.

I'm a money magnet. Bring it. and also on peaceful. Right. They're not incredible. Yeah. No, that's a good point. Good point.

So, I mean, the opposite of that, it would be burnout. I mean, obviously our industry is full of every industry is, but we get a lot of burnout. We get a lot of, you know, I guess people with, you know, high stress. You know, obviously our suicide rate is very high. We're number two every year. So, like, there's all these signs of, like, people getting burnout and just kind of pushing through, right, without getting the help that they need. You know, but what, how do they, what is your take on on the burnout?

What does that look like in construction? Obviously, you deal with a lot of folks like us. And obviously, a lot of those people are kind of at the top, right? They're the owner, CEOs, you know. So tell us a little bit about what you've seen with the burnout rates. Yeah. So one of the most sneaky components of being massively successful is being able to receive help. Being able to know when you need help and being able to, I'm going to say,

sometimes humble yourself to say yes when it's offered. Right. It's not that people aren't offered help. It's that they reject it when it's offered because sometimes being helped is slower and it's, but it's only slower in the short term. It's faster in the long term. But too many people settle for instant gratification, where they just want to do by himself. And if you are doing everything by yourself, you're actually not building and empowering a team that can execute for you, right? Yes, there are deadlines. Yes, there are stress from every single direction. Sure. But when you feel like, whether it's accurate or not, you can't step away, that's a really important sign that your structure is not is not built out enough to handle any further growth right you're being the rate

limiting factor and I think that there is just a really profound unwillingness for people to acknowledge like wait I am actually the problem here because I'm unwilling to unclench my fist and let go of things because they may be done differently by someone else and or it's going to take me too long to train or I don't know how to write an SOP or whatever or whatever reason they give themselves. Those are all excuses and you are going to feel burnt out when you can't breathe. Your body's going to tell you, right? You're going to be like, I'm so tired. I feel stressed.

I'm drinking a lot. I'm using a lot of drugs. I'm, you know, thinking about hiring a hooker. You know, those are real actual thoughts. Right, right. or having in their minds or are living out. And when you're replacing rest and recalibration with substances and activities to distract and to like turn the pressure valve off, that is a really, really scary sign that you are,

you're already deep into burnout. And you're just avoiding confronting what that might look like to fix it. Right. The other thing I really like about talking with people like you and having a podcast is this loneliness at the top thing. You know, we deal with this a lot because we don't really have anybody to talk to. I don't have any of it on my team that I can talk to about most things. My dad and I can talk about some, but we have different problems, right, and different stress points. And so you talk a lot about the power of storytelling in this healing process.

So tell us a little bit about storytelling. and how this can really help us with this isolation feeling that we have. So it's so interesting to me that so entrepreneurial life is so lonely, but most people are unwilling to acknowledge how lonely they actually feel because they somehow think it's a sign of weakness or that they don't know. Well, guess what? Did you ever scale a business to this size before? No.

So how could you know? Right. Like they have people have an idea that they should know more than what they do know. And a should is not very helpful. It's not going to help you. Just acknowledging, like, I've never learned this before. I don't actually know the answer here. It doesn't mean you have to flaunt your lack of answers in front of your team.

But you still have to be, you know, secure in what you're doing. You're showing good judgment, right? You're managing well. But it's that capacity to, again, reach out for support, what find a mentor, work with a really great coach, engage with someone who can be a thought partner for you, it will make the loneliness of the journey far, far, far less. That's that's one half of it. The other half is understanding where you are in your own story, right?

Sometimes we get in the habit of thinking that we're sort of at the end of a tragedy and we're constantly like on the brink of this horrible tragic ending when really we're just in the midst of that, you know, in the midst of that, you know, heroes journey moment where they go through the struggle, where they go through that test. And if we think that the test is the end of the story, we're missing the whole point that we're going to learn something here. And on the other side, we're going to have the elixir, right, that beautiful cure that you can bring. But I'm not understanding where you are in your own story. So often we think we're in a different place than where we really are.

Like we're shrouded in darkness and we think, oh, no, it's just near the brink of disaster. But really, we're just inside the cocoon. You know, up-leveling, learning something new, developing new skills. Is it uncomfortable? Yes. Is it sometimes painful? Yes. Is it lonely? Yes. But it doesn't have to be permanently that way. Right. There are levers of understanding where you are in your journey and reaching out for the help and support of really great guides, mentors, coaches, you know, sometimes mastermind groups. You can find this sense of community in lots of different ways. But, you know, sitting on your couch by yourself at the end of the night is not going to be one of them.

Yeah. I totally agree. that's not going to help anything you know i think the the biggest excuse and me included in that is the time thing like i don't have time to work on this yes and like obviously we we hear it all the time we need to work on you know on our business not in our business and we get kind of stuck in it um and then the next day comes and you have all these master plans about getting started and then that fire needs to be put out and you know our industry is kind of cool and then it's different every day, but it's bad and then it's different every day. And there's a lot of unpredictability. And you're like, so how do you, how do you help people with that? Because you're right,

a lot of us do know we need to do it, but we kind of lack the, okay, what do we do? Yeah. Yeah. How do you get started? How do you get started? So there's that age old saying, like, how to eat an elephant one bite at a time. Right. So you just can't start going at it. You got to know what you're doing. So again, I'm, I'm, I'm going to say, like, reach out for some support because sometimes the very act of paying and investing in that support forces you to make the time. It's not that you don't have the time, is that you haven't given yourself the time, right? So look at it this way. Think about like something not directly related here. We'll bring it back around. Let's imagine like you've got a kid and you sign them up for a sporting event, right? You got all the practice.

is. You got all the back and forth. You got all the games. And you think like, how in the heck am I going to fit this in my schedule? And then you just do. You made the commitment. They made the commitment. You're showing up for it. And you just do it. It's the same thing with this sort of work. You have to make the decision to put the time on your calendar and then to honor that time commitment. Right. And that's why investing in support, there's another person on the end of that time commitment. And you have that sense of accountability because there's another human there who's going to like, hey Jeremy, where are you? I'm waiting for you in the Zoom room, right? So that personal accountability goes on a tremendously long way, right? That's really, really, really valuable.

And I'll give one little tip that if you haven't invested in the support yet and you just need to give yourself some time, there's a fantastic process that I teach. It's inside of HomePro Toolbox. If you want to check out Homepro Toolbox.com, there's a ton of resources there. But it's called bookending. And it's a way that you start and finish every day. Like when you have books on a shelf and you have two bookends that open the books up. So you just end, it starts with the end, right? You end every day, 10 minutes before you're ready to actually leave.

You just stop 10 minutes early, just 10 minutes. Or you stay for 10 extra minutes, right? But you have to be really strict with yourself. Put the timer on and do not take more than 10 minutes. because if you let it stretch out to half an hour, let it stretch out to two hours, let it, whatever, you'll never do it again. 10 minutes, be really strict with yourself. You set the timer and you go through your list. What have I done today?

What do I have neat? And congratulate yourself, well done. I got this done. I got this done. I got this. I'm killing it. Well done, Madeline. You go, girl, right?

Give yourself a little bit of a path in the back for what you did well. Look at what's still open. and then think about what is the big thing I'm working on right now? What is the big thing? And what is one thing on my list I can do that contributes to the big thing? Right? And you might have to do some brain dumping. You might have some little pre-work, but this is, you know, if you already have a general idea.

Right. And then you pick that one thing. You know, it has to be a task. Tasks are a thing that can be done in 15 minutes or less. Right. Other than that, it's a project. Right. It is a project.

If it's a big thing. Is there a 15-minute little component you could commit to? And then you just take that little commitment and you move it to the very first thing for your next day. And you brush your hands off and you go on your way. Then you show up to work the next morning in your first 15 minutes before you answer your emails, before you start doing text messages, before, before, before, before, you take 15 minutes. Again, strict. put your timer on. Don't, don't give yourself more. And you commit to doing that one thing

that you said you were going to do the night before. And if you do that process of book, and there's a little bit more to it with helping you manage your priorities and tasks. But if you just take that really, really simple framework and you only do that, it means that every single week, you're going to give yourself an hour and 15 minutes of working on the business. And that sort of little incremental gain every single day will help you gain momentum in a way that you never could yes. It's such a teeny tiny, ini,

like who can't find 15 minutes? Right. Right. Right. I mean, we promised everybody actionable insight. I think that's it.

So. I'm telling you. It's been one of the things that, so I have a couple clients who, one of them particularly has built to a $12 million dollar business, a $15 million business. And he's now in the process of founding in other business, which will probably be a $50, $60 million business.

And this is one of the techniques that he used when, excuse my language here, when his life was kind of a shit show, you know, a billion things going on. It's the discipline that he used every single day to help him get himself on track. And that level of self-discipline of saying only 10 minutes, only 15 minutes, it's 25 minutes a day, right? You can find that.

But if you wait to find the time, you're going to be waiting for those five years that we talked about. Right. Yeah. No, it's a good point. I mean, this is a good segue. So you started with the consulting part of the industry. And then I guess when did you decide to start ProQ and Home Pro Toolblocks?

And what are those two things doing to solve problems in our industry? Yeah. So I have my, I've had my M.M. McCray coaching and consulting naming has never really been a great paradigm for me. When I was a kid, all my dolls were Baby Maddie, Baby Maddie, baby Maddie. So not my greatest gift. But no one has ever not done business with me because that first consulting firm had a fairly lame name. But there it is.

So that was up and running for a while. And in 2020, I lost my dad. He died fairly suddenly. He was sick for quite a long time, but we thought that he was just kind of okay. And he passed away really suddenly. Like within 10 days, he was in the hospital and gone. And he was my person. He was my sounding board.

He always really understood me. and after my dad died, I took a period of very much deeper introspection than what I had. You know, I've been a student of self-development for a long time, but this like ratcheted up pretty high, like to a older level. And I realized that I didn't want to be in one-on-one coaching for the rest of my life. It just wasn't having the level of impact that I was feeling called to. And so I hired someone to help me sell my firm. And she was like, well, good news, bad news. After she did an evaluation, she's like, well, you're a top 5% coach.

I've worked with thousands of coaches. You are in the top 5% of all the coaches I've ever worked with in my entire career. Like, well, flip and done. Maybe it's good. That was nice. Bad news, you can't sell it. Right? It is you and you're smarts.

I had a really robust content vault. And she said it doesn't matter because it's you teaching all those lie decks. They're all amazing. and yes, you have facilitation guides, but you haven't proven to acquire that someone who's not you could do it. Yeah, that's tough. And I was like, gosh, darn.

And she goes, I could sell it, but you would be insulted. Like, you would be insulted with the number that someone would offer you. And we don't want to put you through that. And I was like, well, thank you for saving me feeling insulted. Thank you.

I guess I paid you a lot of money for something. And she was the worst. one who told me you have this incredible content vault, which I'd been developing for, you know, about 15 years. He said, if you can turn this content vault into something that people can engage with and learn from, that's not just you teaching it live, then you'll have something. And that actually was the beginning moment for Home Pearl Toolbox. So I don't even know, like, it's a blur in my mind how it happened.

So in 2021, in September, I filmed the first video for HomePro Toolbox. And there are about 350 resources in there today. But by February of 2022, about 320 of those resources, videos, worksheets, templates, guides, budgets, handbooks, like job descriptions, onboarding plans. Like, you name it, it's flipping in there. There's even like a worksheet that you can use to determine if you should raise your prices, right? Like, it's crazy. Yeah. It was all present and it launched by February.

Wow. From September to February. I was just a beast and I just, I don't even, I'm looking back, I'm like, I'm not quite sure how I did that. But I did. And building that resource center out actually put me in touch with Thomas McKeever. Donald, who became my business partner over at ProCue. And we started that company about two years ago. Okay.

And it was him bringing his stuff to the table, me bringing my stuff to the table. And HomePro Toolbox is a big part of that service delivery process. And, you know, the rest is history, as they say, right? So the HomePro Toolbox is more of a digital content. It's like a buffet of amazing things. You can just go. In the library, sure, yeah. Go get what you need.

Go get you need. it's incredible for training salespeople so that if you feel like you're not really sure how to train someone and you're worried about it, it's $99 a month. Go get it and use it. It's really powerful. Where ProQ is more very high touch, you know, really get to know your business intimately, get to know you extraordinarily well and be guided by one of our professionals. We call them co-pilots. They're high-level consultants and coaches blended together who walk you through what to do in the business, right? So if you don't have the time, the bandwidth, the know-how to figure it out for yourself,

will be your outsourced thought partner to help you get there. That's really cool. So the thing that made me think about with the toolbox is like that's kind of a cool legacy thing because it's so much of your work and thoughts and like what you've learned. like it's cool that it goes somewhere because so many of us in our industry like you do all this great work and your only thing that you can see is the actual physical product but like at the end of your career you don't always have something to pass on you know what I mean like there's not like there's not something there for your legacy or your kids or whatever so it's pretty

cool that that's all somewhere and that was good advice that you got to like hey you need to go put this somewhere, not just in your own head, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, and I had this really, I called it my content vault. I had this Google Drive of hundreds of awesome. Like, I probably have done, I don't know, hundreds of sessions, workshops and speeches and keynotes and oh my, right? And virtual webinars and just probably at this point, thousands, not even hundreds. So it's, you know, I've been doing it for a long time and I've been out there in the industry, you know, for for about five years, one of the things I did is I worked with large corporations building content for their pros in the background, right? So just so much, such a huge,

rich catalog. But being able to convert it into something that people can use, the way that I've always coached is I give people something that they need when they need it, right? I'm not going to teach you five steps over here when you haven't even figured out how to make step one, right? So that very like one little thing, one little thing, one little thing. Like the bookending thing, for example, like just one little thing, get you going, get you going, and then build on that and build on that. And so that's how toolbox is created. Right. The average video is about seven minutes. Get in. Get what you need. Get out. Get in. Get what you need. Get out. Go use it. Right. I always believe that education without implementation is just entertainment. Right. And if you want to be

entertained, go to the flipping movies. Right. There's way better people out there to be entertained by than me. Okay. That's not what I'm here for. You know, if you want to be really entertained, then go pursue some entertainment, right? But don't use business education as infotainment, right? Like, you know, go use it. If you're not going to use it, if you're not going to make a commitment to, okay, now something, then why waste your time, right? Right. I mean, it's a good point. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just that feeling getting stuck. Like you actually, do want to do it. And so you're hearing it first or learning it first, but then you go like, yeah, but now I got to, now I got to do it. Right. Right. It's the gap between the inspiration and

the action where people get caught up. But the problem is they have too many ideas. It's better to take one takeaway and actually use it than to take 15 takeaways that you find overwhelming. And so because it's the enormity of the task, you do none of it. Right. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah. So the thing about the pro queue, you know, the outcomes include boosted confidence. You have improved relationships, echoing the transformative piece in the book. Yeah. You could share one vulnerable lesson from implementing ProQ with a client in a high stakes industry like ours. Yeah. How did it shift their view from relentless hustle to, you know, legacy balance, meaningful success, all that kind of stuff. Do you have an example that you can share with us?

Yeah. I think. I'm going to go back to the guy that built the three different businesses. He's kind of on the test for building that that $50 million business, probably even bigger than that. When he actually put both of his businesses through the ProCube process, and he started with one, and he was like, oh, my gosh, this is awesome. And then he rolled the next business into it. And what was holding him back was his inability to really empower someone to lead in his stead.

Right. He had to be that person. And some of it, lots of reasons. But, you know, when you're always the person and you have two successful businesses, yeah, relationships are going to burn out. Yeah, you're never going to be home. Yeah, you're not going to see your kids. And one of the things that was really awesome is he brought his son in this summer. He was on his way after college. And he brought his son in to work in the business. And he put him through the ringer, right? He made him start at the bottom and put him through the ringer and he wasn't involved. He had one of the leaders that he had coached and nurtured kind of take ownership of that of that kind of intern relationship. And he received one of the best compliments, which is like even though he's your son, where I'm still going to tell you this, he's one of the hardest workers. He's got so much going for him. And just before having the systems and the structures in place, he would have never been able to bring his son in because it would have been him personally over seeing his son's work, which would have put him in his shadow.

Right. So I think that that's a really, really cool story. There's so many like that. Right. When you can have a team designed and built that's executing to your caliber and quality standard, to your brand standard, you have so much more freedom. Right. Totally agree.

We talked a little bit about this, and this is maybe one of my kind of success. things is the legacy building piece, right? Is that we want it to outlast us somehow, whatever that looks like, it's going to be different for everybody. But your work urges people to reach high and go further, right? So how can executives align their business goals with a personal legacy that brings, you know, that true level of piece that we're searching for? Yeah.

So one of the concepts that we share in our deep dive at ProQ, so ProQ, everyone starts with a two-day intensive deep dive, which is workshopping, education, inspiration. And one of the big reasons we do that is because we want to make sure that we're all looking at the business in the same way together so that we're not having different philosophies guiding the behaviors. And one of the things that we introduce during our deep dive is the concept of being a philanthroprower. How we define that is that using your business, business as a vehicle for good. And whatever modality that shows up for you is perfect. Right. So my business partner and his wife early on in their entrepreneurial journey made a

decision that they were going to give back to the community financially, equivalent to what they had earned their first year in business. And they hit that milestone. And that was so inspiring to me, right? Because I'd never thought of that. And I mean, really, go. back to your first year in business. Is you really earn a number that's unattainable to give charitably? Probably not. Sounds really cool and fancy, but if you really think about what that number is, and I did the math myself and I was like, damn, that's a number I could hit. Right? I don't do that. So your ability to leave legacy, again, yes, there's a financial component. Your business has to be generating enough revenue and profit for you to have some financial freedom to do it. But

But your legacy isn't just in what you can do with your money. Your legacy is in the culture you build and how you train your people and how you teach them to be better humans, right? Having someone, this is another one of our really touching stories, one of our clients came to a call once and said his win, because we always have someone celebrate a win, like what was the win? His win was that one of his team members came to him and said, I'm the first person in my entire family to ever buy a house.

And I'm doing it because you gave me this job. You gave me this opportunity. And I've been able to save over these last couple of years. And I just bought my first home. Right. That's legacy. That lives beyond you. Right?

What you transmit into your team and therefore into your community has a profound effect. And you can do it unconsciously or you can do it consciously. And you can build your legacy even today. Yeah. We're still developing the financial capacity to give financially meaningfully. Right. Yeah. No, that makes total sense to me. Yeah, that culture piece, I mean, we talk about it all the time. Yeah. Especially for these younger generations, like it's vital to have it. You know, but then you got to actually, you got to do it. It's not just a you know let's put this on the freaking wall no it's got to be something that you're about and you want to be about and you know so it's it's like that philosophy of like people by

why you do it more than more than the product right so how do you talk about the why part of it and that's something that I'm kind of dealing with too is like you know let's let's really kind of dive deep into this why why are we doing this what are we doing like when people are looking on our proposals and it's very similar product and service. Why are they going to buy from you? Right. And sometimes it just takes that 5% change. Right?

You just change it 5% and that little 5% difference, the way you talk about it, what you talk about, what you put the emphasis on. So I always say like don't put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. Right. So it makes the word sound here. It really sounds funky. But if you adjust it just slightly, sometimes like, oh, bang, now I see it. Right.

And again, into the in the deep eye, we spend, we do a whole workshop on that. Because knowing what the heartbeat of your business is, knowing the business that you're really, really truly in, right? Everybody listening thinks that they're in construction or in remodeling or in home services. You're not, right? That's the product or the thing you deliver.

But that's not the business you are really, really, really, really truly in. And when you can understand what is that business that you're really in, then you can talk about it with that 5% difference that makes 100%. percent of an impact. Yeah, totally. I'm looking forward to figuring that out. Another thing that you talk a lot about is self-acceptance. For construction pros, you know, we really always almost always start from the ground up. You know, this is something that is a low barrier of entry, right? You know, a lot of people can go get a contractor's license, but typically we don't have a lot of business experience. So, you know, what practical steps from

the tenacious pursuit of peace can help them embrace where they are today without losing sight of where they want to grow, if that makes. No, makes total sense. You know, imposter syndrome is really real. Yeah. And it's because people have this mindset of fake it till you make it. And I would just like to pause it before I give a little practical tip that show it till you grow it is a way more empowering way than fake it till you make it. Because if the heart and soul of fake it until you make it is faking it, is pretending, right, versus showing something until you grow it, right? Just show it and practice it and show up and show it again and show it again and show it again. And eventually the skill will build behind it to support it is a very different come from place. And I think that so often, especially in construction, people feel like they have to, they have to show it. They have to pretend. There's a lot of posturing.

In the home, in the construction space, there is a lot of chest pounding. There is a lot of people who are broke as broke as broke, taking a whole group of people to the steakhouse and putting that on the credit card when they're not going to be able to pay their staff in five weeks. Yeah, yeah, no doubt. Let's not pretend, right? Yeah. Plenty of people who have externally successful businesses who are internally broken.

and who are even financially, like, barely making it, hardly holding down by their fingertips, right? That's not good, right? That's just you want, I call that a vanity metric. You want to be able to brag and to say how good you are and all that. There is no neon sign above anybody's head with their net worth. No. Nobody knows what your net worth is.

Nobody knows, right? Unless you tell them. But there's so much of that. strutting and pretending and posturing and fluffing up the feathers without like genuine authenticity right right some of the people who are standing on stage saying how awesome they are I've had behind the scenes conversations with them and them being like I am freaking terrified right I don't actually know what I'm I don't know how I did that right right that is so sad yeah I'm all about be authentically where you are, it's okay if your business looks like it's doing really well

and you're still struggling a bit. You don't have to pretend so hard. Right. So one of the really simple techniques that I can point towards is actually one of the exercises in the book is called it's just radical gratitude. Being extremely, extremely grateful for what you have today and for where you are today. And you can find it on my speaker website. So Madeline McCray.com slash gifts. There's a there's actually a radical gratitude 21 day challenge where you'll get a new email every day for 21 days that forces you to have a moment of gratitude for something that you

may or may not want to find gratitude for, right? And that persistent drip of gratitude is incompatible with that. that, you know, with that mindset of not enoughness. Yeah. Makes total, again, makes total sense to me. Everything you're saying makes total sense. It's almost like I knew what I was talking about. My gosh.

How did that happen? Yeah. I mean, a lot of this, like I said in the open, a lot of this is about self-discovery. And, you know, it's tough for a lot of us. And maybe that's our industry and being, quote, manly and being tough. and all that stuff is self-discovery is a difficult thing. Sometimes it's a painful thing.

Can you share a story from your coaching, you know, with a business owner that illustrates how this process of self-discovery led to both personal healing as well as the professional breakthroughs? Because like you said before, these are related. Yeah. You can't just make a bunch of money and then that's going to create happiness. How many stories have we heard about that? It's, if you're broken already and you make.

a bunch of money, you're still going to be broken with just more money. It's just, right. So how do we kind of link those two together in that self-discovery process? Yeah. So self-discovery, you hit it right on the head. It isn't easy, right? Because we take really for granted some of our most miraculous gifts, right? The things that we are just like wildly gifted for, it's just our normal, right?

It's that old adage of the bird who's flying and there's a pond. and comes over to the edge of the pond. There's this cute little fish, and the bird leans over, and the fish comes to the top of water, and the bird says, oh, my gosh, I've always wanted to ask this to a fish. Like, how's the water? And the fish looks up at the bird and says, what's water? Right?

The thing that we're observing someone else, like, oh, my gosh, they're in this really cool, unique space. For them, it's their normal. It's the air they breathe. It is just normal. And being able to stop and to recognize, what is incredibly unique and special about you, about the company that you've built,

about how you go about doing what you do, is a superpower. Because too many people take for granted the things that they complimented for all the time because it seems so normal. If someone is taking time out of their day to stop and to recognize you for something, listen,

because they're telling you you're exceptional in this way. and it's really hard for us to accept because it feels so pedestrian to us. It feels like, oh, that's the thing that everyone likes about me. Oh, great. Like, who cares?

It's just so normal. But it's normal. It's normal for you. It doesn't mean it's normal. So a really great story about that. Actually, my very first year-long private coaching client. This was,

you know, a decade ago now. Actually, 2016, it's literally just talking to him yesterday. And he was kind of talking about his story and coming full circle. At the time, he was building about a $5 million business, and now we got a $15 million business, right, with his whole family working peacefully together, where before they were in a pretty significant kerfuffle. And, you know, our work together really helped save his family dynamic. And part of understanding that process, part of what we did was understanding what is the gifts that each one of them brings the table and what roles should each one of them have.

When you have murkiness in your business and everyone just kind of doing everything, helter, and there's no formality in what is this person's role in function? What is this person's role in function? What is this person's role in function? What happens is there's no ability to accelerate in your area of gifting and you end up lurching. Like everyone's kind of lurching and getting resentful and stepping on toes. Right. So that was actually really practical example of not only did it.

help their business grow exponentially, but it created harmony in their family because there was way less toe stepping. And each person had an area where they're in charge of that decision, right? And that's, and that's a different way of going about your business than, then how to everyone living through a vote. Everyone's going to vote on it. Well, that's dumb if everyone's going to vote on it when you're actually the one who knows the most about it, right? Why don't your vote count for more? Right. So that was a really, like just yesterday. I was meeting with actually my original client and his son, who's now their COO. And it was a really cool conversation, but that's exactly where we started, was understanding what do you bring to the table? What are your strengths? What are your gifts? And what role are you therefore most well suited for whether you like that title or not? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes hard conversations, for sure.

Yeah, and the other thing that we I'd like to kind of talk about is we're very busy people, obviously. A lot of times we work hard. Some of us are a little bit on the workaholic side of things. And a lot of us high achievers tend to, you know, not have enough time for family life, maybe marriages, things like that. So, you know, what is kind of some of your insight there, especially talking about this piece component of your book? Yeah. How do you guide us high achievers through those sometimes choppy waters? Yeah.

Well, I mean, it takes one to no one, right? So I myself am a somewhat in recovery workaholic. Back in my corporate days, I used to literally sleep with my laptop. I actually remember one time my son's dad came over to my apartment. And he was like, oh, sorry. I literally had like all my stuff was on his side of it. I was just working. And he was like an awkward.

awkward and I was like, I'm sorry. I was so blind to it. Right. I literally used to sleep with my work. I would wake up at 2.30 in the morning and I'd be like, think, ideas, emails. My outlook adjusted to send all my emails at 8 a.m. because people are like, Madeline, why are you working at 3 a.m? What are you doing? Right. So I just let Outlook fix that for me. So when I made the transition, so my journey is unique in that I became a solo parent somewhat unexpectedly. My son's dad and I weren't working out. I took a bit of a break from the relationship. I tell the story in the book, took a break from the relationship,

and that break turned into a breakup when I found out he was already in relationship with someone else. My son was 16 months old, and I was taking a break visiting my parents, and I ended up living in my parents' basement for two years. and that was a very hard ego move for me. I had a big, beautiful house that he was living in, right? And it was a very hard thing for me to wrap my mind around. But what it forced me to do was I've always wanted to be a mom.

That was really important to me. And as it turns out, my son is autistic and dyslexic and ADHD and also gifted. And, you know, and I had to learn how to not just be a solo parent, but how to be a solo parent to a child with very specific needs. And it forced me to let go of my workaholism because I wanted to be present. I actually taught my son when he was three years old when I was on my phone too much to say, Mommy, please put down your phone. Mommy, please put down your phone. Mommy, please. And one night, I was home from work.

and he had been with my mom all day and then I moved out of the basement I was in my own place and he he said three times to me in like 20 minutes mommy please put down your phone and that was the day that I decided I don't have any self-control

so I have structure instead of self-control so willpower there's only so much of it that you have and I was using all of my willpower and so many other things I just didn't have it to give over there but what I could do was implement structure.

So what I did at the end of every day is I deleted all of my work apps from my phone before I drove home. That was hard, hard to do. Did you reinstall them? What was that? Did you reinstall them? Every morning. Every morning. I would delete all my work apps at the end of the day and I would reinstall them every morning.

It took five minutes, right? It wasn't that long of a commitment, but that meant that I was, and I left my work laptop at work. That meant from the time I left work to the time I showed back up in the morning, I was entirely unplugged. And I had no choice, but to give that time to my relationship with my son, to my relationship with myself, to my health and well-being, to my friends, right? And that decision alone cut the core of the workaholism. And by the way, my business grew.

It didn't shrink when I did that. You must have had a good team around you, yes. Yeah, I didn't have a big team. I had a small team, but I was extremely good at setting boundaries with my clients. Expectations. Letting you. I am absolutely going to get back to you. And I told them, I said, I value my family life.

Right. So I don't work at night. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of us do. struggle with the boundaries. So a lot of us struggle with, for me, it was in the beginning, it was going on vacations and still working, you know, like just not on being able to completely unplug. Yes. I mean, if you feel like you're relaxing, you're on a lawn chair and you're relaxing

for a little bit, you might be still thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. It takes a couple of days to genuinely unplug and then to actually have that restfulness. So I teach something called the money test, which is, you know, all the tasks in your business have a certain monetary value and if you as the owner are doing them right there's a $10 hour task 100,000 and $10,000 an hour tasks right then rest vacation time off friends and family $10,000 hour task because they refuel you so that you don't bring burnout so you don't bring exasperated and being exacerbated and being just like can't handle anything right when you come back refueled refreshed you have more creativity you have more patience you have more

passion. You have more all these things that are will exponentially help and improve your business. Right. So that that's another antidote to burnout that we were talking about like earlier. And it's really important that yes, you do need a well functioning machine behind you to do that. Like great procedures, great team, great culture. Everyone needs to understand. And even just communicating with your clients, right? If you, if your message to your clients was we believe so much in family, we care so deeply about family that our staff from the hours of this to this are not allowed to respond to emails. Their whole attitude towards that is going to be wildly different. Right. It's all in how you tell the story. It's how you frame it up, right? And when you

can share the heart behind it, you said it earlier. People are going to want to do business with that. Right. Right. Blacks tell stories and heart sells. Yeah. Yeah. sell your idea to your client and they won't care. They'll know, yes, they will absolutely get back to me first thing in the morning. Unless there is a life, left emergency or whatever you can. There's no fire. Yeah. We find emergencies are real.

Sure. That's the exception. Manage the exceptions, but build to the rule and give your space as yourself space as the head of the company to decide what you have rules to me. Right. Yeah. Excellent. If you could leave us as construction leaders with one vulnerable story or key insight from the tenacious pursuit of peace, which you probably already have shared, that transforms how we all

view success and legacy, what would it be? So at the very last chapter of the book, spoiler alert, okay, spoiler alert. I tell the story of the, uh, the, uh, the, the, night that my son's dad died and our very, very last conversation. He died in 2021, wildly unexpectedly of a heart attack. And the last conversation that we ever had was about him being able to forgive himself for some of the missteps that he had made. And that lesson of acknowledging that you may have been the one, who did the wrong thing and being able to forgive yourself first and transform the experience

that you're having and the experience that other people are having. So often a lack of self-forgiveness is what fuels us to prove or to over-exert, right? Where we could just find peace and forgive ourselves first. First of all, it becomes easier to forgive other people for much smaller things. And it just changes how we pursue what we pursue. And that shift in us creates a shift in our culture, which then creates the ripple effect that we've talked about multiple times throughout the day. Love it. That's a great way to end the show. Thank you so much, Madeline, for being here. It's wealth of information and key nuggets, like we promised. They're all there. So thanks again. for being here. Tell everybody how to get in touch with you if they want to learn more about your

multiple businesses there. Yeah. So I'm very present on LinkedIn. So Madeline McCray, I'm easy to find on LinkedIn. You can find me on my speaker website, which is madeline McCray.com. And you can also tune into my podcast, which is called Scaling the Gap. So those are three great ways you can find me. Awesome. Thanks again for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah. You are so very welcome. Thanks again for being here. That's another episode of construction. Executive's Live. We'll see you next month. Thank you so much. You've been listening to In The Zone and Construction Executives Live with Jeremy Owens. Be sure to subscribe to In The Zone and stay in the know with the best minds in the

construction industry. To nominate an innovator or changemaker in the construction industry, connect with your management peers and stay up to date with construction industry news. Be sure to visit usconstructionzone.com.