EntreLeadership - What People Don’t Tell You About Being a CEO with Keaton Turner

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

We hate to burst your bubble, but being a CEO isn’t as glamorous as it seems. Keaton Turner, president and founder of the fast-growing mining company Turner Mining Group, knows this all too well. In just four years, his company has exploded, turning the centuries-old industry upside down with its people-first approach. But with that growth comes the pressure for the people in charge to keep up—or else watch their company culture get out of control. In this episode, Turner gets vulnerable about what makes leadership so hard and what he’s doing to keep growing into the leader his business needs so it can get to the next level.   entreleadership.com/podcast Turning Mining Group’s website Turning Mining Group’s Instagram Turning Ming Group’s LinkedIn Keaton Turner’s Instagram EntreLeadership Elite Advisory Groups The Ramsey Show SmartDollar’s website How to Create Core Values EntreLeadership Partners Schedule a call with Tim, the Producer   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've talked with thousands of business owners over the last two decades, and what most of them have told me about their journey is they started out because they needed money. They were good at something. They had an idea, and they had bills to pay, and so they built a business. And then what happens is when you build a business, you know, things get hard. And to keep pushing through the hard crap that you have to do in business, well, you have to have more than just a desire to make money. You have to have a burning desire to make a difference.

from the Ramsey Network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Keaton Turner. Keaton is the president and founder of Turner Mining Group, a national contract mining company with over 150 team members and growing. Keaton knows what it's like to start a business from scratch, with no resources, nothing in your pocket, but what he had was a burning desire, a desire to make a difference.

and he has pushed through failure. He has pushed through the storms. He's built an incredible team and an organization that's absolutely flourishing. But he didn't start out running his own business right out of college. He started out where most of us started out with a job, a job in his family's business. He was working for his uncle's excavating company.

In college, I started working for my uncle. He had a small, heavy civil company, excavation company. We dug football fields, landfills, we did some mining work. And so I did that. Went to Indiana State to be what I thought at the time was an estimator for commercial construction. You know, one thing led to another. I just took off with the family business and did that. And, you know, woke up one day. It's kind of a wild story. Some people might connect with it, but a lot of people think I'm crazy. Woke up one day, 27 years old, right for my birthday.

And I had just read some statistics about how long male men live in the U.S. And I realized a third of my life was over. And that just hit me right in the, and I'd already had some maybe entrepreneurial thoughts or whatever happens. But, yeah, I just decided to start my own thing. Just like that. Just like that. Did you resign that? day or did you kind of talk with your wife? Yeah, I talked with my wife. She was super supportive

because I couldn't have done it. You know, wouldn't be here doing this if I had a wife that wasn't. Because we had a, we had a two-year-old little boy at the time, brand new baby that had just been born, a mortgage, a dog, you know, the full thing, right? It's not like I was some single dude that just stacked a bunch of cash away. So she was super supportive. My uncle had created an awesome successful company and still wanted to run it. And he had a son that wanted to be involved and still wanted to run it. And I saw a big white space in the mining industry. I thought it was super untapped, especially with all the young people, getting off on a tangent, the average age of the miner in the U.S. is 52 years old. So why is that? You know, how many people, how many young,

you have young kids or you know young people that just grow up and like, I want to go mine? No one thinks about it, right? It's kind of an antiquated job. Yeah, and it's, it's, most people when you ask them about mining, they think of coal mining that's dark, scary, dirty, you know, dangerous, you can die. Yeah, I think of like West Virginia, you go down in a cavern with hard hats on. And it's just not, that's just not what it is. So there's, I mean, you guys do, is like strip mining? We're all above ground. So no underground, just above ground. Surface mining, surface mining. Surface mining. surface mining. And we're just a service provider. So we don't own the mine. We don't own the mineral or the rock or the dirt or the gold, whatever it is. We serve as gold producers, platinum producers, aggregate companies, cement companies, specialty minerals. The stuff, the little bitty powder that's on the like a wriggly gum wrapper, that's rock. Huh. Comes from the ground in Montana. Really? Really. So, you know, there's a saying in the industry, if it's a thing, if it's,

It's not farmed, it's mined. It's just the truth. It comes from the ground. Yeah. How is mining different than excavating? I would say excavating is a specific activity. Mining is a whole sector. It's a whole industry. It's a massive industry. There's over 11,000 active mines in the U.S. Really? Yeah. Wow.

Thomas, our COO, who's an awesome, legit guy, Harvard MBA, just a great guy. He's better suited to be on this than I am. He, you know, he says funny things like kids grow up on a farm here in America. No kids grow up on a mine. So, you know, farming is, some would say, a lost art, right? Or if you grow up in a farm town, your certain style of kid, no kids growing up on a mine site. So there's a massive uneducation happening. It makes a lot of sense.

Like in my case, my great grandparents were cotton farmers. and I didn't grow up on the farm, but we grew up going to the farm. Like there was a familiar, we would go out and we'd pull weeds, and we'd mess with the horses and the cattle and everything. And there was a farming culture in our family, even though I wasn't literally waking up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows every morning. Yeah, well, you visit grandma.

But had my great-granddad worked at a mine, I never would have gone to a mine as his kid or grandkid. Yeah. So there's a massive gap. There is a massive age gap. There's going to be a huge labor shortage. There's a windfall coming. And I'm hoping, I'm thinking, but hoping we're maybe five or ten years early ahead of it.

I'm trying to build a business right now where we can capitalize on this windfall. It's hard to build a business, A. It's really hard to build a business in an industry as, you know, arguably the oldest industry on the planet, which is mining, you know. And it's also a real hard thing to do when you talk about upskilling young people, 18 to 25-year-old kids. How do those kids learn from the 52-year-olds? That is a challenge. Young kids don't want to listen. I'm 32.

I didn't want to listen to my dad. That's so true. I didn't want to listen to my dad's buddies. I thought they're all full of crap, you know. So it's a challenging industry, but there's a big white space there. So you kind of saw that when you started? I did because I saw how old, you know, at my uncle's company, we really had two, kind of two sides of the business. We had the old guys that my uncle had known and they'd worked in the business and, you know, or they knew someone that it knew someone.

They were the older guys, right? The old dogs, rough, gruff, smoked three packs a day, drank a warm beer for lunch. That happened. And then you had these young guys that were my age that skipped college that. that didn't really have any other choice. They knew how to move dirt. They liked tractors. They liked trucks.

They ended up working for, you know, an excavation company. And so there's just not really anyone in between. And when you do find people that are in between, they don't like being in between because they should be mid-management, but maybe they're not. It's just a real interesting time for that industry. I'm trying to imagine what it was like your first day where you were no longer. working for your uncle and you're going to set off and start a mining company. I mean, this is a big equipment, earth movers, excavators, then you got to have people to drive the trucks. I mean, there's a lot of front end cost and staffing and getting everything launched. Yeah. Like, how did you go

from, I just want to start a mining company to actually being able to bid on a job? It's a great question. It's so funny because this week I had a conversation with one of our guys. One of the guys I've known for 10 years, he works for our company. He said, you know, I want to go start my own little company. And I said, man, that's awesome. Couldn't be more pumped for you. But it got me thinking after our conversation, and I didn't even really expect to say this or feel this way. Had I known four years ago what I know now, I probably wouldn't have started the company.

I just, I don't know how else is. That's just me being on. It is so taxing, stressful, anxiety, like probably even depression. I'm not a guy that gets depressed. I'm pretty optimistic. You know, life is short. When did that kick in? Probably day three, right?

Like day one, you're kind of still on, you know, day two, you're calling all the people that you know. Some people you probably shouldn't call for other reasons, but calling everybody that you know. And I had all the connections in the industry, you know. I say all. I had a ton of connections in the industry. I had a ton of equipment dealers that just wanted to do business, right? Their young kid, hungry kid, somewhat successful, helped build a business already. It took us almost a year to win our first thing. And I say us, I co-founded the company with a buddy in mine I grew up with, smart guy, way smarter than I am. I would never

start a company ever again without a partner. How did you wait? You've got a two-year-old. Yeah. It took you a year. Yeah. How'd you buy groceries? So, so fortunately, I did have a little bit of money saved up, but also Gant, the buddy that started it with me, he was running another small company. And so he said, you know what? I'll go in with you. We'll start this company. He had really pushed on me to start it for a year because he's even crazier than I am, Big thinker. But he's like, hey, I'll help you out. You know, I'll get you started. I'll, you know, I'll cover whatever salary you need to make, modest salary back then. And, you know, we'll get started. And because we're at that point, you're in it together, right? Like, when we weren't winning any work,

and I thought I'd have a job within a month. I thought we'd have a contract in place. I'd be moving dirt in a month. Do you think that was because were you a little delusional because it's your uncle's place, like jobs were coming in? Yeah, it just was kind of a given that would happen. I think so many people underestimate, not only was I a 27-year-old kid who's, you know, how many people are going to go take a real chance on a 27-old kid. I was also emotionally charged. And I've learned now just, and I'm not, I'm not by any means amazing at it, but I've learned to just take emotion out of the decision-making in business. Because emotion so many times has come back to wreck havoc on the decisions I've made. Well, they're good or bad, right? I've made decisions emotionally show. I've got this 48-hour rule. When things happen, when I get an email from a client or an employee or I hear bad news and I want to go respond and just go fix it right then, I wait 48 hours.

And it's amazing how different my responses. Sometimes I end up saying, you know what, that's not even worthy of a response 48 hours later. But, yeah, as a 27-year-old kid. Yeah, at 27, what's an example of being emotionally charged where it was a problem? things are going to come your way, right? I'm doing it for my uncle's company. I can go do it on my own. And it's, I know how to bid work.

And you don't know what you don't know. Yeah. Right? Like you just, and that's, I think that's one of the things I've also realized is you got to put people around you who can tell you the things you don't know or tell you your gaps or your weaknesses. Because especially young, and we just talked about somebody earlier who, as they mature, it's going to be amazing to see what they do.

As a young person, it's so much more, the impacts, the negative, the potential negative impacts are so much more frequent because you just haven't lived long enough. You got a lot of blind spots. Yeah. You haven't been burned by as many people. You haven't had as many contracts fall through your fingertips. You haven't landed as many contracts that end up blowing up in your face. You know, you just, there's a reason why the old dudes that have been doing this forever have all these scars and battle wounds. and stories and like they've lived through it all.

You mentioned the significance of putting smarter people around you or maybe even more mature people around you. How'd you figure out that that mattered? Man, it took me way too long. It probably took me two years. You know, I love being around smart people to challenge. I had a big ego and still, a lot of people would say still do. Early on in the business, I had a big ego and thought, this thing's going to run around me, right?

the business is my last name. I'm going to make the decisions. When we started adding one or two smart people, they started shining light on the mistakes I was making. The bad math I was doing when I estimated something. The emotional responses that I was making. I could give you a million different examples. And then you start to step back and realize, well, this, I'm not as good as I thought I was. I do not know as much as I thought. And without those people, and it's funny, it's snowballs. You get a couple of those people, they attract a couple more people. And it can snowball the opposite way. You get a few bad people or a few people with egos or whatever. It's easy to start attracting more of those people. So I've learned some real hard, expensive lessons over the last

four years and and my thesis has now changed, you know, used to be good human beings first. That's what I wanted. It's all I cared about. Let's get good human beings on the team. Then it started to change to let's get good human beings with some experience, right? Because we were a young staff, young team. Let's get some guys with experience. Now it's let's get good human beings who are ridiculously smart, super talented, and super passionate. The experience thing's still nice to have, but I know some young guys who are talented, smart, and a good human being, and they're just, they just go farther, you know. But the passion, when the passion thing's gone or you don't have that in somebody,

man, it's frustrating to watch. You know, I can relate to being young and arrogant and, you know, just feeling like, I've got this. and then you fall down and your knees get bloody or then somebody comes in and challenges you on your numbers and you're like, oh, I really don't know what I'm talking about. I've had these moments where those were really good for me in terms of helping me become humble.

But then there was also times I started to wonder, like, do I have what it takes? Did you ever get to a point where you're going, man, maybe this was a mistake, or maybe I don't really know what I'm doing enough to keep going forward? Yeah, I mean, shoot, as early as yesterday, I probably thought that in some capacity. I was going to resign and give up my position as CEO earlier this year.

Really? No lie. I had walked in, Thomas, our COO, Gant, our CFO, co-founder, I told those guys, I'm like, listen, we can go find someone that can run this company better than me, and we can afford to pay them. what am I, why, why am I the one trying to push this rope uphill? And it's a long story. It's been a frustrating season. We've made a ton of change. We just opened a new office in Salt Lake. We've started to win contracts way bigger than what we've previously done. There's been a lot of people just working their faces off. And of course, you add COVID on top of all of that. It just, you get to a point where it only takes one or two things with a whole closet full of skeletons.

It only takes one or two things for it all just to crash. And I took my 48 hours. They talked me off the ledge. But yeah, I mean, I've had it more than one time. What gives you the courage to come on a nationally recognized podcast and say something that's that raw that just a few months ago you were literally thinking? about resigning a CEO? Well, it's one of the lessons I've had to learn with humility. And it's a hard lesson to learn.

But I just feel very confident. I'm not fit to run our company forever. And I mean, you could argue I'm not fit to run it. You could find someone better to run it right now. I believe it. You could find a Fortune 1,000 CEO that wants to go jump into a hot young mining startup and could run it better. that's just the truth.

I don't know how it's not me even being humble. I'd like to say that's me sitting here. It's just the truth. But you don't seem down and that. Like you seem humble, but you've got this confidence of like, but I'm leading. Like I'm going forward.

The reason I haven't made the decision to do that and went and found somebody, I don't think there's someone better to run it five years from now with me learning the lessons. that I'm learning now at the pace I'm learning them. That's good. I mean, I'll just, I'll tell you, we've had a couple projects early on where we made ridiculous money.

I mean, I'm talking enough money that I could just hung it up and retired. Gant and I both could have retired. And instead of doing that, we said, we're building this thing for the next 30 years, 50 years. It's going to last beyond us, if we're lucky, if we do it right. So we took those profits and we've rolled them into marketing. We've rolled them into estimating more jobs and doing some jobs at a loss to go get the lessons. Like, I mean, lawsuits, and you just, you learn so many lessons. I think in the next five years, the pace at which I'm learning lessons, I don't think there's going to be somebody better.

That's my hope. That's my thesis. No, I agree. It takes tremendous vision and maturity, but I'm also going to say it takes a lot of purpose to double down like that. very few people would have the option to retire, but then go all the way back in if they didn't have a huge purpose or a why. Yeah. That's like, hey, we're not here just for money. We want to make a difference.

What was that for you guys? What were those conversations like? Well, it's changed a lot. I mean, early on, I'll just be clear, I'm not like a mission, vision, purpose guy. I don't live in the raw, raw, fluffy. Like, there are people that sit down. That's all they want to talk about, right? that really wasn't me. Now, I had a lot of it deep down. I'm just not a real emotional guy. I didn't

really, you know, verbalize any of it. I got some good people around me that helped us do that. What really, I mean, obviously we want to make an impact in the industry, right? Our mission is to make life better in the mining industry. You can do that a lot of ways. You can help 18-year-old kids working for a mining company take one of Dave Ramsey's course and change the course of their life. I think everybody that works for us should retire a millionaire. I think that's super doable. Come on. You max out your IRA, you know, you do it the right way, 401K, we match, you do, these guys are making ridiculous money, right?

We pay for housing, and we're no different than a lot of companies, a lot of construction companies, you should retire from them a millionaire. No one's teaching anybody that. So there are a lot of ways we can make the industry better. I won't say that we have yet, but I think we're learning lessons and doing things now to put us in a position long term to do that. you guys talk like what was it for you that kept you from just hanging it up and going to the beach why did you get back in it i was scared honestly that i that i that i you've probably seen these people right successful people they hit it they sell their company whatever what do you do like how empty would that like because i'm i'm really i'm one of those guys yeah i would i would i would take some

money i would go buy a few things maybe a car maybe another beat like maybe how you know buy stuff How long does that fill you up, though? Right? Like, Dave, you got, like, there are people that can buy anything they want. They show up and work every day, though, right? And they're changing lives. I know it sounds cliche and cheesy to say. I think two years after retiring at 29 or 30 years old, I'll be going crazy.

God just a sense you had. I just didn't design me to do that. Had you met people? Was that kind of an innate thing? Were there people around you that had either, the bad version of that or the good version you were looking at? Because that's, that's a lot of wisdom at 29 that's pretty unique. You know, I don't know. I wish I could tell you. I mean, I've watched enough people become successful and never stop working to wonder why. Like,

you ever know those people that just work their life away and they've got enough money they don't have to, but they're making an impact on other people's lot. Yeah, they're still going. That's always been super fascinating to me. It's also, I know myself. And I think as an entrepreneur, whatever that means this day and age, the first thing an entrepreneur needs to master is knowing who they really are. Not only what your strengths and weakness are, but really who are you? Like, what is your purpose? You know, is it just to go make some money, sell the company, buy the car, buy the hat? Like, because I don't think long-term. term that that fulfills you, sustains you. I don't think that's really a purpose. You know, so I think really knowing yourself, and I know myself well enough to know that hanging it up that early, I'd go crazy. I'd drive my wife crazy. I'd be a, I'd be a worse father,

you know, even being home more. I'd probably be a worse father because I'm not, I'm not filling my cup. I'm the same. I mean, the idea of retirement just sounds like a purposeless existence. Yeah. I mean, it's, I think when you really truly grasp how short life is, you know, life is but a vapor. Like, when you really grasp how short you're alive, 32 now, my life's well beyond a third of the way over. Maybe. That should scare you. 96. 99. Yeah, I mean, if I can make that long grade, you know, that really rattled me. But it wakes you up for sure. What the heck am I going to do with my life? The little bit that I have, you know, because I was created to do something.

And Ed Milet, I don't know if you guys, you know, know him, follow him whatever. He's got this illustration that he talks about when he, someday when he dies, goes to heaven, meets God. God is going to have a version of Ed Milet standing there looking back at him and it was the best version of himself that he could be. When I hear that, I'm like, man, I got a lot of work to do because I am chasing that best version of who I want to be. That's what is really. awesome. If there comes a time when what I'm doing with Turner Mining Group or any company that I'm involved with is not getting me closer to that, that's time to walk away, do something different, whatever. You talked about the importance of knowing who you are and getting to that personal

purpose that gives you the fortitude to keep going or to be involved with the mission or to double down or whatever the case may be. Did you have a sense of who you were or were there some exercises or things you went through to figure that out. How did you get that clarity? You know, I had a pretty good sense at the time, but I've always, I mean, since I started the company, I've invested not only dollars, but time in developing myself as a leader. So I took a 52-week, very intensive leadership course called Stagan to help me become a little bit better version of a CEO. I'm involved in a group now with other CEOs. One guy's got he's a billion, you know, got 10,000 employees.

I'm learning from this guy, you know, so I'm all the time trying to sharpen and really figure out who am I and who do I want to be and what does the best version of myself look like. But I think having people around me that are willing to be honest and really me allowing them to be honest. has helped that probably more than anything. I think you tapped into something. I don't know if it was on purpose or on accident, but it's extremely important for small business owners, CEOs, founders to not be isolated.

It's why we have a coaching program because what we figured out, we started early on, I sold tickets to our entree leadership event. I was like the founding member of Entree leadership. And all we had was this live event, and it was once a year. And so I would sell tickets and we'd fill it up.

And people would get all this information and they would go back out to change the world. And I would stay, you know, plugged in with them because we had a relationship with them now. And three months, they'd call and they go, ah, things aren't so good. Six months, some of them would call, they'd be dying on the vine. Some of them would go out of business. And it was like, what is going on? Like, they have everything they need to win. We gave it to them at the conference.

And what we figured out is that isolation is the biggest enemy of a small business owner. And you figured out a way to not be isolated is what you're saying. You're plugged in with other leaders who are pushing you. I said it maybe even before we jumped on here. I'll never be involved in another business without a partner. An equity partner, someone that is pulling in the same direction I am. And sometimes you're not always pulling the same direction. Someone's got skin in the game who is a good human being that's going to make you better.

I mean, I just fundamentally believe in it. And I was really at a crossroads when I started my company. I could have done this on my own. I truly believe that. I could have started the company. And Gant, by the way, would have been fine with it. He said, hey, you start it by yourself or with me. Either way, just go do something.

I chose him. And it's the single best decision I've ever made in my life. We wouldn't be, I wouldn't be, I might not be alive had I not had a part. It's so, entrepreneurship is so lonely. Being the CEO is not glamorous. People think starting a business. having the title of founder, CEO is this glamorous thing. It is the opposite.

Most people only see the highlight real. They only see the Instagram or the LinkedIn. They don't see what real CEOs feel and what real entrepreneurs feel. And it's not even anything that you can read in a book or hear on a podcast. It is like, it's tough. It's dark. and if you don't have somebody that can pull you up or you can pull them up, I don't know how people do it. You know, kudos to the CEOs and entrepreneurs that are doing it by themselves and are mentally sane. I would be insane.

Very few people do it. And I mean, you're talking about a formal partnership, but the ones that I know do it really well without a partner and equity partner, they're plugged in. They've got mentors, coaches, they're paying for their own development. They just work really hard to make sure that they're not out there flying in the way. end all by themselves. Because I think you just, like you're saying, it is so hard. And I built entree leadership here as kind of the, I guess, owner of a business unit, right? So I'm doing a lot of the aspects of that, but I can't imagine doing that without Dave and our board members and other sharp leaders around me because the number of times per week that I'll go to another leader and go, all right, I got a problem. What do you think? Like just walking out of a 30-minute conversation that I could not see the solution.

And then they said a few things that all of a sudden I've got a new spark. I've got new ideas. I've got new commitment, new energy. It's that, I mean, I don't love the word collaboration because it's such a buzzword that's kind of overused. But when you connect with another human who's for you, you just have power that you didn't have. Yeah, I totally agree. I use, you know, the picture of filling my cup up.

And I know how quickly my cup can be drained. There's a lot of things that drain it in the business. specifically, but I know there's a couple people that I can go to on the worst days in business who are going to fill that cup back up. And they might not even know they're doing it, right? They're not, they may, I think they're intentional with spending time, but it's not always the equity partner that's doing it, right? It's people that are, that have skin in the game of you and your dreams and what you want to be. The people that really are thinking about that, it's it's just i think it's critical i i i don't know how people that are going to go build something

successful aren't getting filled up i just don't know how they do it you've done a lot of work to build a rock star team you said depending on yeah win in the year before the show you're saying 150 to 300 team members yeah depending on seasonality and contracts under management all that yes anywhere in that range huge team four years in i mean that that that could be a total zoo if you didn't have core values in culture. It has been at times. And I imagine at times, but it stands out to me and just kind of learning about what you guys do. The team loves being there, and you guys have really built something special. And what might be perceived as, I mean, you said it's the oldest industry on the planet, right? It's kind of attired, it's predictable,

it's just a job. It's a bunch of blue-collar guys. They just come to work and punch a clock, but not at your company. How did you design that? Yeah. And that's, one of the lessons I'm learning right now. You know, we have gone through phases where the culture has been amazing and people are on fire. And then we've gone through valleys, dry seasons, where, you know, you see a couple key people quit or we fire a couple key people for X, Y, Z reasons and the team starts to get down. You know, we, I mentioned we just started a new office out in Salt Lake. So, now the team is split. We just divided the company in two, so to speak. And so there's all this, you know, back and forth with, you know, communication. And so it's one of the lessons I'm learning right now.

It's so easy to forget who we are and what is our purpose. And really, I mean, you know, a heart for people is a core value of ours. And if we forget for a week or two weeks or a month, that heart for people thing, it's crazy how cool. quickly the culture can change. And that's the lesson I think that I'm learning now. And so a lot of that comes with communication. I know a lot of companies have felt it with COVID, you know, working via Zoom and Microsoft Teams, right? You don't feel connected to a person. And so that, you know, interpersonal relationships start to fizzle out. And then when some conflict comes in, you know, the business environment, people are quicker to go at each other, right? I really think it's my job.

as the guy, the CEO, the founder with the big vision to keep our team all pulling the same direction. Super easy for people to get isolated and think about their priorities for their role and not the priorities are the big picture of the company. Somebody's got to bring everyone back down to earth and say, hey, guys, this is where we're going together. This is what we're doing. But it's, I mean, culture is not, there's no magic recipe. You know, early on, I wanted to all the people, the heroes of our story, we did that for a year or two. It was amazing, some amazing content. Then you see some people leave and it's like, wait a second, that hero of the story is now gone and there's somewhere. So there's some weirdness about that. But it's, there's no secret

recipe with culture. You know, treat people well. Be a good human being. Surround yourself with good human beings. Be a good example. Right. Like if I was a phony, you can only hide it for so long. The truth is going to come out. If we have a bunch of phonies on our team, the truth is going to come out, you know. So I'm really focused on good human beings who can come on to our team and pour into other people. If they're just a good human being and they just stay right there in their lane and they never pour into anybody, the whole team, you know, is not rising all at the same time. I like what you said about not being a phony. As leaders, we really have to model our values.

Our values have to be our actual values. I've always said if your implicit values are different than your explicit values, then you're building a house of cards. It's going to crumble. And there's plenty of leaders that have done the exercise of, okay, we're going to get core values and we put them on the wall. But then internally, they're not living that way. And what the team follows is what you do, not what you say.

And when they're watching you, yell at the vendor and cuss somebody out, but then on the core values on the wall, it says, you know, we treat people kindly or whatever. They're going, I know what our real values are. You know, you can't be phony about this stuff. Well, and it's so much harder than most people realize, right? Like, I think back, you know, now as the lens of an owner, I think back to when I was employee and how cynical I was, like, well, that company says they care. They don't care, right?

But now you sit on the owner's side and you realize how hard it is to keep every single person happy and to show every single person you care, but to also mix in the right amount of accountability, right? And are we achieving the right goals? And when we don't achieve those goals, what happens? Like, it's a lot of days I think of myself as the plate spinners, you know, the people that spend all these plates and one falls and three or four more fall off, you know.

It's not as easy as just writing core values on the wall. You really have to exemplify them. And people are always going to see it, right? Like we've we've sent some people away, but paid them very well to go away because we wanted to send them on to their next thing in a loving professional way, some, you know, a way that we could feel good about. No one's going to see that. They're not going to see the number. They're not, they're not going to hear about it. We don't talk about it on a podcast, you know.

So it's, there's a lot that happens as the owner that most people aren't going to see and understand. And sometimes that's okay, you know. How do you, as the owner, 300 employees, now you're split. You mentioned Zoom and how we're all disconnected now. How do you take something like this value of a heart for people and actually keep it alive in the hearts and minds of your team members? Man, it's a challenge. On my worst days in business, I stop and try to think. about what am I actually doing? What are we trying, what needle are we trying to move and where

are we trying to move it to? Because it's so easy to caught up in the day to day, the mundane, right? Super legit guy gets frustrated at really legit girl for XYZ reasons, right? And they, and you want to have a heart for both of them because neither one of them might be wrong, but they're telling themselves a different story. And so there's friction within the company. I really try to take a one-on-one approach with folks, and it doesn't always work, but sitting down and almost being the peacemaker and instilling into everyone, what are we actually doing? Oh, wait a second, we are all on the same team. We are, we do want the same thing. You guys are talking past each other. You want one thing over here that sounds different in your brain than this guy, but we're all on the same team. We all want to

go win this contract or execute this thing well. People forget that, especially once they get into a rut and they're isolated and they're not working shoulder to shoulder. It's so crazy. And you've probably experienced this. When you're shoulder to shoulder someone in an office, when there's friction, you kind of hash it out right there. Right. It's only going to fester for so long before the tension in the room kind of gets the best of everybody. And we're like, let's just stop, get this over with. When it's via Zoom, or Slack or Microsoft Teams, it can go on for a long time. And people can start having their own conversations and back channels. And it starts to really permeate through the company.

So, again, I think it's reminding the team, what is the mission, what is the vision, what are our core values? Having a heart for people was not a core value by mistake. You know, we didn't list it just to put something on the wall. We want to live it. You know, leaning in one-on-one takes a lot of time. I don't mind conflict, but I hate resolving conflict because it takes so much time. You know, we've got so much already on our plate with getting the sales in, getting the product or service delivered. And then when two people on our team, the same team, aren't getting along, as a leader, you've got to stop and be the therapist.

You called it peacemaker. That's less passive-aggressive than me. it takes time. Yeah. And sometimes it's hours of working through stuff, depend on the situation. Yet, you know, this value is very real for you. I can tell. Yeah.

Really taking care of people and taking the time. And for a long time, I really hoped, naively hoped that these problems would just solve themselves. I hope that every day. Okay, they're not getting along, but it'll pass. They'll figure it out. And it almost always festeres and grows and blows up. up and it costs me more time later as the leader. It costs our team more damage. It costs customers problems, right? So say more about taking the time when you don't have the time

to lean in and do this thing called conflict resolution. Yeah, I mean, I get more frustrated as an individual when my team members are at each other fighting. It's all festering than when I'm a parent and walk in the door and hear my kids screaming at each other, right? And they're six and five and four. it is the most frustrating thing ever when you've invested not only money but time into getting good human beings, talented people, passionate people on a team, and they're not getting along or they're having conflict that they can't resolve as professional adults. There's nothing more frustrating. I can tell you, because I've seen it go a lot of different ways. I've seen people, I've seen it Fester blow up and somebody quit, and you can't repair the damage there. You just like, lost an awesome team member that you could have prevented losing. I've seen it go the way where I've fired some people, maybe wrongly fired some people that I could have repaired the damage there. I've seen it go a lot of different ways, but I was eating lunch with a local business owner here right before this, and he's a smaller size. He's the size we used to be. And I was talking about

how he's in the dirt, working with the guys, getting to do all the things I used to love to do. I don't do that anymore. I'm not in the dirt. I'm trying to run and build an organization. He asked me, what do you do all day? And I'm like, that's a great question. What do I do all day? And we're sitting here talking about this peacekeeper, right? Like, yeah, I do some tactical stuff, but really investing into people, I mean, if I could take out, and this is going to sound egotistical, I don't mean it to be this way. If I could take out some of the passion and vision I have for where I think we can go in 10 years, and I could have just a little bit of that to the people that are frustrated or struggling, it fixes a lot of problems. The reason the people get frustrated and can't look past their differences with somebody inside the organization, because they don't have the vision where we want to go. They don't have the patience. They're not feeling the same way about our core values that I do. So that's really my job these days. It's really true that vision is a premium thing for that to occur. Vision gets thrown around a lot

almost like it's just a vision statement but what you're talking about I want to highlight this because it's so key it's this idea that if they could see what I see if they could feel what I feel they would not be arguing with each other right now they would not be looking at their watch to see how quick they could get out of here right now

they would not be talking to that customer that way they would they would be passionately running forward towards this vision you know it's just like it's just like a parent and kids You got to see what I see. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. And figuring out how to unpack that to them in a way where they actually feel the way you feel about it is the job. Yeah. When we, when our culture was at its peak, right, everyone on fire in the business was when everyone had the same vision and felt the same mission and was really living out our core values. When our culture was in our valleys, the dry periods, that's when people have lost the vision and don't feel the same way about our core values and don't buy into the mission. It's just the truth.

And so me as the leader, it really falls on me because it means I've stopped pouring in to the team what the vision is, what the mission is, what is our purpose. There's people waking up and going to work in our company today in the dirt or in the office. that don't really get the purpose of what they're doing. What needle are they moving over the next 10 years? I'm having a conversation tomorrow with somebody about it on staff. It's like what do you see for yourself 10 years from now? If they can't see it, it's my job to help them see it. If they can't see it on their own,

or maybe they see a version of it and they want to confirm that version aligns with where the company's going to go. Sometimes it doesn't align with the company's going to go. What do you tell? So there's business owners right now listening who I know have a vision that they can see in their own mind, but it's not packaged in a way where they're able to articulate it or they're going, I see it, I feel it, and I'm excited about it, but I can't seem to get my team on board. Practically, what do I do to help them see what I see? Yeah, I mean, that's that's the challenge of the CEO. I like it. I think the best CEOs are the people that get the most people passionate and excited about where the company can go. You look. at Elon Musk, right? Like half the reason, you know, people are buying it. It's almost a cult-like culture, right? There's several others. I really think that when people are struggling to get the vision, the purpose, sometimes it may not align, right? We've had folks who we really paint the picture for the vision.

and maybe they're just in a tactical role where they're counting numbers, they don't care about the vision, right? They're just here. I'm going to make a paycheck. I'm going to do tactical things, whatever. And that's okay, right? I don't need every single person in the company on fire to make mining awesome. Accountants. Like, do they even care about mining? Maybe not. But there are people that you better hope are on fire. They have to be on fire. Recruiting. How do we recruit people into our company? to go work in the field and get dirty, cold, rainy, early morning, late nights, if that recruiter's not on fire, we're going to get stale people, right? Like, if our sales guy is not on fire and can pitch our company better than the CEO can pitch it, we're not going to get as many sales. So I don't want to confuse the message that every single employee in the company has to be on fire and passionate and, you know, align with the purpose of the company.

I would say, I disagree. You know, I think even the accountant, because the accountant is sitting by a salesperson, if they're not fired up about why we exist at some level, at least the way accountants get fired up. Yeah. There's different temperaments. Yeah. And passion's going to look different for different people.

But I don't want anybody that just has a job, even in accounting, even in IT. Because if that's in them, then it's in our culture. and one bad apple can spoil the whole batch. I mean, I want that up, down, sideways, 360. Like, I want everybody on the team to have the sense of, like, what we're doing matters. And it may not be as front lines as the salesperson, or it may not be as front lines as recruiting, but that sense of unity of we're here to make a difference, and we have to be able to have each other six. Yeah, and I guess I should clarify, because if you're not passionate about your specific role

and what you're doing and the role player that you are, that's an issue. Because, I mean, culture can start downhill with one person. So that's where it goes back to me, good human beings, right? If it's not a good human being, we've had awesome people and then we've had jerks. And sometimes the jerks are the top performers, right? But they cause an issue with culture. I don't know that, you know, making life better in the mining industry for tactical people. if they're not passionate about their specific role, they can't get that specific role done effectively for the company.

But do they need to really be concerned with making the mind? It doesn't hurt, but I'm not going to be as upset that one of our tactical people in a tactical role is not completely on fire with the mission. Maybe that's wrong. I could change my staff. I've changed my mind a lot in the past. I would imagine that your people are closer to it, even in accounting, that you might, than you might realize. Because when you stand up and you tell stories to the whole staff about here's a difference

that we're making, or here's a team member whose life is better, or here's a customer that we really went out of the way. It's like what we said earlier, people want to be a part of something that's bigger than themselves. Yeah. And so nobody wants to be just an accountant. They want to be an accountant for the purpose of we're a part of something that's making a difference.

Yeah. You know, and I think you've probably created something that, everyone on your team feels connected to the mission of the place, even if the job is a more rote, you know, just typical boring job. Yeah, and part of that's, you know, coming to a startup, right? Like if you're in accounting or, you know, really anything tactical, you're coming to a startup that's in the mining space. I mean, that's kind of a little bit of a bold move, right? To get to get accounting folks that want to go be involved and not only, only a startup, but a startup in a big, old, scary industry like mining. Yeah, I mean,

they're, they're bought in in their own special way. It's kind of an adventure. Yeah. It's a risky. It's a wild ride. It's energy there. Yeah. So what's the biggest challenge at this point? I mean, you've, you've clearly just been up into the right in terms of, like from a year in, took a year to get there, but then you guys started getting traction. You've got, you've built a really incredible team and incredible culture. But today is the CEO. I mean, you talked about what you feel like your job is and casting vision and keeping the peace and instilling the values. How do you see that bumping up against the next leadership challenge in this season right now? Yeah, I mean, we're, and I talk about this a lot with our staff and

a lot of our folks. We're in no man's land right now for a company that does what we do. We're too big to compete with the small mom and pop companies, and we're not big enough and old enough and have the heritage or the legacy to compete with the multi-billion dollar hundred-year-old companies. There's only a few of them in the U.S. Just based on reputation. Yeah, it's just reputation, their balance sheet. I mean, they got fleets, a billion dollar fleet of equipment, you know. And so we're in no man's land.

We've made the jump from the little leagues. And we're kind of, you know, fast pitch now and learning how to hit the fast pitches and swing in first. home runs and we're connecting, you know, we're hitting the ball. But it's a totally, it's, this business is going to require something totally different from me as the leader. It's going to require something totally different from our staff. You know, it's going to require something totally different from our operations team. I mean, it's, it is a true leveling up of the complete organization. And it's a challenge. I mean, it's, it's not only a challenge to build something and kind of maintain, right? You build a company, 5,000, 20 million, 50 million, 100 million,

and maintain to keep leveling up, it just gets harder. The steps and the jumps just get bigger. To go from 100 million to 250 million is a big jump. It is hard. It's a lot harder to go, you know, of course, it's easy to say this where I sit now. When we were $5 million revenue, you know, run rate revenue company to 20, that's, seemed like a massive jump. But looking back, that was cake compared to the stuff that we're going to have to go deal with now. There's kind of these break points. And there's this thing in the industry about the ones and threes. I may have heard of this. But it's like every one and three is a major break point where you really have to reinvent yourself. So going from

100,000 to 300,000 to a million to 3 million, 10 million, 30 million, 30 million, 100 million, hundred to 300. I mean, there's massive, it's not just incremental. We grew our revenue, you know, from a million to three million. You had to become a different company to get to three million. You have a new right of passage each time you level up. You talked about you having to become a different leader. What are you doing to prepare? And I believe that none of us are the leader today that our teams are going to need for where we're going to be tomorrow. If we're growing and we're healthy. So what are you doing to get ready? Well, I mentioned earlier, I'm surrounding myself with people that have been there done that.

Other CEOs, people that are managing way bigger companies. You know, it's wild when you go tour a company. I just toured a facility a couple months ago. This guy's got 10,000 employees. Like, my problems, I asked him. I'm like, how many, you know, because we've dealt with lawsuits, all that, where we've kind of got a target on our back in the mining's just kind of a little bit of a target space. Anyway, this guy's got anywhere from 10 to 20 active lawsuits.

any given time. You know, my problems are nothing. So getting real context into what the next level looks like, that's, that's a few levels. But surrounding myself with people that have been to the next level, right, putting people on the team that have been there. We just brought two guys over onto our team that came from a multi-billion dollar company. We were lucky to snag them. We're getting right to snag one more. So, you know, really doing some of that. But interpersonal work, man, I've never been more dedicated to personally getting better, you know, even away from the business, spiritually, mentally. You know, I need to be like somebody uses the term business athlete. I've never been a business athlete. I've been a guy just trying to get a company off the ground. I got to get to a

$250 million CEO position, I got to be a business athlete, mentally tough, physically tough, emotionally tough. I'm not there yet. You know, there's books you can read. There's leadership things you can attend. There's people you can surround yourself. I'm trying to do it all. Sometimes maybe it's a little bit too much, but yeah, it's... No, I think it's just

staying plugged in. You know, because if you get to a point where, like, success can breed apathy, which can breed, letting you let in your foot off the gas a little bit, and then it's, you know, it's a slippery slope, and all a sudden you've lost the thing you created. And so I think there's really an art to

staying hungry even when you're not hungry. You're trying to get ahead of, hey, I'm not here. And it goes back to that purpose. When you have a strong sense of purpose, and it's not just about financial success, you go, okay, I'm getting ready for something that's about this purpose manifesting. And it's not just, well, I can hit cruise because everything's nice and, you know, smooth now. I'm more worried, honestly, at this stage about the company outrunning my abilities or the company outrunning me and me not keeping up the pace as the leader. I'm more worried about that than the company going the other way, going out of business. I think it happens to so many, especially small companies, toward the company grows just enough to where the guy can't manage it or he can't be an effective

leader. He can't pour into his people. So that's what's on my radar. I think you have what it takes. I would just encourage you, I think it's great that you brought in leaders from billion-dollar companies who have had that experience, you need that. And at Ramsey, we had a season where it was a bunch of us just scrappy cowboys, just making it happen. We had no idea what we're doing, but we had passion, baby. And so somehow it was working. And then we realized, we're getting big enough. We need to hire some smart people that can help us, like, organize things and our clunky databases

and all that kind of stuff from a software and IT standpoint, from the sophistication in our marketing. And we quickly realized that when we got a few of these, geniuses on board, really smart people, what we didn't get with them was that scrappy, humble beginnings culture that we had. And we didn't even realize that it was being threatened. Not that they were threatening it. They just didn't have that. And so as leaders who now had power and influence in the organization, we quickly went, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've got to dunk you into our culture. We've got to decorporate your system a little bit. That's probably not an easy task. our soul, but not losing the talent and the skill that they have.

And I think that's a big part of your job going forward is making sure that, yes, you're recruiting studs who have seen a lot bigger things of what your company has seen so that you bring that season and that experience in. But then you're infusing them with the, let me tell you the stories of how we got this thing started and that scrappiness doesn't get lost because you get too sophisticated. Oh, I'm going to leave here and text about 20 people on our team tell them they have to listen to that part right there. because it's so it's so spot on with where we're at. I mean, and it's a fear that I've kind of always had, right? Do you get too big? How do these big companies get so fat, right? And then you start walking down the path and you look back in the mirror like, yeah, actually,

we're putting on a few pounds. We're getting a little fatter. You roll out a, you know, we're working on ERP and all these things that you do as you get bigger. It's a really good challenge because I can see how folks lose their way and what got them, you know, where they are. I was walking through the lobby and I saw the, what is it, a Volkswagen or something sticking out of the wall with the trunk open? Oh, it's the old Mark 7. That was the car that Dave originally sold the books out of the trunk of that car. Super cool.

I took a picture of it. And we built this building and he found that car, not the actual car, but the same model, cut it in half and opened it up in our cafe. And we've got books that we sell out of the back of that car. But it's a great illustration. It's a callback to the story of the Genesis. Yeah, I mean, because I can remember we started the company. I was borrowing some space from my dad and his big. warehouse, little bitty corner office. Then we went into a basement office of, you know, Gant's

dad's place. And then we got our own new office. Now we've got a second office. And I can just see while we were at the stage where you guys were where, you know, you need to bring in a ton of legit smart people, we can't forget how the heck we got to where we are. And there have been times, especially through COVID. You know, you talk about the ones and threes. That was our third year of business last year with COVID. There have been times where we've been so eager to make that big jump to the next level that we've kind of a little bit forgotten. How did we get here? Yeah. I'm guilty of that. Well, it's telling the story. And then it's also, Dave has modeled this really well, but he just keeps pushing and he keeps playing offense. And you get to a certain level of

success where you're tempted to start playing defense. And smart people are good at mitigating risk. and we needed to get a little bit less reckless. We needed to grow up a little bit. And so we wanted them here. I'm not trying to bag on these people, but what they needed to hear was we're going to keep taking risks. We're going to keep playing offense because there was a time we had nothing to lose and you know what, we're going to act like we still don't.

We're not going to start protecting this empire and hoarding our money and taking all the risk out of the equation. Because when you start playing safe, that's the day that you're dead because your competitors start to creep in And they go, hey, we got nothing to lose. Oh, I know. So we'll say yes to that crazy idea that you guys should have and then all of a sudden you're out of business. There's a term that's used around the office called, and you said it earlier, cowboying. People around the office call me the cowboy. Because early on, I would quote projects, and these are multi-million dollar contracts. And it would be scratches on an envelope math, right? I just yesterday, one of our main guys was out and I needed labor. rates for a project in California. And they were like, well, you're going to have to wait. And I said, no, don't worry about it. I'm going to cowboy it. I'll write some rates down and send them to the estimating team because I know what. I'm close enough, right? I'll add a little fluff to it. And everyone just kind of looked around and, you know, said the cowboy, because it's, it's so true. But I can,

I have also seen us get to a place where we have made mistakes due to my cowboying, million dollar mistakes, several of them. Real, real. real million dollars stories that now people are a little bit gun shy and they say, no, no, no, we've got a process for that. And I have seen that also come into detriment. We have lost projects by 5% that we should have won, that we'd have to make great money on because some of the rules we had put in place to safeguard some of the creativity that we used to have. And I think there's a, there's definitely a happy spot. We're working down to the happy spot. But there is a sweet spot. And I think it's a constant tension. It's the place that I feel like Dave and our senior leaders,

like myself, who are kind of old guard, have had to work really hard. And it's just a constant thing of embracing process to increase efficiency and minimize risk and to have some standard procedures that the team knows if this, then that. There's some benefit in that. But anytime you introduce process, you decrease the speed of decision making. And when you decrease that speed, your response time to the customer goes down. And when response time goes down, they're more likely to shop you somewhere else and you don't get the job and the revenue goes down.

And so there's also a risk in decreasing risk. You know, I mean, you got risk on both sides of that. And I think the tension we hold as leaders is pushing hard on the team that's all about process to see that we still got to move. And so let's do process, but let's do it with aggression and passion. And then dialing back the Cowboys a little bit to say, hey, let's not be reckless to the point that we kill ourselves. And let's actually look at some of these

people who have this sophistication that we can learn from. And let's blend these worlds together and find that sweet spot. But I think that sweet spot is a constant pursuit. I don't think you ever arrive there. Well, I'm glad to hear you say that because we haven't arrived there. And I'm curious from your perspective, how frustrating were those times? Because it's, I mean, your organization just choose through that. And all the change. We lost two years. We were trying to get off of this old. old antiquated CRM goldmine. And man, we had we had patched it, duct tape, bailing wire. I mean, we had gotten more out of it than the goldmine people ever intended a customer to get. And because we were going to, we're not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for software.

We were all cash. And so it was just like, if it kind of works, then we're going to do it. But it got to a point where we were like, this is terrible. You know, we've got customer information all over the place. Different teams are trying to call the same customer, and they call them five times in the same day from five different parts of the company. the customers confused. And we finally bit the bullet and said, we're going to implement Salesforce and have a grown-up CRM. And we brought in smart people that knew about Salesforce. And, dude, the level of IQ was through the roof, but also the willingness to just take two to three years to get it all done the right way and not feel the pain of how much business was going to grind to a halt while we were doing that. And several of these people don't work here anymore because it will find.

Finally, we were just like, we've had enough. This is crazy. Truth through them. Yeah. And it cost a lot. It costs morale. It cost time. It costs revenue. And we had to shake it up. And so we figured out a way to get it plugged in with a different leadership approach and still get the data that we needed and get clean. So we grew up as a company. But as leaders, we almost over delegated that because we were enamored with how smart these people were. Yeah. And we said, well, they're the sales force people. So let's just let them run the project. And they about killed us all before we realized. It was a big lesson that we learned.

Yeah. And we said, okay, we going forward are going to bring in smart people, but we're going to teach them about why we value speed and passion in this crusader mindset and how we're not going to get overly sophisticated to the point that it grinds everything to a halt. And that was a painful lesson, but it's become a part of our DNA. There is so much gold in all that because there are companies our size. That's where we're at. We have chewed through people.

And we have, the morale has been, because everything you just said is straight fact, right? You try to implement a new CRM. For us, it's an ERP, right? Everybody gets frustrated. You bring people in from a billion dollar place. They're used to using an ERP. Our people, we're like Excel, Google Sheets, like, let's just run it. You know, Keaton's going to do some envelope math, cowboy.

Get sticky notes everywhere. Growing up, I mean, I was funny, we use Slack as company communication. We love it. I was going to find a picture, try to find a picture of LeBron as an adolescent with braces and, you know, knee guards on, because that's where we're at. There is greatness somewhere down the line. Five years from now, there's no doubt in my mind. I just got to get the organization to have enough patience and enough vision. And that's really my job. I got to get them to see the big picture, ride this storm out because it is, when you're making all this organizational change for the better, it's a storm in the meantime. And it's a lot of change for an organization to chew through. But it's everything you just said couldn't strike a chord more. How do you kind of prioritize the big rocks or the objectives in an organization that's your size? Another thing that starts to happen is a lot of ideas for solutions start floating up. You drive a lot of ideas as the founder. You're wired like me. You're an idea person. But then your team starts saying, we could try this, we could do this, we could do this.

and quickly it's like little spores of mold like it's just populating everywhere. How do you keep the big rocks, the big rocks, and then let everything else kind of go to the side? So I have a little black book. It's on my desk every day. It's in my truck right now. And it's got all these ideas, right? It's if you've ever seen Happy Gilmore. No, it's what's the football one? Waterboy. It's the little black book that coach has, right? All the secret plays. This has got all of our ideas. These ideas are going to, to make us better five years from now. We cannot chew on these ideas today. They're not even a next week thing or next month thing. But I don't want those ideas to fall away. I don't want people to stop being creative. So, you know, again, it's it's leadership's responsibility to prioritize. What are we going to bite off? Right. What is the most, there's a, there's a funny thing around the office right now when we ask somebody to do something, you know, whether it's me as a CEO or whoever,

the response is, is this the top priority or the other top priorities that you've already asked to do the top priority? It's kind of a running joke. That's what it is. I mean, it's literally that. And so, you know, again, we have staff calls every two weeks, everyone on staff from an office perspective, whether it's Salt Lake or Bloomington. They're all on this call. And we're laying out what are the priorities? What does the organization need to get done? And what is that going to require from accounting, from marketing, from sales, Because all these individual people, they've got their own priorities, right? To do their job, they've got a list of priorities. But do those priorities align with the company's priorities? Maybe not. At least maybe not right now. So it's an ever-evolving battle of, especially as we're growing.

It would be so simple to run a business where growth wasn't at the forefront. Like you didn't care if you grew. It'd be simple. I play golf three days a week, you know? To grow is constant change and managing that change and when the organization is ready for it. Those are the lessons I'm learning now. Yeah. Growth is change. Change is friction. Friction is frustration. And then, you know, you get it all solved and then you grow again and cycle repeats.

I love your little black book idea. I learned the lesson, the hard way of not having that book because I would just have the idea and just dump it on our team. That was my little black book. Like, hey, let's try this now. Oh, I used to do that. And we'd end up with that same thing. They're like, hey, priority is a single, it's not plural. There is a priority. I'm like, what are you talking about? We have 20 priorities, you know, and I finally figured out like, I was driving my team crazy. They couldn't execute anything because the leader is pointing, you know, we could depend on the weather that day. I'm pointing at, you know, we're going to go east. No, we're going to go west. No, we're going to

go north. No, we're going to go south. I didn't realize I was doing it. Yeah. I also learned that I had to tell my team, like somehow I process ideas is I'm just excited and dreaming and I'm not necessarily serious about we need to go do this right now. Oh, I know. And we've had to come up with language for, okay, take them seriously, but don't take them literally. And, you know, actually have kind of a code for, are you saying this like, you want us to actually go do this? Or are you just kind of dream it a little bit? It's like, oh, no, no, no. I'm just thinking like, someday if we got to this point, it'd be cool. It's how I process. But you got to be really careful with your words, especially as a leader, because they hear things very literally. Yeah. It's, if you and I were on a

team together, the rest of the team would quit because I'm the same way, right? You, you, I call two people in my office. I say, here's what I'm thinking, had this thought in the shower this morning. We should go do this, right? They call a meeting that afternoon. This was literally two months ago. They call a meeting that afternoon. We sit down. There's probably eight people in this meeting in this conference room. Hour and a half long meeting. Everybody's frustrated. This idea is a great idea, right? It's a matrix that I want to build basically to tell our estimating team when we should buy equipment or when we should rent equipment. And it's literally just things you input and it's a, it's kind of a little bit of an algorithm and it was going to work. The guy that was going to go run the

project, Alan, whiz kid, legit guy, left the meeting, was getting ready to go sit down and start on it. And someone pulled me aside and said, hey, you know you just pulled him off of these other three things. And they explained what those other three things were. I was like, why did I just waste an hour and a half of everybody's time? This little matrix idea shouldn't even be in our radar. But I didn't have the context. I didn't frame it up the right way. It wasn't in the black book logged as like, this is a nice to have someday, not a need to have today.

So I'm still working on it, but that black book's full of, I just hope I don't lose it. No, I mean, it's a hard thing as leaders, when we have ideas, we want to activate them. And I've had to really remember, unless our team is just dog bone lazy with all this extra time in their day because they're not working, they're already working on something that we have committed to doing that's helping us operate our thing. And so I've got to develop the discipline to ask, if we do this new idea, because I really think there's gold in it,

what will we have to stop doing in order to do this? Or what are we going to have to do at a less quality standard or whatever? And sometimes we have that conversation and we go, okay, we're going to offload that so that we can start doing. And the team's aligned around it and we agree it's a better solution or one of them floats up a good solution. But it's super important to have that tradeoff conversation because if you just keep dumping stuff on your team, they start going, here he comes again. And what they do is they halfway commit to the things you bring them because they're worried that next week you're going to bring up something else. And that starts to show up in morale issues and they start to lose respect for their leader. Yeah. Well, tradeoff is the right word because for us, we do not have unlimited resources.

our people do not have unlimited time, right? We cannot get every single thing done that a growing company wants to get done in the time frame that we want to get it done. Now, let's say we go raise $100 million and we're Uber of the mining world, right? And we hire all these analysts and all these people. Okay, that's one approach. That's not the approach we're taking. We have limited resources. Our Allens, our estimating teams, our people, they have limited bandwidth.

So let's go focus on the things that need to get done right now. And the rest of the organization is just going to have to be a little bit frustrated that the buy, sell equipment decision is made in a very not-processed way. I think it's better, though. I mean, if you were the Uber and you've got infinite resources, your VC-backed, you just start doing everything and you don't force that critical thinking that comes up. And it's, I mean, we've all heard the adage of constraints of the mother of innovation, right? And so innovation and creativity comes from having limited resources. And so I think it's one of the beautiful things about running it that way. And you guys are very cash strong.

Earlier you mentioned buying versus leasing equipment or renting equipment. You have done a really good job of not going into a lot of debt in an industry where a lot of people just sign up for all that. Because you're talking about multi-million dollar equipment. Yeah. These are not just, you know, small. These are big dump trucks, excavators. you could make the case that it's better to go into a lot of debt if you're just looking at the math, but you've taken a different approach. Well, I walked in the building and took a picture of the Cassius King sign that literally hits you in the face as you walk in.

Early on, I mean, yeah, not only could we probably not buy just because we didn't have the ability. No one's going to finance this equipment for a 27-year-old kid with no backlog of work, right? I also didn't want the long-term exposure or risk until I knew my idea was going to play out, right? I didn't want to go stack $20 million with a debt and equipment on our books and hope to go find work for it. I'd rather be the opposite. I'd rather have so much work that we literally can't rent the equipment fast enough or the right equipment that we have to go buy it. That's a good problem to have. the other way around is what most of the industry, most construction companies do.

And there's all these tax shelter things and games. There's shell games to play. But there's also an ego thing that if I, it's like, if I buy a truck, now I'm in business. Yep. No, you just bought a truck. Yeah. I mean, the way you're defining a business is you have customers who are paying you and throwing money at you. And now you got a business. And then it forces the costs and the trucks and the equipment and everything to come into play. Yeah. I, um, it's so easy.

easy, especially us as guys with egos in the dirt world construction world to go buy iron, buy pickup trucks, finance them, really cheap payments and all that. It looks good on paper and then stick your big logo on it, take a picture for your buddies. It looks great. It feels great. What doesn't feel great is when that stuff's sitting, not producing revenue, and you're like, how in the world I'm going to make these payments? Because I've, there's been times where it's like you're looking at the next guy over wondering how in the world is he doing the work that cheap. But you, if you're renting the equipment, you just send it back. Projects over, you send it back.

And maybe it costs you a few more dollars because you're paying a rental premium. And there's tons of nuances we can get into about all that. There's also just a peace of mind in helping me sleep at night, knowing that I do not have a mountain of debt that I'm going to have to go figure out how to get out from under. I hear it a lot with contractors who play their cards the way you have where the guy who is one block over who has financed himself out the wazoo. Eventually, the tide turns, it catches up and he's got to sell his equipment for pennies on the dollar. And the guy that's got the cash is the one going, hey, I heard you got a deal on some equipment. And now you own some equipment for literally half of what you would have paid had you gone to finance. It is, it's a real, it's a real tough.

mental game to play for a I would love to um raise money I would love to see what we could do if we raised a bunch of money and had a had a hundred million bucks on our balance sheet and go buy equipment and bid projects the way that these big old companies do that have a bunch of you know equipment on their balance sheet I would love to do that also scares me to death you know what if it doesn't work out the way you think it's going to work out you know um so I don't want to play so safe that it kills the growth path that we're on? No, you're not, though. And I wouldn't say, I mean, your saying it scares me to death. I would say that's the voice of wisdom. And you're playing the long game. If you're trying to get to the top in five years from now, if you're

trying to be on the cover of Fast Company, if you're trying to microwave your success, you listen to this podcast long enough, you know, that's not the plan. Be the tortoise. Don't be the hair. And, you know, fast success leads to fast failure. Yeah. And if you want to see your purpose come alive and you've got a really cool purpose and you care deeply about your team, you're not doing it to do it fast. You're not doing it to be big. You're not doing it because it's ego driven. You're doing it for them. And so it's not just putting you and your family and your kids at financial risk, but it's risking this entire beautiful thing you've built, which is the livelihood of 300 people that you're investing into. And I think that's the thing that really keeps you anchored in those values. Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. I mean, I think, you know, long term 10, 15, 20 years from now, if our company has not really changed a bunch of lives, but has stacked a bunch of cash, we've failed. Yeah. And I've got to continually remind myself of that because it's super tempting to go stack cash at the expense of what you want,

what the impact you could be making. And it's tempting. I just got to remind myself and the people around me, we are going to be a fail. if we have an impact on a bunch of lives. A lot of business owners out there right now getting their thing off the ground or it's off the ground and they're trying to find that next gear. What do you want to tell them based on, I mean, you've had an incredible journey in four years. Many of them are probably envious of like, gosh, I wish I had accomplished that much in four years. But still, you're still hungry.

You're still growing. You're still learning. What are you learning right now that you would want to impart to these incredible business leaders, men and women? women out there listening right now. You know, really, it's probably a little bit different answer than what you've gotten in the past. There's been times over the last four years where I wasn't in the place I needed to be spiritually. And there were some dark times, especially when the business was early young. You know, you don't have that eternal perspective.

If you're young, you don't have to be young. If you're trying to get a company off the ground or maybe you've had a company off the ground for a long time, but you're in a valley, I can't stress enough the eternal perspective and having a real relationship with the Lord. And I don't want to say that to be a cheesy pitch because I know it's easy for people to jump on here and do the gospel thing. That's not what I'm doing. I don't think long term I could do it without that. I think, obviously, finding people that can pour into you, but they're only going to be able to pour in so much. And if the Holy Spirit's not pouring in the rest of it,

it's just, man, it's going to be a hollow, long, lonely ride from my perspective. Great answer. I love it. And great reminder. Keaton Turner, Turner Mining Group. Hey, I recommend you follow them on Instagram if you're like me and you like to see pictures of big equipment doing awesome things and blowing things up. It's really cool. It's a very visual experience. And so a lot of fun there. They can find out more on your Instagram. How do they find out on your Instagram and

website before you jump off? Yeah, absolutely. Keaton S. Turner is my personal Turner Mining Group on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Clubhouse, TikTok. We have a lot of fun of social. We have fun on social media. Love it. Well, Keaton, love what you're doing. Love your story. Thanks for plugging in here today and I'm inspired and I'm excited to see where you guys are going over the next five to 10 years. You're always welcome back in the Entry Leadership Studio. Appreciate it, man. Thanks so much. All right, guys, great conversation with Keaton. Now, lots of practical content in there. I hope you guys were taking notes because there's so many things. I mean, first of all, I'm just inspired by the guy's story. And four years in, I mean, not that it's all about going fast, but it's just

a statement to the character of his leadership, the integrity and the commitment that he has. to take care of his team. Take care of your team. They're going to take care of your customers, and your customers are going to take care of the cash registers. That's how it works. We talked a lot about values. Now, you guys know we talk about core values all the time.

Please don't tune out because we talk about it so much. I want you to remember that core values are not things that you go get. There are things you already have, things you care about, things you will prioritize that are even, well, they're even strategically stupid. They don't make sense. You'd be willing to lose business because you value these things so much. You'd be willing to lose a key employee because they have breached one of your core values.

You'd be willing to go slower or be less profitable because you value these things so much. And ultimately, they do become your competitive advantage and help you grow further and faster and help you win at higher level. But short term, they're going to cost you if you're doing it right. These aren't just things you put on the wall so that you check the box to say you did this exercise. If you want help on this, our Entree Leadership coaching team is world-class, incredible people, and they're working with business owners all the time on all the issues that you face in business. But one of the things that they start with is core values. They walk you through exercises to develop these, to draw them out of you, to help you think about these things.

And they've put together those exercises in a great free resource called How to Create Core Values. It's a five-step process for developing and communicating your company's guiding principles. To get this free guide, all you have to do is text the keyword, EL values, to 33-444. Again, text EL values, no spaces, to 33-444, or just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the show. If you did, be sure to leave us a review and subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episode. Now, if you're a small business owner between about 2 and 200 team members, we'd love to hear your feedback on the show. ask you some questions and learn how we can make it even better.

If you want to help us out with that, just click on the link in the show notes to fill out a brief survey and schedule a call with Tim, the producer. He would love to work with you. Now, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership. You can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rutter. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree leadership team,

thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like The Ken Coleman Show. Are you doing what you were born to do? I'm Ken Coleman, host of the Ken Coleman Show, where I give you practical advice to help you discover your purpose and then map out a plan to get you there. From accounting to advertising, from plumbing to production, you were created to fill a unique role, and the world needs what you have to offer. Join me on the Ken Coleman Show wherever you listen to podcasts.