CCCT with Retired Captain Bill Toti, Author of “From CO to COO” Video

CCCT sat down with retired Captain William Toti, Author of “From CO to CEO” who served for more than 26 years on active duty, culminating as commodore of Submarine Squadron 3, then 15 years as a corporate executive and eventually a CEO. He has been featured in several documentaries, including The Lost Ships of World War II (Fox), USS Indianapolis: The Final Chapter (PBS), USS Indianapolis: Live from the Deep (PBS), USS Indianapolis: The Legacy, 9/11: One Day in America (National Geographic), 9/11: The Pentagon (The History Channel) and 9/11: Inside the Pentagon (PBS).

For more information, please visit https://williamtoti.com, or follow him on Twitter (@william_toti).

#navy #CEO #Captain #submarine #author #construction #labor #transition

Transcript

Hey there Commercial Construction Coffee Talk fans. Thanks for chiming in. My name’s David Corson, and I’m your host. I’m also the publisher and editor of Commercial Construction and Renovation Magazine. I’ve got a little glare from my light, but that’s what it used to look like. Oh, this is when we had Target. I’m breaking out the archives. November-December 2003. What were we doing? You know, I had a lot more hair back then, but anyway, another great-looking issue. Wow, I mean, I just grabbed them out of the box. But this was actually, I went on my own in 2001, so my company was only a couple of years old, and we’re still standing today. Let’s see where I—oh, I’ve got the hockey geek going. Look, you’ve got to look at this picture. I’ve got to get this up here. So here I am, and I’ve got a lot more hair. I’m putting my rollers on, and I’m ready to go shoot with my son out and got my Thrasher shirt on when they were in the ATL. They’d only been there for a couple of years. I was a season ticket holder. And actually, a good story about The Thrasher—I played in the AAA League in the adult league here in Atlanta, and the president of The Thrasher, his son was on my team. And now he’s the Braves president. And he and my son, we all went through the roller league together. Derek was an awesome guy. But looking back at these pictures, I mean, it’s so much fun to hold. I’ve gone digital in 2021, and in August was my last issue. But holding these magazines up in my hand, it’s always nice to see them. But we’re digital now, and don’t miss the printer, don’t miss the post office, and people are just hitting the site every day, consuming content. And thank you so much if you’re out there, hitting that like button. We want to get this episode out. But listen, TGIF. Today, I’m saving the best for last. I hope everybody had a great week. I was in Detroit, the Retail Contractors Round Table, and then went to New York. Did my meet and greet yesterday, and it was awesome seeing some family. It was like having family and seeing people I haven’t seen in a while. And I flew back last night, just trying to get ready for the weekend, and I’ll do it all over again next week. So thank you for staying with us on a Friday afternoon. It’s beautiful here in Atlanta, about 80 degrees, no humidity. I mean, it’s just so nice. It’s Indian summer, the heat’s gone. I mean, it’s just been beautiful here. And hopefully, you know, it’s nice where you are today as well. I have a gentleman out in Southern California. His name is Aaron Klein, and he’s with a company called Boomer Bucket. He’s the CEO and co-founder of the firm, and they’re headquartered in Austin. Aaron, say hello to our listeners out there on Commercial Construction Coffee Talk.
Aaron: Hello, everybody at Commercial Construction Coffee Talk. Pleasure to meet you, and thanks for having me today.
David: You’re welcome. So Aaron, the way this is gonna work is you’re going to do our episodes in three parts. You’re gonna tell your story, where you grew up, played sports, how many kids, etc. And then how you ended up at Boom Bucket. Then you’re going to talk about the last three years of the roller coaster that we’ve all been on. Lessons learned, any new and exciting things that you see there in that construction equipment market. And then you’ll leave one positive thought or phrase with our listeners, and then we’ll end the episode. So with that said, the floor is yours. Tell us your story.
Aaron: Cool. All right. Well, thanks again for having me. I really appreciate it. No, absolutely. All right. Quick background on myself, David. I was a Navy brat. I grew up all over the United States. My dad was a ship driver in the United States Navy, retired as a captain after 28 years of active service. I followed in his footsteps. I joined the Navy myself right out of college, went to Auburn University, studied mechanical engineering. I was terrified of AutoCAD and sitting in front of a computer all day. So I ran screaming from Corporate America to join the Navy. Flew fighters, F-18s, for 11 years with the Navy, all over the world, East Asia, Iraq, and other places in the Middle East. A ton of fun, greatest job in the world. Then I got married, had kids, and ten-month deployments away from my kids didn’t sound quite as much fun anymore. So transitioned out of the Navy, went back to school, and started working in early-stage technology companies about ten years ago. More recently, was with a company called Yard Club. We were doing rental equipment management software, basically. So we were building software for equipment rental companies to help engage with their customers, to help them rent it, kind of like if you go to hertz.com right now, you can rent a car. But like at the time, there wasn’t really any great software interfaces to do that for the rental equipment around the world for contractors. We sold that business to Caterpillar in 2017, but my partners and I had always kind of had our eye on the used construction equipment space. Used construction equipment’s about a 300 billion dollar global industry. You know, it’s a lot of sorry, 300 billion dollars, about 400 billion events here in the United States. So a lot of used equipment trading hands across, you know, everything from on-highway, if you think like cement trucks and crane trucks to bulldozers, backhoes, excavators, which is kind of our specialty. So we work with, um, we founded Boom and Bucket about three years ago under the premise that we could take a lot of the transparency and friction, or introduce a lot of transparency and reduce a lot of the friction in the buying and selling of used heavy equipment. So we work with some of the biggest equipment companies in the United States to help them inspect, value, and market their equipment. We find buyers, we engage with these buyers, we help them find financing, warranties, and transportation for the machine. We’re on a completely digital and secure closing process for the machines. We wrap those machines and guarantees that we’ll actually come and repair the machine if there’s anything wrong with it that’s not in the inspection, making the whole buying and selling process a lot more easy, fluid, and transparent for everybody that’s involved. And that’s awesome. We started Boom and Bucket. Amen. You know what? First of all, thank you for your service. Thank you for your dad’s service. I come from a military family myself, and anybody that served in the military, I got a special place with me. And being a, you know, my dad was a pilot, and my son’s actually taking flying lessons. We were watching him on the app this morning. A couple of weeks, he works at Boeing. He’s got his AP license, he works on the 787 platform, and in Charleston. And so, my wife’s every time he flies, we’ve got the app, and she’s glued to it. So, it’s, you know, it was that. That’s awesome. I didn’t—I didn’t know you were in there until I did listen. I just learned something new. That’s why I do these episodes. I get their basic backgrounds, but I didn’t know I was gonna have a Navy pilot on there. So, go Navy, you know?
Aaron: Yeah, yeah. I feel like I got a lot more than I gave, to be honest, David. It was just an incredible experience from day one. Listen, Navy pilots, you have to land on an aircraft carrier, you know? And that’s just a whole different ordeal than being, you know, anybody’s a pilot, some, but being a Navy pilot landing in the middle of the night with a couple of lights guiding you in, it’s got to be nerve-wracking. You’ve got to be a special person to be able to do that kind of stuff. So, my hat’s off to you. And, and I’m sure you’ve missed it, you know? It’s like having your old Mustang in the garage or whatever and F-18 and now the—you know, 35 something. But hey, you know, congratulations. That’s just awesome. So Thanks, it was a ton of fun. Yes, I do miss it, especially when I hear the jets fly over. But it’s pretty fun coaching my kids’ basketball games too. So yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, um, you know, as far as, uh, you know, everybody’s kind of going through this roller coaster over the last three years. And, uh, you know, we’re out of the tunnel, but, you know, we’re still having a little dips and bubbles. And, uh, depending on what state you’re in, it’s really different, you know, predetermined on how, you know, how things were going to go. Um, talk about how you weathered the storm over the last couple of years. And, uh, you know, maybe give us an insight of, you know, listen, we’re in Q4 just about, and how we’re gonna finish the year off and going into 2024. You know, give us, you know, your projections, what you see. There’s tons of commercial, you know, guys that are out there that are using equipment every day. So I think they would find your insight valuable. Yeah, so let’s talk about the roller coaster ride. We actually founded the company in 2020, like right in the middle of the roller coaster ride. Um, so we had to do everything for this business at the beginning remote. Um, we did all of our sales calls over the phone. We did, you know, all of our customer research over the phone. And you’re in construction, you know, like this is not an industry that’s great with Zoom calls. They like to look you in the eye and shake your hand. Like there’s a lot of in-person work that has to be done.

So I would say that, you know, starting our company in the middle of that environment forced us to learn some, uh, some stuff really quickly on how to effectively run a team in a company in a hybrid remote environment. So when we say hybrid remote, about 60% of our teammates are scattered all over the US. We have outside field sales reps, we have equipment inspectors, we have software developers that are distributed all over the world, actually. And so we have a headquarters in Austin, Texas, where about the other 40% of the folks work. And so we’ve built some things into our work culture from the get-go that help our teammates feel connected and feel like they’re part of the team, even though they don’t have a physical office that they’re going to every day, rather working from their home, working from the pickup truck. So little examples like if one person is remote, everybody’s remote. So if there’s a meeting and there’s five people in Austin and two people have dialed in, everybody goes to a phone booth and dials in on Zoom. So everybody has the same experience, same experience, just little stuff like that to be successful within that context. Um, the other thing that’s kind of interesting about, you know, the impacts of the last couple of years, probably the biggest issue that just gets talked about all the time in the construction equipment industry was supply chain disruption, right? Um, we went from a pretty stable environment at the end of 2019 to, you know, late 2020, early 2021, 18 to 24-month lead times for new equipment. And, you know, that’s new equipment that usually you can either buy out of the inventory or like a three to six-month wait time tops. That had pretty huge repercussions on the used equipment market because obviously, you know, contractors got a machine, they’re thinking about replacing, they can’t get a new one. So they’re not going to replace them. So the supply got incredibly constrained over the last three years, which meant it sent prices through the roof everywhere for used equipment, right? Um, we’re getting through that now. So, you know, lead times on larger equipment are back down to the three to six-month timeframe. And a lot of the big equipment rental companies have been taking fairly large deliveries of new equipment. So they’re rolling a lot of their used equipment out of the marketplace. So we’ve seen a pretty rapid, uh, what you see in the pricing graphs is basically a pretty huge spike in pricing that started right around the end of 2020.

Now it’s come off and it’s almost back down to equilibrium. So this giant bubble created by these supply chain issues, um, we’re approaching normal, we’re not quite back there, but um, the sort of whiplash effect is that we went from this massively supply-constrained seller’s market to a now, you know, massive buyer’s market where there’s, and there’s an incredible amount of inventory. And so for us, as the, you know, as the partner of choice for, you know, for getting these machines sold or bought, we have to explain these market dynamics effectively to both sides of the marketplace, how buyers understand that they have options to find the right machine for their business, help sellers understand that the pricing that’s now was not the same as pricing six months ago and tell that story with data and information, which is, you know, what technology companies are best at. You know, being a pilot, you obviously know that, you know, planes, they have to be maintained, and, uh, they can’t just sit there and so forth. Um, talk about, you know, the maintenance factor of a piece of equipment. Um, it’s huge. It’s huge, huge. You know, the construction equipment industry often gets compared to automotive. Um, I think personally, we derive a little bit more inspiration from the real estate market because construction working assets condition can vary broadly depending on what, how it was used. So let’s take, you know, a CAT 320 excavator, kind of the center of mass construction, a piece of construction equipment, a 320 excavator that has been, you know, working at a sand plant, right? An aggregates facility, scooping sand for 5,000 hours is in significantly a better condition than a machine that was used in demolition, where it’s just rocking and rolling, getting beat up, and just, you know, it just beat the hell after 5,000 hours. Very different than an on-highway, like a Toyota sedan, right?

Like you put one, uh, 100,000 miles on it, same, 100,000 miles on it. But it, provided you do a little change in the regular maintenance, yeah, it’s probably similar, yeah, they’re pretty similar. So for us, that, you know, it’s the maintenance and how the machine was used are huge contributors to what the intrinsic value of that machine is. And so our job to enforce transparency on this market to make it function better for everybody that’s involved is to expose all of that. And so professional contractors who have work order management systems, who have good maintenance records, who could show that they’ve done 500-hour service pretty regularly on every single one of their machines, they can demonstrate that to a potential buyer. Buyer sees that, knows the machine was well-maintained, that machine is inherently de-risked more valuable than a machine that has no maintenance records whatsoever, when the guy was riding an increased pencil on the side of the machine every time they did it because it’s easier or it’s cheaper, right? And that translates into dollar values. We see anywhere from a 7% to 15% lift in price realization for machines with comprehensive maintenance records than ones without, right? So it’s that maintenance that you’re investing into that asset. Yes, it’s important because it guarantees uptime, but it also is an investment in the, you know, the residual value of the machine too. Yeah, you know, you can’t listen, we’re in construction, so you can’t get anything done without a bobcat or a backhoe or what have you. And it’s the backbone of where the country’s gonna go in the future. And, um, talk about, you know, you know, when you market the equipment to people that have no knowledge, uh, do they say, “Hey, how do I learn how to operate this new this new backhoe that I got?” Or a bobcat or so forth? Or are a lot like construction contractors are at all different levels of experience and so forth? Um, so talk about that aspect of it, you know, like it’s like, okay, I just got my driver’s license, I’m gonna go buy a Ferrari, you know? Versus, you know, like my kid, we bought them an old beater.

I know you’re probably gonna get in a little fender bender or whatever, and then you gradually get them up, you know, where they, you know, talk about that aspect, you know, where I’m coming from. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest surprises for me, actually, John, was how many inquiries we get from people about
How do you learn how to drive a backhoe? How to become an operator, right? This is not something we’ve actually started developing some content around this now because we just get so much inbound around it. It’s not something we had anticipated. Yeah, like the good news is most of our buyers get to us with a pretty good idea of what they want to buy, right? So we’re not teaching them as much about the machinery as we are making sure that we match what they’re trying to accomplish with the machine to the right make, model, hours, at the right price point, right? And so that’s what we do. Most of our exploration, we do occasionally get the person that’s like, “Hey, I need an excavator. What kind of excavator should I buy?” And the good news is our inside sales team is fairly expert on these machines now. They can really help them locate what they’re looking for. From a technology lens, we view the problem you just described of matching the machine to the job application as a really, really interesting application for artificial intelligence, right? So you see some pretty interesting things happening with BERT through like Google search or through ChatGPT. We think there’s a really interesting application here for the future, for plugging some of those AI technology tools into our inventory set and helping guide contractors to the right machine for their application. And you know, there’s so many variables here like quality of dealer support in their region, and you know what their budget is on the machine, like how often they’re going to be using it afterwards. So it’s a pretty big dataset problem, right? And this is just a really, really great application set that we see for potentially for artificial intelligence in the future. I’ve been taking digital classes for the last year, so I’m a digital specialist. I thought I knew a lot about digital, but it’s been mind-blowing what I’ve learned and how you can integrate AI into any business model. It’s a — and we’re in construction, so a lot of people are learning how to integrate it in the correct way. But the way that you’re doing it is using AI, you can find all the different equipment and plug in that question and boom, it’s amazing and it can streamline your business and actually keep your, you know, obviously, you know, your attention, probably if you do a good job with anything that customer is going to come back and give you the referrals and you pick up other business and so forth. So using that technology to your advantage is a major plus, as you’ve said, correct? Yep, absolutely.

I mean, these are things that we stay pretty laser-focused on. Like our customer satisfaction ratings after we’ve, you know, closed deals on the average, like 95 to 100 percent. Technology, we view, we have kind of like a pyramid of like our three talking points, right? Technology, trust, sorry, technology, service, and trust, right? Technology is the layer, it’s the tools, it’s the things that make the entire process more streamlined, supported by a really fantastic service experience provided by real people, and that leads to trust, that engine that creates that repeat business for us. Awesome, awesome. What are some of the coolest products that you’ve seen that have come out over the last six to 12 months? You know, I mean, construction really doesn’t change, you know, you’re doing drywall, you’re doing concrete, you know, sticks and frames, and, you know, but it basically is the same, you know, you’re painting, the paint colors change, I mean, what have you seen on the equipment side that some of our listeners might say, “Hey, well, I never saw that, I didn’t know they had a bucket that or that attachment that might be available?” Oh, man, all you gotta do is walk around Con Expo for an hour and a half and you’re gonna see, oh no, I’ve, oh man, I’ve walked that big boy toy show, God knows for how long, you know. I would say there’s probably two, there’s two big trends within the equipment market right now, autonomous and electrification, right? This last Con Expo, electrification was really front and center. You saw some pretty large electric equipment, you saw a lot of emphasis on it from every single one of the OEMs, and I think a lot of that is driven, it’s being driven a lot by the EU right now, but also by the state of California with the Advanced Clean Fleets and by builders, right? So you’ve got companies like Amazon and Apple who are building new campuses, they build sustainability goals into almost every single one of their projects, and that’s driving the adoption of electric zero-emission vehicles. All of those sorts of projects kind of downstream into the GC and into the subcontractors too. Electric equipment, I think, is super cool. It’s going to be, it’s going to be, obviously, this is the future, right? We can’t keep belching smoke into the atmosphere forever and ever.

There’s still some pretty big barriers for adoption for electric equipment, primarily around charging infrastructure. So I don’t believe that we’re going to get like, when we think about zero-emission vehicles, it’s not 100% electrification, right? We have to look at things like hydrogen, we have to look at, you know, if it really, you know, clean diesel in some cases too, depending on what the application set is. So for example, if you’re running a recycling facility or an aggregates plant that has, like, you know, you’re tapped right into the grid already, yes, electric equipment is going to work really, really well for you. The mines have done some really great stuff with swappable battery trays, where they’re actually able to run 24-hour shifts on some of their equipment because they’re swapping those things out, and it makes a lot of sense there too because now you’re not, you don’t have emissions inside the lines, right? That’s now, if you’re working on an undeveloped job site, if you’re working in forestry, if you’re in someplace that’s like construction equipment goes places that aren’t developed yet, right? Like that’s the whole point, you know, like we’re building infrastructure. So the infrastructure that may not already exist, there are some creative solutions, you know, you see these big conex boxes full of batteries that people can swap out between shifts. There’s some creative solutions that might work well, but I think for those types of applications, we have to look at things like, you know, hydrogen, we have to look at other types of, I mean, you know, clean, clean, excuse me, clean equipment, zero-emissions vehicles that can achieve the same outcomes without just relying on electric infrastructure. So a lot to unpack there. The other one’s autonomous that I think is super cool, you know, the, probably, you’ve all seen the Case autonomous tractor that was a big one a couple of years back where I’d say, you know, there’s no cab on it, autonomous excavators, remote-controlled mining equipment, all of this stuff is started to take on front and center too, especially with equipment that’s doing fairly, you know, road stuff like, you know, digging, you know, grading or, you know, digging holes that are kind of like all in the same spot, farming equipment that’s just kind of like doing tilling or spraying, that kind of stuff. So that stuff’s kind of interesting. It’s coming along. There’s some great, you know, John Deere just made an acquisition of Bear Flag Robotics to help kind of advance that on the AG side. You see companies like Built Products that are doing this on the construction side too that are building some pretty cool aftermarket, and then the OEMs are starting to adopt it natively too.

Electrification is definitely ahead of autonomous right now, but I anticipate that gap is going to close over the next five, ten years. The biggest thing, it’s just like an electric, you know, like I have an F-150, they came out with the Lightning and so forth, and I never like to go, I’m not one of those buyers like I want to have the newest and best thing first. I wanted to be out there and for a year and a half to two, get the bugs out of it, and then maybe I would buy that truck. But the biggest thing I think is, is the power value that electrification, like an airplane they Electric airplanes have been developed, but they can only go for so many hundreds of miles, and then you’ve got to go down, you’ve got to recharge the battery, just like if you’re in a Tesla, you can only go 200 miles, and you’ve got to find a recharging station, and if you have the adapter that can have the quick charge and so forth. The biggest thing equipment is, is that I that I see is a, is the infrastructure, number one, but number two is technology improving itself. So the longevity of the charge and being able to pull the weight, the power that’s necessary, whether you electrify a huge tanker or just like I said, your pilots, you can understand, you know, it takes a lot of energy, you know, even with Lyft and Dynamics, you know where I’m coming from, yeah? But I mean, the good news there actually is that the OEMs have done a great job of replicating the power profiles on their electric equipment now. So I don’t think the output, they’re definitely legitimate concerns around battery life, right? And so depending on the application, like I mentioned with the mines, they’re running 24/7 operations, they’re able to achieve their objectives by swapping out battery trays. You know, you can get an eight-hour work shift done on a lot of electric equipment on the job site because, you know, the operator is taking a lunch break or you can recharge them between morning and afternoon sessions. So there certainly are concerns around that. I actually think the power output is not one of them right now. Obviously, with really, really large equipment, that’s a little more challenging, but, you know, I think Komatsu just unveiled the hydraulic mining shovel that was all electric, massive piece of equipment.

So the technology is definitely moving in the right direction. You’ve also got just a significantly lower cost profile when it comes to maintenance on electric equipment than an internal combustion engine. So that makes the machines really attractive, especially to the equipment rental companies, right? Because they’re doing a lot of turns on these equipment, they’re keeping like very, very high maintenance standards on their fleet because they sell uptime, right? That’s their value proposition to their customers. So, you know, the sun states and the sun belts and the United Rentals of the world are looking really hard at electric lifts and, you know, smaller electric construction equipment too because it’s a significant cost reduction path for them on maintenance on the machines. You know, the, I just, it’s amazing. One of my favorite shows is the, the miners, you see these huge dump trucks, you know, with the big tires, and they’re, they’re, they got these things, and it would be, it’d be awesome to see them electrified and, and, uh, yeah. And, uh, but I always think, you know, in the back of my mind, I have all sorts of people that talk about electrification, you know, from Schneider Electric and these guys are doing the charging stations and, uh, you know, weight’s an issue and, uh, think about all the debris if you’re doing a demo job on a big shopping center and you’ve got to, you know, get, you’re doing the new parking lot and but people like yourself that are, that are into technology and especially the OEMs working together, you guys are going to figure it out. It’s not I can’t do it. It’s how are we going to do it, right? Yeah, 100%. Thanks. Listen, I make mistakes all the time, but, uh, what I like when I’m like, hey, I’m correct. So I’m on the right tangent. So maybe I’ll write about that my next publisher columns. Who knows? Hey, um, as we finish up here, if there’s some people out there on, you know, on our episode and, uh, they would want to bounce some questions off you on, you know, hey, I’ve got, you know, I was thinking about purchasing this piece equipment or a new attachment or so forth, uh, how would they reach out to you? Oh, super easy.

I’m just Aaron at BoominBucket. Aaron at boominbucket.com. Um, we’ve got a whole team of equipment experts that are a lot smarter than I am though now, and so like head over to boominbucket.com, take a look at the machines we have available, talk to our sales team, sales at boominbucket.com. Um, we’ve got our main line right there on the website too. You can text us, you can call us, you can chat with us on the website if you’re feeling particularly techy. Um, we’ve got all kinds of different ways to talk about machines. We love it. Listen, if you’re out there, if you’re an operator or if you’re a contractor looking to get in a new fleet or you just want to talk construction equipment, give this gentleman, you know, a call, and, uh, he’ll put you in the right, uh, in the right direction with his team, and hopefully, they’ll be able to help you. If anybody wants to reach me, you get me at David C at CCR Dash mag.com. Uh, listen, like I said, uh, the way that Aaron got on here, he probably sent me a press release, I looked at it, we exchanged some emails, and boom, here he is. And, uh, and I always say, I know, you know, you know, I say it all the time, if you don’t buy a ticket for the lottery, you can’t win. If you don’t send me something, I can’t look at it. So don’t let, you know, don’t be the judge, don’t judge that book by cover, let me do it. And, uh, listen, we had 29 million people on our website last year. Hopefully, I’ll, you know, go be up in that number, maybe I’ll break 30 this year, who knows? Uh, but we really appreciate you all, you know, like I said, can’t do this without you. But send that to me.

I do anniversaries, it could be a new product announcement, it could be a charity event, we post stuff all day long, and very tough to get in the magazine, but we have all these different platforms. So send us, let me be the judge, and listen, when we post something for you, we send you the link, you share it, it’s good for both of our SEOs, that search engine optimization for you guys out there that you don’t know what it is, Google it. Helps your Google ranking. And, uh, you know, we want you to add. And on that same button, like I said in the beginning of the show, listen, hit that like button. We want this episode to get out so all you contractors out there are thinking about buying new equipment, and subscribe. I do use a lot want to talk electrification. This way we can get to, you know, get it out to Aaron, he can help you, and so forth. So Aaron, as we finish up, if you wanted to leave one positive thought or phrase with our listeners as we go into the weekend fishing in Q4 at the end of the year and we roll into a 2024, what would it be? So I talked to my team a lot about the beauty of doing hard things on a regular basis. There is a misconception out there that all of us are working towards some sort of destination, like a life of ease someday, I’m going to arrive, I’m going to retire, I’m going to play golf, you know, I’m going to do something, and then it’s done and then I can relax, right? But the reality is as soon as you start stop moving forward, you start moving backwards, right, David? I know I’m preaching your language here, you played hockey, you played lacrosse, right? Any sport, as soon as you stop practicing, what happens? Your skills start to evolve flying, if you’re out of the cockpit for a week, you suck when you go back, that’s all there is to it. As soon as you stop moving forward, you start moving backwards. So the beauty of doing hard things is, you know, it continually moves you forward. It keeps you trying new things, you keep pushing the envelope, and, you know, the hardest part of it is that the first move is always the worst, isn’t it? Always the worst part, that beginning, you have to get through that beginner curve where, hey, you go back in the gym, you do a really hard workout, the next day, man, I really hurt, I’m super sore, but if you push through that, it gets easier and easier and easier. That’s true with any skill set, anything you want to accomplish. Keep doing hard things.

I remember, I’m a first-degree black belt, and, uh, I remember the day in my instructory said, the day that you don’t want to clap, that you don’t want to go to class, is the day that you really need to do it. And then that’s it. I mean, uh, you will, I, I preached to all my teams I’ve coached over the years, you will play as you practice, period. And, uh, and then when game day comes, and you got to be flexible, and we can always go into halftime and readjust if someone gets hurt or, you know, whatever, scrap the game plan, and then, you know, finish off. But I always say, you know, it’s just you, when you don’t want to do something, do it, you know, it’s just like taking action. If you take action today, a year from now, you’re Gonna thank yourself for it, so beautiful. Hey, just taking action, taking that first step. Well, Aaron, it’s been a pleasure talking to you, and once again, thank you so much for your service and your father’s too. You know, being a Navy brat and rolling around, you know, going to here and there, but you got to see a lot of things, and flying, you saw, you know, some just probably unbelievable memories, you know, in the cockpit. And, uh, I’m honored to speak to a person like yourself. And, uh, you know, and look where you’re at today. So, uh, with that said, um, say goodbye from Southern California to our listeners out there. My pleasure today, David. Goodbye, everybody. Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And I’m going to say goodbye from Sugar Hill, about, uh, we’re about 30 miles out of North Town, north of Atlanta, uh, just below the Beaufort Dam on Lake Lanier. It’s like an ocean out there. It’s about 600 miles out of Coastline.

I’m going to tell you, I think I’m gonna go out in the boat later. Uh, I don’t think it’s been driven all week, so I’ve been on the road and, uh, go hit the Twisted Door for some, uh, I’ll get a BLT or a burger, a really good place if you’re up on Lakeland. Have you never seen it? You got to see it. It’s an amazing thing with the Army Corps of Engineers have done up there. So with that said, everybody, just a couple things. Number one, I want you to stay safe on that construction site, all right? Uh, we want you to get home to your family and be able to do it again today. And even though I said it’s not hot here, listen, we want you to drink lots of liquids, okay? Just, this is the coach talking to me, we want you to stay hydrated. When you get dehydrated, so when you get headaches, when accidents happen, so make sure you’re doing, look, I’ve got my electrolytes right here, you know, so put that powder in your water bottle, stay hydrated, and, you know, have a much better day. And like I said, safety is the number one option that we want. We want you to get home at night and see your cat, you know, your kids, and be able to do it again the following day. So everybody, enjoy the weekend. TGIF to everybody. And Aaron, when I get out to California, I look forward to, I’d love to see, you know, some of this new equipment, and, uh, get the, you know, the tour of whatever’s going on, and even in Austin, if I make it down there, I’d love to have the opportunity if you offer it to me, all right? That’s fantastic. We’ll look forward to it, dude. All right, everybody, we will see you next time on another episode of Commercial Construction Coffee Talk. Aaron, pleasure. All right, thank you so much. Bye.