CCCT with Glenn Davis, Director of Construction with RPM Pizza Video
CCCT with Glenn Davis, Director of Construction with RPM Pizza, the largest Domino’s franchisee in the United States for over 40 years, is family-owned and operates over 175+ stores in five states, including Indiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Headquartered in Gulfport, MS, RPM Pizza was founded in 1981 by Richard and Glenn Mueller and currently employs over 3,800 Team Members. Their Team Members are committed to “Creating Smiles by Making Lives Easier” for our customers and community. They focus on developing great Team Members and improving safety for not only their team but for each and every neighborhood they serve.
Last year, RPM Pizza helped raise over $1.8 million for local schools, safety groups, and other community organizations.
They offer a variety of fund-raising programs for schools and community organizations. Enjoy the conversation.
#pizza #franchisee #restaurant #retail #construction #renovation #commercial
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 & Renovation magazine. This is what it used to look like. We went digital in 2020, and the last issue we did in print was August of 2021. Actually, this is Mr. Glenn Davis, Director of Construction. He’s our guest today. So, normally I go into my sports and everything else, but you know what, Glenn, say hello to our listeners out there on Commercial Construction Coffee Talk. “Hello everybody. Welcome, good to be here.” And Glenn’s out of Gulfport, Mississippi, right? “Correct.” What’s the weather like down there? I know we’ve been hot, we’ve been cold, we got a little hot, now we’re going to get some rain all weekend here in the ATL. What’s it doing down there on the coast? “It’s actually warm again down here, we’re in our 70s still, which is somewhat a little bit warm for this time of the year, but we got hit real hard with heavy heat this summer.” Oh yeah, well listen, I live in Atlanta, I get the heat. Gulfport’s a really cool place. For those of you who haven’t been down there, I actually did one of my summits down at Biloxi. You fly into Gulfport and then it’s about a half-hour ride over to Biloxi, but it’s just beautiful down there. If you ever get a chance to go see the coast of Mississippi or Alabama, or even in Georgia, you know you got Destin and all that, it is just beautiful down there on the gulf. Definitely bucket list. I did an event in Biloxi at the White House, and I liked it so much, I actually brought my summit back a year or two later, and we did it at the Golden Nugget, I think it was, and had our casino night at the yacht. We did the shrimp boat tour, and it’s a really cool place down there. So, if you’ve ever been there, you know, the airport’s tiny, it’s got about five gates, and really easy in and out. You fly from Atlanta, I think it was 45 minutes, we went up, we went down, but really, really cool place.
So, with that said, it’s an honor to have a previous cover person on here. Glenn was the first when we did the digital transformation. We had Glenn’s cover on our May/June issue. We reached out to him, said hey, we’re going digital, would that be okay with you, and he said yeah. So, he actually was the start of my digital transformation from print to web, and we appreciate having a cover person on here. So, Glenn, the way it works is we’re going to, you know, you’ll tell your story, and then we’ll talk about lessons learned from the roller coaster, and then one positive thought or phrase. But before we start, I have a sponsor. After that sponsor has his message out there, we’ll come back and start our conversation. So, hang in there and watch the little video.
“Hey everybody, are you contractors out there struggling to hire? I wanted to introduce you to a partner, dear friends of mine, the Contractor Consultant. This is a company that is putting recruiters and staffing agencies out of business. So, if you’re a construction business out there and you’re struggling to hire and you want to grow and expand your team next year and you’re sick and tired of sifting through resumes and all the administrative burdens of hiring, well, I’ve got something very special for you. These guys have figured it out; they make construction hiring faster, easier, and a lot more affordable. They’re endorsed by ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and they work nationwide across 87 industries. So, if you want to put your hiring to bed for a small monthly fee and learn a new way, a better way, a more effective way to hire in the industry, schedule a call and learn more about this new hiring solution. Text HIRE to 66866, that’s HIRE, H, to 66866. Worst-case scenario, you show up on the call, you learn a few new things that you didn’t already know about hiring. These guys wrote the book, the course, they’re doing it every day. So, with that said, welcome to the show and thanks for listening.”
Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks for being patient. So, Glenn, Director of Construction of RPM. Now, if I’m not mistaken, RPM is one of the largest, is the largest Domino’s franchise, am I correct? “Yes, it is the largest in continental United States.” And how many locations do you guys operate? “About 180 in five states.” Absolutely. The pizza business, very competitive, but obviously, you’re one of the big dogs there, right? “Yes.” So, with that said, the floor is yours, tell us your story.
Well, I was born in San Jose, California, and lived there till I was about seven, and then the family moved to Nevada. We ended up in Washoe Valley, Nevada, which is dead center between Reno, Nevada, and Carson City, Nevada. Currently, I have four kids, two boys, two girls, oldest and younger are boys, and girls are in the middle. I actually have 19 grandkids. Oh my God, 11 of them are, you know, married into the family, the rest are basically married into with a spouse here or there. So, went to school in there, went to Earl Wooster Senior High School in Reno, Nevada, graduated 1978, and right after that, I went into the Carpenters Local 971 in Reno, in their four-year apprenticeship program. I did that about three and a half years into it, was able to graduate, and I went into the United States Navy Seabees. Oh, nice. And have built projects in six different countries around the world. I did seven years active and five years reserves. In 1988, I got out of active duty, went back home to Nevada. My dad had gotten his GC license at that time and was building custom-built houses, you know, 5,000 plus square feet for doctors and lawyers, and those who could afford it. Then come 1990, we had a construction site accident on site with an extend-a-boom forklift, and the roll bar ended up crushing my left foot, which put me into, you know, how do I compete in the business once I healed up, not being able to handle, you know, real rocky foundation in the dirt type walking around or a steep roof. Going through all that battle, and then construction basically shut down on the residential side in the winter of ’91 into ’92. Nobody was building residential, and commercial was slowing way down. So, packed up the family, decided to move back to Mississippi, which is where I was stationed with the Seabees, and nobody was hiring on the construction side. So, while I was active duty, I actually delivered pizza for Domino’s out of a store, working just Friday and Saturday nights from open to close. So, I decided, well, I guess it’s time to change careers. So, I went in, hired at Domino’s Pizza with RPM Pizza, and started off as an assistant manager, became a manager, then became a supervisor. So, I did the operations side of the house for five years, and then I made a sideways move into the office, we call our Resource Center, doing, in charge of the POS system. So, in the technology department, but back then, we’re talking DOS-based computers, there was no Windows, there wasn’t Any of that, so it’s all DOS-based computers doing POS, and I was in that department for five years. Then the position that I have now opened up, so I interviewed for that and received that promotion into the construction side of the house. I’ve been doing construction side of the house for 21 years now. In the beginning, I did construction, facilities management, and telecom, and did that for about 12 years. Then, around 2014, went 100% nothing but the construction inside of the house, handling all major construction, all reimaging. So in 2014, Domino’s rebranded to what they call Pizza Theater, which is what you see in the stores currently. All 180 stores had to be rebranded, and I’m still building new stores and relocating stores into new places. I’ve been doing this, like I said, for 21 years. How many of the stores did you build yourself, when you got your director of construction role? How many of the stores out of the 180 did you build? So currently, in the 21 years, I’m sitting at about a hundred stores that I’ve built or relocated. Sometimes you relocate a store, it still keeps the same store number, so it doesn’t count as a new store, but total, about a hundred stores that I’ve built in all five states.
First of all, we appreciate Glenn’s military service. Your military service, not only being a Seabee, and for those of you guys who don’t know what those guys do, they go out and do the asphalt for the runway. They’re the guys who get stuff done before you even start construction. Being a Seabee, my grandfather was a combat engineer in World War II underneath Patton, and he built all the bridges that the Allies blew up, and afterwards, when they were rebuilding Europe. So, we appreciate your support. The Seabees, I have a fond memory of because, you know, watching some of the old Super 8s that my grandfather had. They go into an island during World War II, and they would go in and do a runway so they could get the planes to run, you know, figure it out, right. So, that’s all. Did not know about that. Yes, so basically, he was an engineer. The Seabees have the Civil Engineer Corps, but then the Seabees are the ones that actually do all the work. They go into wartime, they go in either with the Marines when they hit the beach or land, and they build everything – they build an entire base, runways, sea huts, hospitals, a galley, you know, everything.
Education – that’s unbelievable education. I always tell people if they have kids and they’re 18 and they don’t know what they’re going to do, you know, just tell them to go into the military. You get three square meals a day, you’re going to learn a trade, you’re going to build your character, you’re going to learn leadership, and if you decide to stay in or if you do your time and go back to civilian life, you’ll have a trade or a skill that you can apply to the business world. So, let’s talk about, over the 21 years, you’ve been building stores. They’re not cookie-cutter; every one of them’s different, but they still have the same basic format depending on what location they’re in. March of 2020 comes up, cranes all over the place, low unemployment, everything’s cranking, and then everything gets shut down. Talk about how RPM weathered the storm and got to maintain their clients and construction projects. In the very beginning, they slowed down, and Domino’s Corporation figured out how to do contactless delivery, how to do different things so that the operations side of the house could meet all the mandates. On the construction side, the biggest thing that hit was lead times on equipment. You know, in the beginning of 2022, it was nine months to get a rooftop AC unit. Every store has a walk-in cooler, 23 weeks, region cooler, 37 weeks, ovens were 16 weeks. So, it was not only the meter base, but even the disconnect and all the breaker panels. Last year, in May of last year, I ordered five stores’ worth of meter bases, disconnects, and all the breaker panels, and it took till October to get everything.
The meter bases, I didn’t get the meter bases until February this year. The problem has slowed down a little bit, but it’s still not fixed. RTU’s, rooftop AC units, went from nine months, we’re currently at four months now, so it’s still long. It’s cut itself in half, and a lot of it has to do with everything you use in construction is made out of metal. Metal went up 237% in that range. So, it was hard to get things, and that was the biggest thing – manufacturing delays and supply chain. Freight average right now is 9%; it could go up still to maybe 12%. Before all this, we were at 6% average on freight cost. So, having to adjust for all that budget-wise and everything else has been crazy.
The first thing I did when the roller coaster started, I went out and redid my deck. I got the 2x10s, 2x8s, 2x4s, and then all of a sudden, everything just shot up. If I had waited on that project, maybe five or six months, everything would have been double or triple. It was just amazing. We had our house on the market, and our basement wasn’t finished. I had one room that my office was finished, but it was all stubbed out. We decided to take the house off the market and finish the basement ourselves. Just trying to find little gang boxes, they were like 75 cents, they were now $1.50 at Lowe’s or Home Depot. Trying to find primer for paint, we had a crew, but we had to wait for products. I went to some of my vendors, and they helped me out with the project, but it was very frustrating that the products weren’t there. Even the electrical wire, 14-2 or 12-2, those rolls used to be $60; they were $120, and you couldn’t even find them. We actually ran out of FRP adhesive twice. I bought a pallet full of three-gallon buckets so that when it happens again, and I’m in the middle of a construction project, I’ve got it. Some paint colors are hard to get; it might take a month to get some color that’s not standard. My wife, she’s got contracts with the two major paint manufacturers around this area. We went to one, and they didn’t have any primer. I called around and finally found some. I bought the last few buckets that were on there. It was just outrageous how quickly things went up. The prices of little things, like the electrical boxes, when you’re building a whole house, when the price doubles, it’s all just a line item on the budget, and it all adds up.
Right now, wood has come down. I’m in the HOA’s back; we bought a piece of land in 2020. They sent me a letter this week, and they need to know when we’re going to start. We’re going to build it ourselves. We have a good crew, and things will be fun building that house. It’s just me and her and some dogs, three bedrooms, a basement, three-car garage, just a mellow little Southern Ranch. But my wife’s an interior designer, too. We went into all the homes, and the neighbors are going to be looking, so the competition is looking. How did corporate stores handle the pandemic? Even though with the labor and so forth, the corporate stores, the franchises, how did they handle it? The construction side doesn’t seem to slow down; residential has, but commercial hasn’t slowed down a whole lot. People are still building. How they’re adjusting to it, I know that we’ve slowed down a little bit. The biggest problem we’re having right now is finding real estate. Everybody thought that with COVID, rent was going to get real cheap, but that didn’t happen. Rent has gone up, so trying to deal with that and going through it, my construction cost went way up. I’ve been working diligently with doing cost comparisons and different things, looking at whether I can design a smaller footprint store and try to reduce costs, looking at equipment and everything else, and seeing what I can change in order to help reduce cost. For the last year, I’ve been working a lot on that, doing comparisons from what I’m doing now to other vendors, to see whether I can save money somewhere else, and I’ve been able to save with different things.
Changing a few things to get construction costs down has really been the big thing. We’re still spending more than we did before all this, but it’s creeping up slowly going back down. When the roller coaster started, a lot of restaurants had to close, and they were doing outside delivery. Obviously, fast food was like, if you had a drive-thru. But if you were a restaurant and didn’t have that drive-thru, you were probably very disappointed. Did sales go up because people weren’t able to go out, or was it constant just the way it was year after year? It slowed down in the beginning, but as soon as everything got set with how to handle all of this, then sales went up, yes, across the board. And I think all QSRs, and anybody that could be open and follow the guidelines, because you had to close your lobby, and then for a while, you could open them back up. But if you had a drink fountain, nobody was allowed to use it, and there were a lot of different rules. I mean, as soon as the lobbies opened back up, I had to design and create sneeze shields to go on a sales counter in every store. There was a lot of them going up, but you try to do something so it looks neat, clean, and organized. I created something and had them built, but Lexan wasn’t cheap. Everybody was doing it, which just raised the price. I was lucky to have a sign company that we use for all our signage that’s local. We worked it out, did a couple of different variations, and then they were handed out. For our stores in the Midwest, they were shipped out, and everybody had to put them up. Once it’s over with, I designed them so you could take them apart and store them, but in reality, they just get thrown away. Some QSRs figured out how to put a shield up on the drive-thru window to make it smaller, so we had to do that on all stores. It was a lot of going back and forth and trying to figure all that out. That was high priority, and everything else kind of stopped while you figured this out, got it made, got it shipped out into all the stores so they could open their doors and keep the customers and team members safe. You wonder if the sneeze guards even worked, but that’s a whole another debate.
How was the construction process during this time? You know, in Georgia, we kind of stayed open. I had three projects that were right. I watched this old retirement home being built, a new fire station, and another project for the city. Everything didn’t slow down, but it depended on what state you were in. If you had to go in and do a bathroom, you might not have been able to do it because you were in closed quarters. But if you were on an outdoor Federal Highway project where you were open, you probably were able to get it done. What was a typical lead time for one of your facilities to get built? From the time I permit to the time I open runs about four months, with the last month, half of that two weeks, we give to operations so that they can get the store set up and training. So it’s usually about three months for the construction, and then you’ve got to install equipment, get your final inspections, punch list, and then turn it over to operations with a health inspection. They open up, so typically about four months if everything goes smoothly. The biggest thing that changed was on the building department and plan side. Several years ago, you could get a permit within seven to ten days, then it went to 30, and during that time, it could be 90 days before you got a permit. A lot of it because different municipalities basically shut down and were virtual. Health departments were working from home. The municipalities struggled more than we did on the construction side. The thing you had to worry about was quotes from subs. The GC would get a quote from the sub, and he’d say that number is good for two weeks, where before it’d be three months or 30 days. I only had one project close down. Mississippi was open, Louisiana was open. But I had one project where we ended up shutting down for two weeks because the local city decided to say, hey, we’re shutting down construction projects. We’re taking a hiatus. Our local Domino’s, it was an older store, and they knocked it down, rebuilt a new one. Domino’s, I think, has come out with a nice line of diverse products. They don’t just do pizza these days. You’ve got a bunch of new items. Do you get to go through any of those taste tests yourself, even from the construction side?
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 & Renovation magazine. This is what it used to look like. We went digital in 2020, and the last issue we did in print was August of 2021. Actually, this is Mr. Glenn Davis, Director of Construction. He’s our guest today. So, normally I go into my sports and everything else, but you know what, Glenn, say hello to our listeners out there on Commercial Construction Coffee Talk. “Hello everybody. Welcome, good to be here.” And Glenn’s out of Gulfport, Mississippi, right? “Correct.” What’s the weather like down there? I know we’ve been hot, we’ve been cold, we got a little hot, now we’re going to get some rain all weekend here in the ATL. What’s it doing down there on the coast? “It’s actually warm again down here, we’re in our 70s still, which is somewhat a little bit warm for this time of the year, but we got hit real hard with heavy heat this summer.” Oh yeah, well listen, I live in Atlanta, I get the heat. Gulfport’s a really cool place. For those of you who haven’t been down there, I actually did one of my summits down at Biloxi. You fly into Gulfport and then it’s about a half-hour ride over to Biloxi, but it’s just beautiful down there. If you ever get a chance to go see the coast of Mississippi or Alabama, or even in Georgia, you know you got Destin and all that, it is just beautiful down there on the gulf. Definitely bucket list. I did an event in Biloxi at the White House, and I liked it so much, I actually brought my summit back a year or two later, and we did it at the Golden Nugget, I think it was, and had our casino night at the yacht. We did the shrimp boat tour, and it’s a really cool place down there. So, if you’ve ever been there, you know, the airport’s tiny, it’s got about five gates, and really easy in and out. You fly from Atlanta, I think it was 45 minutes, we went up, we went down, but really, really cool place.
So, with that said, it’s an honor to have a previous cover person on here. Glenn was the first when we did the digital transformation. We had Glenn’s cover on our May/June issue. We reached out to him, said hey, we’re going digital, would that be okay with you, and he said yeah. So, he actually was the start of my digital transformation from print to web, and we appreciate having a cover person on here. So, Glenn, the way it works is we’re going to, you know, you’ll tell your story, and then we’ll talk about lessons learned from the roller coaster, and then one positive thought or phrase. But before we start, I have a sponsor. After that sponsor has his message out there, we’ll come back and start our conversation. So, hang in there and watch the little video.
“Hey everybody, are you contractors out there struggling to hire? I wanted to introduce you to a partner, dear friends of mine, the Contractor Consultant. This is a company that is putting recruiters and staffing agencies out of business. So, if you’re a construction business out there and you’re struggling to hire and you want to grow and expand your team next year and you’re sick and tired of sifting through resumes and all the administrative burdens of hiring, well, I’ve got something very special for you. These guys have figured it out; they make construction hiring faster, easier, and a lot more affordable. They’re endorsed by ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and they work nationwide across 87 industries. So, if you want to put your hiring to bed for a small monthly fee and learn a new way, a better way, a more effective way to hire in the industry, schedule a call and learn more about this new hiring solution. Text HIRE to 66866, that’s HIRE, H, to 66866. Worst-case scenario, you show up on the call, you learn a few new things that you didn’t already know about hiring. These guys wrote the book, the course, they’re doing it every day. So, with that said, welcome to the show and thanks for listening.”
Hey everybody, I hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks for being patient. So, Glenn, Director of Construction of RPM. Now, if I’m not mistaken, RPM is one of the largest, is the largest Domino’s franchise, am I correct? “Yes, it is the largest in continental United States.” And how many locations do you guys operate? “About 180 in five states.” Absolutely. The pizza business, very competitive, but obviously, you’re one of the big dogs there, right? “Yes.” So, with that said, the floor is yours, tell us your story.
Well, I was born in San Jose, California, and lived there till I was about seven, and then the family moved to Nevada. We ended up in Washoe Valley, Nevada, which is dead center between Reno, Nevada, and Carson City, Nevada. Currently, I have four kids, two boys, two girls, oldest and younger are boys, and girls are in the middle. I actually have 19 grandkids. Oh my God, 11 of them are, you know, married into the family, the rest are basically married into with a spouse here or there. So, went to school in there, went to Earl Wooster Senior High School in Reno, Nevada, graduated 1978, and right after that, I went into the Carpenters Local 971 in Reno, in their four-year apprenticeship program. I did that about three and a half years into it, was able to graduate, and I went into the United States Navy Seabees. Oh, nice. And have built projects in six different countries around the world. I did seven years active and five years reserves. In 1988, I got out of active duty, went back home to Nevada. My dad had gotten his GC license at that time and was building custom-built houses, you know, 5,000 plus square feet for doctors and lawyers, and those who could afford it. Then come 1990, we had a construction site accident on site with an extend-a-boom forklift, and the roll bar ended up crushing my left foot, which put me into, you know, how do I compete in the business once I healed up, not being able to handle, you know, real rocky foundation in the dirt type walking around or a steep roof. Going through all that battle, and then construction basically shut down on the residential side in the winter of ’91 into ’92. Nobody was building residential, and commercial was slowing way down. So, packed up the family, decided to move back to Mississippi, which is where I was stationed with the Seabees, and nobody was hiring on the construction side. So, while I was active duty, I actually delivered pizza for Domino’s out of a store, working just Friday and Saturday nights from open to close. So, I decided, well, I guess it’s time to change careers. So, I went in, hired at Domino’s Pizza with RPM Pizza, and started off as an assistant manager, became a manager, then became a supervisor. So, I did the operations side of the house for five years, and then I made a sideways move into the office, we call our Resource Center, doing, in charge of the POS system. So, in the technology department, but back then, we’re talking DOS-based computers, there was no Windows, there wasn’t.
Highlight of Doing Construction
Highlight of doing the construction construction. So yeah, how many locations do you think future projects you’ll do over the next year or so? As we move in, we’re closing out this year, Q4 is almost over, the holidays are coming, and then we’re going into the new year. I have one under construction that’ll open up before Christmas, a new store, and then next year I have one new store slated currently and four relocations. For me, that’s five builds. A relocation is the same thing to build. It still takes exactly the same amount of money and exactly the same equipment to build a to relocate a store as it does to build a new one. I have slated and then there’s going to be four major remodels to do up in the Midwest.
Bullish or Bearish
As we finish out the year and go into Q4 and the new year starts, are you bullish or bearish on what’s going on in the restaurant sector? It really depends on what type of restaurateur you are. I think things are going to start to get better in 2024. I think construction material cost should start dropping and all the different reports and stuff I’ve seen say that should start dropping. Real estate’s hard to figure out, and with us right now, we’re not really building any single unit free-standing buildings because it’s just not economical; it hasn’t been that way for 10-15 years now. We do some duplexes and triplexes, and the development is handled through our real estate, then I do the build-out of the Domino space. We’re looking at a couple of those, but those are ground-ups. You got to get the real estate, then basically comes down the numbers. Construction costs are currently up, real estate is up, so everything when you add it all together, the store still has to make money. My job is to try to get those construction costs down. Since four stores ago, the store I’m on now will be about $65,000 less than the last four. I have one that’ll start construction in March of next year, and I’m figuring out how to save another $40,000 on that one.
Domino’s Operations
Domino’s corporate is doing the same thing. I just got back from a two-day trip up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, talking about the same thing with Domino’s corporate and with their development team. Trying to figure out how we can build smaller, what we can do with equipment. For example, a cut table is 4 foot by six foot, or whatever size. Can I make it smaller? Ovens, you can’t always go smaller, but you can go less, and they’re working on trying to get the bake time down to be quicker. There is an oven that is a little bit quicker that we’re going to be testing at the next store. The challenge is how to build smaller but still fit all your equipment and meet ADA standards throughout the entire store. On the real estate side, like, I could build into a 1,200-square-foot space all the time, but a landlord doesn’t want to lease 1,200 square feet because if we ever leave, they can’t flip it easily. The smallest they’ll go is 1,500 square feet. So how do I put a 1,200-square-foot store into 1,500 square feet? What do I do with the other 300 square feet to reduce cost? We figured out how to do that, and we’re going to try it at the next store that’ll open up in Madisonville, Louisiana, but it starts construction in March. The landlord is building a building right now. The challenge is comparing the vendor we’re using now with another vendor for lighting and signage, construction equipment, and see if I can save any more money.
Famous Quote
If there was one positive thought or phrase that you’d want to leave with our listeners on Commercial Construction Coffee Talk as we finish out the year and roll into 2024, it would be a famous quote. Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous quote is, “You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledgehammer on the construction site.” With that, it’s like, okay, a lot of people are trying to cut costs, so if I’m paying $20,000 for plans, how do I reduce that?
Can I spend $110,000 for plans? The problem is that when you do that, you’re going to be using a sledgehammer on site to correct something that you don’t want because it wasn’t on the plans, but you tried to save money. So, save money where you can, but with the plans, you got to make sure they’re detailed and everything else. If you do have to use a sledgehammer, you’re talking change orders. Anytime you do a change order, the price goes up with overhead, profit, insurance, and everything else. That is probably the most famous quote that I like the most, and I have others too.
I’m a digital guy these days. I’ve been working on my digital agency, which is going to launch here in a couple of weeks, taking digital classes all for the last year. I have to nurture my business page every night. I always put quotes up there, some videos, but the other night I put one up that said, “Every boss was a worker before,” just like Domino’s. I have a little picture of a guy in a car or something like that, but it really hit home.
When I started my business back in 2001, I’d been a publisher, an ad sales guy. I moved my way up and then went out on my own, but I knew how I wanted to run my publishing firm. If I didn’t do any of those previous six to eight years, there’s no way I could have done it. Nine out of ten businesses don’t make it when they start out as an entrepreneur because they think they know it, but having that experience behind it is priceless, in my opinion.
If anybody wants to get in touch with me, I’m at David C at ccrm mag.com. Glenn and I have known each other; he’s been on the cover of the magazine. He was telling me, “Hey, you should have these types of people on your show,” and I said, “Hey, why don’t you be on the show?” So he got approval, and that’s how he made it on here. If you ever want to be a guest, reach out to me. Getting in the magazine is tough, but we have so many social media channels, press releases, new product announcements, anniversaries. Don’t judge that book by its cover; let us do it. We will post that stuff. We get a couple million people a month that hit the website. We’ll post it, we’ll send the URL, share it. It’s good for our SEO, search engine optimization. Google will find you. Send it to me. It’s like playing the lottery; if you don’t buy a ticket, you can’t win. If you don’t send me something, I can’t look at it.
With that, I’m going to cave into, hey, hit that Subscribe button there too. Make sure this episode gets out so everybody can hear Mr. Glenn’s story, coming from a CV to working in a Domino’s, and now he’s built over 100 locations in all these years. Hit that button, and we really appreciate it. Number one, if you’re out at a construction site, make sure you’re safe. We want you to get home at night, see your kids, your wife, your dogs, whatever, and catch some z’s and then be able to go back and do it again. Safety is number one in my book. And number two, even though it’s going to be winter, like Glen said, it’s still warm down there in Mississippi, we want you to stay hydrated. Make sure you drink lots of liquid on the construction site. Don’t get dehydrated. Dehydration gives you headaches, you make mistakes, that’s how you get hurt. So number one, be safe on the site; number two, stay hydrated or liquified, and you’ll just enjoy yourself so much better.
Glenn, pleasure having you as a guest. I’m honored to have you on here. Listen, you graduated high school in ’78, I graduated ’81, so we’re both about 26 or 27 years old, right? Yeah, exactly, age is a number. Once again, thank you for your service. Hats off to you. With that said, Glenn, say goodbye from Gulfport, Mississippi. Goodbye from Gulfport, Mississippi. And I’m going to sign off from Sugar Hill, just below the Buford Dam, about 25 miles north of downtown Atlanta. Everybody, listen, you got Thanksgiving coming up in a couple of weeks, then you got Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s, and boom, this year’s over. It’s been a wild ride, but 2024, you know, look, there’s a lot of stuff you can’t control, so you just got to do your gig, and whatever happens, happens. But 2024, I’m very positive about it. I’ve talked to a lot of my clients; they’re all very busy, and construction keeps going right along. Whatever happens, you got to roll with the punches, but we’re all going to make it. It might get a little worse before it gets better, but it’s going to get better. I always look at the glass half full or empty. You know what? I’m just glad I have a glass to look at. So, you know, stay positive, have a smile, get rid of all that negativity. It’s not going to help you. You can’t worry about it. Be a warrior, not a worrier, and your products are going to show up eventually on the site, and you’re going to get the job done.
Glenn, I look forward to seeing you. I’m not sure what I’m doing with my events, if I’m going to bring it back totally in person or probably doing another hybrid gig. I’ve got another big announcement that I’m going to make here. I don’t know if I’ll do it this year, I might do it in the last issue of the year, but I’m sure you’re going to like it. I’m honored to have you on the show, and have a great rest of the week, what’s left of it. Everybody out there on Commercial Construction Coffee Talk, we will see you next time on another episode. Glenn, pleasure. Thank you so much, pleasure too. Thank you.
The 2024 virtual Men’s Round Table will be held Q4, 2024, date TBD.
