His Journey from Teacher to Entrepreneur , Project Map It.

Mission Control Podcast

In today's episode, Mike sits down with Stephen Spence, who runs Project Map It. Project Map It is an interactive map that showcases all your previous work and lets customers search by area, project category, or even product type. You can easily embed the map on your website, enhance your web presence with SEO, and show prospective customers your company's presence in their neighborhood. An extremely useful tool in an age where technology and business are becoming evermore intertwined. Stephen talks about his journey of getting started with Project Map It and the many struggles he faced along the way.

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00;00;02;08 - 00;00;25;17 Mike & Stephen Okay, Steven Spence, project map it. How you doing, man? Mike Sterns Acsend digital. I'm good.

00;00;25;20 - 00;00;43;04 Mike & Stephen Yeah, yeah. My friend. You see, we did a jersey swap. We're gonna do a little signing afterwards. You know, something like hold up. Yeah, yeah, we're going to do that, and it's going to be great. Thank you for coming. I'm very excited to be here. We're excited to have you bracelet with open arms. I mean, you get the concierge white glove service, like all of our clients, right?

00;00;43;05 - 00;00;59;27 Mike & Stephen As a partner, we can pick you up from the airport, bring you in. yeah, it's good stuff. So, shout out to roofer. you know, if you're looking for clean and pristine proposals, roof measurements, instant quotes, like anything you can to make your business better. Even a CRM hit up the team, a roofer down in the description.

00;00;59;27 - 00;01;19;13 Mike & Stephen There's going to be a link. You click it, you let them know I sent you. You'll be happy you did. Monday. We yeah. We love roofer. We're partnered with roofer. Yeah. We don't have many partners. we have a couple of project map it. we have roofer, and, I see that, like, a lot of companies, it's kind of just, a money grab, right?

00;01;19;17 - 00;01;39;06 Mike & Stephen Like, hey, sponsor this and we'll do this and we'll promote you. And I have a hard time doing that because I want to be aligned ethically as far as efficacy of whatever it is I'm sponsoring, I want to know that it works. I want to know that they're going to provide the same type of experience for my customers that a son aims to provide every one of our customers.

00;01;39;08 - 00;01;59;23 Mike & Stephen So so, you know what? With that we have I think we're I think we have like 13 partners, of which we really work with, probably six of them, like hardcore. And part of that, just our bandwidth. We're a small company, right. So we don't I don't we now I am now able to utilize my time a little bit more to work with our partners.

00;01;59;23 - 00;02;20;20 Mike & Stephen However, with what you just said. We do not do any kind of a rep share with any of our partners. We co market, we send customers to people we partner with, people that we know that are either going to help our contractors, leverage and use project mapping easier like certainty ABC supply, SRS distribution. That all just helps the contractor.

00;02;20;22 - 00;02;36;09 Mike & Stephen and then we have partners like you, you know, you're our go to website, full on marketing agency that we send people to. but yeah, no, Rob shares, I, I agree with you. It just gets muddy. You start saying, hey, I'll give you X amount if you send me referrals and crap like that. I don't like it.

00;02;36;11 - 00;02;54;23 Mike & Stephen Yeah, I appreciate that. What, have you talked to any of the customers that have had us do any work for them? yeah. Responsive roofing. Ron Hilliard is a stud. I love the guy. Ever since I met him, the very first time on our first demo call. Ron, Ron loves you guys. I was just checking out the website before we started this, and?

00;02;54;23 - 00;03;18;24 Mike & Stephen And it's a slick looking website, man. The aim to please. You're doing good stuff, which I. This which is why I've been through, I think, 3 or 4 other marketing agencies in my six years. And when I met you however many years ago now too, there's been a couple of years. You were three years, at dinner with TC Bakker, and, we were talking about acquired taste, but once you acquire it, you can't get rid of it.

00;03;18;28 - 00;03;39;27 Mike & Stephen Look, folks, I'm not for everyone, okay? I attract some, I repel others, and you know what? I'm okay with it. I used to try to please everyone, and then I said, fuck it. Are we allowed to talk about this? Yeah, yeah. So, like, we had dinner with T.C. Bakker. You remember that, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And. And the first five minutes you were giving it to the the lady waitress and I.

00;03;40;00 - 00;03;54;28 Mike & Stephen And I was sitting pretty much right across from you, and I'm trying to figure out it was the first time I really met you. Like, is this guy, like, just an asshole or is he joking? And then even throughout the dinner, like, the acquired tastes happened throughout the dinner, like at the beginning, I was kind of like, what?

00;03;55;01 - 00;04;10;28 Mike & Stephen What's going on with Mike? Everything. I can't tell if he's joking or not. And then by the end I'm like, this dude is is authentic and genuine as you can get. Yeah. And I think, I think she had a similar learning curve. Like I wasn't being explicitly an asshole, but I have a dry sense of humor. You do?

00;04;11;00 - 00;04;29;02 Mike & Stephen and I find it fun. Okay. And some people do. Some people don't. But we left her a nice tip. She was smiling. We did? Yeah. And, we had good food. The service was good. Yeah, yeah. And we, you know, it's funny because in that meeting we had talked a few months before that. I'm big on accountability.

00;04;29;02 - 00;04;45;08 Mike & Stephen Core value number one is accountability at the end. And, you know, seven, seven I were we were exchanging conversation and it was a screen share. So we had had a screen share a few months earlier. And she said, now that I imagine, you know, now that we're able to finally speak. And I was like, well, hold on a second.

00;04;45;08 - 00;05;02;10 Mike & Stephen I was like, you know, we we talked before, we talked in depth before on a screen show. So. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, I don't think, I think I reached out to you and like, we never then reconvene. Like, what happened? He's like, oh, man. And we started to and we talked through it because communication is super important.

00;05;02;12 - 00;05;19;06 Mike & Stephen Okay I was at no no excuse what Mike said. What you said, right there is 100% truth. I did forget that we had a screen share. It's all that was also going through a very dark time in my life when we had that screen share. And, you know, I was empathetic to that. I think you were.

00;05;19;08 - 00;05;56;12 Mike & Stephen You know, it's, you're a friend of mine, I think. I think it's important. I think it's important for, you know, any any healthy relationship that has any chance of sustaining the test of time at the foundational level. You know, everybody expects something from somebody, right? And what those expectations are, they vary from relationship to relationship. If you think about with a casual friend, with a partner in life, with, with a partner in business, with employer, employee, like there's always like these built in expectations and like I think the more explicit they are and the more accountability there are to those expectations, the better the likelihood that relationship has of succeeding over time.

00;05;56;14 - 00;06;17;14 Mike & Stephen Can I I actually want to speak to that. But before I do, I have some some props here. I only have one, but I do have a swim cap that you're more than welcome to wear. So if you want to wear it or I can wear it. and then I also have some swim goggles. And I made sure to get my sons red ones because it matches the sand.

00;06;17;17 - 00;06;36;05 Mike & Stephen So last time we spoke, what was the thing one of us or both of us had was one gap. My kids would not give me two swim caps. Okay, so would you like to wear it? Since that's your show or would that would that make your hair look bad? Because my hair always looks bad, right? It might fuck up my hair, but you know, I've been dying to drop the line.

00;06;36;05 - 00;06;52;11 Mike & Stephen I think it's I'm glad that. Are you not entertained? Yeah. And I think this would be the perfect opportunity to do that. Okay. There you go. I'll tell you about since you're doing that, I'll do this at least for a little bit. Until Christian says, Steve, you look like an idiot. You can take those off. Now, full disclosure, I've never put on a swim cap before.

00;06;52;12 - 00;07;10;17 Mike & Stephen Yeah, well, I haven't either. So you're going to be the first. Why aren't you a swimmer now? Yeah, I I'm a good runner. I was a lacrosse player. Lacrosse? That's right. Cross guy. So I think they start at the front like that and they just pull all the way back. It doesn't have to be perfect. Oh, yeah. You rock it much better than I do,

00;07;10;19 - 00;07;28;08 Mike & Stephen How's it feel? You don't have to go over your ears. But the swimmers, do. You? Look. You look like. Not over the years. Oh, you can hold it up. You. You can hear me. I'm like this. Are we good? And we're back. So back to what you were saying? about built. You took it off. Well, yeah, I was just.

00;07;28;09 - 00;07;44;07 Mike & Stephen Yeah. Oh, well, I'll wear it the whole time. You said you wear it the whole time. I have to throw it. I mean, that be bad for the podcast. Are those prescription, those glasses. Those are those, aren't you. Yeah. You know, I was I say I could throw on the red glasses, add some flare. But I do want to wear the got the goggles look good.

00;07;44;10 - 00;08;02;17 Mike & Stephen So, I got a message for you. You did much better. I don't know how to do it. I got a message from a guy. I got a message from a guy on LinkedIn. Well, just. I don't need to say names and and, And I. That's nice. That's all good. Yeah, yeah. All right. How's my hair? Kristen?

00;08;02;21 - 00;08;23;26 Mike & Stephen Yours looks good. so I got a I got a message from a gentleman p last night, and you told me I had to wear it the whole night. Take it off, I love it. Got a message from this guy. you were talking about building relationships with new, new partners and stuff like that. Yeah. got a message, said, hey, you know, I listened to your podcast with leap, and I really liked it.

00;08;23;29 - 00;08;48;22 Mike & Stephen In fact, funny enough, I heard you mention engage, which is another great partner of ours. And, we just pushed engage out to our dealer network, and I would love to talk to you. Oh, no. I'm sorry. Wrong. Running around. That was another LinkedIn guy. Two messages. So last week this gentleman texts this guy, message me on LinkedIn and basically said, hey, we have this program that does roof measurements.

00;08;48;25 - 00;09;06;28 Mike & Stephen We'd love to chat with you. And I said, sure, I'm always up for a discovery call. I messaged back, I said, here's my here's my email address, here's my phone number. Feel free to give me a call. And in my inbox like five minutes later, I got a calendar invite for a day like he picked a day. I didn't like that.

00;09;07;01 - 00;09;28;10 Mike & Stephen And because he's assuming, I said give me a call or whatever, it screams entitlement. It does like like, hey, here's the day you didn't ask me like, hey, when are you free? You know, it's just that was the first that was the first kind of interaction I had with beyond the messaging and LinkedIn. And so I canceled it and I just I email back, said, sorry, I can't make it that day.

00;09;28;13 - 00;09;44;02 Mike & Stephen And so instead of him saying, hey, any and he called me Spencer too. By the way, my name is Steve Spence, not Spencer. it's new nickname. Spencer. No, no. Yeah, not at all. I hate it. So you're probably a little too young. You won't give me your age, but Spencer for hire was a big show back when I was younger.

00;09;44;02 - 00;10;00;28 Mike & Stephen And people would call me Spencer, and I hated it. Got it. So he's been calling me Spencer this whole time, too. And I'm just thinking to myself, dude, you were. You were starting off on the wrong foot. Like you want to form a relationship with me. You can't even say my name, right? And secondly, you keep scheduling these meetings and I cancel the meeting.

00;10;00;28 - 00;10;17;18 Mike & Stephen I got a the meeting was supposedly yesterday, and I canceled it. He emailed me yesterday. Hey, sorry I can't make the meeting in time, I rescheduled it. He didn't even see that I canceled the meeting. So that guy is not ever going to get any of my conversation, business or discovery call again. Sure. Yeah. The the entitlement of.

00;10;17;24 - 00;10;33;09 Mike & Stephen Okay. You want to meet? Well, here's the date and time we're going to me. And I'll just assume even though you're running a business free, you're going to make sure that you're available. Yeah. It's, it's a needless power play, I would say. I was a teacher for 20 years, and I got to be honest with you, like, names were very important to me.

00;10;33;17 - 00;10;49;28 Mike & Stephen Yeah, we had a we had a young lady from Africa. Didn't speak a lick of English. Come into my math class one day and on the paper EJ said her name, although I'm was her name, but it was hard to enunciate and I asked her. I said, how do you say your name? She goes mayowa for short. Yeah.

00;10;49;29 - 00;11;07;06 Mike & Stephen I said, how do you say the whole name? I mean, she didn't. You understand what I'm saying? She finally, I think, understood. She said Ola Ola y mayowa. And so I literally spent like the rest of that class, just walk around in my head quietly saying all over my, all over my, all over my own. Because names are important.

00;11;07;06 - 00;11;22;24 Mike & Stephen I was called Stephanie by teachers when I was in school because my name is spelled with this. Like, come on, man, names are important. And when I'm on calls all the time, the first thing I say is I don't. I don't know how to enunciate your name. I want to make sure I'm saying your name right. And people appreciate that man relationships.

00;11;22;24 - 00;11;43;17 Mike & Stephen The details matter. Devil's in. The details matter. Yeah. I am a big believer in small details. Can make a big difference in anything. Yep. You know, I, I got a message I had reached out to David Carroll dough marketing. And that's my guy, by the way. At the time we hadn't had much of a relationship. I was like, hey, I was interested in, you know, doing some of these mailers or whatever.

00;11;43;20 - 00;12;07;21 Mike & Stephen And he responded with a calendar link. So when we got to talking, I was like, I was like, you know, a little bit of a power play to send a gala link. You don't acknowledge the message, just drop a Kelly link and I think that's more of a me thing. Right? I think that's me being, an opportunity for me to grow, maybe where it's like, you know, you're saying you want to you want to talk about something, somebody sending you a link to schedule some time, like that's fair.

00;12;07;24 - 00;12;23;13 Mike & Stephen The other side of me is like, you know, hey, how's it going? So we talked about it. We communicated, and he's like, never even thought of it like that. Communication. I don't think it's a mike thing. I think I think that is a I think the way you felt about it is the way everybody should feel about, to be honest with you.

00;12;23;14 - 00;12;47;19 Mike & Stephen Yeah. I think it's also so I think it's great that you talk to him about it. And he acknowledged it. Yeah. And that's the thing. Like especially in business, there's so many moving parts. Everyone's so busy like within, you know, my job my team job and and everything like that. And your roofing company and your your admins and your product fulfillment and project managers, there's so much stuff going on that without proper context, like we can't just assume what people are thinking.

00;12;47;19 - 00;13;05;09 Mike & Stephen We can't assume that like, hey, this dude is being malicious or trying to power play me because he just responded with a calendly, right? Like David was probably busiest because he runs a very successful company. There's a lot of things going on. It's like, let me just make sure I get this link out where it's like me. I'm like, okay, maybe you're being sensitive, right?

00;13;05;09 - 00;13;30;08 Mike & Stephen And we don't know. I was stuck in traffic yesterday, and, there's this woman, this she's, you know, she's going like 20 miles an hour and the speed limit is like, 35. And, you know, Everett, big guy at six months, 20 pounds, he's teething. He's in the backseat. He is screaming and crying. And in the moment I became furious that this lady is driving so slow.

00;13;30;10 - 00;13;48;23 Mike & Stephen Because all I want to do is get my son home, maybe get him some Tylenol. You know, as a parent, I don't love my son. You know, in the back sounding like he's in anguish right? So, you know, my my initial response was like, can you just fucking go, lady? And I wanted to like, blow the horn. But I thought about it like, she doesn't know.

00;13;48;23 - 00;14;01;05 Mike & Stephen Yeah, she doesn't know that I've got a screaming six month old in the back of the car. Right. She's, you know, for whatever reason, she's going a little bit slow, and it's not that big of a deal at the end of the day. And she's old. She may have been old. She was driving slow. I don't know that she was old or not.

00;14;01;05 - 00;14;17;13 Mike & Stephen I didn't look, but I was just trying to work on being situationally aware and like, not being so triggered by things that are inconsequential in life. I agree with that. That's that's my opportunity for growth. And I got to focus on that every single day because, you know, some things they they just really fucking strike a nerve.

00;14;17;15 - 00;14;39;26 Mike & Stephen Oh, I also just drove from the airport with you. So I am fully aware of how you drive and driving 20mph is. Oh, okay. Oh, you're gonna cut that and I'm just going to leave it. It was a fun ride though. It was. There's nobody that takes their job more seriously and works harder than the folks that are sitting, waiting at the arrivals gate.

00;14;39;28 - 00;14;57;06 Mike & Stephen and when you're pulling up and you're trying to pick someone up from the airport, they are the most zealous individuals, rigid, process. I mean, as soon as they see that you pull up, they come tap on your window. You can't be here. And now you got to justify that this guy's literally walking through the door, and it's okay.

00;14;57;09 - 00;15;10;15 Mike & Stephen Like, no, they have to be outside. You have to do a lap. It's crazy. They do a good job though. Yeah, they're doing their job and they're doing it well. And for that I appreciate that. And I like that you just use the word process. I mean I think that's important. I've never heard you use that word before.

00;15;10;17 - 00;15;32;12 Mike & Stephen Yeah. Something new I learned I saw it on TikTok. So yeah. So I learned that processes are important. And in the absence of processes, shit doesn't get done. but, you know, I also find having process isn't enough, right? A lot of the times people fall into a few different buckets and it causes points of friction and breakdown, within their business.

00;15;32;12 - 00;15;55;28 Mike & Stephen And, you know, they don't have processes, right? That's the first problem. Or they have processes. They're just shitty processes or they're not. They're not the right processes for where they're at or nobody's managing and holding accountable their team to those processes. Right. Which you could have the best processes for the, you know, the most contextually relevant processes for where you're at in business.

00;15;56;00 - 00;16;24;21 Mike & Stephen But if nobody's making sure that people are following those processes, what the fuck are we doing? Right? Or and or as people grow, the need for iteration or changes, those processes typically come into play. And, you know, we have processes that don't match our growth. They were built when we were at 2 million. Now we're at nine, and they have to be revisited to make sure that consistently, we're functioning in a way that's going to deliver the optimal customer experience, deliver the least amount of friction to our team.

00;16;24;25 - 00;16;52;04 Mike & Stephen When you Duvall's, and get shit done so that our customers are happy, our employees are happy. because if that happens, you'll have lower churn, higher retention of your employees. You have better reviews, right? and I think that's often overlooked is like these small breakdowns that happen in your business, whether you had a half million, a million, 2 million, whatever is the symptom is like someone being unhappy or production taking long, even if the customer isn't unhappy with it.

00;16;52;04 - 00;17;12;21 Mike & Stephen Like there's there's glaring issues, symptoms of these issues. But the issue is the breakdowns and those breakdowns become disproportionately more impactful as you scale. Right? and cause a lot of people a lot of headache and a lot of heartache. And the more people are subjected to that on the employee side, the less they're going to enjoy doing their job.

00;17;12;23 - 00;17;32;08 Mike & Stephen So I can talk to that. I need to take this off. Can I take this? This things give me a I don't know how my children do it. So, I, I'm in exactly those those shoes. I'm, I'm walking in those shoes right now. Right. We're a small we were a smaller company for the first three years. We were talking about humble beginnings.

00;17;32;08 - 00;17;50;07 Mike & Stephen And we can get into that if you want. We're going to. But, we've been growing right quite a bit over the last year and a half. And before it was just me. Yeah. And then I had me and Perla and I was able to train Perla slowly enough because business wasn't coming in so fast. That. Right. So Perla, Perla is like me.

00;17;50;07 - 00;18;07;15 Mike & Stephen She knows everything about the company. But then we started hiring. We have. We've hired 3 or 4 since, four since. And what we recognized quickly was a we're not leveraging our CRM the way we could with automations and efficiencies and stuff like that. so I spent I mean, it took me a good three months to figure out how to use HubSpot the best way.

00;18;07;15 - 00;18;25;11 Mike & Stephen And we finally dialed it in, and we're still dialing it in right now, but we're much better. And then the other thing I learned is I didn't know how to I knew how to do everything. But when we hired new Customer success manager, for example, that customer success manager had to be trained. And so we didn't have any like playbook to train them.

00;18;25;16 - 00;18;43;12 Mike & Stephen So we've built all that out. So we are finally at a point where our processes are at least at the scalability where we are right now. But we might have to hire 3 or 4 more people in the next month. Are we going to be able to evolve those processes? We will a lot more efficiently than before because we've put some stuff into place.

00;18;43;14 - 00;19;00;27 Mike & Stephen Yeah, I mean, I've dealt with a lot of that and it's an ongoing process. Right. you've got a lot to focus on when you're running a business. A lot of things that you saw coming up, probably many more that you didn't see coming. Yep. My biggest challenge and I talked about this. I was in Detroit with Eric Renault, and we shot some content at MGM on draft day a couple weeks ago.

00;19;00;27 - 00;19;16;28 Mike & Stephen But my biggest thing was getting the shit out of my head onto paper. Right. So then you can look at it, you can make you can organize it in a way that makes sense to somebody that's never worked in your business before. Right? As a new hire day one, this is what you should expect coming in as far as your roles and responsibilities.

00;19;16;28 - 00;19;39;12 Mike & Stephen And this is exactly how you execute that it it it's a transparent start, which makes it a lot easier for them to become integrated with the team and to do their job effectively and just have a better baseline line. Yeah. Starting point. Like for us, we have we have five in the states and two onboarding or two people that help us onboard that are in Argentina.

00;19;39;18 - 00;19;56;21 Mike & Stephen Yeah. And our entire team is great. But we started over the last three months affectionately calling it superpowers. Like, what is your superpower? Yeah, like I was a teacher for 20 years, so for me to build out a nice engage demo deck that we use as a sales deck is pretty easy for me because I was a teacher.

00;19;56;21 - 00;20;14;02 Mike & Stephen I know kind of how people work, how minds work, how people learn, and visualize and stuff. but funny enough, it's not funny. but one of our new employees, we started in December, Pat Martinek, he was a kid I used to coach in lacrosse. He was the hardest worker back then on my team. I coached him for six years.

00;20;14;04 - 00;20;32;18 Mike & Stephen He's one of the hardest workers right here. Project map. And now he's proven himself, that has extreme dyslexia. I did not know that when I hired him. Not that that would make a difference. But, you know, I quickly started realizing, like his emails were pretty. He was struggling with getting his words on paper, on emails to customers, and his job was customer success.

00;20;32;18 - 00;20;59;20 Mike & Stephen So he had to be able to communicate effectively with with our customers. Long story short, people with dyslexia might have problems processing numbers and and letters and writing and reading and stuff like that. But you know what they're great at? They are amazing at processes. Yeah. Everything else. So like when we're talking about how to build these processes into our into our, into our company, what's the best way to onboard a customer?

00;20;59;22 - 00;21;15;15 Mike & Stephen What are the best strategies when you're selling and things like that? When we have our weekly meetings, and I have a question that I put to the team like, hey, this isn't working out, how can we make it work better? Guess who always has the right answer at martech? Like that's that dude super power. He can't process letters and numbers.

00;21;15;15 - 00;21;36;18 Mike & Stephen They mix up and and he's not the best writer. He uses Grammarly to help kind of combat that, which was great. He figured that out on his own. but man, that that dude super is everything else. Yeah. And that's, you know, I'm glad he's making it work. I mean, I, you know, confusing like, that's got to be challenging for him.

00;21;36;18 - 00;21;57;03 Mike & Stephen And but he's using he's proactively using tools to help minimize the impact that that would potentially have on him professionally. Right. Every disability there's some stronger ability. Yeah I have I have ADHD. I mean, I was fed Ritalin for like ten years when I was a kid. That became problematic before I started using like calendar and technology to hedge against that.

00;21;57;03 - 00;22;16;19 Mike & Stephen Like if I had to operate based off of like a notepad with dates and times, I would miss every fucking meeting with you guys that you know, we're supposed to have. So I'm grateful that we have things like technology, a Google calendar, reminders, CRM to where I can categorize my life in a way where some of my shortcomings don't become the shortcoming of one of my clients campaigns.

00;22;16;19 - 00;22;39;18 Mike & Stephen Right? Yeah. and to your point, where it's like a cape and a Kryptonite, that's like the Kryptonite side. The cave side is, I mean, bro, I mean, I'm productive. Yeah. I mean, I'm up early getting shit done, getting shit knocked out, and I get a lot of stuff accomplished. Now, with that being said, I might do 79 things in a day and maybe 14 of them.

00;22;39;18 - 00;23;00;24 Mike & Stephen I left at 80% because I get distracted, right? Yeah. So I have a system as far as like how I'm opening up tabs on browsers and things to do. A recap to be like, okay, did everything get done the, you know, so on correctly, yeah. I tell you, I'm like, I'm broken, you know, so I'm just playing my slice in life when I'm golfing, I'm slicing in life I'm slicing, and I'm not fixing the mechanics of it, but I'm addressing the symptom.

00;23;00;25 - 00;23;14;05 Mike & Stephen So I'm just going to aim left because I know the ball is coming back. Right? And if I am left is going to land in the fairway. I'm sure I'm going to lose 30 yards on my drive. I'm okay with that. I know that I'm not hitting out of behind a fucking tree. You're so you're such a you're such a good wordsmith, man.

00;23;14;05 - 00;23;29;15 Mike & Stephen That was well said. But thanks. That analogy is great, by the way. I suck at golf, and even when I try to play my slides on the golf course, I fuck it up. But it's working better in life than on the golf. My grandfather always said, slow back, swing your hit it straight every time. So I don't hit it far, but I hit it straight.

00;23;29;18 - 00;23;46;12 Mike & Stephen Yeah. So at the time, one of these times we'll have to go play some golf. Yeah. Basketball. First Stephen challenged me to a basketball game. So in challenge, I just thought it'd be good content. It'd be funny. Get Christian out there to videotape. You beat my ass 15 bucks. So we got some content of picking him up at the airport drive, and then we had a conversation.

00;23;46;12 - 00;24;05;12 Mike & Stephen Now we're in the studio, as you heard from schoolboy Q in the intro. I'm just sitting in my studio. Anyhow, we're going to go to the basketball court after and maybe we'll play some pig. Maybe we play some 21, maybe it's just one verse one. call your own fouls. Yeah, 1V1 and I will foul I don't because I he's a hack.

00;24;05;12 - 00;24;22;29 Mike & Stephen Ladies and gentlemen he's a hack. That's okay. So we're going to I'm gonna. You've never seen a guy who's five foot eight worth the post like me. I'm telling you right now. So more awesome content coming in that regard. I'm five, six and three quarters. I've shrunk a half inch, and I work with those pretty well, too. I mean, these are words at this point.

00;24;22;29 - 00;24;38;11 Mike & Stephen We're going to have we're going to have actual data and actual video to go off, and we're going to have shot percentages taken versus made. Oh hell no. We're going to have pain points. We're going to we're going to see who's going to be dominant in the post. I would actually like to do like a charity basketball thing.

00;24;38;11 - 00;24;52;16 Mike & Stephen So it was kind of a few years back. Shout out to my guy Tim Brown. I played against him, I think kind of wrote it. I got thrown on to like a team that they had for it was like a roofers and recovery type deal. Yeah. And I gotta tell you, I'm not great at basketball, but I balled out that day.

00;24;52;16 - 00;25;06;19 Mike & Stephen I mean, I was in the deep three like nobody's business. It was a lot of fun. And I think that, you know, if we get a bunch of people from the industry to put together an event, that would be fun, contribute some money, you know, let's all come to a consensus on where we could donate some money to and have a good time.

00;25;06;21 - 00;25;22;00 Mike & Stephen Yeah, I like it. I think it builds the fibers of the community, you know, stronger. And we help some people along the way. Yeah. And there be a lot of good content out of it. It would be a lot of funny content, I think out of it, getting a bunch of contractors together to, play some basketball, full core basketball.

00;25;22;00 - 00;25;36;24 Mike & Stephen But I mean, back, you know, maybe a year, year and a half ago, Anthony, Mark, Raph and I, we were on a podcast. He he has clear cut exteriors out of, out of Minnesota. Shout out to my guy Anthony. Yeah. I said, Dimitri and Tim Brown. It's an open invite. Like, you want the smoke? We'll pull up.

00;25;36;29 - 00;25;54;24 Mike & Stephen I'll pull up to Minnesota. My guy Anthony and I, we could we could go against the Minnesota boys, see what's what on the court. I think it would be a lot of fun. You know, we could do a friendly wager that we donate to to the charity of the choosing of the winning team, right? Yeah. Whatever. Yeah, that offer still stands.

00;25;54;26 - 00;26;10;29 Mike & Stephen So you guys never played it? We never played. I thought you were going to say I never heard back. Maybe they were scared. They weren't scared. I mean, I'm five foot nothing. Come on. if you're five foot nothing, I'm five foot. Negative. Nothing. Is that a double negative? So, major, five foot something. Yeah, like a five foot something, a five foot.

00;26;10;29 - 00;26;34;11 Mike & Stephen Some look at you, but I'm sure you. You're telling me I'm the wordsmith? You're string savvy fella right here. Savvy fella. So we mentioned humble beginnings. I mean, what was the inspiration for Project Map and where did it start? How did it start? I mean, give it to me. Give it to me. yeah, I'm pretty humble. So I was a special education teacher for 20 years, taught math and, coached lacrosse.

00;26;34;11 - 00;27;02;02 Mike & Stephen I'm big lacrosse guy. I live in Maryland. So, you know, that's a big hotbed for lacrosse. So I was the high school lacrosse coach for 15 years at the at the high school I taught at for 15 of those 20 years. one of the one of the alumni of the guys that I coached. Yeah. Matt, that coach for years saw me ten years later, and said, coach, we need to get together and I need to talk to you about a new software that I've built.

00;27;02;02 - 00;27;29;04 Mike & Stephen I think you'd be great. So we met for about three months on and off, and he hired me. So I was the first ever employee at Project Map it. I left a 20 year teaching career making about 90,000. I was getting my I got my certification for to become an administrator. So the literally my 21st year, I was hoping to become, principal and assistant principal to start and then, as it usually takes you, if I was good enough at that, maybe I'd become principal then.

00;27;29;04 - 00;27;52;03 Mike & Stephen Superintendent. No, but, aim for six hours, guys. If you. If you hit the moon and you're still up. Yeah, yeah. I might have fucked that saying up, but it's all good anyhow. So. So I left a 20 year teaching career, and it wasn't long after I started a project map. It that we realized quickly that at that point in time, there weren't thousands of people signing up like we thought there would be.

00;27;52;04 - 00;28;18;27 Mike & Stephen Yeah. So, the owner, Matt, he owns a roofing company, which was his inspiration, built a great product. Yeah. he he continued on with his roofing company, and I was kind of left with sort of stranded. Yeah. A guy that taught 20 years of, math to high school students. All of a sudden, in this world of of contractors not knowing a lick of like, what certainty don't score.

00;28;18;27 - 00;28;42;06 Mike & Stephen And all these different things were, and trying to grow the company. So I had about $125,000 saved up in my 401 K. in an over the course of three years. That was pretty much depleted my first year salary. A project map it I think was $37,000. So I sat at my house and worked my ass off and and tried to get one customer at a time.

00;28;42;06 - 00;29;05;06 Mike & Stephen And for many months I was paying myself $3,000 a month, and then it became 5000. And then we're at a point now where the company is sustainable. We have some really big partnerships. People are reaching out to me instead of me begging other people to help bring leads in for us. So it's been it's been a, you know, I always say, I don't know, there's definitely signs for humble beginnings.

00;29;05;06 - 00;29;22;19 Mike & Stephen But, you know, I've just come from the old school cloth of working really hard. Yeah, I think there's no one in in our company or no one that knows me that would say Steve doesn't work hard. So I worked hard, worked many, many hours, probably at the beginning, probably 70, 80 hours a week. Now it's probably down to 6070.

00;29;22;19 - 00;29;42;04 Mike & Stephen I work on weekends and stuff, but, we're sustainable, we're growing. We have partnerships that are going to probably help us exponentially grow here in the next few months, and life is good, I love that. I mean, it had to be nerve wracking. More so for you than Matt. you know, Matt knew he had a fallback plan, right?

00;29;42;04 - 00;30;08;11 Mike & Stephen You could just get right back in the roof, and he has a great roofing type. Still, I think, whereas, you know, you leave a 20 year career, I'm assuming based on the prerequisite to become, you know, certified and have a degree to be able to teach high school math, right. I would assume you feel a lot more vulnerable, because if it doesn't work out, your employability is a lot more a road to that is more challenging than just hopping back into your roofing business.

00;30;08;11 - 00;30;26;21 Mike & Stephen I did not want to go back into teaching at all. So I mean, okay, how come? I was I loved teaching when you're in the classroom. When I was the sage on the stage, I was in front of the kids selling curriculum. That's why I'm a good sales guy, right? Like I sold curriculum to high school kids for 20 years.

00;30;26;21 - 00;30;50;06 Mike & Stephen Yeah. my last five years, I was, a department chair, and I was not in the classroom. And, you know, I didn't handle things super well as a leader of that department. In the beginning, I jumped right in and started trying to make changes, which was a learning lesson on my end. I wrote to a lot of people the wrong way, and, honestly, that that helped me at least get a taste of what a pseudo admin position would be.

00;30;50;08 - 00;31;11;05 Mike & Stephen And it's just kind of thankless, man. I just feel like no matter what you do as an administrator, since that was my path, teachers weren't going to really like you and I, and I have a personality that I. I don't like it when people don't like me. like, I need affirmation. I don't anymore. I've worked a lot of a lot on that with my therapist over the last two years.

00;31;11;07 - 00;31;28;18 Mike & Stephen So I know a guy you can talk to. I talk to him every Friday. In fact, tomorrow I've got my my one hour appointment. But point being is I just realized it wasn't for me. And when I left, I did 20 years, 15, in the classroom. And I loved those 15 years. The last five years was a great learning experience and I definitely had great memories.

00;31;28;18 - 00;31;45;10 Mike & Stephen But yeah, no, I don't I didn't want to go back into teaching, and there were certainly multiple times that came to me and said, we're going to close down project mapping. And I had to beg them now, like, if he closed down the project, map it in that first year, I wouldn't have had a job, you know, now, if Project Map it closed, which it won't.

00;31;45;17 - 00;32;08;13 Mike & Stephen Don't worry everybody. But if it closed, I mean, I have I think I have other opportunities because I've made a name in, in the industry. Yeah. So I'm not as concerned obviously now. But we're sustainable in the, in the company's growing. So I'm, I'm just really proud of that. Right. Like my second career I'm really proud to know that I, along with the team that I'm closely working with right now, we're growing and making making strides.

00;32;08;13 - 00;32;27;08 Mike & Stephen So it's fun to be a part of that. Yeah. And I think, I think there's something to be said about the baptism by fire approach, right? Being thrown into something that you have not much familiarity with at all, or in an essence completely ignorant to. Right? Totally 100. But I don't mean ignorant to be like, a term that denigrates Stephen, right?

00;32;27;08 - 00;32;47;08 Mike & Stephen Like I was just, you don't know, right? 100% ignorant. So you come into the situation and, you know, I mean, the most dangerous man is the one with nothing to lose, right? I was me, you're in there and you're like, oh, we got to fucking make this work. Yeah, right. So we're going to scratch and claw Chris. And cue the Al Pacino speech from any given Sunday halftime.

00;32;47;15 - 00;33;02;00 Mike & Stephen When he talks to his team, you don't have to kill. That's fine. but I'll tell you what I mean. That is a speech you know, that that few minutes that he talks about. Are you familiar with it? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. we scratch and we claw for that inch. Bad impression. But go check it out.

00;33;02;00 - 00;33;20;13 Mike & Stephen You could drop a link in the description. yeah. That's, I mean, it's remarkable. I mean, even as early as a a year and a half ago, I mean, it was when Pearl and I were just working together, the two of us. It was like a pearl. You need to sell two more subscriptions, or we need to sell two more subscriptions to pay the bills.

00;33;20;15 - 00;33;40;29 Mike & Stephen Yeah, we're not like that anymore. That's good. We've got reserve money in the account, and life is good. I love that for you. Yeah. Thank you. So, what's the growth plan? Are you guys going to be marketing? Are you going to be focusing on acquiring customers by direct marketing and advertising to the roofers or contractors? Are you guys really leaning in on the partnership side?

00;33;40;29 - 00;34;01;15 Mike & Stephen Is it a blended approach like what does that look like? It's a blended approach. We certainly have only relied on partners and cold emails and stuff like that. You know, we've got about 6000 people in our database and we send out, you know, cold email campaigns, which brings in some good business, to be honest with you. Yeah. we've locked in the cold email system pretty good.

00;34;01;17 - 00;34;20;26 Mike & Stephen We use crossbeam with our partners, which is a way just to see mutual mutual companies that that work with us or our prospects of each. So that helps. We we've started over the last three months to try to do paid ads and stuff like that. So we are rebuilding our website now to be launched within the next 30 days.

00;34;20;28 - 00;34;42;19 Mike & Stephen this is building it. So one of good question. Ascend Digital now, one of the owners of Project Map it, we're a partnership of five. He is a marketing guy and he's branched off a little bit, from his. So he and his partner Carly are building it. So shout out to Ryan and Ali. So we're actually building it right into HubSpot, which is our CRM.

00;34;42;19 - 00;35;05;22 Mike & Stephen Yeah, we're just trying to get everything in one spot. So we do like the analytics are there. So you know true. What is it one of one truth source. What's it called. Single source of truth. Single source okay. So everything in HubSpot, so marketing's going there. We just hired a new social media person. that's going to be doing that for us.

00;35;05;22 - 00;35;23;00 Mike & Stephen So that's going to be pretty nice. We're going to be posting five days a week, doing some video editing and stuff like that. So we're hoping to use social media as a platform to, to gain leads as well. So we are going after our own leads now. So it will be a hybrid. In the past it's been more cold emails and calls, partnerships.

00;35;23;03 - 00;35;44;26 Mike & Stephen Dude, I think the relationship partnership route is like for our customer is the most underutilized and undervalued component of running a business. You know, if you think about it like it doesn't take much for roofing contractors. There's so many other different contractors that you can refer business with. You guys are all selling the same people maybe at different times.

00;35;44;26 - 00;36;01;17 Mike & Stephen Yeah. Because somebody, you know, furnace takes a shit if you have an alliance with that Hvac company and they notice there's a couple shingles in the yard, or there's a few shingles missing on the roof, it's an easy conversation because they've already garnered their trust to say, hey, we've got a great company. They're they're very they're authentic. They're ethical.

00;36;01;19 - 00;36;17;12 Mike & Stephen Have them come take a look at this. This is probably why you'd want them to come take a look. and just being focused and locked in on building and developing those relationships consistently over time and developing new ones, it could be such a great source for leads for a roofing company. And a lot of a lot of guys don't do it.

00;36;17;12 - 00;36;38;02 Mike & Stephen Some of you know, some will do it. some do it with just like property management companies because they've got like the complexes, the apartments, things like that. But, may having those strategic relationships with industry adjacent verticals, I guess, is could be so powerful. And like you just said, you've leaned into that and it's been very fruitful for you.

00;36;38;02 - 00;36;56;09 Mike & Stephen So it helps with any business. I don't care if you own a fucking salon, you own a roofing company, a marketing agency, or you send us two companies. And literally, I mean, I don't even have to demo them. It was like a text message in a five minute phone call. They're like, yes, I'm me up. If Mike Mike stern says, I need project map it, I need project map it.

00;36;56;16 - 00;37;12;05 Mike & Stephen And we and we have those, you know, I think, you know, we have we have very close relationships with all of our customers. I feel like we do a really good job with customer service. We check in on them. They know that they can call or text me anytime, even on the weekend. I'll probably respond, so there is that.

00;37;12;05 - 00;37;30;04 Mike & Stephen But you know, we also have under a thousand customers, whereas some of these huge industry leaders that are in the software world that we're partnered with, you know, they don't they have thousands and thousands. So their bandwidth is a little harder to be like, yeah, let me introduce you to Steve Spence. But I do think it is under utilized.

00;37;30;06 - 00;37;49;02 Mike & Stephen And honestly, it's been the main reason we've grown is because of we don't under utilize it. Yeah, we like I don't know if it's that we pride ourselves on our tight relationships with our core partners or if it just that's the only we haven't had paid ads yet or anything like that. So it's all I could lean on anyway.

00;37;49;05 - 00;38;12;28 Mike & Stephen Well, it's it directly affects especially for like our shared customers, it affects their profitability. Right. Because if you're if you're having to spend money instead of time. Yeah. Like there's a cost per acquired job. And that directly impacts what you're going to make from that job. Whereas if you know, you do five jobs from Google Ads or you do five jobs from a referral partner, there's significantly more profit when you're not paying out, correct?

00;38;12;28 - 00;38;33;10 Mike & Stephen $200 a lead to Google ads, sir. And you know, if you can build a business where you've accomplished everything you want, you know you can provide for your family, you can do everything that you need in life, and you don't have to spend money on Google ads or marketing, like, do that. Like it's all good, like and like I say that I encourage people to do that right now.

00;38;33;13 - 00;38;52;03 Mike & Stephen Like I always say, I'm like, I'm the fat kid, right? That always ran with a garbage bag to make weight on Saturdays for football. So like, I like cookies. And I think of lead source as an opportunities as cookie jars. Right. So like referral relationships is one of them. Google ads, another one SEO, Facebook trade shows. Right. Like like our customers roofers have all these different opportunities.

00;38;52;06 - 00;39;13;03 Mike & Stephen Go with the ones that make the most financial sense for you as far as keeping your company profitable while accomplishing the growth that you want. And that might be you have three different cookie jar as you want. Maybe it's only one. Maybe it grows into five, you know? So we have a really close relationship with certainty. so maybe dangerous me talking about.

00;39;13;03 - 00;39;32;16 Mike & Stephen But you know what? I'm a transparent guy. I really don't care. So we're hoping to have a really a deeper relationship with certainty. And as a smaller company with fewer, like, right. We don't have 140 employees. Yeah. Like some of these software companies that are our friends, that are our partners. We've got five in the states. You know, it's not big.

00;39;32;20 - 00;39;55;06 Mike & Stephen So like it's one of those things where I could I could put all of my energy on a relationship with somebody that we have a close relationship already with like certainty. But all my energy on that or I could have six different relationships with other manufacturers. And, now I'm being spread thin right now, I'm not going to give certainty as much attention and love, because I have to give some love to everybody.

00;39;55;08 - 00;40;11;11 Mike & Stephen Right? And so for me, it's almost like, hey, why don't you and I'm not putting all my eggs in a basket, but why don't we really grow this one relationship with this manufacturer so that their territory managers or their sales reps get to know us on a on a personal level, we get to know them on a personal level.

00;40;11;13 - 00;40;27;19 Mike & Stephen Now it's like, hey, we've seen project. I've been presenting for certain team all over the United States over the last six months, and I've gotten to meet a ton of territory managers. It's been so fruitful. They they finally know who we are, right? And they're like, oh shit, like Project Map. It's awesome. This is a no brainer. I'm going to find my contractors tomorrow.

00;40;27;21 - 00;40;42;00 Mike & Stephen So and it just makes sense, right. For somebody that's small and it's kind of one of those. It's kind of like the same analogy, you know, focus your own attention to focus your attention on one. And it'll be more fruitful than having to focus on 15. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I'm glad it's working out for you. It is so far.

00;40;42;03 - 00;41;15;14 Mike & Stephen So project map, we throw it on, throw it on a website and like this is my take on it. And it's funny because we, we developed a way less sophisticated. We we developed a way to try to accomplish the same thing in a way less sophisticated way. Years before we met. Right. So, we built a website and we did like, API with Google Maps and did like a pinning project where it was just showing the pins because I'm like, I want people to know that if they're looking for this contract and then this area, that they're going to be more comfortable because they've already done work for them, like we've talked about this.

00;41;15;16 - 00;41;38;12 Mike & Stephen and I mean, it sucked. It was good. It was it was better than nothing. It was. Yeah, it was better than nothing. But comparatively to like what you guys have available, objectively, it failed. so Project Map is really cool because if we're pushing people, I mean, I've got I've got clients that use it on every sales call their reps, you know, if they're out there, they're they're pulling it off.

00;41;38;12 - 00;41;55;12 Mike & Stephen They have whether it's in engage or they pull it up on the website and they know that, hey, we've done 11 projects within a, you know, a half mile radius, a mile radius. It's like, hey, by the way, like you're all your neighbors chose us. You could even take that a step further and your neighbor shows us, and you know, this person at this house, look at the review they left for us.

00;41;55;19 - 00;42;18;07 Mike & Stephen If you're doing a really good job getting reviews, you can follow me for more tips on getting reviews, by the way. But, you know, and you can cross-reference. And I mean, that just builds such like, a formidable, impenetrable close with that customer. If everything else in your sales process is dialed in, it's like that one thing that could really push them over the top, be like, it's a really easy decision.

00;42;18;07 - 00;42;34;14 Mike & Stephen You told us where you see why we're good company. You told us you understand why we install things the way we do. You told us you understand the value in our warranties that we offer, why we offer them. You told us all these things, and the fact that you find value in all the reviews that we have, and, you know, we're showing you that everyone else in your neighborhood has made the right choice.

00;42;34;18 - 00;42;50;07 Mike & Stephen You know, you you want to be the one that has to worry about the contractor disappearing. I don't want that for you. In good conscience. I can't walk out of here without you saying yes, or give me a really good reason why we're not your contractor today. Yeah, you did a good job there. Would you buy I? Would he buy these?

00;42;50;07 - 00;43;11;19 Mike & Stephen And even even if you were at a higher price point than the other two contractors that came out to my house, I'd still use you. Social proof is a really important aspect of sales nowadays, especially because the trend of the people that are buying those fixer uppers that are asking for new roofs, new windows, whatever, are the digital natives kids, younger people that grew up with iPhones and iPads in their face?

00;43;11;19 - 00;43;27;07 Mike & Stephen They're vetting you. They're looking you up online. They're looking at your Google reviews. Yeah. So now if I give them a tool that shows like, oh, by the way, there were 11 houses. If I just zoomed into my, my neighborhood and I see that, you know, my roofing company did 11 jobs. Yeah. I'm going to pick you. Yeah.

00;43;27;09 - 00;43;51;29 Mike & Stephen Especially if we can show them all the great reviews we got with the jobs. Yeah. Right. And so like, what is the talk to me about the process? If I'm a roofing company, I'm like, you know what, project map it fucking let it rip. We're doing it. How challenging is it? Because if we're you know, the idea is we can get photos right of these completed projects and show them the beautiful siding that we install, the Hardie siding or the the new shingles that we install through certain tiered.

00;43;52;00 - 00;44;13;06 Mike & Stephen I think it would be a landmark, if I'm not mistaken. They've got an excuse. But you know, we're showing and we're showcasing this. But what is the what is the lift for the contractor to get to that place where all these things are on their website showing their pictures, and imagine it had to be very challenging now. So since since you are mainly roofing, are you only roofing for website marketing?

00;44;13;09 - 00;44;32;20 Mike & Stephen Layer 9,595%. So we'll talk roofing because we're probably right around the same, right? 90% of our customers are reverse, so it actually can be real easy. In fact, we had a customer the other day we were trying to sell and they're like, wow, I think it might take a month. And I said, we can actually get you done in three days because of X, Y, and Z, because we have what's called an interview.

00;44;32;22 - 00;44;49;10 Mike & Stephen Once we sell them, we talk to him for five minutes just about the strategy of getting them up and running as quickly as possible, because as a company like we want our customers to get up, you work with contractors. You know, sometimes contractors don't respond to your emails or tax or they're busy. As busy as crap, right? They would rather do anything but talk to him.

00;44;49;13 - 00;45;08;00 Mike & Stephen Talk to us. so with that said, when I tell a customer like, hey man, we can get you on board and your map can be embedded on your website in three days. They're like, what? I thought it would take like a month or two. Nope. So we have good partnerships and some pseudo integrations with the biggest thing, right?

00;45;08;00 - 00;45;25;16 Mike & Stephen If you are mapping platform includes three things. Reviews your favorite thing. Right. So we can bring in all the Google and Facebook reviews, and showcase them on the map. So reviews pins on a map and photos. Out of those three things, the hardest is getting the pins on the map because it requires an import of a spreadsheet.

00;45;25;21 - 00;45;44;03 Mike & Stephen Or you can manually, like add a thousand pins, which nobody's going to do. Yeah. So we started working with companies like ABC supply and SRS distribution so far. and what they can do is we could when we talk to the roofer, we'll say, where do you order your supplies from? And eight out of ten times it's one of those two, right.

00;45;44;07 - 00;46;06;09 Mike & Stephen ABC and SRS okay. We can get that. All the deliveries that that SRS or ABC set that delivered to the houses that you order material from and use that spreadsheet. Like what? Yeah. You just fill out this form so we can get those spreadsheets pretty easily through ABC or SRS. With those two, we do shingle branding, color and siding, brand and color.

00;46;06;11 - 00;46;23;14 Mike & Stephen And then, CRM, we're very familiar with all the different CRMs. You can always export a spreadsheet from a CRM. It's not hard. It takes five minutes. And if they give us their login credentials, we can do it for them. And they're like, oh, I just need to give you my login links to leap. Okay. Yeah. And we take it, we take it from there.

00;46;23;19 - 00;46;43;05 Mike & Stephen The only thing a CRM doesn't spit out on a spreadsheet is the shingle brand and color. Right. And our map, which was a little differentiated, piece than what you had when you did the maps for your customers is that we have a filter button. So now if a sales rep is looking for that certainty landmark more black, they can click a filter that says more a black.

00;46;43;05 - 00;46;58;17 Mike & Stephen And the map is going to change to only show pins that have more black roofs. Right? Yeah. And I love that. as opposed to them lugging around the shingle board if you can. But a CRM doesn't spit that information out, right? Your, you know, they only spit out like it was a roof job or a siding job.

00;46;58;20 - 00;47;14;05 Mike & Stephen Well, plus, you know, I found and we talked about this in the past, I found the more that I can take off of your plate as the contractor, the less anxious I am, the better I feel, because you guys get busy and you might not be the best at responding in emails. And it's okay. Nobody is expecting anyone to be perfect here.

00;47;14;07 - 00;47;36;09 Mike & Stephen So if we can bypass the need for someone at your company to be responsible for A, B, C or all the above, let's do that. Let's go directly to the manufacturer. They have all the information we need, and they have more information than what we would get from you exporting it from the CRM. That's a brilliant workaround to be incredibly efficient and make it as easy as possible for the contractors to to utilize the the product effectively.

00;47;36;09 - 00;47;57;01 Mike & Stephen So that gets the spreadsheet taken care of. Right? We can handle the spreadsheet. That's not as hard as you thought it was. Mr. and Mrs. Roofer. Yep. Second thing photos. We have a direct integration with company cam. Again we know how to get into any CRM and download a photo and then upload it to project map it. So what our company will do is we'll spend two hours free service to load photos will connect.

00;47;57;01 - 00;48;12;29 Mike & Stephen If you're using Company Cam, which like seven out of ten people are always on company name. So then you give us access to come back and we'll connect company cam to Project Map. It will spend two hours loading photos for them. Or if they give us access to their CRM, we'll spend. Somebody just gave me a ton of, iCloud photos.

00;48;13;03 - 00;48;39;18 Mike & Stephen Yeah. By address. So we'll spend two hours loading photos. That takes care of the second piece. And syncing your Google reviews literally takes five minutes. You log into your Google Business profile and boom, they come in. Yeah. So to get onboarded is actually very simple. you heard it. Give me a call. Easy peasy. Very simple. Yeah, I like I said, I have I have customers that use project map it and their sales team are consistently referencing weather.

00;48;39;18 - 00;48;57;27 Mike & Stephen Like I said, they implement into an engage. pitch stack or they just use the website. It's, it's a game changer. And I appreciate what you do, and I appreciate you coming here and dropping some knowledge and sharing some experience with us. Man. That's, That's incredible. Before we wrap this thing up, do you have anything you want to ask me?

00;48;57;29 - 00;49;26;12 Mike & Stephen Oh, man. Nothing. What? What process in your company? I always like to ask this. You know, you being the the leader of your company, which I know you have multiple leaders, but for people that are still growing like myself and like you, what kind of advice would you give other business leaders or entrepreneurs when it comes to building your team?

00;49;26;14 - 00;50;11;09 Mike & Stephen so I'll give a disclaimer that I don't think that, you know, I'm the most qualified to give the best advice on this because I'm still young entrepreneur myself. I think what have you learned? I've learned that it's I would much rather turn away opportunities in the event that we will have challenges fulfilling that and losing out on those opportunities and taking the time that I need to get the right people in the right seats that I'm confident are going to consistently do the job the way that I want it done, the way our customers expect to have it done, then to hire somebody to fulfill a need based on us signing somebody and

00;50;11;09 - 00;50;28;00 Mike & Stephen not having the means to fulfill it. I'm very I'm very hyper focused on that. We've had several instances where we've shut down sales and we had to turn people away. Shout out to Eric Renault. He was one of them. He can attest to it. And he reached out to me like a year and a half, two years ago.

00;50;28;00 - 00;50;47;11 Mike & Stephen And I'm like, we're not in the position to help you. I gave him some some guidance as far as how I would make the decision to shoot somebody else. And it came full circle, and eventually we were able to to connect and do business. But we we weren't in the position, from a human capital perspective, to invest what we would need to, to give him the best quality of service that people come to expect from ascend.

00;50;47;14 - 00;51;20;17 Mike & Stephen So for me, that's the biggest thing is, you know, it's it's okay. We talked about it. Another piece of content we shot. Not every customer was your customer. Even the customers that are. The timing's not always right. Yeah. And, if that's the case, like hire in anticipation of the need. If you can. If not, it's okay if you're booked out for weeks on production and you're going to start losing opportunities because of it, it's okay to take a step back, and take a look at like, how do we how do we create a situation where we could still sell more in the future but not be bottlenecked on production or where we're overworking?

00;51;20;17 - 00;51;43;13 Mike & Stephen Because because that's another thing, right? That's putting stress on all your current team members when they're overworked. And there's just there's too much food on the plate. Yeah. It's you know, in theory, as a business owner, it's a good spot to be because revenue revenues loaded up and you've got opportunities coming in. But also it you know, it can cause some significant issues with your employees internally because you're asking them to pick up the slack of and then on top of what they're already doing for customers too.

00;51;43;17 - 00;52;02;23 Mike & Stephen Oh yeah. Yeah. Usually, usually at some point it'll lead to dissatisfaction from the customers because, you know, you know, the first things to go are like typically like quality control. Right. Like we don't have we usually have a project manager at every job site. You know, that comes by a couple times a day. He only made it there once or in the two day install.

00;52;02;23 - 00;52;21;03 Mike & Stephen Right? I mean, look at Boeing. They were the first ones to cut quality control. We might want to cut that. I don't know. We might be able to roll with it. Yeah. You know yeah. Quality control is really important, especially when you're flying 40,000ft in the air. so that's one thing that I would say is has been important to us.

00;52;21;03 - 00;52;46;18 Mike & Stephen And it's really been a focal point for me as we continue to grow, is making sure that we have the resources. The folks within the company aren't overworked to a point where they hate their fucking life, because that's not good for anybody. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, I've learned we really and I and I've, I feel like I've always learned this or always felt this way, but I learned, I think, through my interactions when I hired Pat because I noticed Pat's emails stunk.

00;52;46;21 - 00;53;05;07 Mike & Stephen And I like I wanted to get mad because that's not my kind of email that I would write. Like, we we provide good customer service. And I didn't get mad. And Pat shared with me his issues with dyslexia and stuff like that. We came up with a solution. So for us it's, you know, we pride ourselves on helping each other out, right?

00;53;05;07 - 00;53;20;17 Mike & Stephen Like if there is something we just, you know, Ashley, just went on maternity leave. They just had a baby girl yesterday. it's not going to be this morning. Shout out to Dawson. Yeah, I've been texting with Pete a little bit here and there. So, we're down a person right? So we're all. We all know that.

00;53;20;17 - 00;53;43;12 Mike & Stephen We're picking up the slack. We aren't going to try to kill it on leads. Like, I know that sounds horrible, but we don't want to over we don't want to overextend ourselves. Well, we can't give customer the customer experience they deserve as well. But being a lifelong learner man like you're going to be, you're like, as a leader, your employees are going to fail and tie back are always says it put people in uncomfortable situations so they become comfortable.

00;53;43;15 - 00;54;01;06 Mike & Stephen Right. So you know brand new guy Eric started in March. He's like it like today he got his first week early, sold somebody and he's in charge of onboarding that person with Perla support. But he's going to be crapping himself, right. Like he's nervous as crap. But that's okay. We want you to be nervous. We want you to be a lifelong learner.

00;54;01;11 - 00;54;16;11 Mike & Stephen And it's okay if you mess up. That's our big thing. Yeah, and I appreciate that perspective. You know, I had somebody that reached out this morning. He submitted a form about a week and a half ago to have us do, like a discovery call intro call. And he submitted it again today and I called him. I'm like, look, man, I'm really sorry.

00;54;16;13 - 00;54;48;29 Mike & Stephen You know, for the delay, you know, we typically try to be expeditious with getting out, you know, speedily type deal. I think it's important people feel valued when you respond to them. And I didn't even acknowledge the first one. Right. And that's that's my bad. But I communicated I express, as I said, as much as we love growth and opportunities to work with new people like our allegiance, and our main focus is on our primary clients that our clients and customers of ours, I said, so it's been a fucking couple weeks and that's not an excuse that doesn't excuse me not acknowledging you are getting back to you, but I just want to set the

00;54;48;29 - 00;55;02;19 Mike & Stephen stage at like, you know, we'll be very cognizant of not letting that happen again. And I am sincerely apologetic. But he's like, dude, it's all good. I and I can appreciate that as somebody who wants to be a customer of yours. So he's not going to be a customer of years, he is going to be a customer. Yes.

00;55;02;20 - 00;55;22;21 Mike & Stephen Yeah. Cool. He was just saying he could appreciate that because why he's not a customer now that that little bit is focused. Lifelong customer. Right. Exactly right. Because I'm when he's on the other side of an he is a customer. He knows that I'm we're not going to, you know, skirt or cut corners or skirt out on his campaign to make sure we're, you know and if signing new class, if you take care of your customers, your customers go nowhere.

00;55;22;21 - 00;55;37;11 Mike & Stephen I had a customer the other day. He was charged for his yearly email me, why the hell am I getting charged? I didn't approve this and I said, we're too big now. We're like, we can't get your permission verbally. You get you get an email saying you're going to be charged. You know that you're going to be charged.

00;55;37;11 - 00;55;53;18 Mike & Stephen If you don't, you should know your annual. I said, I'm sorry. I'll refund you right away. Yeah. He's coming back right away within five minutes. You know what, Steve? You've always been good to me. I want to see you be successful. Just keep us for another year. You guys are good enough. And I know, I know, a couple of my salespeople, are using you for sure.

00;55;53;20 - 00;56;08;14 Mike & Stephen So, you know, you build those relationships. And honestly, man, we we joke, we didn't joke about it, but because I think it's true, like, there are two things when we talk to people, whether it's on a lead or a training, the first thing we always say on a on a phone conversation or a demo is, do you have a hard stop?

00;56;08;16 - 00;56;24;20 Mike & Stephen Or I respect your time. Do you have a minute to chat right now? And we want to make sure we're saying the person's name, right? I know it sounds funny, but it goes so far and we do not. We are not pressure sales. We don't pressure. It's okay if you see value in project map it. Awesome. We're here for you when you're ready to start.

00;56;24;23 - 00;56;40;25 Mike & Stephen If you do, if you don't see it, that's fine too. There's a hundred thousand contractors out there. We'll be okay. Be okay. A lot of times that actually that river. It's not reverse psychology on purpose, but a lot of times it you know, people will really, truly appreciate and want to do business with you because of that attitude.

00;56;40;27 - 00;56;58;10 Mike & Stephen Follow them for more sales training. Well, that's all the time we got for today, folks. I am very grateful for you coming out making the trek up to Buffalo. Hopefully it's everything you hoped for and so much more. And, you know, take a look for that basketball content because it's coming. hey, I promise you, it's going to be 15.

00;56;58;10 - 00;57;10;00 Mike & Stephen Nothing you but that's. And we gone