Episode 6: How to Gain a Leading Edge

Episode 6: How to Gain a “Leading Edge” (with Todd Dawalt)

INTRO: Welcome to Episode 6 of the Quit Getting Screwed podcast. We’ll talk about everything related to contractors, construction, and information to help you run better businesses.

Karalynn: Hey guys, this is Karalynn Cromeens, and welcome to the Quit Getting Screwed podcast, where we talk about all things to help companies in the construction industry. And today on the show, I have a very awesome guest who’s also on the same path that I am to help construction companies run better businesses. I have with me Todd Dawalt, and he owns The Construction Leading Edge, which is a website, but also a podcast where he goes in-depth, gets to know your business, and helps you run a better business from the inside out. Today, we’re going to ask him for some tips and tricks and get his insight on how you can grow better revenue, have better time management, just a better construction company, have less chaos in your life, and actually enjoy what you do. So good morning, Todd, and thank you for being here today.

Todd: Yeah, thanks, Karalynn. I appreciate it. By the way, I love the name of the podcast.

Karalynn: Well, you know, it’s because I think everybody in the construction industry, the way it is, has gotten screwed at least once. It’s a rough business out there.

Todd: Oh, yeah. If it hasn’t happened yet, it’s coming.

Karalynn: Exactly. Exactly. So, take a few minutes and tell us where you’re from and how you got where you are now.

Todd: Yeah, I’m located in Kentucky, about 30 miles south of Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s the biggest area. So, I grew up in Kentucky and, how I got to where I’m at now? I’ve been in construction full-time since 1997, started out working for a big general contractor, doing commercial building projects, and bounced around through in that world as a project manager and estimator, and then started my own business. I thought you know what? I’m making these guys all sorts of money. I’ll just go start my own business! And then I made quite a few mistakes there because I thought, “Hey, I’m pretty good at building buildings; the business side of it can’t be that big of a deal.” And that was a big mistake. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know there. And so, I got hit with a bit of a perfect storm with my own business. I had a business partner who stole money from me, so I got screwed by my business partner.

Several other things happened all at the same time, such as customers that didn’t pay, and it all just hit. It went from everything going really well to it just dropping out at the bottom, so I shut that business down. That was around 2005. Then, I found myself working for a sewer rehabilitation company after the depression while the recession hit. Right? So, in 2008, all building construction stopped, housing stopped, commercial stopped. I got laid off from the real estate developer I was working for, and I found myself in this sewer rehab industry, which is an industry I had no idea even existed. And there I was, general manager of a sewer rehab company working for a bit of a crazy father-son duo. And I started that in about 2011, and that’s what it was at that time. I was so frustrated at dealing with ownership, and I was probably a little frustrated that I was outside of the building industry, not building big buildings like I was used to.

And it just really started to bug me how bad we were at the people side of the business as an industry and leadership, and that’s really where it started. And I was, at the time, driving an hour or so each way to work, listening to lots of podcasts like Dave Ramsey, Tim Ferriss, some others. And I said you know what? We could really use a podcast like this for the construction industry. So about seven years ago, almost seven years ago to the day in 2014, I recorded my first podcast, and that’s kind of how we got started.

Karalynn: Awesome. So, you said your business was going, and it was really good, and then, not trying to pick an old wound, but I want to learn from your experience, and I want my guests to, too. How fast did it go from good to really bad? Was it something that was a slow burn, or did it happen right away? And what were some of the signs?

Todd: Yeah, it was probably much more gradual than I realized, or I was willing to realize. Frankly, I was in denial. Most people are in denial, but it went from feeling like everything I touched turned to gold to just absolute garbage. It was just a really negative situation in probably 60 to 90 days. I would say when all of this, it wasn’t that everything happened, but that’s when it all came out, and it all went downhill really fast. But the symptoms, what it looked like was that I was focused on what I call shiny object syndrome. I’d lost focus on the big stuff, the important stuff, and I was over here messing around with land developments and raising capital and other stuff. And I just took my eye off the ball and stopped focusing on getting work, managing cash flow, making sure it was profitable, taking care of my team, just the basic blocking and tackling.

Karalynn: Well, there are so many things to manage, right. And you’re out chasing what you love to do, but you can’t just do one. You have to do both. And so, I guess in that, if you were to go back and tell yourself before you started this business now, knowing what you know now, what would you tell yourself to help yourself out, so that you wouldn’t end up in the same situation? I mean, I think everything happens for a reason, but if you were going to give yourself some advice, what would that be?

Todd: Okay. My advice would be to focus the majority of your energy and time on stuff that’s not building—the business side of it. So, one specific thing would be, make sure you understand cash flow. Make sure you manage your cash flow because everything else can look great, but if cash flow is not working, none of that other stuff matters. You just die.

Karalynn: So, based on that, how did you get from this idea of we need to work on the people side and make businesses better to where you are now? And what kind of services do you offer now?

Todd: Yeah, so it started off with this idea that we need something for the construction industry. I was pretty passionate about leadership, and that’s what I really started focusing on. I felt like, if we can do a better job of leading our people, leading our businesses, that’s going to solve a lot of the problems that we were dealing with, like turnover and low morale and this skilled labor delusion, as I call it. So, I just started interviewing people I knew who would agree to come on the podcast, and I just asked them questions about their experience and thoughts on leadership and just sharing. If they’d been in the business 30 or 40 years, let’s just share some of the best nuggets they’ve come up with. And then, after a few years of that, I built enough of an audience. Then I asked them, what do you need help with?

And it turned out people needed help with cash flow and putting systems in place and the business side of it. Most people are pretty good at the sticks and bricks on the construction side, but the business side is just kind of a mystery. So, I just started developing tools and systems and sharing what I found and learned that worked for me in the sewer rehab business that I was running. Which, that’s really the crucible where I learned a lot of this stuff, out of necessity. We got into a situation. This guy brought me in to run his company, and he was in cashflow crunch mode, unbeknownst to me, and things were falling apart. I don’t know if he hoped I was the silver bullet or what, but I got stuck being forced to fix a lot of problems.

So, I learned how to solve what the real root causes were behind cash flow issues. And cash flow problems are not problems. They were symptoms of underlying problems. So, I started developing systems and processes and things to work on in that sewer rehab business. And then I just started talking about and teaching that on the podcast. That resonated with people, and they needed help with that. So, I started developing and selling tools and doing consulting. What I do now, my business consists of a few things. There’s the podcast, and I talked to folks like yourself, talked about your book and how to Quit Getting Screwed. And basically, you gave a free legal masterclass for subcontractors, which was great. And I interview construction business owners from home builders, remodelers, commercial GCs, big companies, small businesses. And so, I have the podcast out there.

I also have a couple of masterclasses where I will go in-depth and teach how to drive bottom-line profitability. I have a masterclass on getting paid for estimates because for home builders, remodelers, and light commercial GCs, the free estimate is the root cause of a lot of problems. I’m about to roll out a masterclass on the financial side of the business. So small business owners can be their own CFO. I have a mastermind group of about 60 construction business owners right now who use co-construct, which is a specific piece of software. And we have monthly zoom calls and other sessions. So, it’s a peer group for home builders. And then, I do one-on-one coaching and consulting where business owners bring me in and say we need a strategic plan. And then, I need help designing my organization. Then I need help putting systems in place, whatever the needs are. What they really need is help focusing, getting clarity on what their most important things are, what the strategic objectives are, and then help focusing on systems and putting the right systems and right people in place so they can step away from the business and be a business owner, instead of owning a job. So those are what I primarily spend my time on these days.

Karalynn: So now you take that hard part of learning how to run a business, which is the business side, not the part that you’re good at, you know, building houses or building the buildings. You take that hard part and manage it or help them manage it. At least, what I found in running a business because at the end of the day, businesses all need to run. And then there’s what you do, right? I run a service business, but if you know what to look for, that’s one of the big parts of the battle, right? I get the monthly reports. What does this mean? What am I looking at? How does that interpret? And then, if you’re watching it, you can see it. And then you don’t have to spend all your time worrying about what you don’t know. If you narrow that down and help, give people a plan, okay, here’s what you’re doing. Is it monthly or bi-weekly, or how often should they look at the cash flow numbers and know what to look at? How often should a successful business look at that kind of stuff? 

Todd: Well, my thought process is, what are the problems with the financial reporting? The whole approach to financial reporting is primarily a rear-view mirror. So, whether it’s looking at your financial statements from 60 days ago, and what good does that do you? Maybe there’s some good, but my philosophy is, it’s like the windshield on your truck or your car, right? You should spend the majority of your time looking forward. And then the rear-view mirror part is a small percentage. You need to look back on that stuff, but if you’re spending all your time looking in the mirrors, looking backward, you don’t really know where you’re going. I actually developed a tool for this. I call it the Revenue Maximizer, and it’s probably the best tool I’ve ever come up with because it’s designed to allow the builder or the contractor, it doesn’t matter which as it’s agnostic to what kind of work you do. You could sell birthday cakes, I guess, and it would work for you. But it allows you to put in your backlog, understand what your overhead costs are, and then forecast what your cash flow needs are up to 12 months out. And then it takes it to the next step and allows you to start putting together an execution plan of how I am going to do it, right? I need to generate $180,000 in revenue next month. That’s great. But how am I going to do that? Well, it takes it to the next step and has execution plans. You can create execution plans that answer the question, “How am I going to do that”? And then it’s part of a revenue maximizer, Excel spreadsheet template. It’s part of a whole process, or a whole system, of running a business that takes you from the forecasting and says, “This is what we need to do to make our numbers work, to solve our cash flow problems, to generate the profit. We need to meet our overhead and then takes it all the way down to planning, helping the people in the field, closest to the problem, doing the work, actually plan what they’re going to do.” So, it all actually happens.  

Karalynn: Wow. That is impressive. I mean, first off, most people don’t even know that’s what they need to do. And so, you’ve gotten them to the process of here’s what you need to do, and here’s how you’re going to do it, right down to the daily things you need to do to make sure that you’re going to reach your goals. You project the numbers over here, and then that is where we want to go. How are we going to get there? How many jobs, what does the backlog need to look like, etcetera? That’s amazing because so many people who love what they do are just going to work every day and hoping that’s enough. And just like not reading your contract, it’s not enough. It’s not enough. If you’re not watching your revenue, nobody else is either. It is only a matter of time before you meltdown before it’s too late.  

Todd: Yeah. And that’s exactly what happened to me. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking when I had my own business. I was a civil engineer, and I had been a project manager. I never had to worry about cash flow. And I just thought it was going to take care of itself, but it does not. It does not take care of itself. And you’re right; there’s nobody else watching it for you. Your bank is not going to say, “Hey Todd, it looks like you’re running a little low. What’s your payroll going to be next, next week? And you know, what invoices do you have coming in?” They don’t care. They, they actually like to make money from NSF fees. That’s a profit center for them, and nobody’s really watching it for you. So that’s one of the things I teach that is probably at the basis of the foundation of a lot of the work I do. It’s what I call right-to-left thinking.  

So, most people operate from left to right, right? As you said, they go to work, they show up, they sit at their desk, or they get in their truck, and they go do the most pressing thing, and a big opportunity comes along. And they’re like, yeah, we should bid this because it feels good today. Or maybe I don’t feel good today, so I’m not going to look at it, and it really just depends on the day-to-day. So, then they focus on getting projects started, and they do the best they can with what they have at their disposal, and then they get to the end of the month or the end of the quarter or the end of the project or the end of the year. In the end, they ask their CPA, “Did I make any money?” And then they find out, well, shit, we lost money again. Or we just broke even, and they wonder, why am I doing this? And that’s left to right thinking, just one step after the next, just taking it one day at a time.

Karalynn: When you’re putting out the fires, whatever comes at you that day is what you’re going to do. 

Todd: You know, everybody loves being a firefighter, right? They make movies about firefighters. They don’t make movies about people who do strategic planning and avoid fires, right?

Karalynn: Right, the people who don’t look up every time that ding on their email that goes off. That’s how everybody normally does it, so now tell me how we should do it. What is a better way? 

Todd: That’s how most small businesses do it. They operate from left to right. The way big businesses run and the way you can run your businesses better is to operate from right to left. So right to left means, you go out to the right side of the page, whatever that is. It could be something like, “I want to sell my business in five years. I want to retire at the end of 2021. This is what I want to have. These are the results I want.” What does the right side of the page look like? Lifestyle, vacation, income. How much time are you working every day? What are you doing? What are you not doing? Let’s design it, right? You own a business. You should be the architect of your destiny, right? And this is a big mindset shift. It is getting to the driver’s seat and really asking the question, what do I want? I remember asking myself that question a few years ago, right before I started my business full time; that’s a tough question. Because if you spent 20 years just taking whatever came to you, and then suddenly you have to ask, what do you want, Todd? Oh man, now I have to pick? What if I don’t like it? What if I get it and I don’t like it?

Karalynn: But here’s the thing. If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit every time. Every single time. But if you set a bigger goal, get there, and don’t like it, you can change. You can refocus. You know, this is not everything you thought it was. Learn from the experience and go on. And that’s the thing that people don’t understand. You’re not ever stuck anywhere. You can always change. You can always have a different mindset. But like I said, failing to plan is planning to fail. And not that you can’t learn from your failures, but if you’re not headed anywhere, if you don’t have a goal, then life will run you instead of you running life. So, like I said, if you are going to aim at nothing, you will definitely hit every time. So, keep going.  

Todd: Yeah. So, right to left thinking is really just going and deciding what you want. Spend some time asking yourself and answering the question; What do I want? And that is what goes on the right side of the page. Then we start working from right to left and ask the question, what’s it going to take? So, let’s say you want to make a hundred grand a year, right? You’re a small business owner, and you want a six-figure salary. I’m not saying that’s like the ultimate dream, but just for the simple map, you want to make a hundred grand a year. Alright. What’s it going to take? Well, I’m going to have to generate. I can make like 15% net margin. Let’s do the math easy 10% net margin. Okay. Well, that means you need to do $100 million of work at a 10% net. All right. What are you going to do to do that?  

Well, I do $50,000 projects. That means I need 20 projects a year. Okay. Well, how many opportunities are you going to have to bid on? Well, I’ve got my hit rate is X. So, you just do the math, and you say, well, I have to bid on X number of projects at $50,000 a piece to generate a million dollars, and that’ll get me. I have to price it at 10% net. And then that will, that’s how I hit my goal. And then you can do the same thing with selling your business, hiring key people, taking vacations, whatever, but pick a goal. You have to have something that you’re trying to achieve and then work backward from there. 

Mostly, here’s what I say most businesses are like. Imagine if you pulled up to a gas station, you saw somebody with a really nice truck, you know, like, um, extended cab, super nice truck tricked out 70-$80,000 truck.  And you said, “Hey dude, that’s a nice truck. Where are you headed to?”

And he said, “Well, I’m going to drive about 400 miles to a gas station. And then I’m going to turn around and come back here.”

“Oh, and then what are you going to do?”

“Well, then I’m going to fuel up. And then I’m going to drive 400 miles until I run on gas and get to another gas station.”

You’re just existing. You’re driving this truck just to fill it up with gas. Like, where are you going? Nowhere. I’ve got this truck. I’ve got to use it. And I’ve got to keep it filled with diesel, right? That’s how most businesses are. They’re just turning money over burning their tires off. And they’re not actually getting anywhere. And it’s sad, but it really takes a mindset shift.  

Karalynn: I agree because there’s so much potential. All of these people have so much potential, and usually, they’re so good at what they do. So, if you could, you know, narrow down what it is; Ask yourself what you want? You want to work three days a week. It doesn’t have to be a dollar amount. It could be something, you know, whatever you enjoy doing. We only have one life. This is not a rehearsal. This is it. You can’t wait for some event to be happy or for this grand thing to happen, to decide you’re going to love your life. I mean, it’s got to happen along the way.

Todd: Let me add one thing to that. If you’re putting your happiness on the other side of something, on the other side of a salary, retirement, selling your business, you’re setting yourself up for a huge disappointment because you better figure out how to be happy. Now. Well, I interviewed a psychologist a few months ago who focuses on suicide prevention. And she said the statistics show that the suicide rate for people in construction after retirement skyrockets.

Karalynn: I can only imagine. 

Todd: So, you better figure out how to be happy now.

Karalynn: Putting your happiness on the other side of something hurts more than it helps. There’s always going to be another “something.” There’s always going to be another thing that you want. There’s always going to be another something. So, while we’re kind of on this, how important is your mindset to your success and to happiness just generally in your business and life?

Todd: I think mindset is all of it. It’s the most important thing.

Karalynn: What do you do? Or what are some tips you can give people to get in the right mindset?  Yes, you enjoy what you do, but after a while, if you’re coming in every day and you’re driving your truck the same 400 miles every day, and you’re not getting anywhere, you get stuck. Obviously, they need to contact you to figure out how to change that. But even if you’re in that situation, you can still have the right mindset. So how do you get in the right mindset? What are some of the things that you do?  

Todd: Yeah. So, the number one thing I do every day and is something that I have to do, and if I don’t do this for a couple of days, I can feel it, and I have to work to stay positive. Number one is, you have to understand that you control your mindset. If you don’t believe that, if you don’t believe you can control your feelings and your thoughts, then just zone out. Because what I’m going to tell you next isn’t going to matter because you just don’t believe you can. So, number one, you have to understand that you control what’s going on in your head. You can control your feelings; you can control your emotions. You can control what you think about, which is where it all starts. That’s the number one tip that I share with people which, surprises them and pisses some of them off, is gratitude. 

Often your problem is that you’re focused on all the negative. For example, say you just bought a white vehicle, suddenly you see all white vehicles like everybody’s got a white vehicle. It’s the same way with negative stuff. If you train your mind to look for the negative, you will see the negative in everything. So, my number one piece of advice, which I follow daily, is to spend five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever you need every day, writing down the things you’re grateful for. And this sounds goofy, but research has proven it will reprogram your brain. You will start to see the positive, and you will stop focusing on the negative. And I can tell you, that has been an absolute game-changer for me. So that’s my tip. Start off writing three things. If it’s 30 seconds, whatever you gotta do, and then just write the things you’re thankful for. You may have to stare at a blank page for a while but find something that you’re thankful for, but eventually, it will change the way you think.  

Karalynn: I agree. And I think that you miss a lot of opportunities if you’re stuck in that negative mindset. You don’t see the things that could happen. You only see the bad side. You see the bad side of people, you see the bad side of the situation, and you really turn yourself off to the unlimited possibilities out there. So, I do think that mindset is a huge thing. I’ve read a bunch of books on it, that you decide whatever thoughts you think about. That’s where you’re going to go, whether they’re good thoughts or bad thoughts. So, you might as well have them be good ones and have a good direction. 

Todd: Yep. I say you might as well be positively delusional.  

Karalynn: I agree. I’d rather be yelled at for being too happy than not happy at all. So, oh, you said something. I wanted to go back to something really quick. You said something about the skilled labor delusion. What is that?

Todd: Yeah. A lot of people are saying we don’t have enough skilled labor. Our problem is people don’t want to work. These millennials don’t want to work. All they want to do is sit at home and play on their phones or whatever. And so, this was a big problem, and it continues to be a big problem. A few years ago, I really started digging into it and trying to tackle this problem. And what I realized was that the skilled labor shortage is not just a problem. It’s actually a symptom of other deeper underlying problems. So, when you look at the national bureau of labor statistics, they have an incredible amount of information. One of them is pretty interesting. And this is why I say it’s a symptom. The national bureau of labor statistics shows that the separation rate – the percentage of people who leave their job either because of quitting, getting fired, getting laid off, retirement, whatever – the separation rate in the construction industry was like 60% for several years. There’s only a couple of industries that are higher, like hospitality and maybe retail, but we’re well above average. We’re like 20 points above the national average, and it’s increasing.  

Here we are for the past several years; I started looking at this in like 2017/2018. The economy is strong. Unemployment is down, but our separation rate is increasing. More people are leaving the construction industry than they were a few years ago. So that tells me, if we want to solve our skilled labor shortage, we should really start focusing on the turnover problem. What if we could keep 10%? What if we could reduce that separation rate by 10%? So, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 million people that work in the construction industry. What if we could just keep 700,000 of them from quitting their job or getting fired? What would that do for us? And another way to look at it is, and I love what Mike Rowe is doing getting young people into trades, vocational schools, all that, but wouldn’t it be tragic if all of those people were successful and they brought a hundred thousand young people came into the construction industry next year. And 60% of them said at the end of the year, you know, screw this. I don’t want to do this anymore. And they left. That would be tragic. So that’s why I say the skilled labor shortage. It’s kind of a delusion. We’re delusional if we think all we need to do is hire more people.  

Karalynn: I think it goes with the name of the podcast, Quit Getting Screwed. How long do you stay around and get screwed until you decide you’ve had enough and you do something else? I mean, it really is a rough industry. Everything runs on credit. You’re going to make more money if you don’t pay the contractor that did the work. It’s rough. And you can level the playing fields in it, like the skills you’re providing, how to look at cash flow, and the legal side of it, too. So, there are resources to make it suck less and make you less likely to get screwed. But I wanted to also ask you, what are some of your time management tips too? Because you know, the firefighters that go put out the fires when they’re email dings, and you know, they have great plans they want to get to this today, but they never do because they’re always working on whatever comes in front of them. How do you time manage and get better at that? 

Todd: I use a couple of strategies. Number one is what I call block scheduling or batching. Let’s call it block scheduling. What that means is you take control of your day and set meetings, put things on your calendar for the activities that need to happen every day, every week. So, let’s say you’re a project manager or business owner. You need to process look at invoices. If you think about it, all the things you’re doing every day have change order requests and invoices to approve, emails that come in, client interaction calls from people in the field. You can either just take those things as they come and then just operate like a call center, and then not get anything done, and let everybody else hijack your time because that’s what phone calls and emails and text messages are. They’re hijackers. They’re trying to take your time, use it for their purpose, and do what they want to do with it. 

So, my advice is to turn off your phone, turn off notifications on your email, create a block schedule where you’re batching activities. So, one of the activities you can do, let’s say you have a few foremen you interact with. You would say, I’m going to talk to you at eight o’clock in the morning, and then two o’clock in the afternoon, and you hold your questions until then. If I have questions for you, I’m going to hold them. And then we’re going to batch that communication. We’ll talk about that stuff at those times, and then, I’m not going to respond to emails as they come in, and I’m not going to play email ping-pong with people. I’m going to check my email at certain times of the day. And I will train everybody not to expect an immediate response. They’ll know I’ll get back to them, but I’m going to check my email at certain times of the day and then change order requests that come in; I’m going to check those things once a day, I’m going to let invoices stack up and twice a week or once a week or whatever.  

So, I’m going to take control of my schedule, and I’m going to determine what needs to be done. I’m going to block it out on my schedule. Then, the other thing that goes along with that would be to schedule deep work sessions. If you have to do an estimate or you need to do something that requires an hour of heads-down, distraction-free work, then go somewhere else. Go to a hotel lobby, a public library, a coffee shop, somewhere else. Put your phone on Do Not Disturb or put it on airplane mode. Don’t open up any sort of communication, not even email and work. And everybody knows you’re off the grid for 60 to 90 minutes. You may want to do this once or twice a week. Get out of the office, so you’re somewhere else out of sight, out of mind. So those are two of my biggest time management, maybe even time multiplication, tips.

Karalynn: Having recently been on that block schedule, that’s how I wrote my book. That’s how I got it done. I’m best in the morning. I’m not very creative and can’t write anything in the afternoon, so I block those hours off. And, you know, I have people to talk with. I have legal documents to review. I just say, if they’re in by one, I’ll get them to you by the end of the day. If not, we’ll wait till tomorrow. You can be the master of your own schedule, and it’s not a bad thing. You’ve got to get over if people are offended. They just learn to get what they need from you. But it’s not a horrible thing to take time. And actually, you’re being clear to everybody that works for you, which is being kind and setting reasonable expectations. So, thank you so much for our interview today. A lot of great tips. If somebody wants to get ahold of you and pick your brain or set up a coaching session, how do they reach you?

Todd: There are two places to go. Number one would be to go and listen to the Construction Leading Edge Podcast. If you just search for Construction Leading Edge on a podcast player, you’ll find that there are 200 plus episodes in there right now. So that’s a great place to start. Number two would be my website, constructionleadingedge.com. And if you want to talk about working with me one-on-one, you can go to constructionleadingedge.com, and there’s a red button that says, “Schedule a Call,” and we can talk about that. We can talk about my coaching program and take helping you from strategic planning all the way down to what we need to be doing this week to make that happen. That right to left thinking that we talked about. Then the other place would be buildermasterclass.com. There are quite a few resources there. That’s where my masterclasses live—quite a few resources on change, order management, communication, a few other resources there. So, specifically, if you’re a builder, remodeler general contractor, there’s a lot of great stuff for you there.  

Karalynn: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Really great stuff here. I think we could really make a dent in people’s lives in the construction industry if we look at our work this way. You need to set that ultimate goal and then work backward. And quality of life matters! We need to be happy now and change our mindset. Thanks again, Todd. I hope you have a great day. 

Todd: My pleasure. Thanks, Karalynn.

Karalynn: Thanks. 

OUTRO: Thank you for listening to this episode of Quit Getting Screwed. I hope you found it helpful. If you like what you hear, please like us and follow our podcast. If you want further information, you can find us at subcontractorinstitute.com. We’re also on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and the book is available on Amazon. Tune in two weeks from now for a new episode. Thank you.

This has been a transcript from Karalynn Cromeens’ contractor education podcast, Quit Getting Screwed, in association with The Subcontractor institute. To hire Karalynn to help you and your business, please visit our construction law firm website.

Episode link: https://the-quit-getting-screwed-podcast.castos.com/episodes/episode-6-how-to-gain-a-34leading-edge34-with-todd-dawalt

This article is intended as a general educational overview of the subject matter and is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of recent jurisprudence, nor a substitute for legal advice for a specific legal matter. If you have a legal issue, consult an attorney.