Welcome to Close it now, the podcast that's revolutionizing the H Vac and home improvement trades industries.

Get ready to dive deep into the world of heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

We're turning up the heat on industry standards and cooling down misconceptions.

And we're not just talking about fixing vents and adjusting thermostats.

It's about the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement.

We're the driving force, inspiring top performers who crave excellence not only in their professional endeavors, but also in fitness, nutrition, relationships, and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all.

This is Close it now, where excellence meets excitement.

Let's get to work now.

Your host, Sam Wakefield.

Well, all right.

Welcome back.

Close It Now.

I am stoked about this guest today.

We have another brother from the Boston area, so he is joining us today.

This is Mark Mason.

I don't know if you've seen this, but he just launched an incredible book that I'm excited to dive into.

It's about being a.

It's the Resilient entrepreneur.

How do we be resilient as an entrepreneur?

Which if you're an.

If you've even sniffed the idea of being an entrepreneur is a concept you must know.

You have to be resilient.

You have those days, the up days, the down days, and everywhere that's in between.

And how do we manage that?

How do we handle the mindset around that and then navigate through it and not let those down days derail you?

And so I'm super excited to introduce.

He's not only an author, he is founder and CEO of in RCL Mechanical and also has a property development company as well.

If I can get my language straight today.

And, man, I'm just excited to have you on the show.

We've been bouncing around each other and been in each other's circles on social media for years now.

And so it's great to finally get to sit down and have a good conversation.

So thanks for joining us, Mark.

Thanks, Sam.

Appreciate it.

Yeah, like you said, I mean, I feel like I've seen you around social media bouncing around the same friend circles and, you know, I feel like this is the new, like, you know, whether anybody likes it on social media is a new thing.

Right?

Like, like, it's like I almost see people on social media and have these friendships and relationships on social media more than I see my normal friends.

Right.

No doubt.

So.

And you kind of just like your expertise and your.

And your growth is just Exponential.

When you can kind of leverage it over the whole US or world, you know, if you may, you know, so.

No, I appreciate it, man.

Absolutely.

The book.

Yes, the book just came out that was that exciting.

Two years in the making.

You know, it's called the resilient opportunity.

Like Mr.

Wakefield just said, it kind of dives into, deep, into that entrepreneurial journey, the adversities that we all kind of dealt with.

So I'm excited for you to take a read.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

It's going to be, I'm sure it will be one of the Close it now book club books.

So for everybody that's listening, yes, the Close it now book club is rocking and rolling.

The date of recording.

I'm sure you won't hear this in time, but the June book we did go for, no, the Sequel.

And the authors, Richard Fenton and Andrea Waltz, actually sat in on the conversation that we had about the book in the book club meeting.

So that's one thing that's really exciting.

With Closing now, every, every chance that I get, I'm going to have the authors actually hang out for the discussion of the book to get extra insight, which is really exciting.

So I'm sure, Mark, your book will be one of those.

But let's go back a little bit.

Give us a quick highlight.

Real man.

How in the world did you end up where you're at, what you're doing, you know?

What gives you the, the street cred to write a book called the Resilient Entrepreneur?

Well, I mean, I think I'm definitely no better than anybody else.

I think that I just work extremely hard and I'm just disciplined, you know, And I think if, I think if you have those, those traits, I feel you can do anything really, you know, to rewind it here a little bit, you know, I think that to tie it into the book, we all have this.

You know, they've always had adversity in the past.

Right.

You know, we've all lost somebody.

We've all had these tragedies, some higher than others.

Right.

So, you know, as I was growing up through my childhood, I, I crossed a lot of that, right.

And I, I, throughout my childhood, elementary, middle school, I had the opportunity to go left to right this whole time, you know, And I feel like when you're that age, just, you just don't know what you don't know right now.

Looking back at it, after I got through high school and I, and thankfully I've hung around with the right people, took that right path, you know, Found something I love because I feel like, truly like to, to, to be explosive in life.

I feel like you need to like find what you, you're passionate about or you just, you're not going to really have a purpose.

Luckily I found that and as I was coming up through the success and as, as I started building my side business doing plumbing at H vac, I got my plumbing license, got into real estate and I was just that go get it.

You know, I, you know, my first house I bought.

I, you know, I did everything to get that full close house.

I, you know, dumped $60,000 in credit card debt into it, refinanced it, paid it off, rolled it into the next one.

While building the plumbing business, working, you know, 12, 14 hours a day is hustling like, you know, a lot of you probably have that listen to this or want to, right?

And it takes me to like 20, 19, 2020 where I started o mechanical and I started really kind of gaining that reputation of, you know, you know, the entrepreneur, the successful business owner from the real estate, the plumbing and all that good stuff.

And I wanted to, I got into a coaching group and everybody was writing books.

I'm like, all right, this is definitely the right room to be in.

Even though I have no desire to write a book, you know, but all these guys, like, you know, they're doing it right, they're doing something right.

You know, they own the only multi million dollar companies, seven, eight figure, nine figure companies.

And it just grew on me.

Kind of like, you know, you are who you hang out with.

I'm sure you, you know, you're all.

About the average of their five closest people in your circle.

Absolutely.

It, it just, you know, what happened was I was like, you know what?

I'm gonna write a book.

It was a challenge to me not realizing that that challenge was like probably going to be one of the bigger challenges of my life because it took extreme amount of focus and like dedication, which you know, I can be.

But like to have it for a long period of time to write a book is.

But I definitely underestimated that.

So I figured out what I wanted to write the book about because I feel like I went through that trauma in adversity and I created success out of it, right.

And I wanted to say, hey, how do I get other people to, to, to inspire, to do this as well?

So that's what the whole book's about.

It's kind of how to convert adversity into wealth.

Kind of goes through my story in the first couple Chapters of, you know, what happened to me and, you know, and how I did it.

Right.

And kind of goes over like building your own personal core values, trying to figure out who you are, who you want to hang out with.

Kind of like those basics, per se.

Yeah.

And then goes into the basics of building a business, essentially.

Like, you know, what are those basic things you need?

So it's almost like a two part book.

Sure.

You know, to help you maybe get over these, these, these small transitions in life that like, you may like play victim of, but if you use it as fuel, like you can use it to get you to the next level.

Yeah.

So, you know, and then it goes into the basics of business, which is, you know, your basic, like how to do a business plan, you know, what's marketing, how can you get free marketing?

Right.

How do you leverage social media?

And you're huge on the same.

I mean, you're in the sales world, marketing world.

They tie in, they marry, they're in bed together.

So it's the same.

Yeah.

It's almost the same thing in a way.

Yeah.

So I.

Or two sides of the same coin.

Maybe it would be a better way to say it.

100, you know, and I think that that's the one thing you need to know how to leverage as getting into it.

Right.

Whether you're one guy out of a truck or you inspire to be a Fortune 500 company, like it's just a matter of like how much money you're going to spend on it.

Right.

So that's what it was about.

And I'm just one thing I learned to.

The whole process was like, I was just super.

I had super.

A large amount of gratitude of like the support I had.

I didn't realize like how much people are watching.

And when I was like telling people with the book, I'm like, you know, it's funny because I love marketing just like you do.

And I'm like, all right, well, it's time to.

My publisher says I have to mock my ass off for two and a half weeks.

That's the number.

Right?

Two and a half weeks.

You're gonna have to get in front of people.

I'm like, oh my God, I'm gonna annoy so many people.

But you know, I did it.

The imposter syndrome was real.

I got it in front of a ton of people.

We had a book release party.

Mh.

Truly just an amazing experience because people read it, people gave me feedback, people supported me that weren't even probably going to read the book.

You Know, and I just found out who.

Who.

Who really, truly loves me.

Who.

You know, who.

Who.

Who needs help, who doesn't need help, you know, who.

And everything else in between, man, it was.

It was just an amazing, amazing experience.

I love it, man.

Let's go back to something that you start.

I definitely want to talk about the.

The marketing and the business plan.

And it sounds like part.

Almost a little bit of a how to as well.

Yes, that's exactly how it was.

You know, it's funny because it does.

It does.

You know?

You know, it starts from, like, I think one of the chapters called it was all a dream.

Right.

You know, it starts with that, like, so I try to stop from, like, that bottom.

Like, you know, when you're in their bedroom and you got nothing, like, you just have this dream, like, I want to be a police officer.

I want to do this.

It's like.

And it's how to put around the people that give you the opportunity to be able to want a dream.

You know what I mean?

Like, I feel like a lot of it's opportunity.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, 100%.

Let's go back to something you said initially about the identity and the belief and the mindset around it.

Because, you know, I.

We.

We know that if you're entrepreneur with the limitations and if you've never heard this out there in.

For everybody listening, you know, and I.

If you've listened to very many of my episodes, I know you've heard this, but you are limited by your beliefs, your belief system, who you believe you are, what you believe you're capable of.

You know, we start off life with none, no limits.

As a kid, we could.

You know, they tell us you can be anything you want to be, which is absolutely true.

But then the limits come in through life when we maybe got our teeth kicked in and we're told you're not good at this or whatever.

So we start to set our own limiting beliefs in ourselves.

But I'd love for you to dive into that a little bit, especially around this concept of entrepreneurship and, you know, taking that leap and what it takes to mentally be resilient enough to be able to do that.

Interesting.

You're 100% right about the beliefs.

It's funny because, like, you're right.

The older you get, you set these limiting beliefs, and it comes from fear, comes from failures in your life.

It comes from insecurities, and it's very hard to get over them.

Right.

And if you're.

And if you're around that People that like feed into that, then it's almost like it's going to hurt you, right?

It's going to suppress your, your, what you really are.

So I mean, one thing that's really helped me get to the next level is working with speed.

Like, I feel like if someone said like mark, what is like your superpower?

I, I work with speed.

Like, I work extremely fast.

It doesn't allow me to think about, you know, double think things, right.

And I don't use it.

I mean, this certain, at this point in my life, I pivoted a little bit, you know, working from speed, you know, years ago, worked very well.

Now I have to pivot a little bit because I, you know, I'm in a different position.

I still work with a massive amount of speed.

But like I would say that's probably like a hack is like you don't give me enough time to second guess it because usually when you have a plan B, a C, you're going to go to that, right?

Because you have that fear and you're nervous.

I don't get the money.

My wife, you know, like, you know, where am I going to get a van?

Where am I going to, you know, where am I going to do this?

You know, what about payroll?

You know, so the moment you start thinking about all those things, you create these narratives.

So I think that if I'd say that's one hack, you have to work.

With speed, you know, can you give us.

I love, I love that, you know, we've, if you've never heard it, there's a big time expression in business, especially people who are wildly successful, that money loves speed, success loves speed.

Break that down for us a little bit though.

Can you give us an example or two where that's applicable and how.

You know, clearly we get derailed a lot of times by overthinking.

But when we, when you say you work with speed, what does that really look like?

So on the spot here, this is what we do.

Yeah, no, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try using a real life example.

So like, you know, speed, I'm super urgent, which kind of aligns with speed.

Right.

And for example, since we're on, you know, we're talking sales marketing.

Last year, you know, we, we're getting behind kick with diminished returns of marketing, you know, and that required us to work with an extensive amount of speed.

Like I could have overanalyzed and looked at this.

What is my PPC leads, giving me leads, giving me my Facebook leads, What's going on.

But the fact of the matter is I'm burning tens of thousands of dollars on canceled calls every month.

Yeah, no doubt.

Like, let's work with the whole industry.

All of home services.

It was like you could almost put a pin on the date.

Mid.

Right at the end of June, start of July 2023, everything fell off the cliff and hasn't really come back yet.

And so it's like, yeah, that this huge example.

I love that.

Yeah.

And.

And to be honest with you, I could overanalyze this and give you this big spreadsheet and.

But I said, you know what, I'm cutting all my marketing in half, you know.

Yeah, I'm just operating with speed.

I know there's an issue.

Could I cut it in a third or a quarter or cut it or just eliminate it all at once?

Absolutely.

But I made that fast decision and it got me aligned.

Right.

It got me in a spot.

Like, okay, my cancel call rate went from like 28 to like 14.

All right.

Like I did something right, you know, I, but I could have analyzed that over months, you know.

And I think that the people that are kind of coming up that are starting to grow, I think that like that's something that you really have to have a handle on as you grow and get that foundation because that's something that like truly you need to get coached on.

Right.

Because if you learn by trial by fire, it's going to cost you 10x if someone just has a quick like 3 to full meetings coaching session and, and kind of educate you on how that all operates.

And I wish I did that in the beginning.

So that's kind of how I correlate to speed as an example recently.

But even if, if I'm going to dumb that down even a little bit more just with emails, everything is urgent in my life.

Like I don't wait on emails.

I don't wait on getting in contact with people hiring and hiring and recruiting.

Like I am on the phone immediately if that comes in, I send them an email through my, my ATS system.

Hey, I'll be calling you, no problem.

I'm coming from a 508 number.

Boom, call answer.

Like people just need, people need these technicians and installers right away.

Right.

And if you wait 24 hours, 48 hours, they might already have another job.

So like I feel like you can't let that opportunity pass.

So that's what I mean with work with speed.

And I think you can apply that in so many different areas.

Right.

So I hope that answers your Question, Sam.

It does.

Yeah, absolutely.

I.

For a long time, I've told people my sense of urgency, especially when a company hires me to coach them or train them.

I was like, okay, I'm going to tell you ahead of time.

My sense of urgency will drive you nuts because we get it done.

There's no.

We talk about it once we make a decision and we do it.

And that's.

That's like, if we close that gap, man, so much more incredible things can happen because then it just.

It happens instead of, well, okay, well, we'll talk about it in the next meeting.

We'll table it to the next meeting.

No, let's make a decision and do it.

If it's the wrong decision, we can course correct, but until the car starts moving, you can't turn around.

So what if you point the wheels in the right direction?

You can't even turn it around until it's moving.

100.

I'm so glad you said that, because I think everybody's first mindset, if you.

If you have those insecurities, you're like, well, what happens if I did the wrong thing?

It's like, you course correct, right?

It's not.

Nothing's a life or death situation.

Will it cost you a hundred dollars?

Will it cost you a thousand bucks?

Maybe.

Right?

But at the end of the day, you're gonna.

You're gonna make it so much faster, so much quicker.

Not analyzing something, and your.

Your competitor is gonna be stuck behind you, you know, so that's a great example.

I love it, man.

Well, let's get into a little bit more into the.

The.

So talk about speed and making decisions.

Let's dive.

Jump over to the mindset side of things for a minute, because there's such an entrepreneur's mindset, especially revolving around this concept of the resilient entrepreneur.

Dive into that because you've had huge wins, you've had huge setbacks, and you have to be able to navigate both of those to be that resilient entrepreneur.

So I'd love for you to talk about that a bit, because that really is such a crux to be a successful entrepreneur.

Yeah, that's a good one.

You know, I.

The first thing when you saying that, the first thing that comes to mind is, like, you just can never give up.

I feel like things can be so hard and, you know, I work around the clock.

You know, I woke up three times last night, sent a couple emails to myself, like, I'm working around the clock because that's how I'm going to get my competitive advantage, right?

And I made a goal that we need to be X amount of profit profitable this year.

And I'm not going to do that working an eight hour day, right?

So that's when we talk about resilience.

And that's why I, resilience is just, that's why I need to book that.

Because I feel like it's a very underestimated term and, and realistically, in order to be what you want to be and hit the success that you want to, like, it's going to legit.

Take that, right?

You're going to get, you're going to lose money, you're going to lose people, you're going to lose best friends, you're going to lose family members, you're going to, you're not going to see eye to eye with people.

You're going to get robbed, you're gonna get stolen from, you're gonna get, you know, and all that stuff, like imagine, like think about all that stuff I just said right off the rip.

And it, obviously it can grow and grow, but like think about all the, the lanes that come with that.

Like, you know, your best friend did this, this person did this.

This person quit.

This person stole money from you.

This person stole that person from you.

This guy got the tools, this guy crashed the van and left the next day.

Like, there's so many setbacks and things that cost money and things that like, will give you the out.

I guess that's what I guess I'm trying to get at.

Like, you have so many outs, you know, and I feel like you have to be able to just be confident enough to be like, you know what?

I'm going to get through this, I'm going to get through this, you know, and you know, the book came out at the perfect time for me because we got our ass kicked in 2024.

You know, we rode this amazing wave from like 2019 to 2023 and boom, we got hit with that union petition, we got hit with a lot of setbacks and you know, turnover and like every aspect.

I could have walked right, I could have went left to right.

But you know, I decided to fight through it all, you know, and obviously as a business owner or someone getting into this, you, you have your personal setbacks, you have your professional, you have like, you have all these things coming at you and I feel like the book goes over.

Like you have to take that all as fuel.

You know, God puts you in that position to because he knew you can get out of it.

And you Know, one way or the other, like, you're not gonna fail unless you give it up.

Like, that's the only way if you think about it, right?

You're not gonna fail unless you give up.

So you just have to keep moving forward.

It might look different, right?

I think that you have to.

At some point, you have to look yourself in the mirror and say, things may look different, but I'm not going to give up.

Yeah.

You know, and I think that's resilience.

Like, I think that, like, it's pretty simple.

I feel like all these things that we talk about in this entrepreneurial world is like, they come down to, like, a core, like, handful of things.

Like, if you do them in their heart, as.

As you know, right.

Nobody loves waking up in the morning.

It's like, yeah, I'm so excited to get up at 4 or 5 o' clock in the morning.

I can't wait, you know, but, like, when you do it, like, you gain a couple hours a day, that couple hours, it compounds, I think everything compounds.

Like, you know, you being confident compounds, you being resilient compounds, you being disciplined compounds.

And I think that that's kind of what the book goes over, you know, And I think that we've all lost a mother, lost a father, you know, had these super tragedies, you know, and I have every angle to just say, you know what, I'm all set.

Like, like, I'm just gonna work a 9 to 5 or I'm just gonna be small.

Maybe I'll just have one or two guys.

I'm just.

Maybe I just don't want to do anything.

Maybe I just want to be a bum, who knows, right?

Like, I had all those oats.

But, you know, I think that if you're listening to the right podcast, you're around the right people, you're doing what you can do, and you're like, almost infiltrating that mind with positivity.

You're going to win.

I love this so much.

Such a good.

Surrounding yourself with the people and, you know, I call it staying close to the campfire.

You know, when you stay close to the campfire, it keeps your.

Keeps your mindset warm, keeps you focused on the right things, the main things to keep the main thing, the main thing, so to speak.

And when we're doing that, it just keeps us on track.

Those accountability partners, the people pouring into your life and not always taking away.

And, man, it's huge.

It's crucial.

So, Mark, one thing, I want to circle back to here real quick.

Is because I know there's so many companies in areas that are very union driven.

I was just in Chicago with Perfect Temp and with on the Mark, and I hear these conversations there.

You know, there's.

And lots, of course, lots of companies in your area, you know, Akea and.

And green energy and you guys.

And just so many companies all over the areas that constantly having this conversation around union.

And they're either in competition with these union shops that are grossly underbidding things or whatever the conversation is.

But the conversation usually comes back to we're building a culture.

So fingers crossed we don't get all of this craziness, this union petition, all these things.

So if you're okay with that, I'd love for you to kind of talk us through that a little bit, especially since you're in the midst of it.

What are some of the.

Navigating this help us out here?

Because I know there's a lot of guys that they have this hanging in the back of their mind.

There's this anxiety, this fear that maybe, God, we hope we don't ever have to go through this or experience it.

Talk to us about it, man.

Yeah, well, I'm big on flipping the mindset, right, like, because like, they came after us for a reason.

And it kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier.

It's like our branding and our marketing was so good that realistically they were nervous, you know, and we have a commercial side of the business, and we also have a residential side of the business.

And, you know, our commercial side of the business of works.

We work in Boston.

So they saw us around Boston.

We get the Boston top place to work in 2024, 2023.

And, you know, we were on their target, you know, and what happened?

We're taking union jobs.

Yeah, we're taking union jobs and all that.

And I'm in growth mode.

Right.

The biggest thing to me is, like, I'm keeping my people busy.

My main concern is like, how can I grow this thing as quickly as possible with the best piece, but best people possible and have fun with doing it.

Right?

And that's what I was doing.

We have to have fun.

And that's what I was doing.

And you know, and then we got, you know, they infiltrated the company.

You know, they call it like, you know, sometimes they send people into the company and they kind of just.

They disturb it.

In my opinion, that's kind of probably what happened.

And, you know, we got hit, you know, with these union cards, you know, and I think about 30 of the people signed them in the commercial side.

So started that clock and we had a certain amount of time, about 30 days to campaign of why essentially, like why like, you know, we would like to stay a non union open open shop.

And they kind of did what they had to do, not realizing how dirty it actually gets.

Like it was literally dealing with the mob.

Sam no, I'm not surprised at all.

It was goes back to what Jimmy Hoffa and all of the things.

It was nasty.

It was the most un American thing that I've ever been through from somebody just doing good, trying to build a culture, trying to build a company from the ground up, you know, that it's not like I inherited millions of dollars and said, you know what, I'm gonna start a company tomorrow.

Like everything was sweat equity.

And these guys came in and just swept the floor.

You know, I mean they just wanted, they, they wanted what they wanted and there was no, there was no out.

And you know, we dealt with it the whole, we won that, we won the election.

You know, the big thing was all the, all the laws changed in 2023 with the Biden administration.

And it was new for we were the first company that I was told in the US to go through it with the changes of the legislature.

Interesting change.

The 28th of 2023 on December.

We got hit January 11th, so right, right away.

So, you know, and we've prepared for this, but we also didn't prepare for the changes and all that good stuff.

So we knew enough to be dangerous and to prepare.

But you know, we, we relied on council to really help us do it.

And we won the election on February 9th.

We were on the election three to one vote.

I think it was like 34 to like nine or something like that.

And they, they excluded like 15, 20 votes just because they wanted to.

But the big thing was because it didn't really work, in my opinion.

It didn't really work.

It just was very one sided.

And the big thing during it was like, hey, you can't get any unfailing practice strategies during this.

Like you can't tell people you're going to freeze to pay.

You can't tell people to go, don't go union because of this.

And we followed all those guideline.

Even had a HR consultant walk around with us as we kind of campaigned.

So we make sure we stay between the lines.

Sure.

We didn't get hit with any.

We won the vote.

A week later we hit with 40.

Now the new law stated like once you get Hit with that, like it forces you to recognize and bargain with the union.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So we said, yeah, so as a quick aside here or here in a minute, I'd love for you to give us maybe a bullet points of what the changes were that kind of facilitated this extra navigation that you went through.

Yeah, I don't exactly know all the changes.

There was a lot to take in, but those were some of the changes.

Like I think that main one was like, you know, if you get hit with those ulps, like it doesn't matter before or after.

I think under my attorney's impression it was if you did get hit with the ulp, during it, you were fine.

But once we get hit after, I think that was a change that kind of got overlooked.

So either way, we were going to go to bargaining.

We didn't even know it.

Right.

Because like there was no way a judge that was going to overrule 40 charges and you know, because all they needed is one.

So, you know, we fought them all year in, in court.

Once again, we're a four year at that time, we're a three and a half, four year old company with major growth, you know, not a lot of equity.

And it really put it, it really puts stress on the company, you know, and I think they did what they wanted to do, Sam.

They wanted to remove us from competition.

Yeah, they wanted to eliminate us or have us join us, but the way we're structured, it was tough at that time, you know, so, you know, here we are now.

We, we got the judge's ruling a couple months ago and they said, you know, you lose, you have to go bargaining.

So now, now the whole clock starts again next week.

I start bargaining with them in good faith for a year, which in my opinion I think they're probably going to, you know, not bargain respectfully.

Like I think they're going to come at it like differently.

You know, I think their whole thing, Sam, is they, they try to financially drain these companies until they just have to fold.

Sure, that's just my opinion, but I, I don't wish it upon anybody, you know, especially someone that's just, that just started a new company that, you know, that, you know, I just think there's different ways to go about it.

And I feel like if people want to go union, there's an open door for it.

You know, you don't have to force a company to go union when that wasn't in the business plan.

Yeah, you should just go to a shop that's union and join it yeah, absolutely.

Wow.

What an incredible.

Thanks for sharing too.

What an incredible journey.

So if there was any piece of advice you could give to companies out there in the areas that are heavily union, that are somewhere either maybe facing this or trying to avoid it, what would that be?

Well, I think that we should have another episode and to dive deep into the full process and what actually happened deeper.

Because I do think that people have to have the picture of exactly what's going to happen, you know, because if someone told me the steps that were going to happen, I would have been a little bit ahead of it and I would have been able to navigate things a little bit better to put my team.

Because everything's about the team.

Like, I'm going to survive either way.

Right.

Whether a union, not union, whether the company's there or not there, I'm going to be okay.

But I'm emotionally tied to the people that took shot a shot on the company, took a shot at me, that I told them that they would have a job.

Right.

That's what, that's what kind of gets me.

But I mean, overall, like, you know, I think that this is another one.

I work very fast.

I, I work with speed with this.

You know, did it hurt me?

I don't know.

Right.

But I think we went to a seminar, an open shop merit seminar against union shops.

We, we are, We Are ABC Contractors.

It's a nationwide networking group.

And like six to 12 months prior I went to that and I learned a lot about the connect.

Like, well, number one, I made the connections on which attorneys to hire because there's specialized labor attorneys that deal with this.

Like, like this is not your typical, like the guy that sends out your small claims court.

Like, this is not something that they would handle.

Like these, these are like, when you're dealing with the national labor Board, like, you need to have the right fit.

Right.

And I think that although it didn't turn out how I wanted to, I think I was represented very well.

And I think that anybody that thinks they're gonna face this, I think they should just stay ahead of it and just get a labor attorney in their.

Back pocket, you know, make the connection.

To make the connection, figure out who they are and, and make the connections.

Before you 100 and maybe even talk to them, spend a couple thousand bucks, have them spend a couple hours with you and just have them go over how you can protect yourself.

Yeah.

You know, because I think one of the reasons, one of the ways to protect yourself is just obviously you need to get the tools Right.

And the attorney is a tool.

But they might be able to figure out ways that like you can work things.

You know, I think that one thing that we could have done if I had this conversation a couple years ago, I could have split the company.

Like I have a commercial and a residential vision which is very.

Not a lot of people like that.

You know, we do commercial spec.

So like if a hundred and fifty thousand square Amazon building comes up, like we, we bid that plan spec and we go do that with commercial plumbers and then we have your residential division where you do service plumbing and service H vac and installs.

Right.

So like we're two totally separate companies that we probably should have had those split the whole time because it would have probably made us a little bit diverse than that.

But that would be my thing is, is it doesn't hurt to stay ahead.

Like we all talk about being proactive versus reactionary and I think that that's a proactive situation.

Situation that you can stay ahead of if you're a little bit nervous.

I like that.

And my phone number and my Instagram and Facebook are probably going to be on here after.

So guys, if you need something like shoot me a dm, like I don't mind getting on the phone with you guys.

Excellent.

Yeah.

And for everybody, I'll make sure to have all of that in, in the show notes.

So don't try to write it down.

And you're in Drive Time University right now.

Yeah, yeah.

Check the show notes if that's something you want to have a deeper conversation with Mark about.

And I will absolutely take you up on that.

We'll do a whole episode on every bit of that because it is important to be able to navigate and there's so many business which actually this is a great segue to the other, the next place that I wanted to go with you because it, you know, being proactive in business is so crucial.

Yes.

You have to be able to pivot.

We have to be able to pivot quickly sometimes.

And you know, we react to the market.

But the more proactive we are and the more especially like you mentioned earlier, bringing in advisors and counselors and coaches and those types of things that have proven results.

Not the quote unquote gurus out there, but people actually know what the heck they're doing when we bring those in.

A lot of times we can forecast the future based on past experience.

And so we can.

For example, when I work with companies, I can take a 15 minute look at a handful of things in the company I can see, you know, the pitfalls and these are just gaping holes where you could big gotchas in the company and then have one conversation with people.

Okay, here's the things you need to do to patch those holes.

So those types of things, that's what happens when we, you know, hire coaches and people like yourself that have been through the experiences.

It's okay to, for everybody listening, it's okay to spend, you know, like Mark saying, spend a couple thousand bucks with somebody, buy some time with them and earn the right to have that conversation because it will save you multiple times that in the future.

So along these lines of being proactive, I love where you went in the book, the next section that we were talking about about more of the how to setting up the business plan, those types of things.

So I'd love for you to give us a little bit of a breakdown of what's in there and your thought process around the requirements for a company.

Because most people, they get frustrated.

It's the entrepreneurial seizure like Michael Gerber calls it.

They get pissed off at the boss one day and they want to go start their own shop.

So they hang out their shingle and they get going and okay, I'm great at fixing stuff now how do we get people to buy it now?

Okay, I don't know how to price it all these things.

So take us into that level of business.

What are the steps?

What things should we have set up first before going to bad?

And clearly you like speed, so this doesn't mean a million miles of preparation work, but there are some things we have to do first.

So through this portion of it.

A little bit.

Yeah.

So I love this because I feel like this is almost my favorite part.

All right, so let's put Sam's just quit his full time job, you know, and he's, you know, he just bought his 3, 500 van, you know, and it's like, okay, what do I do next?

Got the tools, I'm ready to go.

Yeah, you got the tools, you're ready to go.

I feel like you have to figure out the why, like what do you want?

A lot of people don't know that, right?

So I think that someone has to figure out what, what do they want and it can change.

So I think that everybody has to put a pin in it.

You know, I didn't want to a 80 man shop.

Like that wasn't part of my vision at that time.

I pivoted with the market when I was growing, right.

And I made the decision that I Knew there's going to be some foundational cracks.

I knew I was moving with a lot of speed, but I bet on the growth and the sales and the volume, which came to a complete halt when I get hit with the union stuff.

So there was a, you know, I, I pivoted and then obviously I had a setback, right?

I had, I had some adversity.

You know, we're where realigned and we're getting through it.

As you guys can tell, like it sucked.

Sucked big time.

But I got over it, right.

I'm so alive.

The company's still here.

We're, we're moving and grooving.

So I mean, how does that resonate with you?

Like, I think that you have to figure out the why.

Don't forget, don't overthink it.

It can always change and you just got to do it.

You know, I think that a lot of people get caught up in the logo to get caught up in the.

I need to do an llc.

I got to get, I got to find that cpa.

I got to do this.

I have that mindset.

Like, get the contract.

Yeah, get the contract.

Figure it out.

Go sell that forty thousand dollar cut in.

Like, go sell that, that furniture placement, you know, as an llc.

The right thing to do.

Absolutely.

But if, if you sell 15, 20, 30 of them to get off the ground and get some money in the bank, it's not going to kill you.

Is there a little liability possibly right at the end of the day, like, just move, everything's gonna work out.

You know, you can set up that LLC on the way.

You know, you know, I go into.

And that sounds kind of like that the beginning stage, right?

You know, you get on social media, you tell your parents, you tell everybody that you, you do H Vac.

I truly, I truly didn't know the power of referrals and words and just you and the community until I, I had someone in my area that was kind of a mentor to me and he's like, Mark, you just gotta just tell people you do it.

I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna tell people I do real estate.

That's weird.

Everybody's gonna think I'm wealthy and think I'm rich and guess what?

Like, it was a limiting belief.

Like, you know, I thought people were gonna draw this thing about Mark Mason in the back.

And what did it do?

I started telling people, I started posting about it and it truly spiked my business.

Like, you know, I went from literally flipping a house, making my first flip.

I think I made like three grand.

I mean, we're building 22 units right now.

So, like, guys, like, it can happen.

Right?

Like, I, like, that's all with, you know, I.

I was not a trust fund baby.

I didn't have millions of dollars in the bank.

Like, sure.

I literally started RCM Mechanical with $20,000 in the bank, and I put no money into it since I started it, you know, and where, you know, volume isn't everything and we can get into that at some point.

But, like, you know, where we closed last year at 18, 19 million bucks and ton of setbacks.

But I kind of.

To draw you back to the beginning, like, it's just about doing it.

It's about that speed.

It's about not thinking about it.

Right.

I'm not saying rush through your install and don't have quality control.

There's things that you kind of have to like, all right.

Like, you kind of have to have that common sense.

But it starts that.

It starts with just getting to work.

Get the contract, get an llc right after that, make sure your insurance is in place, make sure your license is there, which is all simple stuff for the most part.

I think if someone's going to try to make that sound like it's a bigger thing than it is, you're probably talking to the wrong person.

Yeah.

You know, attorney is not going to charge you $5,000 for an LLC if he does.

Now, please contact anybody on this podcast or anywhere.

No kidding.

I mean, in Texas, mine were 900 bucks.

Yeah.

And you can do them yourself.

Full on, you know, with an attorney.

Full on everything.

Articles, incorporation, with the stamp included.

Absolutely.

It's not insane.

It's not insane.

And to be honest with you, so many people put the logo in the.

Which all.

That's all the fun stuff.

Right?

So so many people put that stuff before even getting the job, and then they never start.

So, like, make sure that you want to do it right.

Go get that job.

Get that confidence, you know, and then chapter.

You know, let's see.

So chapter six, I go into that dynamic building, like that.

That business plan, and that's kind of what I just said to you.

That's kind of all that in there.

Like, yeah, I.

The nlc.

I want this logo.

I want to do.

I want to do residential.

Like, I think the whole point of a business plan, guys, I think that people get a little bit nervous, right.

Whenever somebody asks me to go into business or wants me to be a business partner, I'm like, no problem.

Send me a business plan.

And I never get one.

It's kind of funny.

I got that from Sean Whelan.

It's like, he's like, hey, anytime.

Once you get all.

Once you have all this success, everybody wants to partner with you.

So just ask it for a business plan.

So that's kind of like my little.

That's a great way to weed them out.

I need to start.

I need to start doing that.

I think that's probably why I have like, six different projects going right now.

Yeah, exactly.

So get that business plan down and all it is, guys.

It's like, where do you want to work?

What cities and towns?

What kind of work do you want?

What are you envisioning?

How many employees do you want to have?

How much revenue do you want to do?

What's your.

What's your profitability?

How much is your net profit?

What do you want your gross margin to be?

Essentially, it's almost like a bible of, like, your wish list in business, which is tough to do when you don't know it.

So I think that, like, simply getting with somebody that's done it before, you know, like, I bet you if.

If someone messaged Sam and said, hey, I'm starting my business, I.

I want to do a business plan.

Can you just help me?

An hour your time, just to kind of go over it.

I bet you probably on the podcast and.

And there'll be a great podcast on how to build a business plan.

Oh, you know what?

I.

In fact, I'll put a challenge out right now.

Anybody that wants to do this, message me.

I'll take applications, of course.

We'll screen this a little bit, but we'll do an episode, literally, of sitting here walking someone through what it takes, the questions I ask, have them answer it, and we'll do a real time workshop as an episode of how to put together all the things you need for a business plan.

So if you're out there and you're wanting to do that, pop me a message.

You can email me samoseitnow.net or go to the Facebook group.

Find me on Facebook and join the Close it now Facebook group and pop me a message through there.

And yeah, that's a great episode.

Good idea, man.

I love that because that's real value, guys.

You know, that's super valuable.

So take them up on that.

Absolutely.

So I go into the business plan and Sam's gonna build it for you.

And then we have I.

I touch on sops and operating besieges in this book and core values, because I feel.

Like I'M so glad you do that because nobody has them and everybody needs them.

Yeah.

And sometimes your personal core values go into your, your professional core values, you know, and then your SOPs.

I literally, it took me years to build up my SOPs.

Now there's actually a lot of people that just sell them that you kind of manipulate them.

And when I started them chat, GBT wasn't a really big thing.

Probably would have saved me so much headache, way more hair.

But I will say it's easier to build the SOPs than to hold people accountable to them.

It is.

Yeah.

I will say that I think that Everybody talks about SOPs like you're done once they're done.

Absolutely not.

It takes you years to make living, breathing organism.

It really is.

It has to be updated 100.

And I think they're very underestimated.

And I think that it's funny, I have a buddy of mine, Mike, he's, he owns Horizon H Vac in Rhode island.

And he's like, you know, he bounces a lot of things off me and I kind of mentor him along the ways because he's kind of about, he's like an $800,000 million dollar shop right now.

And I'm like, you know, you got to do this.

You should debrief on these jobs.

This is how you collect the money.

And like, I've been through all those.

I said, hey, put a debrief form in place right now because like, let me tell you, it's so much harder to do it when you're at 5 million, you know, so this is those SOPs.

We can go into that in pretty in depth, but I think that like, just write down what you do day to day.

That's the easiest way to replace yourself.

And Dan Martell has a really good book called buy back your time.

And that doesn't mean like, like, hey, like, you know, although he kind of means like he's trying to back you out of the business as much as possible.

It doesn't mean you don't have to be in the business.

It means that like, you should be working on different things.

Right.

Yeah, I, I actually, it's funny you mentioned, I'm literally in the middle of that book right now and I'm doing, I'm going through the process.

The way that I, the way it hits me is I get the opportunity to be intentional about what I spend my time on, knowing the KPIs around it.

So if I'm doing a lower value activity, it's because I chose to not because I have to.

Which is wildly different than I think so many people get caught in the loop of, oh, I have to do all this work, not even knowing, man, I could hire somebody for $8 an hour a VA that, that would do this faster and better than me anyway.

But if I like it and I want to do it, it's a choice.

And I plug it intentionally into my schedule.

That's the way it hit.

You're right that it's a very powerful book, guys.

I'm sure you get a ton out of it, Sam.

But you're right, it is.

And I'm the king of doing these admin tasks because I feel like success from them, weirdly, because I feel like my day, I feel like sometimes I just end my day and I'm like, what did I even do?

Like, what did I get done?

Like, this is crazy, you know, but like, checking my emails.

Dan would lose it.

He could jump to the podcast right now.

But like, I check my emails because I feel complete, you know, I really haven't like graduated to not check them.

I've tried it multiple times.

I've been weeks, I've been a couple days.

But at the end of the day, I just like doing it right.

And that's how I keep a pulse of my business.

So I'll work myself out of that.

You know, I have work to do as long with, just like everybody else does.

And then I go into the power of marketing, right?

And that kind of goes into.

So let's camp out on that for a minute because I think there's so many people, especially since you, I love that you started and totally bootstrapped the whole thing.

You know, you started with, what did you say, $20,000.

And every bit of it has been through your growth because of things like this.

So totally go through what you're about to go through.

But I would love to follow that with a question of.

Speak to the guys that are that small shop right now or the place where you started, or they're wanting to.

If you had to do it all over again, knowing the things you know now, clearly you've learned along the way and can shortcut some.

Some people, they can learn from your mistakes.

So how would you do it if you started fresh right now with no money, but build this answer however you want to.

Yeah, so I'm in the back of a truck, just getting going.

I'm inspired to be a 10 man shop.

I drag my wife in or my husband and I'd say, you know, I need something from you.

I need you to post five times a week, you know, on social media and cover all the platforms.

I don't care what you post.

Don't care what you post.

Just post anything.

Me related, H vac related, plumber related, I don't care.

And put me in and come up.

With anything you think is relevant.

Anything you think is relevant.

And that's how I'd leverage social media.

And I think that what goes on with social media is a lot of people don't know the why behind it and how it works.

So I think that once I was educated on that, it made sense.

And I'll kind of give you guys the breakdown of it.

When post on social media, you get engagement.

And I have to.

How much people look at your post, how many impressions you have, right?

And when Facebook or Instagram knows that you have people looking at it, they show it in front of more people.

What does that do that gets you in front of so much more people than a yard sign does.

Right.

You know, I mean, only so many people drive by yard sign when you're on social media.

Like, it can be thousands of people in just a small area, right?

Especially if you can really learn how to give value to, like, Facebook groups.

Like, you know, you're getting around everybody in that town, right?

I've bought in Facebook groups.

You know, we won't go down that route yet.

But like, for example, like, you want, like, the reason my growth was so exponential is because I, I created a brand and I believed in the brand.

And what happened was I, I made the social media, the social.

If you go on my social media right now, it's not about plumbing and H vac.

It's introducing people.

It's showing people what's going on in the background.

It's taking pictures of things.

It's.

It's not like quick tips.

You probably won't see quick tips on my social media.

You know, we touch on cool values a little bit, but like, you will not see, like, hey, how to change your afl.

You know, Although there's probably.

There's, there's, there's some, there's some value in that.

I think it's more in videos, though.

I think that people want to watch that on videos, not like photos anymore.

But I think that none of that costs money.

You don't need Facebook ads for that.

You don't need to boost it.

Like, get on social media, get in front of people, get in front of those Facebook groups, tag people, engage with people, build that know, like, and trust factor That's a.

That's a big one.

Because when anybody goes and looks you up online, they're going to look at your Google reviews and they're going to look at your social media and they want to see.

They don't want to do business with our sale Mechanical.

They want to do business with, like, Mark Mason.

They want to know.

Like, I think it's.

I think a lot of people have this image in their mind that, like, it's.

Because I was like that for a while.

Like, I want to do all that.

I was so up on the air.

Do I do my personal.

Do I do.

Do I spend a lot of time on my personal brand on Instagram?

Because I had three businesses at one point.

I had a restaurant, I had RCL Mechanical, and I have Eastside, the development company.

I'm like, what do I do?

Like, do I do.

I just post on each business platform to post on mine, and I just doubled down on mine.

And I.

I love that you said that because there's.

That's where a lot of people, I think, miss it.

Because I, you know, personally, I've done a ton of study into social media.

And yep, the last five businesses I've had have been built on social media.

And yes, I have a.

The professional page, but where I have always gotten the most traction is on my personal profile.

Because Facebook, if you have a professional page, you can do it, but it will cost you Personal page.

You can get the same better attraction at guerrilla marketing.

Free 99, which is my favorite price.

And yeah, you're right.

You.

Sam, you're right.

And we're talking about free marketing.

Yes, absolutely.

And at some point, I took that leap and I had a professional videography company that I found that.

That gave me a ton of value.

Their value was they got the best out of the person they were interviewing.

Yeah.

Which you don't see that much.

I've hired you over a few companies that, like, stand in front of you with the camera like, hey, what's up?

Like, what do you do?

And it's like the guys, like, feel awkward, right?

This guy, this media team told by fire, they.

They just knew how to get the answers out of people.

I was like, it was.

And we rode that wave.

So we had.

We had them talk about themselves, you know, and.

And you guys can do this on an iPhone, right?

You go to.

Go to your technician.

You've hired your first technician.

Better yet, I'm gonna give you an example.

I love that we're talking about this 2020.

My friend Matt Benavides.

I left.

I left Sagamore, my old commercial company, and he did.

You know what?

I.

I did the development.

I was doing a flip.

And he's like, I want out of here.

I want out of here.

He was my foreman when I was an apprentice, and he's like, I want out of here.

I want out of here.

You know, I'm like, matt, here's a deal.

I'll give you every one of my flips to Plum if you leave.

I will support that 100.

He goes, I'm gonna drop my truck off tomorrow.

Always, like, Thursday, Whatever.

It was a couple days.

It was like, no joke.

He made that decision.

He was like, I'm out.

He goes, you do that.

I'm dropping my truck off.

He dropped his truck off.

No two week notice.

And he started, right?

And I keep seeing these, these, these.

And you're gonna know who he is once I get into it.

And I start seeing these Instagram reels and tick tocks.

I'm like, oh, my God, look at all the followers he has.

He's the Boston porn monster.

Have you seen this stuff, huh?

He's the Boston plumbing monster, guys.

He legit.

He started all those videos on my projects, and he would just film what he's doing for the day.

And he's naturally funny, but, I mean, this kid's getting paid.

He's still, to this day, he does probably 50, 60 of my real estate development stuff, and he is killing it.

He makes thousands of dollars a month on social media and he has an iPhone.

He.

The footage is not great, and he just goes through and it's almost like how tos, right?

He figured out how to do the how to's, right?

He may not change a filter, but he's going in, he's fixing a stack that's cracked or whatever, and he just lines it up.

He's funny and he's got Timberland, he's got Milwaukee representing him.

He's.

He's found his niche, and now that's opportunity, guys.

He created that opportunity.

So, like, I feel like there's just so many avenues and things that you can pivot when it's time.

But that brings you guys a little clarity of, like, where you can take things.

My social media, if you look at my social media, I have that professional page that, like, really engages on, like, who my people are.

It's not about me.

It's not about the company.

It's about the people.

He talks about that how to and just funny.

Day to day loves to get the comments about being a hack and.

But he just makes it work.

Right?

So you're just gonna pick what you enjoy.

It's gonna be, it's gonna be one of them.

You can't do anything these days not have social media.

I'll make that 100 clear.

No doubt.

Yeah.

Oh, I love this so much.

Yeah.

So it's huge.

You know him, right?

1.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, 100%.

I'm going to reach out to him and have him on the show too.

We'll have some fun up on here.

Oh, did he.

Is he coming on?

Well, we haven't scheduled anything yet.

I'll bust his chops.

You do it.

Yeah, for sure.

I'll, I'll get reached out.

Just like you and I, we've been bouncing around each other in social media for a while and hasn't, haven't hadn't quite made that connection yet, but we will.

But yeah, I mean, heck, social media, I love social media because it's the leverage point to get in front of so many people.

And one thing that I would just add the yes.

And here super quick for everybody listening.

Don't be scared of it if you think that, oh, I don't want to do that.

Because when you maybe get bad reviews, etc.

So what, you're going to get them anyway.

So just.

It's another platform.

You have to be out there.

The other thing is so many people are scared to make videos of themselves and I don't know, I don't like how I look on camera.

What's how you look in person?

Get over yourself.

If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you have to do hard things sometimes.

So if you don't want to be the face of it, find somebody in your company that will, that'll own it.

For example, when I was, you know, in the field, the last company I was in, the owner of the company, he didn't want to be in any of the social media.

I said, that's fine, but we have to have it.

I'll be the face of it.

And so I was the one that took it over and I ran it and it was awesome.

They had, you know, had hired some social media and they did other things, but all of the real world stuff, I'm doing dogs of, you know, air conditioning, the Dogs of Austin.

Hashtag Dogs of Austin.

And people would literally buy from us strictly because we took care of their dogs.

It was like, hey, the fan favorite was this little cool little pug named Waffles.

And, and so many comments came in about that one dog that I got a selfie with that day we went.

I had.

I went back to that homeowner months after the project, say, hey, can we do some more pictures with your dog?

And they were like, oh, my God, that's awesome.

And so it was just hilarious.

You're gonna make the best out of it.

You're 100% right.

Yeah, you're 100% right.

And go back to your comment, Sam, about, like, how you look on camera, because believe me, like, you probably feel the same way still.

There's probably second guessing the second guess on my end.

But, like, it goes back to what we talked about in the beginning.

It's like, work with speed.

Don't even give yourself time to think about how you look.

It is what it is.

That's you as a person.

If you don't like, you change it.

Right.

100%.

Well.

And, you know, even the same, I've got.

I don't know how many.

I'm coming up on 250 episodes.

I've.

The first year I got into social media was when Facebook Live started and I did this challenge.

Go live for 30 days in a row and see what happens.

Well, that 30 days turned into 300 days.

Not because I was good at it.

It was strictly because I got just in the flow and started doing it.

And even still, I go back and listen to episodes all the time and I'm like, oh, my gosh, I hate the way I sound.

I don't like my voice when it's being recorded, all these things, but do it anyway.

Yeah, somebody does grow.

Yeah, you just grow like that.

It's a natural progression.

And that's what happened with the book.

The.

The reason the book took so long is because I wrote it and then I hated it.

And then I wrote it again.

I'm like, I'm not giving myself enough time to hate it again.

So I'm releasing it, you know?

Yes.

I love that.

Back to the same thing you just said.

Yeah, and it's so good too.

And, you know, my friend Corey Barrier, he said, told me something because I was telling him the same thing about my book.

It's like, I don't know if I actually, you know, these concepts I teach different now.

He's like, so release it.

And then when you write your next one, say, here's how I've progressed in my thinking.

And it's like, oh, brilliant.

Duh.

Instead of just rewriting and never doing, just actually do it.

Yeah.

100% super powerful.

Nailed it.

You Nailed it.

I think that goes about with this whole episode.

Like I feel like we covered a lot.

I feel like that the speed is one thing that like it keeps coming back to, you know what I mean, with everything.

It's like, you know.

Do you think the Boston Palomasa had a, had a plan on how his social media was going to blow up?

Like, you know, I mean he's got millions of followers.

It's just like he just did it, he pivoted, he made it happen and he sent it.

You know, he's, he's getting famous off talking about people's sisters.

Yeah, I love it so much, man.

Dude, this is, this is such a good episode.

I, I wish we could talk for a long time.

We'll have to do another one on, on the union.

Yeah, for sure we can do that.

But for now I'd love to wrap this up with what are you most excited about?

What's really getting like lighting your fire right now.

What are you looking forward to, you.

Know.

In personally or business?

Both.

Either one, Whichever one.

However you want to answer this.

You know, I ask open ended hands for a reason.

I, I super, I'm super dialed into the company and you know, obviously my, my biggest go now is to get this thing profitable, more profitable than it is.

But at the same time I want to be able to have some time for myself and my family.

Like I'm doing it for that, you know, and I'm like, you know, and it goes back to Dan Martel's book about buy back your time.

It's like I'm not saying I don't want to work, but I just need a little bit of breathing room so fast in the day and I pivot and like I move faster than your average person that you have on the floor in the company and I think I of drive them crazy a little bit.

You know, you got to know you have crowd but I feel like I just want to get to the point that like things slow a little bit down.

I can be a little bit more dialed and precise with my decisions.

So like I'm excited to just get there.

I'm excited to put pieces in place to get there and there's a lot of things that I need to do to get there.

But I would say by, by the end of the year I think we're going to be in a really good spot.

And I think obviously money solves a lot of things but, but it takes time, you know.

And you know, nobody gave me the, the playbook on how to Read financials of a company that's this big.

You know, I mean, you know, and there's a little.

And you have whip reports and you have all kinds of things and cash flow reports.

And there's just so many things that you learn as you grow as a human being.

And I think that, like, I'm.

I'm armored now.

And I think that I'm excited to buy back some time and to have a normal work day to like, give back, maybe have some time in myself and my family.

So that's what excites me, man.

I like it.

I like it.

What excites you?

Give me one.

Give me one minute.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, thanks for asking.

Nobody ever asked me questions in these episodes before I answer.

That makes me think of recently, this last year, year and a half, I've gone through this major transformation and I love that you're going through it.

I learned the difference between being a businessman with a family and being a family man with a business.

Business.

And the minute that I learned that there is a separation there, I made the choice to be a family man with a business and it changed that mindset shift, changed everything in my life because then I prioritized differently.

My calendar looks different, the way I schedule things looks different.

And man, that choice, the second that happened, it changed it all for me.

So there's a little a tip for you, maybe that will be helpful in your journey.

Thank you for that.

I'll take that away.

Yeah, that's a big.

That's a big one.

But yeah, what's exciting for me right now, you know, I've got a couple things on the horizon.

One is I'm working with or about here really, really soon be working with officially with an editor on my book, which will be the name of it will be be someone worth buying from.

And the other thing is I'm.

I'm really excited about.

I'm putting together a home services mastermind which will be a really low entry point as far as cost wise.

I want to keep it super inexpensive to be able to help as many people as possible, which is something that there's a lot of those.

I know of several that are like one trade specific type of things.

But I really want to do something on a bigger scale that impacts all of home services to a level that really hasn't been done before because we're in a place right now with things changing so fast in our.

I mean, the industrial revolution took 100 years and there was a lot of pain going through it right now.

We're in this AI revolution, which is not slowing down.

It's not going backwards.

In fact, it's speeding up.

And the projections are six months to a year for the same type of transformation that happened in 100 years of the Industrial Revolution.

So a year from now, not a single one of our businesses are going to look the same.

Not even close, or the world is not going to look the same.

And so I really, really am focused on putting together one big group like this Mastermind to help, especially home service companies navigate this.

Because there's going to be a lot of the talk about robots coming into the workspace doing the manual labor jobs and tasks.

I mean, right now, for an example, we're paying our technicians, you know, six figures.

Six figures plus annually, and a robot costs 30 grand is what the projection's going to be.

2026, they're rolling out a million of them.

2027, they're projected to roll out 20 million of them.

So companies will be replacing labor force not because they want to, but because they have to to fiscally keep up.

So how are we going to navigate that?

And so I'm really working on staying on the forefront of being a thought leader in that space to really help us navigate and pivot properly to stay.

Both stay profitable, as well as how do we help our people retain incomes, and how do we help all of us together collectively transition and learn new things and become the operators of these tools instead of getting replaced by these tools?

So, yeah, that's where my head's at.

I love that.

I love that.

Let me know when that comes up because I would love to be a part of it.

You know, if there's still some open slots, please let me know.

Or if it's a tree of Facebook, whatever, just let me know.

Keep me posted.

You know, 100.

I'll be talking about it a lot because it's something.

It's going to affect all of us, like it or not.

And so we.

We've got to just like, how do we navigate when unions come knocking, we're going to have to navigate this because it's.

It's even more widespread than that.

So.

So that.

Those are the two things that I can talk about right now that I'm working on that I'm excited about.

Nice.

I look forward to that.

Yeah, thanks for asking.

Look forward to it.

Fun times, man.

Well, we need to.

We've got to wrap this up.

Our.

We're.

We're running out of a Runway here, man.

I'm so grateful that you're on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, man.

Yeah, appreciate it.

I hope Everybody got value.

100.

What?

Leave everybody with something.

What's the big word of wisdom or quote or, you know, just.

What do you want to say to everybody before we sign off here?

Actually, I was thinking about this earlier, you know, you know, to go with marketing, the marketing aspect of this podcast, like, you know, and to go with how we talk about social media.

You don't make it feel like marketing, you know, like, you can be marketing without it being feeling like marketing.

Right?

So, like, I'll leave you with that because I feel like, don't get too caught up in the details of, like, you know, I want to do this, I want to do that.

Like, make it feel organic.

So just leave with that, because I feel like one takeaway.

You guys should kind of leave here.

It's like, hey, let me go and let me ask my wife to help me with this.

Or let me.

Let me make a goal to post three times a week to start.

Like, if you can do that and.

And just keep in the back of your mind, just make it feel organic.

Don't make it feel like marketing.

I have a quote in my book that I use during it.

See if I can find it real quick that it kind of goes back to what I just said.

And it's under the marketing section.

For everybody on YouTube.

You're seeing what's going on.

I love how you know your book so well.

And I can see that the pages are like, you've thumbed through this thing a ton, which is really, really cool.

Not many authors that I've had on know their book as well as they know the content, but they don't know the book itself.

Book itself.

Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.

I love it because after you're ready, you're probably like, I want out of here.

You know?

So look, it says the best marketing doesn't feel like marketing.

Essentially what I just said, right?

So, like, guys, like, keep it simple.

Keep it short.

Keep it simple.

Let it.

Let it grow into what it is.

Love it.

Well, how do they.

For everybody listening, if you want a copy of this book, where do they get it?

Amazon.

Just type in the resilient entrepreneur Mark Mason.

Marc M A S O N.

You go right on Amazon.

You can go onto my Instagram.

I have it under the link on Instagram.

You can find me on Instagram.

Mark Mason.

Underscore Facebook.

Same thing.

Mark Mason.

My company name is RCL Mechanical.

We have both Facebook, Instagram, you know.

And if you want to see examples of what great marketing looks like, go follow Mark's Instagram and Facebook.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Go in and check it out.

Guys.

I appreciate you all.

Thanks for having me, Sam.

I'm sure, I'm sure we'll be in touch.

100%, man.

Well, I appreciate you being on the show.

For everybody else, thanks for, thanks for listening today.

This has been a great episode.

We covered a lot of things.

If you got some value from this, first of all, we'd love to love you to start engage in the conversation and we can keep it going within the Facebook group.

So again, join, go search Close it now on Facebook.

Join the group and love for you to drop a big takeaway or two in the comments in the group.

And also my business grows just like yours.

So if you got value, love for you to leave a five star review, you can review it on review me on Google or Apple podcasts.

Drop a review there.

Drop what your big takeaway from the show was.

That would be very helpful because all of you may or may not know this, but when I'm working to get higher profile people, not that you're not high profile, Mark, but when I'm working to get people on the show that, you know, are, you know, in household names and their books are all around the globe in 40 languages, when I'm reaching out to those authors and speakers and those type of people, their gatekeepers, one of the very first things they look at is how many reviews does this show have and what are, what's the rating?

And so the more and better reviews I can get, I can get better guests on the show, which is also, it helps the show grow and bring more value to everybody involved.

And I love reviews just like you love reviews.

So review the show.

We'd love that.

And otherwise, man, I appreciate you being on and for everybody out there, I hope this brought you some massive value today.

I know I learned a ton and I know you did too.

So work every single day.

Go be someone worth buying from.

You've been listening to the Close it now podcast.

Our passion is to dive headfirst into the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement and at the same time covering fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all.

We hope you've enjoyed the show.

If you did, make sure to like, rate and review.

We'll be back soon, but in the meantime, find the website@closeitnow.net find us on Instagram herealcloseitnow and on Facebook at close it now.

See you next time.