A COVID Shutdown Sparked A Smarter Pivot with Branden Joynt, Joynt Industries

0:00Welcome to Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McRae with Action Coach Business Growth Partners. Every week, we sit down with business owners, founders, and leaders to uncover the real stories behind building a successful business. The wins, the setbacks, the lessons learned, and the strategies that help them grow. No scripts, no fluff, just honest conversations with entrepreneurs who are in the trenches every single day. Whether you are a business owner yourself, thinking about starting a business, or simply enjoy hearing how successful people think and operate, you are in the right place. Let's jump into today's episode, shall we?

0:57All right, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. I am Cliff McRae with Action Coach Business Growth Partners, where we work with local business owners to turn big ideas into real scalable growth. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Brandon Joint with Joint Industries. Brandon, how are you doing today? I'm doing well, Cliff. How are you today? I'm doing excellent. We're excited to have you on. So let's go ahead and jump right into things, if you don't mind. Absolutely. All right. So, you know, for those of you who may not know it yet, who are you? What is Joint Industries?

1:27Well, my name is Brandon Joint. Our parent company is Joint Industries, and we have another one, IMPG Holdings. So we have two separate corporations. Our primary emphasis through Joint Industries is actually floor care and restoration. We own a company called Nice and Clean Floor Care and Restoration, and we focus on commercial carpet cleaning, tile and grout upholstery, things of that, and the commercial realm, a lot of hospitality. And then we also do emergency water response. So anything floods, mold, odor remediation, fire, anything like that. Okay. And who was Brandon Joyne as a person? Who are you personally?

2:06Oh, goodness. 42-year-old overgrown man-child. I love to play. I love music. I play classical piano in my spare time. I play music at church on Sundays. I hiked a lot. I actually went on a little hike yesterday up to big creek and just had a great time went and visited a whole bunch little waterfalls and that was my day yesterday um and i had to work on the weekend so i calmed out yesterday but yeah anytime i can get a chance to get out i'm a little bit of an adrenaline junkie like rock climbing skydiving anything like that that's okay of course yeah that's awesome and And, you know, we were both talking ahead of time that, you know, I'm a musician as well.

2:52So I actually played trombone in high school and college. It actually paid for my full scholarship, which is pretty amazing. That is amazing. I do a lot of, you know, of course, at churches, we're playing contemporary Christian music. And I also love to go back through the old hymns and stuff like that. I'm actually working on a set of about 30 old hymns currently just for fun. But also I love playing Chopin, Rachmaninoff, working on some Beethoven pieces right now. Just a whole bunch of just like monster pieces that will probably take me way too long to finish because I'm working on too many at the same time.

3:31But that's OK. This is for fun. Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. All right. So let's get into, you know, the business talk. So, you know, what's something about running your business that people think is amazing, but it's actually complete BS when you hear it? Oh, definitely the, oh, you can make your own schedule. You can do whatever you want. You know, entrepreneurs are all wealthy, you know, whatever. Of course, you hear that one. Oh, it must be nice to be able to do X, Y, Z, whatever. But people really miss all the work that goes into it on the front side and all the education, training, and just the studying that goes into it.

4:15And sleepless nights, you know, it's always challenging. But, you know, every time it's a chance to solve a problem, which is kind of where I thrive. I really enjoy problem solving. So that's, but, but again, like, you know, a lot of people assume that it's easy or, you know, that you came from money or, you know, any of these long listed things. So there's definitely a lot of misconceptions in the world of entrepreneurism. Yeah. Yeah. Like you got the Bugatti and the Lambo sitting in the garage, right? Sure I do. Yeah. I don't, I don't remember which garage I put them in. Oh, that's funny. So, Brandon, what was the exact moment where you realized, you know, this business could either really work or it could completely blow up in your face and you could lose everything?

5:07Well, actually, that's actually a very easy question. So years ago, I actually started out running movie theaters. So when I was in high school, I got a job working at a local drive-in movie theater. And that is absolutely the most fun job I've ever had in my life, just as far as, you know, I love the atmosphere and stuff. but that was fun. I worked for that company for about a decade. It was a small independent company. The guy that owned it passed away and then his family came in, took over and started liquidating locations. One was a retired school teacher and the other was a retiring nurse and they didn't want to be running movie theaters which I completely understand now.

5:52I didn't really understand it back then. I was in my 20s And they were starting to liquidate locations. And I was an area manager. And I looked at my wife. I said, hey, you know, we've got kind of two choices. If we stay where we're at now, this company is going to close. It's going to be hard to replace my income. So we could lose everything. I said, or we could go out and try to do this for ourself. And in a worst case scenario, we lose everything. and my wife was like okay i'm down and we literally found this little theater in a different state we moved from kentucky down to east tennessee and and opened a movie theater on a shoestring budget i think the day i signed the lease on the commercial property i had a hundred dollars to my name oh wow yeah it was it was a crazy time yeah yeah and now you have a team of employees that work for you?

6:52Yeah, there's 10 plus me. So, so yeah, there's, there's a whole team of us and they're, they're structured out of different, across different aspects of the business. So have certain people that work in, in specific different roles inside of the two different companies that we have. Yes. But there's 10 or a team of 11 if you count me. Okay. Okay. Now, Brandon, what would you say is the most stressful moment you have had so far as a business owner? Like a, you know, how am I going to get through this type of moment? Oh, well, that one's also easy. When COVID started, I owned two movie theaters, one in East Tennessee and one in Lebanon, Ohio, and everything shut down.

7:36And there was the first three weeks of COVID, I lost over$50 ,000 of liquidity, like right out the gate. And of course we all know how long that lasted and the movie theater industry still, in my opinion, hasn't made a recovery. So really glad I got out of that. And that was honestly the best thing for me, but that was incredibly stressful time for me. That's hands down the most challenging obstacle that we've overcome as a company. Very nice there. So, you know, had you ever thought about quitting your business? no no i just i absolutely love what i do i'm very very driven and like it gets hard of course but i think i think the the thing for me is just having future goals of what i want it to look like and knowing that like we can set our own path a clear path on how to achieve these goals and some of them are trivial.

8:39I mean, a lot of people talk about like setting goals and stuff and it's like whether it's, you know, the hybrid or like fast car or whatever. For me, it's just rental properties. I love rental properties. So long-term specifically is the niche that I steer towards in my IMPG side of the company and just knowing that we can set a clear path on how to obtain these goals and just coming to terms with the fact that it's okay when things get hard. Every day doesn't have to be sunshine and rainbows and you're allowed to have hard days. So you choose your hard and you choose what challenges you face, whether it's working in someone else's company, that's gonna have its own challenges, but life is all about challenges and overcoming them.

9:29I agree with that. So maybe this is hypothetical, but maybe you can come up with an answer for this. If you could wave a magic wand, let's say, you can wave a magic wand right now and instantly fix one part of your business tomorrow, what would it be? Ooh. Okay, I'll be honest. We're really weak on marketing. So we have, I think that would be the magic wand. Because I feel like there's no one singular right answer. but instead you know in our business that's been it's been something we've definitely worked on over over time and that's its own story in and of itself but but that to me would be the one area of my business that we've really just not put enough effort into now you know okay so following up with that what would you what would you do what kind of what would that solve getting the marketing with that result in additional business kind of what are you looking to solve there if that were if you were to solve that problem so so i definitely think that people just have to know who you are because they no one can utilize your services if they don't know who you are that's that's the first step but also like just because i offer services it doesn't mean that somebody's ready for my services at this point not some point in the future there will be I just have to be the one top of mind when that time comes.

10:59Okay. So really it's about visibility, just making sure they have you in mind when they're thinking about that. Absolutely. And we've made huge progress over the years. But I think going into this whole entrepreneurial experience, that was my personal weak link, something I really just didn't understand well at the onset. So when we started the Nice and Clean Floor Care and Restoration Services Company, that's not what it started off as all. This is we started off as Newport Carpet Care, and we were just focusing on cleaning carpets residentially in Newport. And that market just wasn't a sustainable one for us.

11:40But then when people did call us, they'd be like, hey, do you service Morristown? Hey, do you service Pigeon Forge? Hey, do you service? Because I had the wrong name. and so that's that's kind of the starting point you know i didn't take branding seriously early on now we take it very seriously my vans now you can't miss them i actually some of my vans are bigger than they need to be just because they're billboards for us but that's been part of our our journey as far as fixing our marketing okay okay but i guess what we really lack is in the is more the digital realm. The digital realm. Okay.

12:17So you're thinking more like, you know, maybe getting social media, more social media. Yes. I don't have anybody currently on the team that's good at it. Okay. So that is our weak area. And if I had one, a magic wand to fix one element of my business, I think that would be it. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's fair. Now let's say if visibility suddenly doubled tomorrow, Do you feel like your current systems and team could handle that growth? We would probably add team members from an equipment standpoint. We could absolutely handle it. I believe in over-investing in equipment and capacity. So, for example, the equipment and machinery that we utilize on our trucks, it is the leading industry standard.

13:07So, we have the largest truck mounts. the largest slide-in truck mounts on the market. They don't make anything bigger. It would have to be direct drive. And there's just, honestly, there's no need for that in this area. For example, we go to Nashville twice a year to sub out for another company because we can extract 14 floors up in the air in these high-rise buildings. You're doing hot water extraction without using portables, And most people just can't do that because they don't have the power to run that far. And I've got two of those because I like having redundancy in my systems. For example, we were on a job one time and, you know, trucks are equipment and equipment breaks down.

13:56So we had one of our trucks, you know, something broke. Of course, we got it fixed right away. But being as I had that redundancy, I was still able to meet the timeline for the customer. We just worked late one day and a little late the next day and we got it done. But if we didn't have dependency in our system, then that customer would not have been serviced properly. So I think that investing heavily in equipment and capacity, that way as we grow, it's really more about just adding team members. And so our equipment, we actually kind of stay ahead of the curve. Okay. Okay. Okay. Now, this next question is hypothetical, but let's say if someone shadowed you, you know, went behind you and kind of watched you for a full day or even a full week, what would surprise them the most about how you operate your company, would you say?

14:49we are very we're we're structured don't get me wrong but we're also very i don't want to use the word casual because that's not the right word but i try really hard not to micromanage my teams because i've got really smart really great people that work on my team and i will ask them hey what are you doing today? What do you need me to do for you today? And I think there's, it's not just top down leadership. I have my own defined roles inside of the company as do my management. You know, they have their own defined roles. And, and we also, something else that's kind of unique about our company is we actually two years ago, completely did away with our vacation and sick days policies.

15:44Because I think that if a person has a sick kid, they need to be with their kid or their spouse or life happens. And so creating a work environment that's really centered around the team member first, because what they're doing at work is to enable their life outside of work. And that really shows in our company. we have a very very cohesive team and i think a lot of it's because of the culture that we've built and we're not i'm not looking to work my guys absolutely the hardest that i can or the longest amount of time that i can or actually one of my guys last year was or two years ago whatever it was he was stressing out because he's like hey you know i've got my vacation i used to like to do with my wife.

16:33I got my family vacation, but I haven't been to my home state in 15 years. I'm like, well, then go. He's like, I don't have enough time. I'm like, I told him, I said, you're going. Like, yes, you are. You do have enough time. You just, you, you put on the schedule, work it out with your other coworkers, make sure that we're covered and staffed and you're good to go. Like don't, don't not go see your family back home. That would be a horrible thing. And I wouldn't want an employer to be nitpicking me that hard. So I prefer that he goes and does that. And ultimately, you know, he's happier because he's got to accomplish one of his goals and a timeline that was ahead of what he thought it was going to be.

17:16Yeah, no, I do feel like, you know, especially now, even more so because, you know, life has changed so much here in the 2020s here. Micromanagement just doesn't it doesn't seem to be as effective. And I don't even know if it's ever really been effective even back in the 80s when, you know, there was really hardcore. Everybody was really micromanaging. I just don't know if that's an effective way to manage and lead people because, I mean, I feel like, you know, they say to fear your boss. But, I mean, I don't know, man. I just feel like, you know, being kind of a teammate more so than just I'm your boss is a great way to manage too.

17:52How do you feel about that? Well, I'll give you an example. As far as our company culture goes, I actually did a survey of the team a little while back and asked, what changes would you like to see inside of the company from a management standpoint? Like, what would give you more job satisfaction? And I did not get the responses that you would have anticipated. One of the things that we do is we do an annual team building day where we go out and we just do something fun. And we've done from paintball to just like whatever. We just go play, you know, as a team. We've gone rock climbing. We've done like a lot of just different activities.

18:32And one of the feedback I got was, hey, we would like two team building days a year instead of one because we really look forward to those. And like that was some of the feedback I got was, hey, can we incorporate more team building into our schedule? I was like, well, absolutely, we can do that. Yeah. No, that's huge. That's huge. Because you're right about that. That was the that was the thing because I was actually a director of operations at my last position. And you're right. When I when I first came into that company and I ran a survey, that was the that was the exact same thing that we got to.

19:05We need to do more rather than just because it was a collections floor. Right. So rather than just coming in every day, you know, same thing, getting on the phones, going home, you know, they want some they want some breakup. They want something, you know, from the monotony of the job. You know, let's do more. You know, let's go out more. Let's get some ice cream. Let's do games. You know, let's break up the monotony. I feel like that's important. Another area we push really, really hard on it is education, certifications. So I believe that certifications, well, they actually follow the team member, not the company.

19:40I have an open policy with my staff. If there's a class that they want to take, I'll pay for it. If they tell me, like, hey, this is going to help us as a company, this will help us grow, this will give us new capabilities, it's an open checkbook for them. The same when it comes to, like, literature. If they have a book that they want to read or anything, like, you tell me how much it is, I'm going to buy it for you. And they take me up on it. One of my guys actually just finished up a very aggressive path, but he just finished his triple masters with IICRC. And to put that in perspective, there's less than 2 ,000 triple masters with IICRC globally.

20:21Wow, globally? Globally, yes. Wow. And I have one on staff, and he actually got his before I got mine. And I don't have mine yet. I've got four more courses that I have to take. and that we fast-tracked him and we prioritized that because that was one of his personal goals. And as a company, it helps us grow because when you're doing restoration work, the IICRC is the one that sets the standards for restoration, mold, water, structural drying, fire, trauma crime scene, odor remediation, all of those things fall under the IICRC. and the standards and having having a triple master is just it's a really really big deal and but I mean it cost me a lot of money but we have literally invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into education over the years oh wow that's awesome no I love that I love that now you know let's talk about numbers without getting too specific you know since you've you've been in business.

21:28How long have you actually been in business? How many years? Oh goodness. 14. 14. Okay. Yeah. So good. Wow. Yes. Okay. So you were in your late twenties, I guess when you signed that. I was, I was 28 when I started. Okay. Yeah. I was one of the youngest independent movie theater operators in the nation. Yeah. 28 is really young. I'm like, oh my gosh, such a kid, you know, but looking back at my management style and stuff, then was very different than what it is now too. And that's something I'm proud of as far as personal growth was I was that show up to work, really strict. It was a movie theater.

22:08I thought everybody should be in a shirt and tie sort of deal. And from a culture standpoint, I think I was probably a little on the toxic side back then. But here's the thing. Some of my original people that I hired back in the day to run my first movie theater are still with me today. Oh, wow. So, yes. And it's transitioning out of that industry into a completely new industry and ultimately keeping the overwhelming majority of my management staff with me. My management team stayed with me for this transition. So the guy that just finished his triple masters was originally an assistant manager at a movie theater.

22:54Oh, wow. Yeah. That's awesome. That's great growth. It really is. It's a unique path. It's very different. But when you have the right team, I sincerely believe that you can accomplish almost anything. Yeah. Now, Brandon, what year would you say out of the 14 years, what year would you say was the turning point where things started to scale? As far as the FloorCare company, 2017 is when we decided to focus into commercial. It was the second half of 2017. And before that, I had one experience cleaning a commercial property. It was a very bad experience for me. I had trouble getting paid. I had trouble with just everything.

23:40And I just decided, I don't want to be in that world anymore. But then I realized, hey, I need to get better about setting terms and expectations. And then we stumbled into one really, really great client that ballooned and actually over-doubled our company overnight back in 2017. And we've doubled several times since then. But being willing to accept commercial cleaning is hard. It has its own unique sets of challenges. And we actually specialize in something in low moisture cleaning. and we do hot water extraction as well, but we also, a lot of our commercial clients are high occupancy, fast turnover, dry times are incredibly important.

24:29So we invested in industry-leading equipment for low moisture cleaning. So when we're going into commercial properties and let's say we're cleaning a hotel room or a cabin or a resort, whatever, we can go in, clean, and an hour, two hours later, they have a guest in that area that we just cleaned. And so, I mean, that business has absolutely exploded over the years. Definitely not what I saw myself doing, if you'd asked me, you know, 15, 20 years ago, like, hey, what do you think you'll be doing with your life? That's not what I would have anticipated. But that's where we are. And it's been a very organic growth for us.

25:13Okay. Now, you know, and let's get into your competitors a little bit. What would you say is one thing you're doing today that's giving you kind of an unfair advantage over your competitors? That is actually a really good question. It would depend on, you know, which branch of the company we're referring to specifically. But like we do, we're very much a business to business company. so we do just an incredible amount of business networking networking events chamber events you name it hospitality association chamber events bni you name it we do we do all of that we're we focus so heavily in business business networking and and that's one thing that i i don't see my competitors doing consistently.

26:08I see them doing it, but it's, it's very, it tends to be a little bit more hit and miss. It's like, Oh, we got busy. So we're not going to do that right now. We're going to, we're going to run more radio ads. And, and, you know, if it's working for me, that's fantastic. I actually have some, some really fantastic competitors in my market. I got, there's some, there's some companies out there doing some really, really great things. There's even companies that are out there that if I find out they're running a contract, I don't try to bid on it because I know that they're, that client is receiving high quality service and, and definitely have the mindset that there's plenty of business for all of us out there.

26:47Somebody else doesn't have to lose something if they're doing a great job with it for, for me to make a buck, I can go make it somewhere else. It's not a big deal. But I think the, I think the consistency in the networking is something that we've been doing better. And, and, and our actual branding, I think is our branding is really on point or like our, we have full wraps on our vans and we have big, large vans and you can't miss them. And we have, we have a, for a small company, we have a very large presence in Sevier County. Okay. Okay. Now, you know, and this is kind of a, you know, it may be a hypothetical, but it could be, you could have actually had a situation like this, but let's see, have you ever had to make a tough call?

27:35Let's say like, you know, letting someone go like an employee go, or maybe cutting off and stopping a job halfway through, or just turning the job, turning a job down completely that ended up being the right move long-term. Oh yeah, absolutely. I, we, we've definitely turned jobs down. We actually turned one down recently because there's certain things that, you know, clients will want something to be done a certain way, but if it breaks what the standard is for that, you know, I'm going to pass on that because, you know, if somebody, for example, let's say you've had a trauma issue, whatever that might be.

28:19And, you know, there's been, you know, you're dealing with, you know, blood or whatever it is, then that's not something you want to just, it's like, oh, well, we'll just go in and we'll wipe it down clean and it's fine. Like it's not okay. And there's, there's standards for that. There's certifications that are required for that. And, and there's protocols that need to be followed and, and we're not going to compromise on that. Like somebody out there will, I guarantee, you know, somebody will do whatever, you know, a client wants on. We'll use that as an example. But there's, but it's more about doing things right.

29:01Actually, without saying any specifics, I'll tell you about a job I'm doing right now. We're just finishing up. We're doing a, it's a remediation project dealing with rodent infestation. and when we got into it you know we quoted out the job it's not an insurance job so when i would give a quote for the job and let the client know that like hey we're going to need to you know remove and replace these materials whatever but then bluntly i wildly underestimated the amount of time that it would take so we're we actually just completed that job yesterday and did a fantastic job on it now the client's going to get the original bill that they were quoted i ended up spending like an extra five days on the job with multiple technicians.

29:50I'm going to eat it on that one. And that's okay because to me, it's about doing the job right. Like I don't want to just go in and do something halfway and then somebody, you know, somebody's going to live there later. That would not be okay. So, you know, if I miscalculated the amount of time that it would to do a job. That's on me. That's not on the client. I'm not going to go back and try to build a client more. I'm just going to, I'm going to eat that and like, Hey, I learned something on this and education is valuable. Ultimately it's a cheap lesson for me. Okay. Okay. All right. So we're going to go ahead and head into what's called the quick fire round.

30:31So how this, yeah. So how this works is I'm going, I'm going to give you one word. And then I just want you to tell me the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear your reach word in regards to running your business and then kind of give me a little blurb at the, you know, like two or three sentences, a little paragraph or whatever, you know, on why you chose what you chose. That makes sense. All right. First word is success. Freedom. Freedom to, to, to follow what, what you want to do, do things that you enjoy. The most successful people that I've ever known in my life had very little money.