206. "Just Ship It” The Philosophy to Start Your First Business

0:00Ty McBride grew up sweeping sawdust on his grandfather's job sites. Construction ran deep in his family, but his grandfather kept reminding him and his dad of one thing. Don't just settle for the family business, go out and build something of your own. Ty tried different careers, but construction always pulled him back. Then in 2013, a tornado ripped through his hometown, destroying homes and even historic landmarks. When Ty was tasked with restoring one of those monuments, he couldn't just tear it down and rebuild. That challenge introduced him to epoxy, a material strong enough to preserve the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore.

0:31That moment planted the seed for PreserveIn. What started with$300 worth of epoxy and a few tools from his garage has now grown into a thriving franchise, attracting everyone from Fortune 500 executives to aerospace engineers. I'm Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the HealthFit Podcast, where we uncover the secrets of building and running successful businesses. I am so excited to welcome Ty to the podcast today. He's already been on the YouTube, and that was a great episode. So excited to get you on the podcast. Ty, thank you so much for being here. Ryan, man, I'm excited as well. Love sharing my story.

1:00and love all the support that the Upflip audience has already given us on the YouTube channel. Nice, I love it. Well, your story today starts when you were young. Growing up in construction family, talk to us about that. What were some of your earliest memories of working construction on job sites with like your grandfather? Because I know that's a huge part of your story, yeah. Yeah, you know, my earliest memories are of my dad. You know, this is back in the 80s, right? So my dad coming home, he's got a nice, solid Tom Selleck mustache. Back then he was a framer and you didn't wear shirts when you framed houses.

1:33That was the rules. You know, Wranglers, no shirts. And those are my earliest memories. I also remember my dad going to quit with the framing crew that he was on. And when I asked him why, he said it was a dead-end job, being on a framing crew. But no, those are some of my earliest memories. But I've been on a job site almost my entire life. Spent just years sitting in my grandfather's show homes, you know, model homes. But yeah, those are the early memories for sure. I like it. This construction business, this was your grandfather's, if I'm correct here. And he, as I lose that opener, he said, basically, don't just settle for the family business.

2:09Go out and build something of your own. I mean, from like a young age, I mean, how did that like kind of plant a seed for entrepreneurship? Did it plant a seed for entrepreneurship? Yeah, well, it definitely planted a seed. And it's funny, it happened like that, but a little bit different in that I went to work for him after I graduated high school. And I was like, this is what I want to do. I want to go into the family home building business. And I spent a whole summer kind of working for him in his home building business. This is early 2000s. And I remember telling him, this is what I want to do.

2:39And he was like, you need to go do your own thing. You need to go do your own thing. This is my thing. You go do your own thing. And I was super disappointed at the time. I was really disappointed that I wasn't going to get to go into the family business. But it probably was the best thing that ever could have happened to me because though he did kind of give me lots of valuable wisdom and I learned a lot, there was also this element of having to do it on my own. So there wasn't that nepotism where like the son, the grandson just kind of gets everything handed. I had to go out and earn it myself.

3:13That's what I love about like a family business and like, you know, the family business owner pushes you to go do something else. I felt that with like my stepdaddy owns his own foreign company. Could have just gone out, done that, but he like really pushed me to go start my own company. That's what I did. But so let's just say he plants that seed for you. But like what careers you have next? You go out then and sell a$200 million company to Facebook or like, what are you doing next? Well, you know, I didn't know what to do. I went to college and I knew I was pretty good in sales. And so I picked up sales jobs.

3:42I sold flooring for a while, carpet, tile and wood. I got a job in the auto industry and ram pickups for a while. And I did all of these things and kind of how I got back into it, back into construction is my dad hadn't really taken over from my grandfather, but he kind of similar story. My dad also wasn't given the business. My dad could build upon it. And so my dad went into the roofing space in the same town that my grandfather's did. So my grandfather's building houses, my dad's roofing houses. And we had had this like major hailstorm in 2010. I was really burnt out from working in the auto industry.

4:17And I called my dad and I said, Hey, I think I want to do something different. I think about like, do you have anything for me? He's like, well, Ty, I don't have a job for you, but if you want to come make yourself a job inside my business, you can. And I was like, I don't understand what that means. And he was like, well, we need to roof houses. If you can go get us some roofing jobs, you can have a job. And I was like, but he's like, I'm not giving you any leads. I'm not handing anything. There's no salary. You go get it and I'll pay you for it. And that's how I got back in. I was like, well, I don't have anything else I want to do right now.

4:49Let's go try this. And that's how I got back into this early 2010. And that was really kind of the springboard for everything else that kind of came after. And one thing to like really note that came after was going to 2013, a tornado devastated your hometown. I mean, talk us to that day. I'm from Iowa. You're in Oklahoma. I get tornadoes. Tornadoes are scary. And listeners, you've never been in a tornado. It is a frightening experience. Take us to that day and take us like the moment like the seed was planted going to the epoxy business. Give us all that. So the epoxy business still came about two years after that.

5:22But kind of the tornado thing was really what started to kind of change my perspective primarily. And I remember it. I mean, I was in my dad's office and we were listening to the news. And I remember very, very clearly hearing Mike Morgan, who does our weather, get his like special tie on for tornado day. And he said, if you can't get under, it's like coming right down the street, which is the street we're on. He's like, if you can't get under the ground, get out of the way. And my wife and our one year old were in the office and we're like, I guess we're leaving. We're leaving now. And so we left and we left the office, headed the other direction.

5:59And my grandparents lost their house that day. They were fine, but they lost their house and many other people in the community more did. But where it really started to change things for me was this process of restoration happened then. Like, and this was like rebuilding people's houses back, but it really started setting like how much houses mattered to people. And the, really the thing that hit was I got a call from somebody. They said, Hey, you know, the insurance company came in, they took all of our walls, all the sheet rock, we're down to the studs and on the stud says McBride. And we looked up you guys and found that you guys are still in business.

6:39And I guess a McBride some point in time built our house. Would you like to come and restore it? And that was the moment that I knew I wanted to be in restoration. I loved what my grandfather had done by building things, but I wanted to be part of a solution that repaired rather than replaced these things that these, you know, people like my grandfather had built going back all the way through history, right? Like, you know, Oklahoma were, you know, states founded in like 1907. So I thought like, that's what I want to dedicate my life's work to. And then eventually I was able to find myself in historic preservation work.

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8:01I think a lot of times the right thing in a family business or any business, you got to step out and kind of make your own thing. At least that's what I wanted to do. And so, and I knew, I knew by this point very clearly that I wanted to work on old houses. I wanted to preserve and restore old houses. That's what I wanted to do. And my dad didn't want to do that. Like what he was doing, roofing houses, right? He thought it was, he actually thought, I mean, I love my dad. He thought it was crazy when I told him I'm going to restore old rotten windows and doors. He thought it was crazy, but he's like, if that's what you want to do, go do that.

8:31But I just had found this like this demand and every, as you said, like every step along the way was not ever some like crazy big idea. It was like just walking through a door, some door open, whether it was another project, a meeting, a person I had met, it was just walking through the door and say, Hey, I'm going to try this out. I'm gonna learn something here. And each one of those little things stacked up to the business that we have now, even to the point of the epoxy. Like I was having to work on this window of this house in 2015 and I couldn't figure out how to fix it. I found this, it's called preservation brief nine and it's from the national park service.

9:11And I read this like 40 year old document and it talked about epoxy. And I was like, I don't know. And I told my wife, I was like, I'm going to buy some epoxy. And she was like, Ty, what are you doing? We have kids. Like, what are you like what are you thinking here what are you thinking like and then when she saw it come in the mail and it was you know a box and it i had spent three hundred dollars on it which was a ton of money for us and she's like to do what but it's all those little things all those little doors that you step through along the way and you thank god for youtube i've gotten several youtube degrees so yeah that's hilarious i love it now you have three hundred dollars of epoxy here do you have any leads you have any clients are you just kind of like oh i have three hundred dollars epoxy i I better go out and find some like work to do.

9:52Like talk to us about that station, like what listeners can learn about that and just like taking action essentially, which I absolutely love. I don't know how much a listener can learn from this, but I had already sold all the work. So I had a problem. I knew that these windows needed to be fixed. I knew people would pay me to fix them. I had experience. I'd already sold the work. I was just trying to figure out how in the hell I was actually going to fix it and actually do the thing I'd promised to do. That's a phenomenal takeaway. I want to cut you off there. phenomenal takeaway keep going yeah it's so so good i was in over my head and the epoxy was like because i'm like there's like these like custom wood parts on the window i'm not like a top-notch woodworker i can run a table saw and a few things but i'm not great so i don't have the skills to do this i can't find anybody locally with the skills i'm like pulling my hair out and the epoxy though i always say like i started with 300 like it was more of like a hope and a prayer that i was going to be able to solve my problem with the epoxy, which it did.

10:50It did solve my problem. And I was able to fulfill my contracts that I'd already had people signed up for. There is so much to learn there. Cause I feel like a lot of, you know, want to be preneurs. I say that a lot on here, want to be preneurs. Look at a business idea. Great. I have a business idea. I'm going to go make a website. I'm going to go file an LLC. Then it's like, well, now I have no leads. The route that you took essentially is like, you sold the projects. Now you just needed to get the product to actually fulfill it. Is that kind of like the route that you took? I absolutely love that route.

11:16That is definitely it. Before I started my business, like a lot of people, right? Like I was trying to figure out, I was like reading all the books about, I'd read start with why somewhere I came across a podcast that Seth Godin had done. And in the podcast, it was, well, I had to start a business or something like that in the podcast. He had this phrase, he said, just ship it, just ship it, just put it out there in the market and work hard and solve your problem. Once you put it out there in the market. And I really, and I still do. I just embrace that. I was like, just ship it. Just put it out the market, hang my shingle and go to work.

11:51And I have always been, this sounds arrogant, but it's not. It's just like, I think that if you have that spirit of entrepreneurship, of problem solving, if it's a big enough problem and you're committed to it, you can solve it. You don't need to wait till the perfect is the enemy of good. You don't have to wait till you have all things figured out. just get started. I love that. And listeners, if you'd stay tuned for more, but that's gonna be my takeaway series. Just ship it, baby. Just absolutely ship it. Okay. So you just shipped it, you know,$300, you got the contract, like what's kind of like next in the progression, you know, you have the business idea, you got paying customers.

12:27When do you like decide to like really like double down on like epoxy? Well, I'd like to say right away. It was, I was just genius and I did, but no, no, honestly, I didn't. I chased everybody else's idea of what my business should be. So, right. So I was talking about my YouTube education. So I'm doing this kind of specializing in historic windows and doors. And so I look for other people who are doing the same thing out there and I go, okay, well, they're doing it this way. So I tried to do it that way. Epoxy was a tool that we had in the truck. It was a tool that we had on the shelf, but I ended up buying all the tools to make all the wood components.

13:05I mean, I had at one point in time, I had a 7 ,000 square foot woodworking shop and I'm a terrible woodworker, but I hired good ones. I have 7 ,000 square foot woodworking shop. 20 employees were like doing all this like really cool stuff. The only thing like everything we're doing is really cool. It's so Instagram worthy. It helped me get on HGTV. All that stuff is really awesome, except for my P &L looked like a train wreck. and how we stayed in business all those years, I don't have any idea. But no, so I went down this other path that, you know, then somebody told me, well, you got to do commercial work in historic preservation.

13:38So I went out and landed, all built off of this, I went out and landed massive, what I would call massive contracts, right? Like, because it's in this really cool niche space and I was like the only one in Oklahoma doing it. So I was able to land like$100 ,000 contract to do window and door restoration. And then I picked up a$350 ,000 contract. Oh my gosh. Well, how are you landing these? I do want to get actual for the listeners. Like, how did you land these? And like, what you know now of doing this? Like, how would you advise people to like land their like first big clients? So for me, it was really about like, is boots on the ground stuff on this like commercial contract, getting these bigger contracts.

14:16It was boots on the ground stuff. It was going in to general contractors. So in the historic preservation space, there are tax credits. And because all this stuff is public, what I could find, at least in Oklahoma, Kansas, and the surrounding states, Texas, I could get a list of everybody publicly who was currently trying to get a tax credit on their project they had going on. And on this list would be the general contractor and would be the architect on record. And so then I would get their information, and then I'd get on LinkedIn. If they were close by or if I was in their area, I mean, this is showing up with donuts.

14:52this is knocking on the doors and it's just just trying to get my name out there and uh yes it's a lot of hard work and a lot of donuts but it works like that ground game stuff works when you're trying to get into that space and then one project led to another that's always the thing like we didn't go get a 350 project to start with we got a 40 000 project that turned and that general contractor hired us for a hundred thousand dollar project and then that general contractor got another job. And so it was about finding that one relationship that really led to a lot of that work. All that being said, it was the most miserable time in my life.

15:27Wait, why do you say that? I mean, you're landing like huge factors. Why is it the most? Did I just miss the sarcasm there? No, no, more money, more problems in that way. Like for some people, I think they can have massive success. I've got friends that are still in it that love it. For me, it wasn't the right thing. I think that's a lot of times understanding understanding who you are and what your business goals are in life. I love serving what I call my neighbors, my customers. I love that. I love serving my neighborhood. And what I, the bigger and bigger we grew, once again, still bottom line's not growing, net profit's not growing, just headaches, red tape, all that stuff is growing.

16:03But I had actually priced myself out where I couldn't serve my neighbors, my literal neighbors. Like I was like, I'm too expensive now for you. And I don't want to say this lightly because I know that COVID was very difficult for a lot of people. And it was difficult for my community, my neighborhood. It was the best thing that ever happened in my business, hands down, because it forced us to rethink our business. During that time of doing that big, huge commercial project, it was in Kansas. And we're trying to wrap this thing up during lockdown and we couldn't go. And all of our commercial projects, I had on the books over$2 million of commercial projects that were lined up to happen.

16:42And all of the developers in that space, like stopped, they stopped. And some of those projects still are like just now coming back online. Like I'm watching, I'm watching activity and I'm still, I'm seeing them come back online now, five years later. So all that stuff went away and myself and my team, like, we got to figure out something else. We got to do something else. This isn't one. It's not what I want to do anymore. and this is where the first thing we did is like we just going to go back to our community our neighbors right now because i got to put food on the table and i can't go to these jobs i don't know what the future is going to hold so we opened up our crm and we sent we sent our community our neighbors an email that said hey right now we're here to just serve whatever old house needs you have just tell me what your needs are and we've got people that we want to keep working during this season we'd love to do work for you and this was right during the switch we're like home service blows up everybody's at home and so this just like it is like blows up people wanted small projects materials hard to get and this is where the epoxy thing finally after all of this time this is when we actually started to take action on these ideas oh man super good just so i'm like comprehending this right so you guys were going after the commercial projects you know those two million dollar whatever projects you had two million dollars in book business or whatever it is.

18:01But this philosophy of like, you know, service your neighbor, like work with your neighbor. So I'm assuming then obviously your pricing drops like dramatically then to like help service them or like, how did that exactly work? I'm really curious on that. Yeah. Well, we just kind of reevaluated once we sent this email out and we started talking to our neighbors, we said, just tell us what you need help with and we're going to try to make it work. And I had built a business that was designed to meet the historic preservation expectations, all this stuff. What I hadn't built a business on was to serve my customer, my neighbor, because I couldn't serve him anymore.

18:33So when we sent this email out, what I told my team was like, hey, we're just going to help them out with whatever they help with. We're not going to blow stuff up here. We're not going to take one window rotting and turn it into a whole house of new windows or restore. We're not going to do that. We're just, if they got one problem, we're going to solve one problem. We're going to keep it small and we're going to stay light and we're going to listen to our customer. And so that's where this kind of this thing came from was like, man, people have a lot of small problems around their house. They don't know what to do about them.

19:00That was the gap meant everybody in their dog. And this is something for the listeners. Like everybody is always chasing, especially in home improvement is chasing the big contract. Everybody's chasing the big contract. You want to take one thing and turn it into, you know, take a thousand dollars. You took him a hundred thousand dollars. And we just stopped seeing it that way. We said, you know what, rather than do all of that, we're just going to focus when we keep it small for our neighbor. and it paid off. It paid off big time. Yeah. I mean, what was that pay off? I mean, COVID, you don't have the commercial projects anymore.

19:29Like how did that like really shape your business? I know you hinted on it before and you know, you said it right there, like you blew up, like you said, a few moments ago, like how did that really like shape your like business and like throw you into like a whole new realm of like home services? We ended up doing as we split, we kind of split business entities. So we said, okay, we've got this customer base that still wants these kind of full projects. And so you can look it up online. The company's called Old Home Rescue. I was managing and working with our owner up until just this last year when I exited from that.

19:58But we're like, we're going to start inside of this. We're going to start a targeted home repair business that's going to focus on repairing wood decay with an epoxy only service. Like that's the only thing we're going to do. We're going to fix wood rot, termites, carbon abuse, carbon ants. We're going to do that because that's when we looked at the list of like the things that people were asking about the most from that initial email, it was always wood decay, wood decay, wood decay. It was always rot or termites or something. We're like, that's the thing. And going back to my Fort Riley project, this project in Kansas that was$350 ,000, what I had learned there is we actually had implemented this epoxy repair service there big time because when we got shorted for where we couldn't get material because of COVID, We had a bunch of things that we could fix with epoxy, and they had made me go through all kinds of hoops to get this kind of repair service approved by the Army Corps of Engineers and the historic preservation there.

20:54And so I was like, man, we literally wrote a manual on how to do this. My customers are saying that this is what they need. Let's make this its own thing. And so we kind of separate them out because we wanted it to survive on its own if it could survive. Because what we knew, you know, I was thinking about scale. We knew if we could make something simple that was profitable, we could grow that beyond just our backyard here in OKC. We could kind of grow that at a national level because wood decay is a national. It's just an environmental problem. So when we kind of began there, we're like, when we started preserving, we're like, we're going to take this national.

21:28If every step along the line, if we can prove it, we're going to take it national. And we're going to follow just kind of best business practices to do that. Just like comprehending that, like understanding like the wood decay aspect of it. Like, what's the lesson in it? For me, it's like analyze your data, like know what customers want. But for someone that's like just getting started with like their home services company, I mean, what's the lesson in there that they should be able to take away from that? You know, I don't know how to tell someone to know it from when they first get started, you know, but I do think that you can do a lot of research.

21:57For us, it was just listening to people, listening to them and trying to really understand what the real problem was. People bring things to your attention. And I think that this is a thing we get stuck in in the home improvement industry, people will tell you, they'll say, I need new windows or I need a new roof. But a lot of times the value is asking kind of like the deeper questions like, why? What makes you want a new roof today? Well, I got hail damage on it last week. Okay. Do we have to do that thing? Do we always have to do it? And definitely in today's economy, I think people want alternatives.

22:30But even before today's economy, I've learned that people want alternatives, selling all kinds of things in the home improvement industry. My dad having the roofing business and having to do windows and door siding along with sales, along with roofing sales, is that nobody really wants to spend money on most of these things. Hard truth, if you're out there and you're a roofing contractor or you're a window replacement contractor siding, nobody really wants new windows on their house. That's a boring purchase. And they're super expensive. Nobody is just dreaming and scrolling Pinterest, thinking about the new windows they're going to get.

23:06And so when you're in a sales like that, so that you've got to like really force something on somebody, it creates all kinds of issues. One of the main ones is that people aren't very happy when you get done. Like I never had anybody like, just go like, I am so happy with my new roof. They're like, thanks. It could have been worse, I guess. Like no one's really excited because it never really does anything. I guess if you're like the pool business, if you're making pools for people, they get stoked because they got something cool to jump into, but windows, and that kind of stuff, not so much. And so that's where we had just kept following this pattern that everybody had said we weren't listening.

23:41And we just started listening to our customers. I really like it. Between a lot of this, between that just shipping mentality, you mentioned what's your why, listening to your customers. For a first-time entrepreneur that's out there, with everything that's the experience that you have now, what's the most common thing that you see first-time entrepreneurs make and how can people avoid it? Because I want to get really actual for our listeners here that they never even started a business, but like something where it's, you know, less than you can get$300 a pox. I don't know if that's still the price of it, but like, you know, like kind of give us some advice there for first-time entrepreneurs.