Jason Reid on Compounding Advantages by Focusing Local - EP.294

0:00If you have your goals really identified, you have to take an honest look at your own ethics in terms of what do you spend your time with. And, you know, that is an enormous exercise because most people spend 80 % of their time outside of work doing things that don't have anything at all to do with their goals. So I really took an honest look at that and broke that habit severely. and that you know just enabled me to really focus on what i was really wanting to do and then to a large degree i accomplished it

0:39Alex Bridgeman: jason thank you for coming on the podcast think like an owner has been this college project of mine that eight years later is all focused on how ambitious small business owners are growing their companies and a lot of them have focused on garage doors recently but of also we were just talking about kind of home building and building suppliers before this i'd love to hear about like how'd you get into all of the building and contractor oriented businesses in oregon like where where did that come from well it started pretty early on i i worked when i was in my you know 19 20 years old for a masonry company and learned how to rebuild chimneys and that sort of thing pretty quickly and decided to start my own little business doing that.

1:26So I did that for a couple of years. And even though I did good work, I wasn't a very good business owner at the time. So, you know, it didn't last through kind of a harder time in the winter where it's slower. So after that, I worked for a remodeling company for many years. And that's where I kind of gained most of my technical skill. I rose pretty rapidly in that business to be the the project manager and then the general manager of the company and did all aspects of mid to higher end remodels on residential homes primarily. But after doing that for a couple of decades, I worked there for 24 years.

2:06I've just got to a point where, well, he was going to phase out his business. He was retiring. So I started my own little one, but I was pretty dissatisfied with like what I accomplished in life. So I had to do some real soul searching at that time. I was in my mid-40s and just felt like I had a lot more gas in me, but I didn't know which way to go really because what I'd been doing, even though I was arguably successful in what I was doing, it was just so small compared to what I felt like I could do. So I took a couple weeks off and went to Hawaii with my son just to try to get out of the environment and clear my head and really kind of free my thoughts to think about what I really wanted to accomplish, you know, and really define that.

2:53And I really enjoy doing large scale kind of projects, a lot of action, a lot of activity. I could tolerate a lot of confusion and put order into it. And I wanted to make a lot of money. That may sound greedy, but there's a lot of charitable causes that I support, and the only way to really support them with any kind of degree of magnitude is to make some bucks. So I decided, okay, well, I really like construction, so that's good. I'm doing something that I really love and I'm passionate about. I'm just not doing it at the right scale. So how do I grow quickly, like really quickly? Because remodeling is a tougher business in the construction area, requires a lot of skill and a broad range of things.

3:47And it's highly dependent on like very, very proficient project managers to be able to grow to any scale at all. So I didn't think that that was the right one to really scale. So I started looking at other construction businesses. And I learned from one mentor I picked up on this guy named Dan Pena that a good way to grow is through acquisition and just acquiring companies and how to go about that because I had no clue. My idea of buying a business would be go to a bank and beg for a loan. And it's a lot different, actually, how you go about getting lending for doing large transactions like that when you're buying companies.

4:35So I learned a lot about how to do that, how to go about it. And went all in on it in the fall of 2019. Mortgaged my house or refinanced it to get some down payment money down and bought a little commercial fencing company in Portland, Zockert Fence. And so I was running it, running my remodeling company, going between the two, and was just flat out putting the pedal to the metal on the commercial fencing. I found that it was an interesting niche. you know these fencing companies to a large degree are people that started out with a pickup truck and they grow to a certain extent because they're comfortable with and then they keep it there they don't go any further because it's not it's out of their comfort zone so this was a perfect example of that it was a great little company very small only had about 12 staff but they're doing a couple you know one and a half two million dollars a year in revenue and and You know, I was, well, how do you get your work?

5:42You know, you just get it off the government website. Things get out for bid. I'm like, well, why aren't you bidding all these things? Well, I just pick the things I want to do. Like, oh, okay. That's interesting. So I give you a, okay, we're going to bid everything that we possibly can. As long as we can deliver it.

6:01Alex Bridgeman: And even if we can't deliver it, bring it to me and we'll see if we can figure it out. and so that company we went from the one and a half or some million revenue it was doing to nearly 10 million that first year and i was just having a blast and that's when i knew like okay i'd really tapped in to the right kind of line of of where i can really get things going so ran that really hard for the first year. And then I bought two other businesses the next year, another fencing company in another area of Oregon down Coos Bay, and then kept repeating that. And at the end of, you know, four or five years, I'd grown it to, I think, about 280 staff across 12 different companies that I'd acquired.

6:55So that was a heck of a lot of fun. But that took a lot of fun.

7:01Alex Bridgeman: What intrigued you about fencing originally? There's a former podcast guest, Sam Rosati. He has a fencing business that he's actually in Tampa. So I need to introduce you to him. But what intrigued you about fencing? Well, at first, what intrigued me is like it was in like an area of construction that I thought, OK, this is kind of a simple area. I can really get my head around fences. No problem. Even though I'd never done a commercial, you know, I'd never done chain link fence. I'd never done, you know, ornamental iron fence or any of that. I figured, okay, I can figure this stuff out really quickly.

7:37And that's what I did. So it was in the area of where I lived. It was a great price for the company. And it was a product that I could really get my wits around. and then once I saw how much potential there was in it that's where I really got pretty excited about it.

7:58Alex Bridgeman: And so of the 280 folks on your team how many is just the fencing businesses? Well, let's see. I'm not sure what's out right now because I haven't been involved with them directly for the last year or so. And of course I did sell off a big chunk of what I had acquired but there was four commercial fencing companies that we had, no, excuse me, five, and probably just those, probably made up about 120, 150 of the staff. Yeah, that's pretty impressive. So what's DreamCon? Can you explain that more? Yeah, well, after I got about four businesses under my belt, I knew I needed to create a real management team.

8:52And I'd already gotten somebody to be a direct assistant, an executive assistant for me. That was really great and helped me organize things. But I figured, okay, well, ultimately, I'd love to, you know, roll these companies together, do a roll-up with them. And I thought, okay, I'm going to develop a company to both manage them and to build this roll-up. And the roll-up never really came to fruition. just because of the nature of trying to refinance and restructure SBA loans is just too complicated. But the management company of DreamCon was established with myself, a really good CFO, and COO, and a couple other people.

9:38And they would put in standard bookkeeping in each of the companies, companies put in all the the financial records to make sure they're like you know just straight and correct because those are those can get really out of whack if you're not on top of it and we'd also develop programs that we could implement across the companies to improve them so we would go in once in a while to each company you know be there work at it directly on site for a while and then we pull back. And also we work within that company to hire the more higher end executive people, the managers and the senior project managers and that sort of thing to really get them established.

10:22Alex Bridgeman: Are there any projects that stand out to you as maybe the most interesting to you or had the most surprising benefit or you just learned the most from? Are there any projects that stand out? Yeah, there's a few. There's one we did for Google out in the Dalles. They built a data center out there and they're expanding their what's the name of the Google AI project? Oh, Gemini? Gemini, that's right. So it's their Gemini project and it was a big expansion of that. So there's this multi-billion dollar data center being built right there on the dowels where electricity is cheap and we put a perimeter fence around it that was you know it was a 1f almost two million dollar project so that was an interesting one because we had a lot of automated gates and crash rated ram systems and you know wedge barriers that raise out of the ground that we installed and all kinds of you know automation which was somewhat new to us at the time, get into that field.

11:32Often we had subcontracted out a lot of the automation until we realized how simple it was and that we could learn it in a couple of weeks as long as you're intelligent and willing to really buckle down and study it. So that was, I think, a real memorable one. It was a big, large-scale project and it was a lot of fun to do.

11:53Alex Bridgeman: What about internal projects that you worked on in the companies? You said you would kind of pop into the business for a little while and come back and implement certain things. What about some of those? What stood out to you in those? Well, I think the biggest thing with that is it's not large changes that are really needed, usually, to make a big improvement. and most of the changes I would find out about just by walking through the company and talking to the employees and seeing how they're doing and asking them what they like, what they don't like, how they think they could really change things.

12:31I mean, the company down in Coos Bay, it does primarily residential fencing, probably 60, 70 % of it is residential. And it was a giant revelation to just implement a Google Calendar to keep track of the jobs instead of having it on a paper copy. And so the old owners never wanted to because he was old school and didn't want to embrace any kind of new technology, even though Google Calendar is not exactly new. So it's just that little change there increased the productivity by a pretty good factor. and a lot of the other things is just in being in really good communication with all the people you know you find out a lot about the company and you also find out a lot about the potential of the people and i found that to a large degree your your best talent is just not being utilized and it's right there and in the company working already and just by giving them the opportunity to take on a new role, a bigger role, you know, it brings in a whole new level of excitement to the whole area.

13:45Alex Bridgeman: Who are some examples of people on your team who had all this talent that they just, they weren't in the right spot to use it or it wasn't asked of them to use it or something? But who are some people that come to mind? There's one that stands out, John Kuzme. He worked at the fencing company, He'd worked there for, I don't know, eight or nine years already. And he was an estimator, and he'd worked in the field. He'd done installations, and he'd done their automated gates and everything. He was pretty skilled, technically, all these things. And, you know, I found out, you know, he really wanted to do a lot more.

14:25He'd done all these different areas, and he'd excelled at them and done really well. But he was being paid pretty moderately, and so I went, okay. great you're going to be the manager i'm going to let you run this company so i installed him as that and of course we have good oversight in the financials to keep track of that to make sure nothing goes awry but he did fantastic and he did so well that when i bought another company i asked him to find himself a replacement and train him up to his standards because I wanted him to run the next company. And he did that as well. So that's one example.

15:07Another one was just a young kid who was actually friends of my son when they were in high school. And he started work with me part-time just one summer and then he really liked doing fencing. So I'm like, great, go and learn all about it. And within six months, he was able to do large-scale estimates. he was project managing projects by himself over super rising these guys that are you know twice three times his age and that was a lot of fun and he's he's actually still there in the fencing company running it he's helped grow it to a large degree in the last couple of years that's fantastic those are cool stories

15:52Alex Bridgeman: what was your biggest learning curve in going from being a general manager with the remodeling business to, you own the business now. It's yours to manage and ensure that it's going well. What were some learning curves that stood out to you? Probably the biggest learning curve is negotiating and navigating the large contracts that you get involved with with these big general contractors, because you're doing a lot of jobs in a commercial fencing company each month. but you're getting contracts that are, you know, 40 pages long, all kinds of fine print, you know, who has time to read all those?

16:34Well, you should definitely read them because that's what I think my learning curve was, you know, making mistakes and getting messed over or screwed over, or you could put it even more crudely if you like, by a few of the contractors. because there's by and large, you know, 80 % of everybody out there is doing great, honest work. But you get these ones that they put in the contract language, different things that they can do and bind you to if you, for whatever reason. For example, there's one that it was a pretty large project that we hadn't signed the contract yet because I wasn't sure about the job, and it was by the prior owner that it estimated it.

17:22I wanted to look at it to make sure it was accurate because if it messed up on the estimating, it would have been a big financial problem. So it'll look good, but we had to rework the contract and I had a funny feeling about the guy, and he was rushing me to sign this contract, and in the language of the contract was items that he could fire me for cause with no pay at any time during the job if he found I wasn't performing, which was so vaguely described you couldn't even tell what it meant. It's like he didn't like me that day, so he fires me, and I'm out$200 ,000. Well, so I kicked that back and redid it, but I wasn't careful enough because he did still have in there some clauses about arbitration expenses and things.

18:16And on this particular project, he kept delaying paying me and then fired me towards the end of the project because we weren't performing. And right after he had given me a giant change order for a little item of the job that he was going to do to help me out to get the job done quickly. And it was like five times the cost of what it should have been. So anyway, I spent a lot of money trying to figure out with lawyers that I can't really do anything about this. I could fight them, but it's up to the whims of the arbitration how it would go. And by the time I got through, the lawyer fees would be greater than any money I could possibly get recouped, even if I got the entire contract amount.

18:58So that was a big slap in the face to learn that. But it was an important lesson because it hasn't happened again. Sure, we have occasionally, rarely, trouble with the contractor, but we're on top of it now. Yeah.

19:15Alex Bridgeman: And you said, you know, 80 % of contractors do good, honest work, but I mean, having, you know, one in five contractors in any particular job be dishonest or pull something on you definitely could throw the whole project off and off track and cause a lot of pain. Absolutely. Yeah. And it was especially painful for this one because I did some research on the guy. I had him investigated privately because I just want to know what I was dealing with. I was willing to put some money at it to really expose the light on this guy. And I did find out that he had a history of doing this. He would hire a contractor, a smaller guy, smaller company, string him out and not pay him, and then fire on towards the end of the project and then get them into arbitration, which is too expensive for them to handle.

20:13And then they would settle for a small, small, small amount if they got anything. So he did that. I had, I think, 15 different cases documented where he had done that, that exact thing. So I made sure it was known that this is what this person does, do not work with them.

20:34Alex Bridgeman: Is he still doing it now? I don't know if he's still doing that kind of shenanigans. You know, eventually that does catch up with you. Word does get around. So I don't know if he's even operated anymore. I haven't looked him up recently. Hopefully not. That's pretty evil, especially for small contractors where they may be on the edge of, you know, on every job trying to make it work and take care of families. Yes, it's very evil. You know, it's pointedly destructive, you know, for their own benefit. Yeah, that's pretty cut and dry. For other learning curves and running businesses for the first time, what else did you spend a lot of time sharpening as a skill as you began running more businesses?

21:22Well, I think the biggest thing is to go into it knowing that there's going to be something that's going to be a big surprise. And to just accept that as a matter of business, because if you're going to grow fast, there's going to be a lot of pains you're going to bump into and have trouble with. so you just have to embrace that because otherwise it'll become such an impossible barrier that you may give up you know so so one of the things that i did is i i really kept my eye on the mountain of where i wanted to go with the business what my goals were the bigger goals and kept that purpose and that goal and the intention really live within all the staff as best I could.

22:13And that helped me overcome some of those obstacles. Like the first obstacle I had was the first business I bought is I ran out of money. I was told that the invoicing of the company, they get paid usually within 30 days. And it turned out to not be the truth at all. It was 60 to 90 and sometimes 120 days before they get paid on these projects. so here i am three weeks in thinking i was going to get some invoices to get paid and i'm running out of money and i had to put credit cards use credit cards for payroll to pay things until i got the money flying in so that was that was one of them but being able to really keep your eye on the on your goal and keep that alive and keep your your spirit high about that is the key to overcoming those things because I could have just been infuriated and frustrated and whined about it to everybody, but it wouldn't have done anything except just make it more of a problem.

23:12So I just went, okay, well, we're going to get the money in, but I'll just have to do this for now.

23:19Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, you seem pretty steady Eddie and even keeled despite any of these projects could send anyone into a roller coaster of emotions day to day. What have you learned about keeping balanced and consistent, not letting the highs or lows get you down or up too much? Well, I think the key thing is there's a little bit of humility in looking at these different things where you have to take an approach of all these different problems you're running into, even though they may be in the moment, you know, these huge, enormous problems, you know, 20 years from now, it's going to be a blip in the wind, you know, and 100 years from now, no one's even going to remember or even think about it.

24:07It's just, it's just a little tiny blip in the real scheme of things. That was the key thing. So knowing that and then thinking and envisioning very large goals that are perhaps not even realistic, just really setting those goals and creating the feeling of accomplishment of having accomplished those. I was doing that daily all the time, just reaffirming these different goals I had to keep that drive and that passion. Because one of the things I learned from Dan Pena, Mr. Pena, I think I'll look him up sometime, most people give up on their goals because they just don't believe in themselves very much, or they're not really passionate about it.

24:58They just give up. and the key to overcoming that is to one find out what is it you really want to do like really for real like you could just love it you could just do that and then to take that idea and expand it to a much larger scale because you're never going to accomplish any more than what you can envision yourself so if you're going to accomplish a lot well you probably need to envision ten times the amount of that to even get to that the initial target. It takes a lot bigger goal to even get partway there. I mean, take Elon Musk. He wants to go to Mars and colonize the planet. So that's a pretty big goal, pretty impossible, pretty ridiculous.

25:44But you know what? It's actually approaching now and he's accomplished all this other stuff that has all kind of led in that direction. So the other thing I learned is that if you have your goals really identified, you have to take an honest look at your own ethics in terms of what do you spend your time with so i did this as an exercise like every time i was spending time doing something you know i would make kind of a mental note like okay how much time do i spend doing this and what did it have to do with my goals and you know that is a enormous exercise because most people spend 80 % of their time outside of work doing things that don't have anything at all to do with their goals.

26:33They're doing whatever. They're doing TV. They're going to the pub. They're hanging out with their friends who also have no goals and they're not doing anything. So I really took an honest look at that and broke that habit severely. And that just enabled me to really focus on what I was really wanting to do. And then to a large degree, I accomplished it.

26:56Alex Bridgeman: So how did you set your own goals and maybe what were some of those goals? Well, I wanted to have an enormously profitable conglomerative companies taking on large-scale projects and expanding at a rapid rate. That's one of them. I wanted to become a professional pilot and owner of aircraft, which I did that as well. I wanted to create a successful family. It was happy and thriving. And I've done that. The funny thing is when you really focus on your goals and that's all you're putting your attention on, these things, even though you don't know how to do it sometimes, you find a way because that's all you're putting your energy into is to just keep pushing at it and surprise.

27:47Now you find that there is a way to do it.

27:50Alex Bridgeman: Will you tell me more about the pilot thing? I'm a huge aviation geek. I even have, this is my favorite gift from our wedding. These friends of ours in Seattle, her dad was an Alaska pilot and got me this Alaska Airlines model. It's the most memorable gift from our wedding that I have on my desk. so I'm a huge aviation geek. You said a commercial pilot? No, not a commercial pilot. But when I was 12 years old, I lived in a little town called Council, Idaho. If you look it up, it might come up on the map. It's like 900 people. But it has a little tiny airport there. And when I was of that age, I took an interest in airplanes and I walked down to the airport and I, you know, walked into the little office with these old pilots here and tried to talk them into giving me pilot lessons.

28:46And they kind of laughed it off and put me on this old style simulator to toy around with. And I didn't really know what to do, but I really had a real interest. I really wanted to fly. You know, I had won this lottery ticket or raffle ticket. Rather, I was selling them on the 4th of July, these raffle tickets for a plane ride. Me and my friend were selling these. And whoever sold the winning ticket would also be able to go on the flight. And so I got to fly in the small aircraft over the mountain ranges of central Idaho. And that was it. I was like, okay, I want to do this. This is just, there's so much joy in this.

29:25And over the years, that dropped away as a goal. got kind of beat down and there's no one to blame except myself but there's a lot of you get a lot of opinions about different things like becoming a pilot it's like oh it's expensive oh what are you gonna do are you gonna fly you know for a job and all these different things it's like it's these counter intentions to actually just fly in a plane so i was doing a fencing project actually at the Aurora Airport. That's 10 minutes from where I am now.

30:01Alex Bridgeman: I grew up in Canby, so Aurora was a very... Yeah, that's right. ...a Columbia helicopter out there. A couple flight lessons as a kid. Vans Aircraft is there. There's a good family friend who worked at Vans for a long time. So there's a lot going on at Aurora. It's a busy time. They got a terminal, a control tower recently too, which has been an upgrade. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a great little airport. So I was doing this fencing project, and I remembered that goal I had to become a pilot. And I was like, why did I not ever do this? And I had no good reason. It was all just other people's opinions, which I just kind of took on as a reason to not do it or something.

30:43So I enrolled in lessons the next day and became a pilot. Out of that airport, actually.

30:52Alex Bridgeman: Nice. Good, good. I'll ask for your recommendation on trainers or flight schools. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know if she's still doing much teaching, but the instructor I had was Mindy Fisher. And she's now a commercial pilot for Alaska Airlines, I think. It's either Alaska or Horizon. I don't remember exactly, but she's a fantastic instructor. Yeah. So that was great. And I was able to incorporate flying with a lot of my work sometimes, flying to the different areas. I mean, Portland to Coos Bay, that's a hell of a drive, but a pretty easy flight. It is. Yeah. 45 minutes, you know, from Aurora.

31:32It's no problem at all. Versus three and a half hours of driving.

31:36Alex Bridgeman: No problem at all. Or, you know, Council, you know, I was looking it up on Google Maps, pretty close to McCall. You know, that's a nine or 10 hour drive from Portland or, you know, 60 minutes in the air. 70 minutes maybe? Yeah, one Saturday I took off in the morning and flew to, I think it's Easton, if I remember right. Oh, it's a little town. I forget the name. It's in far eastern Washington, right next to Idaho. And I picked up my dad, and then I flew down to council, met with my brother. We had lunch and hung out for a while. Is that Lewiston? It's near there. It's not Lewiston. It's a small town.

32:17The name will come to me. But anyway, it was great because I gave my brother's daughter and son a ride in the airplane and had lunch and hung out with him for all the afternoon and then flew my dad back home and flew back home myself all on the same day.

32:32Alex Bridgeman: I mean, this is a great region for, I tell anyone who will listen, but it's a great region for if you own a little 172 and you just want to fly point to point. Like going Ben to Boise is a five and a half hour drive or a 40 minute flight. And there's that type of journey all over the Pacific Northwest, going to eastern Washington or going to the coast or going to southern Oregon. And like, it's a great little region for private flying where roads often take a long time or might be closed or, you know, there's something going on. So, absolutely. Perfect region for it. And most of the flights, you know, you're probably not going to fly more than two hours at a time because you can get pretty much anywhere you need to go in that time.

33:20It saves a ton of time. Absolutely. And it's so beautiful, too, especially in those cool mornings where the air is really clear. you know you get up to altitude and you can see all the way to the olympic mountains in canada and all the way down to mount shasta and all the way over to the seven devil mountain range in idaho and you can see the the coastline you know all you know and all the mountain main mountains through oregon and washington are popping up it's just clear as day what do you like to fly do you own a plane or just rent yeah i'm partial owner of a beachcraft debonair excellent excellent Yeah, and just great.

34:01It's a low-wing aircraft with rechargeable gear, and it's been a lot of fun.

34:07Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, those are pretty fast, too. You're not a slowpoke getting anywhere. Yeah, you're cruising around 150 miles an hour. So, good 20 % faster than the 172. Yeah, and certainly faster than the 150. I did a few flights in. Those are, those have a hard time getting to 150. Yeah. Not gonna, not gonna happen. What are your goals now? What are you excited? How do you set your own goals for, you know, today onward? A lot of these have been accomplished. The pilot one, very exciting. But what, what's on your set of goals today? Well, it's something I'm actually working on while I'm in Florida. Part of the little project I have is just to do kind of what I did in Hawaii, Just kind of regroup, rethink, and examine what it is I want to accomplish now.

35:01Because I think it's pretty critical that anybody, to accomplish anything, you really latch on to something that you really want to do. Because if it's something you really love and you're really passionate about, then the obstacles that get in the way are going to be not much of obstacles anymore. you're going to be very willing to persevere and do what it takes to get through them or around them or over them or underneath them, whatever you need to do to get past them. So I'm spending some time to do that. I haven't decided yet. I still have different charitable causes I want to put more into, and it's going to require more funding to do that.

35:39I really like to fund, one of my goals was to develop an art foundation that helps fund art projects that embody, like the nobility and purpose of the human spirit. because I think art that's, you know, especially larger scale projects, they can be very inspiring to people, you know, get some out of their head, make some think and dream bigger because that's what artists do all the time. They're visionaries of some future idea or some just aesthetic creation. So I think that's something that I'd like to actually finish. You know, I haven't done that yet, But it's going to take some money to put some seed money in it and hopefully get donors to help invest into it to fund art projects.

36:26Alex Bridgeman: Is there anyone who shares a similar ambition in Portland you've met to this point? Yeah, I did team up with Zael Schoenberg, who's the founder of Pickathon, which is a music festival that's been going on for the last 25 years out in Happy Valley each year. and it's a collaborative effort where they develop like whole like kind of artistic communities and they showcase a lot of lesser known artists you know and on multiple stages and things so that's something I've done it's not quite in line with what I had in mind for my art foundation but it's certainly you know somebody that I I helped out I put a lot of work into helping build out parts of Picophon Nice There's probably a crossover between home development or home building and art.

37:21Alex Bridgeman: There's a couple example communities like this, but there was one in Chapel Hill where Michelle and I lived for about two years. and the builder bought this pretty large acreage piece of land and built an entire community that was designed to be very walkable that had all the key services a family would need on a daily basis there's a school there was a preschool and a daycare there was a grocery store bank, coffee shops, a couple of restaurants, all kind of centered around this courtyard that had like these large grass fields where you could go play and run. And then the homes would be like tightly packed, not packed, but tightly centered around this courtyard.

38:09Alex Bridgeman: So you could walk very easily from your house to any of these things on a daily basis. And it was supposed to be a way of removing cars and making it more, feel a little bit more open and easy to spend time walking around. Very popular community. And there is some art in designing the right layouts and walkways and where does certain landscaping go. There's big and small decisions in building something like that. So if you want examples, there's one that you probably enjoy reading about. Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. It's fantastic. What other causes do you spend a lot of time thinking about? Well, one that I haven't gotten into doing anything about yet, but I'm interested in, is doing something to reform the education system.

39:00I'm kind of a product of it. I'm a high school dropout, but I was not done. I just wasn't learning anything. And, you know, there's kind of a big problem with education in America and that you're being taught a bunch of stuff, but you're not being taught how to do, you know, how to use what you're learning. There's a large disconnect. And, you know, you go into any classroom and the only ones that really are successful is just dependent completely on how good the teacher is at getting the students involved and like interested in what they're doing. and and that's a big failure i think because uh i think and i think it's an administrative failure a programming failure because it's not hard to educate people so they actually use the information i remember even my son going through grade school they're teaching math in like this weird convoluted way i was like i couldn't even make sense of it like why would you even think this way it's so complicated you know when it's not complicated if you just do it like this way i learned it's just like what is going on like i think it's like it's being purposely forced in there's these programs to install methods of teaching and it's just completely untested just somebody dreamt it up thought it was going to do good or maybe they thought it was going to do bad and then just rammed it down everybody's throats because they're, you know, they're that kind of an individual.

40:34And it's not that complicated. There's not a single problem in this world that there isn't already existing solutions to that are highly effective. Even drug rehabilitation and other things like, wow, we just get in proper drug rehabilitation, that'd be a game changer because most drug facilities, any rehab center, you know, 30 days and insurance kicks it out. It's usually not enough time to really do the job. And their success rate is only a few percent. You know, it's very low. But there is programs that are highly successful, you know, 80 % plus, like the Narconan program is one of them. Like, it's highly successful, but it takes a couple months.

41:17So there's these different methods of handling things that if you just find out where they're doing it well, who's doing the best, and do that. that's all you have to do you have to reinvent the well or try some new weird thing you know take what's working the best and then improve upon that if possible that's what you do and that's why i applied to business as well i try to find the very best people i could and improve upon that and get everybody the chance to improve and as long as everybody have the same purpose they're going in the same direction they're either like on board with i'm doing or they're going in that direction, then you're on my team.

42:00If you're not, well, it's kind of like, well, why are you here? Why do you do something you don't want to do? To make money, to make a paycheck? That's not a good enough reason. Do something that you enjoy doing, at least.

42:14Alex Bridgeman: So you're not visible. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So there's a lot of different things. And that's one of the things I'm trying to think about, how to do that, how to maybe get more connected with it. different officials in government and i started to do that a little bit in oregon you know had a couple talks with the you know one of the congressmen there but you know i think these people they need help in government there's too many wrong solutions being implemented or they're just being implemented because it's a way to funnel money into different things but it doesn't require like an enormous amount of resources to to make a big improvement if It's the right solution.

43:00It's not like if you have the oil on the car, you don't fix the tires and rebuild the engine. You just add some oil and go on down the road. That's all it takes. It's like you got to have the correct identification of what the problem is and then solve that. That's it.

43:21Alex Bridgeman: Absolutely. Jason, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a ton of fun, And I appreciate you sharing your time. I'm excited to see you again when you come back to Portland as well. It'll be good to meet you and spend some more time together. Yeah, absolutely. Good talking with you. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Think Like an Owner. If you enjoyed the show, please consider leaving us a review and telling a friend to help more folks find Think Like an Owner. For full episode transcripts on our weekly newsletter, please visit our website at tlaopodcast.com.

43:56Thank you.