Mike McCarron on Why Landscape Companies Stall Without Systems

Intrigue Media (00:31)
Hi everybody, welcome back to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast. Very cool guest, Mike McCarron on the show today. Thank you so much for doing this, Mike. ⁓ Mike runs and owns Imageworks Landscaping ⁓ and it’s kind of interesting. I don’t think I’ve had an opportunity to meet many, if any, people that work on some of the contracts that you have. So at some point there’s gonna be a cool anecdotal story or two, I’m sure. But why don’t you give the crowd a quick little rundown in terms of, you know.

Mike McCarron (00:38)
Absolutely.

Intrigue Media (00:57)
how you’ve been involved in the industry, what you’re up to these days.

Mike McCarron (00:59)
Yeah, so Mike McCarron, ImageWorks Landscaping. I’m located right outside Washington, D.C. We’re in the Fairfax Station area, about 20 minutes, 20 minutes outside of Washington, D.C. Like I said, an ultra-competitive market. Been in the industry since 1998, graduated from school. Did not want to stay in a booth and be a CPA, so I said…

I want to continue doing my outside stuff, which I’d love to do. I’d love to build and construct, race cars, boats, jet skis, all kinds of mechanical things. And I like being outdoors and doing that. So I said, I don’t want to be in a stuffy office, even though I’d agreed in that. But so the landscaping thing just worked out great. And so as a result, that’s what I ended up doing. And it just grew and grew and grew.

And then got more more active with CIMA, NALP, a of landscape magazine, landscape management. So I really started contributing, writing a lot of articles and helping out quite a bit to help other people basically launch. mean, a lot of people get stuck in that 200 to 600,000 range. Unless you can afford a consultant or you have someone that’s going to help you or you have friends that want you to succeed versus becoming more successful than them and that kind of thing, you struggle in that area. And so I’ve kind of taken it.

It is under my wing to help as many people as I can, give back as much as I can. And so I’ve been really active in that probably in last eight years.

Intrigue Media (02:17)
Yeah, well, I mean, that’s how we got a chance to

meet each other. I think it was at CIMA for the first time. And then understanding more about your involvement with NALP and like, you know, essentially lifting the industry. It’s pretty amazing what you’re doing in terms of how you spend your time and give back to so many people. So I really appreciate what you do, So, well, I’ll get back to that because we got to get to the meat and potatoes. We don’t want to leave people waiting while they’re listening in their truck.

Mike McCarron (02:21)
Uh-huh.

Yeah, that’s what happened.

Okay, yep.

Intrigue Media (02:38)
We all know that the one question we ask here is what’s the primary growth constraint holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry? And so what’s your view on what the primary constraint is, Mike?

Mike McCarron (02:48)
You know, everyone’s going to say labor.

I agree that labor is a problem only to a certain point. And I think the biggest problem is right now is people don’t totally know their numbers. And people, you know, do these wild ass guesses. They just say, hey, I hear someone shows charge and so and so. They throw a number on the wall. Sometimes they get a job. Sometimes they don’t get a job. And so if you have all the perfect labor in the world, then I could give you the perfect cruise, the perfect trucks, and perfect equipment.

Could you still grow your business? answer is probably not. Sure, you can be busy. And let’s not construe being busy with growing a business, right? And that was kind of one of the hard lessons I had to learn in very beginning, and that we can be as busy as we want, but at the end of the year, we still have to make money. So if you back out the labor, which is what I know everyone’s gonna say, and I take heat for it all the time. However,

Intrigue Media (03:36)
you

Mike McCarron (03:37)
Having 50 employees and not making any money or having 25 employees and being profitable or having 15 or 10 employees and being crazy profitable, what would you rather do? You’d rather have the 10 to 15 and be super profitable.

Intrigue Media (03:49)
Yeah,

less headaches, more cash in the bank, you’re doing things with your fam, you name it.

Mike McCarron (03:52)
less assets, less trucks,

you need a smaller location, all those kinds of things. So I tell everybody, you know, focus on making money, focus on your systems and your processes. And then once you get that in place, then you can find the perfect employee. You can pay them a great amount of money and they can help you grow your business. So unless you have the back end taken care of, the processes and the numbers and your systems in place, bitching about not having enough labor is really

kind of a second step. I’ve taken a lot of heat for it over the years but I’ve seen a lot of big companies come down. I’ve seen a lot of big companies shed a lot of employees. I saw a company that’s a half an hour from me had 80 employees and now they’re down to about 27 because they just blew up and then they came right back down. So I say start with your numbers, start with your foundation.

Get your systems in place, how you bid things, how you do things, how you sell things. Get all your contracts clean. Get your processes clean within your company. How you do business. And then grow it from there. Then you’re growing on your terms. You’re growing on your profit. And you’re growing on your systems. But chasing everybody else and bitching about labor is, I don’t believe, is way to go.

Intrigue Media (05:00)
Yeah, it’s exercise

of futility, right? I really appreciate that perspective. So then what was it like for you? Like when did you have the kind of aha that you need to get this shit figured out and tighten up the ship?

Mike McCarron (05:11)
Uh, yeah, little interesting story about me. Some people already know it. Um, I will, you know, it’s always a touchy subject for me, but I’ll bring it up again. Um, 2010 lost my wife. passed away from cancer and there I was raising two girls in third and fifth grade by myself. And had I not had systems in place, we were just on the cuff of really fine tuning at that point. Had I not had systems in place that I not had good people around me, I would have gone down a very dark hole. And fortunately we were

Intrigue Media (05:23)
tough man.

Mike McCarron (05:39)
are

just really getting it dialed in at that point. I worked part-time.

I probably worked 18, maybe 15, 18 hours for three years until my girls got to middle school where they could come home by themselves. I still had to take them to school, be there when they got home, all that kind of stuff. So I only worked very few hours just during the day to come in and touch a couple of things, sign some checks and get back home. we were starting to get the systems and processes in place, which was great. And then it took off from there. Once they got older, they could come home by themselves and eventually they’re able to drive and that kind of thing. I eventually got remarried.

So all that worked out. However, had I not had that in place, would we be here today? Would we have completely fallen apart? And the answer is we might have. And I know other companies out there that they’re just one banana peel away from falling apart or blowing up or whatever you want to call it. Fortunately, I was right on the other side of that when that tragic hit me. And so therefore I was able to survive it. I know people that they won’t survive it, couldn’t survive it today.

Intrigue Media (06:20)
Yeah, okay.

Mike McCarron (06:37)
And so I try to help those people because I know deep down there are so many companies that have that problem that if something bad happened to them, it would be a done deal. So that’s kind of my crusade. it you want to call it. on my shoulder. I don’t know if that’s what the right word is, so I always, yeah, it drives me and it drives me to help other companies because I was fortunate enough to survive it and I know other people wouldn’t be able to.

Intrigue Media (06:43)
Mm.

Either way, it drives you passionately to help.

So, I mean, first of all, that is tragic and appreciate you sharing. You know, it seems like you had already started doing this type of work before, you know, that moment in history, so that you were able to get past it. So what happened for you before that made you think, I gotta get this straight?

Mike McCarron (07:01)
Yeah.

⁓

We were, I said to myself, I can only work so many hours. can only wear so many hats. I think we had maybe five or six employees at that time. Um, I was, you know, I was running a crew sometimes and then I wasn’t, and I was doing sales and I was a mechanic in the evening and juggling, juggling all the things that everybody does. And I said, okay, we’ve got to start peeling these things off. And I was married, had two young girls. I was like, want to do stuff and go places and various things. I said, okay, Mike can’t do everything.

Intrigue Media (07:32)
Right. Just all the things.

Mike McCarron (07:45)
can do everything yes is that a long-term goal no so in 2005 for 2006 I don’t know maybe we were out 200,000 somewhere in there and I started peeling off some spots then over the next two or three years we started you know got a part-time mechanic had two or three crews running I had someone helping me doing some estimates and stuff so I started slowly pulling them back in the positions in so I wasn’t doing everything I didn’t have it all figured out in early days I’m not not claiming

Intrigue Media (08:10)
No, no,

that’s the whole point though. and like, you know, everybody’s trying to figure it out.

Mike McCarron (08:13)
And, but

when she, when she got sick in 2008, it kind of really accelerated what I had to fine tune really quick. And I fine tuned it over that, over that time period. And then, at that point I was able to slowly, I was able to slowly grow it from there. And obviously once that travesty hit, I already had a couple of years of it in play to fine tune it.

Intrigue Media (08:21)
Pressure creates diamonds type of thing.

Yeah, okay, crazy. You know, it’s interesting what you say about that. I think it’s a piece that we hear a lot, especially for smaller, you know, not necessarily startups, but say, you under a million, where they’re like, once I get, you know, another crew, then I’ll be profitable. You know, it’s like, once I get to this level, then I’ll be profitable, as opposed to being profitable today, and then taking those profits to invest in the growth. What’s your take on that thinking?

Mike McCarron (09:02)
⁓

I think people, you know, yeah, great question. People get enamored with equipment. People get enamored with trucks. It’s interesting. You go down there to GIE Equip Expo. The amount of…

Intrigue Media (09:08)
trucks.

dude. There’s a billion dollars

of drugs.

Mike McCarron (09:19)
the amount of junkies down there looking at equipment and everything else. And then you look at the people that are in the classes. So the people that are out looking at equipment are completely different to the people that are looking at, that are in the classes.

Intrigue Media (09:30)
Interesting.

Mike McCarron (09:31)
And if you want that shiny new equipment, then you need to do X, Y, and Z internally behind the back end. I’ve always said to people, yes, do we have some junk in the beginning? 100 % we did. Did we throw Band-Aids on things for several years? 100 % we did. And then we slowly start turning over and we realized there’s fleet purchasing programs. And you hold your millers for three years, you hold this for seven years, you hold this for two years, and you slowly start flipping your equipment. But I had to go to someone

I had to learn people had to ask questions. I had to network with people. They were outside of Virginia So over let over those years I networked with people in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Connecticut, California I networked with all these people that would help me because they were not in my same market So for example with the company down the street who’s my fiercest competitor to help me Absolutely not but would accompany down in Georgia help me and tell me what they’re doing. Absolutely

Intrigue Media (10:22)
Yeah.

Mike McCarron (10:24)
You’ve got to network with people in the industry, NALP and SIMA and EQUIP and all those things. You can meet a ton of people that will help you and at the drop of a hat, yup.

Intrigue Media (10:32)
At the drop of a hat, like the openness and collaboration

that you see at these things. I mean, all the events are cool. I think Elevate’s awesome. ⁓ Simon’s thing is probably one of the most fun. the way that they give people an opportunity to connect after the show is pretty amazing. But one thing that’s been true every time we go hang out with landscape entrepreneurs is everybody’s work hard, play hard. Everybody’s an open book, always willing to share, ask questions. It’s game changing.

Mike McCarron (10:41)
Yeah, that one.

Yeah, I think that when people are in a business that are smaller, they’re afraid to ask questions, they’re afraid to ask for help, they’re afraid to say, hey, I don’t know something. What are you doing? What are you using? What’s worked for you? What’s not worked for you? And that’s a level of maturity. That’s a level of desperation. Is that a level of… Yeah.

Intrigue Media (11:19)
Well, it’s like

a power through vulnerability. It’s like asking for, one of the things I found fascinating, someone said this to me like a year ago, it doesn’t matter when, but when you ask for help, you’re giving somebody the opportunity to do something that they wanna do. And so it’s like people want to help, but our ego is sometimes getting in the way and say, hey, I don’t wanna look stupid or foolish or something, I don’t know.

Mike McCarron (11:40)
Yeah, and I think that’s a part of the business I love. I’ve managed to reach a level of success where I’m able to help people. I’m able to give my time a little bit more. I’m able to write articles and contribute stuff and do all those things. And I think it’s cool because people are willing.

to take help but they just don’t know how to find it and manage it. And when you’re okay accepting help and you can say I don’t know everything, I screwed this up, we made a bad choice, how did the numbers look, was it good or bad purchase or whatever, once you’re able to get past that, your business can grow exponentially.

Intrigue Media (12:17)
Well,

I think that’s really interesting that you bring that up because we hear it time and time again, the number one answer of what’s holding back a landscape company is the entrepreneur.

Mike McCarron (12:26)
Yeah.

Intrigue Media (12:26)
the, you know, between the ears and getting their head right. I think what you just nailed on is this like kind of big milestone step of like, hey, it’s okay to not know it’s actually helpful to ask for help and really can set you on a path for growth because you can surround yourself with amazing humans, you know, be the dumbest person in the room, which is, you know, ideally the goal. That’s, that’s super cool, man.

Mike McCarron (12:45)
So.

And I think the other thing is, is that when you start sharing information, like when the first couple times you and I started talking, and you’re like, Mike, what are you doing? And we started chit chatting back and forth. So for example, I talked to a friend who’s up in Ohio. talked to him this morning, of fact, and I guess they got seven inches last night and five inches today or whatever. They got 12 inches of snow. And we told them about these modifications we were making to our snow rater machines. And he was like, Mike, I’ve never seen this. Can you send me some pictures? And I said, yes, no problem.

Intrigue Media (13:03)
Yeah.

Mike McCarron (13:13)
He’s like, that’s a great modification. That was awesome idea. Maybe we need to start modifying ours that way. He’s up there, I’m down here. It’s that kind of sharing of information that I think a lot of business owners, entrepreneurs, they’re not around the right people. They’re around people that are toxic. They’re around people that don’t want to see them be successful. I mean, who wants to see you be successful? The only two people who want to see you be successful are your parents. Most everybody else around you don’t want you to be more successful than them.

Intrigue Media (13:39)
Isn’t

that just a crazy phenomenon?

Mike McCarron (13:41)
And it’s a weird phenomenon that if you’re around other business owners, I network with the painter, I network with electrician, network with the tree company, all these kinds of things. And we share stories about how to do things better. And I think that’s a huge missed piece of the pie in trying to grow your company instead of just bitching that you don’t have perfect employees walking through your door. ⁓

Intrigue Media (14:04)
Yeah, which I

mean, it’s interesting, too, because I was having a conversation earlier today with somebody who is looking to grow. It’s like a landscape adjacent company. They do like aquatic pond scaping and like waterfront management. And the culture is mangled. Like people are smoking cigarettes in the office and drinking at one p.m. every day. They’re swearing. You know, there’s people yelling at each other. And I mean, it’s not that bad.

Mike McCarron (14:22)
boy.

Yeah.

Intrigue Media (14:28)
But the reason I bring it up though is because if we don’t get that right, no one’s gonna wanna come work there. And I think the staff thing.

We don’t see staff as an issue for anybody who focuses on culture and development. So they focus on making a great place to work. They focus on being the best leader they can be. They focus on training and developing their team. And oh my goodness, they’ve got people wanting to work there. And so I think it’s just a good reminder for folks that if it’s hard to find people, it’s typically a good time to look in the mirror to see what can I do to be the leader people want to follow kind of thing.

Mike McCarron (15:00)
Yeah, I totally agree with that. We probably started maybe 2018. Yeah, probably 2018. We do an all hands on deck meeting every Monday morning. The entire company, everybody there. We do a full on PowerPoint presentation. I have a big screen behind the back of the shop. All the chairs laid out. We do breakfast.

and we go over a PowerPoint presentation for 45 minutes every Monday morning. Does it cost a lot of money? Damn right, it costs a lot of money. The food bill’s a lot. You’re paying people to sit for 45 minutes. Yeah, is it expensive? It is, okay. But you can put up all…

Intrigue Media (15:27)
Yeah, it does.

Mike McCarron (15:37)
how you want your company to do work, your training, your safety, your cones, all the things, how we do business, how we mow, how we do snow, how we do X, Y, Z, all of our bed edges, how you want everything to look. And we do it in both English and Spanish. And that way, everyone’s getting the exact same information from me or my manager from the top down. Everyone’s getting the exact same information. I knew another company that started doing that down in Florida probably 2002.

and by the third year, their employee retention rate was over 95. We started out this year with 100 % retention, we didn’t lose a single employee. So, you know, all the training, the consistency, the Monday morning meetings, all of that.

Intrigue Media (16:12)
Epic.

clarity of

expectations, what it looks like to win.

Mike McCarron (16:20)
over the weather for the week so we know hey we’re getting rained out Friday we’re gonna go hard Monday through Thursday or we’re losing Wednesday we got to go hard Monday and Tuesday we’ll try to pick up early morning Thursday if it’s not too wet or whatever everybody everybody’s on the same page most people don’t want to train most people don’t want to do that they don’t want to put them I got a cool template for all of our presentations and PowerPoint and I just adjust the slides pictures from the week good and bad

Intrigue Media (16:32)
Yeah, you name it.

Mike McCarron (16:44)
We show safety badge, safety stuff, a gas can sitting on the truck of another car from my competitor. I put that in there. All the how not to behave, all those kinds of things. but that gets back to that culture. That gets back to how the company runs. Is it profitable? What are the rules of the game? And those are things that, those are tough decisions. One, asking for help. Two, wanting to train and explain what your expectations are. And then managing it and getting it done.

Intrigue Media (16:58)
Yeah, what are the rules of the game? Love it.

Well, what I love too is the consistency of Mondays. It’s not once a year, it’s not once a month, it’s once a week, every week, setting people up for success. So, don’t wanna lose it, because there was something you said at the beginning about systems and knowing your numbers. So if you were to, like if someone was like, my god, that’s me, I need to do this.

Mike McCarron (17:11)
and tough.

No, every Monday.

Intrigue Media (17:29)
What is it that they have to install and how do they start looking at this thing? Is there systems that you’re using from a tech stack perspective? Is there a philosophy or mindset that you have? What do they start doing if they want to make that decision to say, I’m going to start cleaning up this stuff?

Mike McCarron (17:42)
Yeah, so

what you what you need to do if you’re if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re saying okay, I need to figure something out. So let’s just say you’re doing residential maintenance because that’s a pretty simple one. Everyone can digest. think that’s most your clients, right Rob? So, okay. So you need to create a Seal Team 6. You need to create your best team, your best driver, your two best mowers, your best trimmer, your best hedge guy, whatever you want to do. You need to take a stopwatch.

Intrigue Media (17:53)
Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Mike McCarron (18:09)
I said that right to stopwatch, okay? You need to go to the job site and watch them mow a property. They’re gonna mow it, gonna edge it, gonna weed whack it, they’re gonna blow it off. And then you need to time it.

Intrigue Media (18:11)
Yeah.

Mike McCarron (18:21)
Okay, then they’ll go to the next job, maybe a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller. You’ve got to time it, go there, watch everything that gets done. From the second they turn off the key all the way to the cones are cleaned back up and they start the truck and you time it. You need to get some baseline numbers. I know my company can do X amount of square footage and X amount of level of detail work in this amount of minutes.

I can plow X number size parking lot up to three inches in this amount of time. I can put down salt in X amount of square foot in this amount of time. It takes a while. It takes a whole season because you got to chase the, you got to chase the fine pruning. You got to chase the pulling weeds. You got to chase the mowing. You got to chase all these things, but you need to set the standard for what is acceptable in your company. Once you have all those timelines, you plug those timelines into your, into your allowable budget and you know whether you’re up or down.

single day and that’s how you got to start. So for example, if my company runs all 52 machines, some people run 60, some people run 72. Okay, if I’m running a 52 and I’m doing this size property, I know I can get this much done in one minute, one hour, whatever. You take all those stats and you plug them in and that becomes the standard for my company. Now, a lot of people are like, okay Mike, well now you’re just getting to be nerdy, you’re going deep into the numbers.

You play sports, I played sports, everyone wants to know how we score the game and what’s the score. Are you on the 50 yard line? Are you down in the end zone and you’re in trouble? Yeah, yeah, like where are you? I know soccer, the ball goes from one end to the other end in less than 30 seconds and there’s a goal, but that’s not how landscape works. You don’t go from one side of the property in 30 seconds and score. Football, you’re just a gradual down the field. But the players on the field need to know.

Intrigue Media (19:40)
100%, man.

Did you win? you score a touchdown?

Mike McCarron (20:03)
what direction we’re headed, how much time we have to get there, and what the score is. And if you set all the standards up and you plug that in your software, and there’s several good softwares, I don’t want to get into software plugs here, but there’s several good softwares you can put in your budget for each individual job. And then at the end of the day, were we under budget, or were we over budget? Did our company score 80, 85, 90, 95? Or is it really dry?

Intrigue Media (20:14)
Okay.

Mike McCarron (20:27)
and we scored a 105, 110, 115, 118 % effective. And you start looking at those numbers and you know every day whether your company is up or down. You have to start, you have to start with the baseline. But.

Intrigue Media (20:35)
Yeah, I love it man.

Well, it’s

simple discipline though. It’s not like you’re talking about rocket science, right? You’re talking about doing the things that make clear sense. It just takes discipline and you gotta do the thing that’s working on the business, not in the business. That cliche we all hear so much. But it gets a great example of actually how to do it.

Mike McCarron (20:55)
the issue is that nobody wants, they just want what’s the industry average, know, how many square feet, they they don’t want to take the time to follow a crew for one day, get all the data from them, follow another crew, follow another crew and get all the data on.

Intrigue Media (21:07)
If I was listening to this, I’d

be like excited to go do this tomorrow. Like, seriously.

Mike McCarron (21:11)
And, but

once it’s really interesting because like for example, and we’re getting deep into numbers now, we’ll talk about it for one second. Yeah. So we have, we have the, the steel connects on all the equipment. tells us how long each piece of equipment run.

Intrigue Media (21:18)
Well, it’s full circle, right? Coming back from school.

Mike McCarron (21:27)
And we looked at a blower from a commercial team that does these big huge apartment complexes. And we looked at a blower from a residential team. And the minutes are not that far off by the end of the year. And I was kind of fascinated by that. thought for sure the blower with the big apartment complex would be running all day. It’s not. They’re doing all the trim, we do detail work in Boeing and they only blow at the very end where the residential team, they’re blowing every 20 minutes when they’re on a new job. bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. So that one cruise blower versus the other

Intrigue Media (21:42)
Yeah, light lights ahead.

Mike McCarron (21:55)
cruise blower, the amount of hours before we sell our equipment was actually pretty close. And so, you you have to look at some of this stuff and it all ties together. Your efficiencies, when you’re going to sell your equipment, how you bill your customer, what’s the standard for your company. All these kinds of things got to be in play before you, like I said, early we started this conversation.

Intrigue Media (22:14)
Well, I mean,

it’s… I love it, Mike.

Mike McCarron (22:15)
People are bitching

about not having the employee, do you have any metrics for is he a good employee? Is he a bad employee? Is he effective, not effective? Like you. Yeah.

Intrigue Media (22:22)
So for the sake of not plugging software, ⁓

Aspire, LMN, Synced Up, anything else that people might wanna check out? Just because I know a of people ask us what’s the best software, we always tell them options, we don’t know which one’s the best based on them.

Mike McCarron (22:34)
Yeah, I mean,

I would say you’re know, your top five if you’re going to if you’re going to kind of.

I mean, you’ve got clip, you got service autopilot, you got LMN, you got aspire, you got boss and you got asset includes. So those really your top. Those are your top six that are out there right now for the most part that I did. I see in here a lot of the trade shows and they come in the 200 to 3000, 5000 price point, depending upon the size of your company, how many tablets you’re running, stuff like that. you need to have you need to have. And like you said in your previous

Intrigue Media (22:51)
Cool. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s great.

Yeah, that’s cool.

Mike McCarron (23:08)
and you said even when you’re speaking when I was in your class, you have to have industry specific software that deals with this stuff. You can’t just buy something bogus off the shelf and hope it’s going to give you what you want. It’s not. It’s not. It won’t. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Intrigue Media (23:22)
Yeah, it just doesn’t have the depth typically, right? And

we hear it a lot with folks that use jobber, and then they usually graduate out of it.

Mike McCarron (23:27)
Yeah, I

know a couple friends at use jobber. It’s got some different features than what we’re looking for. But yeah. Yeah.

Intrigue Media (23:35)
Yeah, no, that’s cool. Okay, so

you dove into the industry. You’re helping all these folks. You’re seeing common problems. What was it though that made you essentially an advocate for the green industry? What made you get so involved? SEMA, NALP, you name it.

Mike McCarron (23:49)
Um, yeah, a couple of things. um, yeah, how does, how does that work? So I can, I think it’s kind of, I saw there’s an opportunity for a lot of people that hit the $600,000 mark, four to 600,000, I think is kind of the pain point. And there’s a lot of consultants out there that will help you only if you’re a million and above, 2 million and above. If you said, I’m a $300,000 company and I need help.

Intrigue Media (24:10)
Yeah, that’s fair. I see that.

Mike McCarron (24:15)
very few consultants would return your phone call. And I struggled with this a little bit in beginning. I reached out to a couple of people and they said, how many employees you have? And I said, we got five. We’re doing a couple hundred grand. They’re like, You could tell they wanted no part of it. I called a couple other people. Like they…

We weren’t over that magic million dollar mark, you know, and we kind of got blown off quite a bit. Finally linked up with someone who helped me quite a bit, got me totally dialed in. We shot past the one million mark. We just kept going from there and he helped me all the way through. Amazing. And that person is unfortunately no longer alive. However, why did he help me?

Intrigue Media (24:43)
Amazing.

Mike McCarron (24:48)
Did feel sorry for me? I don’t know. Was my story good? I don’t know. But he had a tendency to dip down in the $500,000 to $700,000 range and bring companies past the $2.5 $3 $4 million range.

Intrigue Media (24:58)
Amazing.

Mike McCarron (24:59)
Most consultants want to start at one, start at two and take you to ten or four to ten or whatever. They don’t want to help anybody down below that lower mark because they don’t have their systems in play and it’s too much of a headache. And I said, you know what, had that person not helped me, I wouldn’t be where I am today. And then I had the opportunity to speak at Sima. They said, hey Mike, we like your story. You can get up and talk in front of some people about it. I said, sure. And then that developed from there and went on to where I am now. But you have to have someone

has to have faith in you and someone has to be your cheerleader and that 400 to 700 thousand that four hundred one million dollar range it’s not that you are blind to it you just don’t know what’s further down the road because you haven’t driven down there and driven all the way back yet and and so I’ve so I’ve just kind of been an advocate for helping people there’s a lot of people out there that need help that are in that lower range

Intrigue Media (25:40)
Yeah, no, that’s fair.

Mike McCarron (25:49)
And those people end up running bigger businesses and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s like you, if people didn’t trust what you were doing, you never would have had the opportunity to speak at the events that you’ve had. And now that’s kind of snowballed because someone trusted you to allow you to go on the stage at a national event and tell your story. And now obviously here, both of us are, I was in your class and now we’re both here on this podcast. So.

Intrigue Media (25:59)
No, no.

Mike McCarron (26:12)
I think our industry lacks people wanting to help other people down below a million dollars. If I had to quick sum it up, that would be it.

Intrigue Media (26:20)
Yeah,

Mike McCarron (26:21)
Yeah.

I’m not saying, you know…

I’m not saying I’m perfect and I always tell everybody, you know, I’m the kid that did pretty good in school, not perfect in school. I’m the guy that raced cars. So I had to tinker with everything. I had to fix everything when I was younger. I had friends that were computer nerds. I had friends that were, you know, doing some cool stuff on Capitol Hill and video stuff and political networking. So I had some political friends. I had some race car friends. I had some nerdy friends. I had some IT friends. So I ended up just kind of getting this weird

⁓ experiences, guess. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and I look at, and I look at these, I look at these small businesses and they’re like, okay, Mike, how do know so much about it? We walked through your shop and how do you know what Miller that is? And how’d you know what filter and went on that Miller and all that kind of stuff. Then I go to a vet and they’re like, how do you know how this is that? So I just had a weird upbringing with all the different kinds of things that are now as a business owner have all come together. It’s allowed me to speak on many different topics.

Intrigue Media (26:53)
Eclectic Network.

Mike McCarron (27:21)
But also, when I go to these small businesses, they need all of those things. They need an accounting guy. They need an IT guy. They need a guy that’s mechanical. They need a guy that can help them with their contracts. And I’ve kind of got just enough of all of that, that it’s allowed me to help out a lot of people and it’s allowed me to get some stage time to talk about the things that I did to get to where was and the things that I think a lot of these smaller businesses are missing. And those are those the components of it. Yeah.

Intrigue Media (27:44)
That’s cool.

And then

Mike McCarron (27:47)
Ooh.

Wow, okay. Yeah, I’m trying to think, trying to just, yeah, think of a good book. I mean, very early on, we were running Clip Software in the early 2000s. And that’s when a lot of people launched. Craig Rupert was at that event. Obviously everyone heard of that company. Tony Bass was there. Marty Grunder was there. Bill Wright from Wright Standards was there.

Intrigue Media (27:49)
or a couple.

Epic.

Mike McCarron (28:10)
Chris from Gregson Clark Sprayers was there. So I had a lot of powerhouse people in the early 2000s that were just regular, everyday people that would come to these conferences and everyone would talk and that kind of stuff. So I learned a lot from those people. And that’s when we started developing all the businesses.

Intrigue Media (28:28)
Yeah, that’s a

Pretty

substantial list of.

Mike McCarron (28:32)
2003, 2006, 2007, right there. Kevin Kehoe, was that a couple of his things early on, Jim Houston, Charles Van Decoy, all of those people that were really big names early on that social media wasn’t there to make them bigger. They would have been bigger now. mean, a of them are big now. Let me rephrase that. However, had social media been what it was, back from 2002 to 2010, they would have been really

Intrigue Media (28:49)
Right. Yeah.

Mike McCarron (29:00)
huge now. So yeah, was around a lot of good people very early on. that list of those eight or ten names I just gave you, I learned a ton of pieces from each one of them.

Intrigue Media (29:09)
Yeah, it’s amazing,

how can someone connect with you?

Mike McCarron (29:10)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

My information I so a couple things I’ve been in I write for landscape management magazine. I write for snow and ice But yeah, my information is available on LinkedIn too as well if you wanted to reach out and and had any questions I could if not I can point you to other people that if I can’t help you they’d be able to help you but You know start just whatever you do start don’t don’t act like you’re not important Don’t act like you’re not big enough. Don’t act like you don’t have good ideas and suggestions

And I think so many people are worried about getting shot down and being made fun of that they never launch. They never launch because they’re afraid of making mistakes and they’re afraid to be shot down, I guess for lack of better word, yeah.

Intrigue Media (29:45)
reach out.

Appreciate what you do, man.

Mike McCarron (29:52)
No,

no, absolutely.

Intrigue Media (29:54)
Seriously, you’re an

Cheers, buddy.

Mike McCarron (29:55)
Anything I can do to help let me know.

You got it. Thank you.