Fake Construction Gurus Exposed.

Swale is swailing. All right. Cool. Cool. All right. [Music] Good morning everybody. Um we're flip-flopping a little bit. Schedule's getting a little weird. All good. Um the job that we've been out on, uh we're not going to be back out there until after the driveways poured, which will be end of the week, depending on the weather. Maybe Monday, I don't know. We'll see. Uh in the meantime, I also have no idea what we're doing or starting today until then. But we'll find out. We'll find out together. YouTube has allowed people to get more bad information than ever before. And it's not actually your fault, the viewers fault. It's content creators like me that are trying to give advice when it's really not their area of expertise, but they still feel qualified because they hold a camera in their hands. Well, let's break this down and get very granular and very specific today. Figured out what we're doing. What are you dinging at me for, truck? All right, nothing. Um, we got uh it's grading and like five drain boxes and a whole bunch of drain tile going in and all sorts of stuff. So, couple of little boulder walls. Should be should be a fun little couple day project. Just waiting in line at Girtton's here and these dudes in front of me got no idea what's going on. which generally the case if you get here in between like 8 and 10:00 but ain't nothing to do except for hurry up and wait I suppose a lot of running around. So um last stop and I was meeting Alex to throw some stuff in uh the trailer here and he goes, "Oh my god, that Silverado right over there, that's his old work truck uh from when he was working at the company he was working at before he started here." So, all right, we are all loaded up. And man, are we loaded. I got all this piled up. Stuff behind the seat. Bed's all freaking full. Trailer's damn near full. But we got everything except for the stuff that we forgot, which we will find out on the site is when we need it. >> One of the things I noticed these younger content creators is ego. They want to show off. They want to look cool. They want the prestige. They want the accolades, not understanding the cost of what that greed will lead them. And when they're out there talking in front of a camera about their fleet of trucks and everything else, they're showing you the good. They're showing you the frosting on the cake. But that cake is filled full of garbage. That cake is filled with things that they're hiding the layers, the darkness, the layers underneath. Let me just break this down. When you see a company that's got a wide a huge range of equipment and fleets of things like that, it looks good and it makes guys like all, you know, just the average guy want to have that for themsel. But to get there, there is a cost. You see, the bigger you here it is. All right, guys. First off, I'm going to explain who I am. My name is Stan Genetic. I've been a lifelong contractor. I started running equipment when I was 9 years old. I'm 54 years old. To work my way through college, I started a company uh when I was 20, 21 years old. And that was to pay my way through college and I never stopped that company. And that company is still in operation today. So, I've watched and learned through 30ome plus years of running a company and 40ome plus years of operating equipment the nuances that work and then the things that don't work. And what works for me may not work for everybody. And this is specifically one of those mistakes that I want to address is building your company. Build your vision. You look at these YouTubers and they have these fleets of equipment, but they're not showing you how miserable they are inside. You see, the first thing you need to do is when you start your company, what do you want? Lay out very specifically what you want. Do you want a big massive company? Cuz if you do and you're a contractor, congratulations. You're in the right business. It's easy to grow a big massive construction company. But when you grow a big massive construction company, you build the you you grow the bullseye that's on top of your shoulders. And what happens is a lot of times you guys will start a company based on what you love to do, your heart, your passion, your desire. Maybe you love running heavy equipment and you could just envision the perfect scenario is having a company filled with heavy equipment. Well, the thing is is you don't get to run all of those pieces of heavy equipment. You start to hire people to run those pieces of heavy equipment. And as your company grows, you, the owner, get separated further and further away from the very thing of joy that made you want to grow that company in the first place. Identify exactly what it is you want. If you just want a massive company with that's highly profitable and you don't care about running the equipment, you can easily do that. But if you love running the equipment, then think about what'll happen when I have 20 pieces of equipment and 20 different guys running it and I've got an HR department and I've got a receptionist and I've got this massive overhead that I've got to take care of. Is that where your joy is at? No, it's not. and the other content, social media content creators that are growing these big companies aren't sharing what they're losing as they're growing them. They lose the very thing that got them into the business in the first place. You're not getting out of this alive. I'm not getting out of this alive. Money is not the most precious thing we have. Time is time is the absolute thing that nothing else can buy. Time cannot be recovered. Time is only lost. And when you focus on building something that is not driving your happiness, you're taking your happiness away and are never able to fully recover it. Identify the exact reason why you're building this. Do you want just money? You build a company for money. Do you want to be happy? Build a company for happiness. Do you want to be able to play every single day? Build a company for that. And you can do all of these things. And what happens is is when you find the joy in where you are at, other things will naturally fall in line. But if you get off on the wrong track and let's say you're you want a company so you can just be happy, you're going to and you build a massive company, you're going to be miserable. Let me use a real world example from my own life. I never wanted a big company. My dad wanted a big company. And early on, I realized this may not be for me. I built a big company. Again, it's no, it's not hard to do. There's no secret to how you do it. You can build a big company pretty rapidly if you so choose to in construction because we are a very highly soughtafter commodity. People that work to the next level, that honor their word, that do good deeds, that don't screw their customers, that do everything they say they're going to do and are willing to sacrifice, you're going to grow. I mean, you're just going to you're going to blow up. But as you blow up, you actually get more miserable. I never wanted a big company. And as I was growing, I'm managing more and more people. I'm managing more and more jobs. I'm taking on more and more responsibility. And in turn, I'm getting further and further away from the thing that I wanted. And personally for me, I just wanted freedom. I wanted to be left alone. I wanted to have enough money that I could do anything I wanted at any time. But I didn't need so much money that I had to show off to other people. showing off meant absolutely nothing to me. And a lot of these companies are just showing off. And it's not their fault. I believe they're just younger. They're impressionable. And they're looking at what somebody else is doing thinking that's success. You've got to define what success is to you before you move on to the next step and that's developing your company. Good morning everybody. Uh so today uh we're going to cut in a little bit more of a swale here. We're probably going to Yeah, about where that we're going to kick her out to about where that flag is there and have that be the outside of the swale. and uh got plastic and rock going in and all sorts of stuff. So, let's go get that miniacs popped off and they're scraping this sculpting her out a little bit, guys. Oh, there's a whole bunch of redwing blackbirds over there. There's a pond back there. And I've been having a very, very good time watching all the birds coming in and out. They got a pretty decent amount of wildlife up here. I'm tired. I'll stop rambling. Let's go. All right. Well, she's uh raining on us pretty good here. Oh, we got to see if our swale's going to work. Swail is swailing. All right. Cool. Cool. Yeah. So, I identified pretty early on after I had built this massive company that I had built my own misery. And that's not what I got into this thing in the first place. I wanted to remove my ego from the equation and take a good long look at how I wanted to spend my time, which is the resource I could never get back. And I just wanted to go to work every day and enjoy the people I was working with. I wanted to enjoy my customers every day. I wanted to go to work and do something different. I didn't want to, no offense to you grass cutters, I didn't want to make tall grass short every single day of the week. I wanted to have a new challenge and something different to look forward to all the time. And so I had taken my misery, which was growing this massive company on commercial projects, and I extrapolated all of the skills that I needed to do that. And I put them inside of me, and I said, "We're changing this company from the very foundation on." And we eliminated half of the guys. just goodbye. You guys, you don't fit. You're here for yourself. You're not here for the customers. You're not here for the team. You're here to serve your own needs and nothing else. You don't care what happens. You got to go. And I kept the guys whose heart and soul was inside of the organization. And I said, "You're the kind of guys I want to hang out with every single day. Let's do something absolutely new." And then I looked at my customers and I was working for commercial contractors and commercial contractors will screw you over nine ways till Sunday if they kept because they got to look out for their own bottom line. And I didn't want to work with somebody who I understood where they were coming from. But I still didn't want to work for that person even though I understood them inside and out. And so I said, "Residential customers, these guys are excited when you show up. I freaking love that. I want to feel that all of the time." These guys, you can see when you look at them and you look in their eyes, you can see they're soaking everything in their hopes and dreams. You're building their vision. There's just something so satisfying about connecting with somebody and knowing that you're building something that they are so excited about versus where I came from was a set of blueprints and a time schedule and nothing else. It was all about money. And I said, "All right, I'm going from 100,000 and $500,000 projects." I mean, that's all I did was hundred,000 to $500,000 projects to5 and $10,000 projects. Is this going to work? Unreal. How much happier we were? How much more profitable we were. I've never looked back. I I encourage you. Follow your heart. Follow your p. Don't build my vision. Don't build their vision. And the guys that are on social media, I met a lot of them. And on my hand, I can count the number of guys that are good guys. And some of them aren't even around anymore. Brian Barek, one of the best guys I ever freaking met. Um, we don't need to go into the whole list of all the I mean, there's guys that are a freaking amazing people on social media. Greg Witstock, the Aquacape, the pond guy. Freaking amazing guy. True true true true person that loves to help other people. But there's on the flip side of that coin, there's a lot of people that I look at that are like, "Wait a minute. You're a contractor and you can't change the wheel on a a freaking piece of equipment. You're a contractor and you've never ran an excavator. You're a contractor and you don't even know what I'm talking. Are you actually a contractor? And you find out when you start to qualify, are they real or not real? Who's fake? But the camera that they can pick up and hold in front of their face makes them an authority. And I've screamed from the mountain tops before and this has gotten me in trouble. And I don't care anymore. I'm done. I'm done. I do not care if YouTube kicks me entirely off. I don't care anymore because I didn't start this to comply. I started this to leave a legacy to help. You see, when I started this company, I would not have been successful if I didn't have a dad who built me up. I wouldn't be here. I'm just going to tell you straight up. And he had no skills. He had no money. He was poor. But you know what? He poured into me belief that I could do it. He poured so much belief. He said, "You have the whole world in your hands. You can become anything you want." And I'm telling you, you you you can become anything you want. Please build your dream. Not mine, not theirs. Find your happiness. What is it you want? What is the thing? And build just that. Don't worry about what anything anybody else does. Nothing. Just build your dream because it's your time and it's very very limited. It's a very small amount of time we're given here. find your happiness. >> Good morning everybody. So, didn't get too much filming yesterday just because we were doing a lot of figuring and that ain't exciting to watch. Bunch of dudes kind of standing around doing math. Anyways, um we got five drain boxes between these guys and the neighbors. Uh neighbors has one there and on the corner. These guys got one there, one right there, and one right down in the corner there. Um, we're going to tie them all together into a 6 inch chunk of drain tile and shoot it just as soon as we can daylight it. Um, we were going to go out to the pond and daylight it out there, but kind of worried about that getting plugged up back over there. Uh, so we're going to as soon as we can daylight it out, we're going to shoot it out of there. Oh yeah. Oh, got cooked. Sat in traffic for an hour getting up here today. But um Zach and uh Brucey are grabbing some boulders and we'll just start working on this drain tile. One of the things that was jamming us up yesterday was this pad for the AC here. Realistically, in a perfect world, this pad would be like 10 inches up because right now, um, we are as far as tweaking the grade. So, this was all low along the house, pitching towards the house. Um, so we need to bring it up, but we're stuck with the height of the pad over here, which is I mean, you guys can probably see from over here is quite a bit lower than the grade out there. Um, you're probably not getting too much water. What with the overhanging stuff, but there's still going to be some getting in here. Um, that took a little bit of time to figure out, but we kind of got a um we brought it up as much as we could and we kind of got a swale uh cutting out kind of that way. That should uh alleviate this air conditioner being like a foot lower than it should be. Oh, yeah. And then uh we got a couple of little wing walls going in over here. Uh just so again, grade was pitching towards the house and stuff just so we could get it up and have everything pitching real good down around here. You see that? That's a guy that cares about his work. And that's all I want is a team of guys that care about what they do. They care about the customer. They care about what they put into their jobs. And it's more than just caring about a paycheck. All right, everybody. It's Friday. We're done. Got everything tarped and covered just so that way I don't get monsooned on. >> God bless and go get them, guys. We'll catch you on another one.