A New Venture
Why I started and how it’s going (first blog post)
As a teenager I spent summers as a laborer helping my stepfather on concrete construction sites. As a young adult I had various jobs until my wife got pregnant and quit her career and I had to choose a line of work to commit to in order to provide, so I started at the bottom and got a job as a bottom of the barrel laborer for a large construction company. I quickly climbed the ranks and in two short years was a supervisor running crews, because the culmination of my various previous jobs in management coupled with some construction know-how helped me surpass those around me.
In 2000, an opportunity arose for me to relocate to the east coast and take on a job of building cell phone towers throughout the New England states, so my wife and I with our two young boys went for it, and I ended up spending 20 years developing, building, and managing hundreds of telecom structures and facilities, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in value, all in the employment of a large multi-billion dollar publicly traded domestic and international company. I had great success in facilitating and managing everything thrown at me and my reputation was well-respected in the New England states.
But our heart ached to get back to CA where our families and aging parents were so I found an opportunity to relocate back to CA and took the risk for employment under a different telecom company and moved. That company didn’t develop the department they promised exclusively for what I relocated for so after a year in Los Angeles doing something I didn’t want to do, something happened that changed my path.
My father was having a contractor build his ADU during this first year I was back in CA, and I stopped in regularly to check on the work for him. This contractor wasn’t really a contractor; he was a salesman posing as a contractor, and his subs were literally doing everything wrong every step of the way. Heck, I didn’t even have experience in residential work, but even I could see everything that was wrong, between poor construction and quality through every step of poor customer service, lies, missed dates, incorrect materials being installed, removed, installed again, literally, everything was going wrong.
What I noticed however, was this “contractor” was very successful monetarily. That meant that there are a lot of people who get “sold” and then suffer, and if that works for him, and so many others like him, then certainly there’s got to be a market of people out there who are looking for someone who is the opposite of that; People who are looking for someone who cares.
So I took a risk and quit a 22 year career in telecom and started working with that same bad contractor that built the horrible ADU for my father; going into it however, with the intent to do it better than him. I was unsure how it would go because I always despised “salespeople” and even told my wife (high school sweetheart): “How can I do this, I’m not a salesman. I can’t say all those salesy things.” And her words of wisdom were:” Don’t then, just be you.”
I was sent to sales leads in bulk measure, literally 3 to 4 per day in the beginning. Then it started, people were buying from me. Within the first year I outsold all 5 of the other veteran salespeople. I sold more quantity of sales, but each sale was at a lower price than my colleagues would have sold for. Now I was scrambling to provide the customer service I set out to do.
Fast-forward four years to now and my statistics tell a story in retrospect. I sold and managed 150 different kinds of Home Improvement jobs, single-handedly. Meaning, the contractor one sells on behalf of, I manage the job completely and the contractor only asks: “When can you pick up a check?” I have however, visited over 800 homes in four years and written and provided that many detailed estimates and contracts. One could say that for “sales”, those aren’t good numbers, because that’s hundreds and hundreds of lost sales. But keep in mind, I don’t sell. I didn’t get into it to be a salesman, I got into it to provide the customer the opposite of what that bad “contractor” was getting away with. That could mean that those hundreds and hundreds of people are either looking to be “sold” or are just cheap and looking for the lowest price, of which they will certainly suffer the consequences of both scenarios.
Moreover, now in my fourth year in 2024, those statistics also tell a very different story. In 2024, 75% of the jobs I sold (estimate and contract written and sent) and ran were all referrals from my meager previous three rookie years. I can say for sure that is astounding. Not only because it speaks for itself to come that far in that short of time, but during these four years, not only the company I was representing, but along the way during that time I came to represent a couple other companies, and they have all either collapsed down to almost nothing or rebranded because their model was “gross sales”, versus “Customer service”.
What does this all mean, then? It means a couple things; it means I was correct, there’s a percentage of the market of people who are looking for the right person versus being “sold” or the “Cheapest price”, and it means that those companies whose model is “gross sales” with sleazy salespeople don’t stand the test of time, or they must perpetuate sales but at the cost of customers suffering.
