The Mill #13 – How A $25 Million Company Hustles

The Mill #13 – How A $25 Million Company Hustles

I’m not going to say specifically what it was, but I totally wasted about $6,700 of our company’s marketing budget in December trying something and it flat-out failed.

Hi everyone. I’m Taylor Poole, and this is The Dynda, and this is today’s RMFP, The Mill. So today I had another topic that was really, really, really cool. And it was basically talking about the longevity of keeping good employees around and just kind of the internal, like internal culture.

But a couple of other people that I was going to have on had to cancel on me. You guys start with me. It’s all right. Yeah, we’ll make do, yeah, we’ll figure it out. At least you’re halfway attractive. You’ve got a good face for radio homie, a face only a mother can love.

Yeah. So, off of the cusp, I was thinking about some of the different things. This is our new wall that we put in at Tradecraft Industries. It’s got some reclaimed material. But I wanted to talk about something different today, like just to get people’s minds outside of the box, it’s a new year.

Some of the different ways where we actually make money as a company, that the average, just the, I think the average lumberyard average place doesn’t put any time or effort into and just gets people to think through. Different ways to make money, like contractors, they probably have their two or three streams of revenue, how they get business in like that’s how most businesses are, but they don’t really think about the off the wall ways that they can make money.

So I wanted to touch on some of those different ones. One of Tye’s jobs at Rocky Mountain within the marketing department is he manages a system for us. That’s our Craigslist accounts. It’s a huge system, and what’s funny with it though, is most people they’re like you guys would sell money to sell stuff on Craigslist.

But what’s ironic about the entire thing was that one of our locations completely started off of this foundation. So I’ll give you the backstory to it here in a second. But basically one of the things that Tye specifically manages comes in and he probably spends about 10 hours a week working on it specifically, but we make a million dollars off of Craigslist a year million plus now selling lumber on there.

And I know most people are like, what the heck, but it’s really, it’s a different outlet. There’s a tension there. People go there on a regular basis looking for deals, the way that we sell our material, the way that we buy it, we actually have certain products that you can’t find in other places. And because our products are mill direct, our pricing is fairly cheap, so we can put it on there.

And the guys who are out looking for a deal, they’re finding a deal, but they’re also finding brand new material. I’m not sure, like we do sell some of our leftover Cole lumber. We sell some of the things that are offered. Great. But 90% of material that we actually sell on Craigslist is brand new stuff.

And the revenue is north of seven figures. So, before we kind of dive into some of those things, I’ll give you guys the backstory of where that came from. So, I guess it would be about a decade ago. So about a decade ago, Rocky Mountain, they had their primary location at 44th Avenue in Wheat Ridge.

I believe the Colorado Springs location was already up and running, but a couple of years at this point we needed another yard to house over, just basically overstock material. Cause yeah, and so the only thing that was fairly close by was back then when it was a 10,000 square foot warehouse, a trailer, and this nasty junkyard.

When we bought the entire complex, the tent, and the warehouse that was on there, cleaning it out was so nasty. There were syringes in there, they could tell homeless people would be leaving it. It was really nasty. They got rid of the old trailer, but they needed this thing to be there so that when they bought this yard to be this, they bought extra material that could run it down the two blocks down the street to the other location so we can replenish our stock and then it allowed us to buy a larger material.

Yeah. Well, we bought it a couple years before the recession hit. I think we were about a year and a half before the recession hit. So, boom, 2008 hits. Tye just rolled his eyes at me because I smacked the table when 2008 hit. Now, all of a sudden we weren’t, we didn’t need extra material, but we had the mortgage payment on this lot.

And Shane’s dad, Dennis, came into Shane’s office and he said he needed to figure out a way to generate $10,000 a month to cover the mortgage payment on this complex. Like that is what I need to change this to. How am I supposed to do that? And then he says, “I don’t know, figure it out.”

So, Shane, man, will say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, what I’m going to do or how I’m going to make the money.” So he tried running some of the space out for RVs that worked a little bit, but it wasn’t that great. And then one of the ideas they came up with is we always have custom lumber.

We always have off grades. We always have things getting canceled or whatever, but we already have them on the ground. So we’ve paid for or our mills miss where the mills don’t want to take them back. So they just comp them to us. And so what we, what Shane started doing, was bringing that up.

They’re wrapping it up, taking photos and putting it up on Craigslist. And we were just selling just kind of the one-off stuff. And it worked within, I think he. I think it was like he sold a couple thousand dollars the first month, you know. By three months, I think he was averaging about $5 to $6 thousand. By six months in, he was hitting his $10 to $15 thousand a month range that he needed to cover the mortgage payment.

Well from that birthed this entire division where we started putting up some of our entry-level grade materials. So like we always sell premium things and standard products that exist in the market, but because we’re a specialty retailer and we’re an actual lumberyard, we carry multiple grades and multiple products, multiple variations.

So they were taking the entry level, whether it’s a number three in better or rustic cabin grade, it’s basically something that wouldn’t pass a standard grade that you would use in a commercial project, but you could use it for a cabin. You could use it to build a shed out of. Or if you’re just tight on cash, you could fix a fence rather than replace the whole day.

Exactly. So we started posting things on there and we got that up to the point where it was generating, I want to say margin wise, I think that the entire campaign in its heyday by itself was probably doing on average $2.4 million. And to that day, it was like six years ago when I originally got there, that was kind of the heyday, that was how I got on with Rocky. I was actually putting up the, doing the exact job you’re doing now, putting all the ads up.

And that was back when we had to deal with the Craigslist gods and the forums, and make sure that we weren’t breaking any rules with a lot of rules. I got flagged so many times I had, I kid you not, 17 accounts with like 30 different phone numbers. And this, this was before like tracking and things like I’m literally calling, I’m calling the yellow pages and decks and I’m like, I need some more phone numbers and we’re buying hard lines.

To put into this building. So that way we could run these ads off of it. We had, and then I had, 17 different email addresses because it was checking those and then Craigslist back then could check the IP. So then we were screen-sharing programs at that time, we had a location in Dallas and in Portland.

So I was, so we were posting in Dallas and in Portland on Craigslist as well, too. So I was remoting into those other locations to post. Then I was remoting into the Wheat Ridge office to post extra ads. And then we were remote into the Springs through a team viewer and we put up ads down there too.

Just to get around all the rules and things. And if there was money to be made though, so you do those extra seconds, it was amazing. My first year I’m doing it, it was the first year that we really started tracking how many leads that were coming off of it. That first year, I can’t remember the exact number, but it was over 2,300 leads that came in on average, revenue per deal would be $6 to $7 hundred bucks.

Average margin was around $200. So like, not bad. And we were closing 70% of them. I mean, that’s how the entire division was born. And now that division they’re doing between lumber and wood, they’re probably pushing 4 million is what that division does now. But we’ve got, we got grants.

Then, we got Granite Liquidator and started selling stone. But that’s how that entire thing started. And then we went from there and we moved on to Facebook. When we had some things on, every now and then, on eBay. We had different partners, programs, and stuff going on so that the entire division burst out of that.

But it was just kind of, once again, it started out in necessity and now still to this day, it’s Craigslist the attention is not there. Like it was a decade ago. I would like when I moved down here and was looking for a job, never once in my wildest dream would I be told, hey, go check Craigslist.

It’s really popular out here. And I just said, wait a minute, Craigslist. And it still is popular, man. There was one that we used to post on called Backdoor. That was one that we used to put stuff on. It was like a Craigslist, similar idea, but I think that the entire thing got shut down because it ended up being a sex trafficking site— had to get rid of that whole thing.

So I think the whole Backdoor thing was like, yeah, no. There’s another one called Digger’s List. Now we used to put stuff on as well, too. That one sounds more of a construction site. Yeah. That one kind of fits its name. So, I don’t know, it’s just kind of ironic, but even to this day, like Craigslist has changed.

You can pay $3 to put up an ad now per I have to do all those things that you had to do because I wouldn’t, we still gotta change photos and we have to have different things, you got to update everything. We have different numbers for every location, just so it’s trackable.

Yeah. There’s still steps to it, but it works. Yeah. There’s a reason we have 50 different numbers for Craigslist ads. Yeah, we do. Yeah. 50 different numbers roughly. Yeah. So we got, fast forward a few years, it’s still doing easily a mid-seven figures a year in revenue. I mean, that division was doing about 2.4 million, but it wasn’t all of Craigslist.

It was contractors and Craigslist. So probably about half of that revenue was probably an upgrade suspect. And so the revenue probably hasn’t changed. I’m probably saying a lot. Probably, probably, probably my apologies to anybody listening. He’s probably sorry. I’m probably sorry.

Yeah, there you go. But it’s still doing seven figures a year in revenue, and I guarantee you across the United States, there’s people who would look on here for anything. Well, I know, I absolutely completely agree with that, but the thing is this market has a thriving Craigslist, so.

When I take advantage of it or be relevant on it, I bet outside and I don’t, I don’t know the statistics on this, but I bet you outside of like your major cities, like New York City and LA, I bet you that the majority of the middle part of the United States still has a pretty large Craigslist following too.

It’s just no, and absolutely. But what I’ve noticed is like the small areas where I’m from. It’s in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania. You won’t be able to find it. What I noticed is it’s moved from Craigslist or even marketplace into privatized groups where you have to ask to join. Like there was one for the entire County, the Facebook groups and stuff.

And it was the entire County called the Potter County garage sale. Anybody in the entire County could post on there. And if you liked it, well, there you go. Yeah. And that’s been a thing, but I’ve noticed that that has really jumped into like this. A lot of rural areas instead of posting and just hoping that it gets hit, they post in these groups and say, uh, yeah, anybody want this for $50 or best offer.

And within an hour, someone will have offered it or at least it’ll be seen or shared or whatever. Yeah. We’ve got those out here in Denver. There’s some of the big ones here in town or to get Southeast of Southlands classifieds. There’s one out in little tenants. I was going to say, I just got invited to something for Littleton.

And I was like, what? There’s a big one out in Littleton. I know there’s one up near the Brighton area. That’s got a ton of a ton of stuff on there. Like I just don’t think most businesses look in those areas to market. And why would you, why, like there, most people are going to look at it and say, oh, it’s only a couple of hundred people that are just kind of interchanging and trading and everything.

When. It doesn’t hurt, but here’s the thing: it’s free. It doesn’t cost you that. The reason we got Craigslist back in the day was that it was free. And even now, I’ve got 900 ads running. Thank you, Tye. Tye posted every single one of those ads. Typically that’s what we have on a regular basis, about 900 ads, but they only cost three bucks a piece.

So, over the whole year, we’ll spend $20,000 to $30,000 of total marketing on Craigslist and it’ll generate a million dollars. Yeah. Nothing. Then when you see seven figures, it’s like, okay, it’s worth it. I mean, if you take that over and you move it over into pay-per-click like a single click and for a lot of our products can be three bucks rather than an ad that actually, so it gets directly to people.

If you search something it’s going to show up because you get to control where it’ll show up. Yeah. I mean, our cost per leads on Craigslist are like $15 to $18. They’re insanely cheap. You know, and our profit per deal is probably, I think it’s like $2.79 is what our gross profit per deal is right now.

$270,000. Yes. So I mean, the returns there, I mean, they’re huge. They’re 10 a hundred, 100 x 10 x whatever 10 times. There you go. Great credit. We’re not getting into that, but it’s just, it’s a whole idea of looking at different places, a lot of companies, they start with yes we do SEO.

Yes, we do. Pay-per-click but they’re not all the traditional things, but there’s other avenues that you can take. If you can’t afford to play big ball with the biggest budget in the world says you only got an extra few thousand dollars. Craigslist is three bucks a post. And you can control when, when it appears.

If you find out that you post every hour for a day, and then this one ad at one o’clock got 15 calls where everything else got two, well maybe post every single day at one o’clock; see how that goes. Make sure that’s when people are searching, then there you go. And it’s going to cost you three bucks a day.

Most car dealerships, I know for fact, have whole divisions that just sit there and post on Craigslist everyday, like vehicles. Yeah. And this doesn’t just apply to Craigslist. This can apply to Facebook. This can apply to those groups that really anything where you’re, where you have control over what you post and what the public will see.

There’s nothing wrong with that. But that takes time. It is time consuming. Absolutely. It’s definitely a hustle. Yeah, no, but it has its return. That’s the thing. It has its return, but it has its return in a way where we’re dollar for dollar for dollar. It’s one of the best, most undervalued things that exists right now.

So he mentioned the Facebook Marketplace. So last year in April, we started posting products on Facebook Marketplace and it’s still one that we’re working on kind of getting or tuning it still. Yeah, that’s for sure. No, we are still tuning it, but even in our first from April through December last year, we did about $500,000 in revenue, off of Facebook Marketplace, not having to pay for a single one of those ads.

No, but again, it’s time consuming. So don’t just think like I’ll throw up a few ads and then I’m done. It genuinely is a time-consuming thing that you do have to devote a little bit of time for and make it a continuous ritualistic thing. Well, that’s the key, the consistency, like, like the reason, the reason why we put things up on these platforms is because they have the attention already, like, like.

No, people aren’t just going to stop using Facebook just like that. Unless it comes out. I’m not even going to give the hypothetical that I was just going to give, but no, one’s going to stop using Facebook like that. It’s just not going to happen. No social media is just going to disappear with the snap of a finger.

You can’t fake it. Did you? I shut off and continue. The only way that happens is if somebody decides to pull a Vine and they just shrink it down and again. Yeah. And that’s, but no one owns Facebook. I don’t think so, thankfully I think Zuckerberg runs Facebook and they’re their whole thing.

It’s a publicly traded company at that point. Not disappeared. Like you’d have Twitter own Vine, but Twitter could do whatever they want with Vine. It’s just like Periscope, Twitter wants to make Periscope disappear. It’s gone. Yeah, it is. Yeah. But like he’s talking about how much time it takes to work on these things.

No, it’s not just it. You have to devote a little bit of time either a day or three days a week. To do well, you have to pay attention. You got to talk to people. So we’ll typically have on Facebook Marketplace probably 60 different conversations a day. I actually have one gal on our marketing team doing that as her entire job.

She spends about 15 to 20 hours a week specifically on this, just having conversations with people on Marketplace about our materials. So we can tie (pun intended) about $500,000 of revenue directly to that. But you know that there’s some brand stuff getting put in there.

Like every single time we talk to somebody on there, we’ll send them links to our website. We’ll talk about who we are, you know? Well, and that’s the only thing, regardless of however you want to look at this, it is still branding. You’re paying $3 for an ad that guesses what has your name or company or item that you sell tied to it?

So if someone goes, oh, I don’t really need this, but okay. Let’s say they’re looking just for lumber and they put in lumber. Well, if you put in lumber more than likely, we’re going to be all over that front page. But if they’re looking at the Denver market, but if they’re looking for something that maybe we don’t have an ad for, or have put up, say, they’re looking at just some random thing, they’re still going to see us.

And if they ever go, oh, I need a fence, I think I saw a couple of fences on Craigslist. Let me put ‘fence’ in. We’re going to show up. And that’s, that’s the whole idea of staying consistent. Like every single day, Tye puts up those Craigslist posts with the exception of the weekends. We don’t wait, we don’t put them up on the weekends.

I just, cause we don’t have people like available to answer phones most of the weekend, but then over the week he does it every single morning for a couple hours. And then Amanda on Marketplace, seven days a week, man. She’s having conversations with people and some of the things that we’ve learned is that by putting your posts up at different times of the day, you get better reach.

If you put too much, all it wants, Facebook will just not care. No, you’re paying for that. Now they used to care. You said you’re paying for it. but at the same time, it’s the. The consistency matters if you’re constantly putting them up. like one of the things I didn’t even know, this was a thing, on marketplace, but if you put, if you’re putting products up consistently and you’re answering questions and you’re talking to people, uh, the, the gal who runs our marketplace campaign, she’s a verified marketplace, like dealer, like thing, dealer, something, or other like Facebook is like, you are God on this, you’re verified.

You’re important. And so because of that, we even get more reach. We get more stuff, but that’s because we’ve, we put our ads up about every other day. I’m about, about every 36 hours. They get yanked down and get re re put back up. So that way people can see them, that we refresh the pictures. Like it is a consistent proline.

And the other thing with Marketplace is this isn’t run through the company’s account, this is run through a personal account. So it looks more personable. It’s approachable. It’s not like, oh, this company’s trying to swindle me out of money. It makes it just a peer-to-peer thing instead of, oh, I gotta go talk to this company.

Yeah. It would still be people. It would be nice if we could run it through the company to just be there, but they made that yet. No, they have, and I’m sure it’s dead. It’s in the pipeline. I’m sure. Sucker burden. Now, come on. But it just makes it that much more approachable in my opinion, because then you have the ability to just say, oh well, I don’t know why she’s selling a whole bunk of wood, but how much is this?

We were just talking about it like this, this year, we’ve got a bunch of new things that we got rented on the pipeline, the wheelhouse,our reclaimed lumber. That’s like up on the wall here. We replaced podcast listeners just to visualize old. Yeah, you can look at it. You can pull the stuff up on our website in our social, RockyMountainReclaimed.com or @rockymountainreclaimed

Now we have e-pay, we’ve got a channel. I’ve got a replay. We’ve got some of the equestrian horse fences. But you know, we’ve got a new brand called Rocky Mountain Reclaimed and it’s all around these different types of materials.

That’s going to be an e-commerce website. It’s already up and running right now. You can check it out at rockymountreclaimed.com. So that’s, that’s one avenue that we’re looking at bringing in some different revenue. It’s a product line that we didn’t carry in the past. But we found things that we specifically like and care about that we’re running off of.

Another thing that happened is, uh, we’ve been getting more and more and more attention specifically from companies out of state. We weren’t planning on this way, this was never a specific idea, but we’ve been getting more and more people to our website specifically from out of state who are looking to buy half semi-trucks and full semis of material and they’re contractors specifically who are doing multiple projects a month or they’re building track homes or things of that nature.

And they’re not allowed to buy from a wholesaler. We weren’t selling to them and they ended up calling us. So one of the things that we’re diving through right now is, what does it look like to be able to ship full semis from here to New Orleans. We ship other smaller, smaller packs around the United States on a regular basis, but what does it look like?

Actually giving somebody the ability to, to buy completely mill direct, even if they’re not in our state. And I guess the point that I was getting with that, was more of sometimes the opportunities that you’re in search for you weren’t necessarily going after.

I was looking for them, but they landed at your doorstep. Yeah. I mean like, like Craigslist back in the day, like we needed to come up with $10,000 a month. Shane had no idea and he didn’t even know what he was going to do. Like, let’s be real. Absolutely. He was trying to get a hundred thousand dollars a year.

Now we’re doing $100,000 a month and consistently have for a decade now. Yeah. So it’s just, it’s the idea of consistency and working hard and paying attention to what you’re doing and trying things that other people want. Like it’s all a hustle. Well, no, and don’t just, don’t look at it as if I, if I do this the right way, and if I do it the safe way and spend my money where I need to, that it’ll just fall into place, not how it works.

You need to at least be able to take a chance on a few things here and there because if that one thing works, if one of the seven things work well, there you go. It just paid for itself. Yeah. It’s the, uh, it’s the whole, I don’t know, like one of the things that we talk about at work all the time is, is how there’s a lot of different marketing companies or a lot of different marketing divisions that companies were so far so focused on getting it perfect all the time that, that they spend all their time on one thing.

And by the time they put it out there, maybe it hits, maybe it doesn’t. But they put all their eggs in one basket. The phrase that I always talk about is, these guys always roll their eyes at me, but I’m always, uh, it’s forever, always forever. Sorry. And you forgot. And I know forever always.

Forever, always, and everywhere in perpetuity. There you go. And so our entire thing is, always ever in perpetuity. It’s just, we’re constantly doing things. We’ll have 12 in Detroit, different things running at once. And not going to lie two or three of them, aren’t going to work in those.

But the thing is, is that everything else that ends up clicking, outweighs the stuff that didn’t work. Like I’m not going to say specifically what it was, but I totally wasted about $6,700 of our company’s marketing budget in December trying something and it flat out failed one of those, like this year, that was one of the biggest, like last year.

Yeah, 2018. That was easily my biggest flop. Of everything that we did. I mean, seven grand, seven grand plus time, like the actual marketing spin was seven current and it just, I mean it flopped, but you know Shane wasn’t super happy with me. Yeah, no, I mean, no one’s going to be when you lose seven grand, but everything else that we do is to say everything.

If that’s your one big failure. I mean, I know that the office brought in more than seven grand. Oh, no, that’s my that’s. My thing is you might take a hit and obviously if it’s the first thing you try and you take a hit, you want to shy away from future endeavors, but you have to stick with it.

You have to keep rolling with the punches. That really is when it comes down to like, like I’ve now done this for 18 weeks straight. I’ve done a weekly NFL football review. The one that I just put out for the divisional round. Has far and away been the best one as far as view, time and engagement, I’ve done all seasons.

Yeah. It’s literally four. It’s literally four times. Anything else that you’ve done, but again, even when I’m seeing it I go and look at YouTube and I got one or two views for week three. Okay. Then you go to Facebook and I got 60 or 70 on week three. I’m like, okay, that looks pretty good.

This one has done exponentially better than all of them. And it’s just keep doing it because if it does catch on, well, then you got yourself an audience and you can talk to them. You can just be a person with them. And guess what? You’re there, you’ve provided value where they didn’t think they needed it.

Yeah. I mean, it’s just, it’s not being afraid. It’s not being afraid to work. We have another gal who works on our marketing team. She’s another social media person, but her entire job is she sits there and she networks. All day long, every single day. And her entire job is to basically give love to the local community on social media.

But then she also does business development. She sits there and she deems companies that we think would be a good fit for, and we could provide value to, we give them free marketing. We share the materials, we put it up online in a blog, we’ll have him in a podcast, write a blog, podcasts, go out and film. Does that have a direct correlation to the bottom line?

No, no. You know, but the other side of it is, is those companies, whether they ended up buying from us or not, like we have to have content to begin with. So however we get content doing marketing, you kind of have to have stuff to put out. It helps it’s part of the deal, but so that helps us in our regard.

But these companies, they get free marketing from us strictly because of the necessity that we just need something fun to talk about. and, and I’ll tell you what, that, that model we’ve got. We’ve got brand champions. I never thought I would ever say that at Rocky Mountain, but we had actual brand champions within a year and a half of doing this.

Who backs us up and is almost every single post we put up in the comments. Someone tries to tell us that hemp is better than lumber. We have people saying, no, they’re not. Yeah. Like we’ve got these, don’t comment hemp is better than lumber. There’s lots of good things about it, but it’s nowhere near that at the scale that is necessary.

To be doing mass production of it. Not yet at least. I mean maybe here in 10 years, that’ll be the new product line at Rocky Mountain. Yeah. We can do the 10 year challenge and I can look like an idiot when I said that, but for right now, no. Yeah, it’s just not there, but it’s amazing just in a year and a half time period.

The relationships and things that we’ve built, that’s because we’re active. We’re trying to connect well, everybody’s human. I mean, technically from the government standpoint, we’re not considered a small business anymore, but I mean, we’re still close to a small business.

I forget what point that breaks out. It was 50. I don’t know, like 50 actually employed people. I don’t know. I know we’re close to it. We’ve been close to it since I started working. I think there’s a revenue point too. I thought it was a number of people. I think there’s a revenue. I think it’s like anything over 15 million.

Let us know in the comments, which one of us are stupid here. What is the cut-off for a small business? A”small business.” Yeah, no, that’d be good. We could probably link that up too, but my whole point of it is that we’ve been a small business that’s in our DNA. So if we’re considering medium business now.

Okay, cool. But at the same time, we’ve made our money building relationships. Yeah. Over the course of the 45 year period. And so now that we’re getting bigger, we’re just trying to expedite that process and help out people in the community doing good quality craftsmanship. No, because yeah, we’re here at Tradecraft.

It’s so funny, even within this last week, we’re just sponsoring trade craft. I don’t like that we don’t get any financial benefit of being here. I’m paying them to be a part of this organization too, to put my stuff up on their wall, to film these podcasts here, all that kind of stuff.

One of the things that’s kind of interesting is even just the few weeks that we’ve been a part of it this week, I’ve had three different individual inquiries. about getting people wanting to get more involved here, just in the building community. You know, they’re wanting to do classes, they’re wanting to, we’ve got one gal who’s potentially wanting to do her wedding over here.

So it’s a cool facility. Like very cool. Do not take that the wrong way. Anyone at Tradecraft listening to this, it’s just wild to me. But it’s one of those things that just over time, you just look for different ways to do it. You don’t have to be, you don’t have to have all the money in the world.

You can outwork your competition like we sell against Home Depot and Lowe’s every single day, every single day, only when someone loses them. Well, no, just, just to tie this back in. Sometimes you just have to work harder, say it’s nine or 10 o’clock at night. Whenever you lay your head down, you pull your laptop out.

You have a glass of water or warm milk, whatever you like you post for an hour. And if you post falling asleep well, okay. You’re asleep, but you still, you still wait, but you’re still doing it even when no one else is because then guess what? Unless someone’s getting up at the ass crack of dawn. You’re going to be the first post showing up.

That’s the thing that I get such a kick out of with Amanda, on Marketplace, she’s constantly talking to people like, we’ll go look at the timestamps and when she’s talking to people, it would be like 10:30 at night. And she’s answering some dude’s question on how to build a deck or how many fence pickets he needs, or what the dimensions of our trim being available is a huge part of it, but just going that extra mile and just taking that extra step.

Where maybe you are genuinely busy from eight to five, eight to six, whatever your workday looks like, but you get an hour to yourself. Maybe at night when you lay down, sit there and post it’s a very boring thing. So if you do, if it is like your nightly reading thing to fall asleep to that’s okay.

Because you’re still, you’re still building your business. You’re still building community outreach. Whether that is just putting up an ad and getting your name out there or not. It’s there. Turn the TV on, turn on a book on tape, listen to some tunes, like do it and then fall asleep. And you’re set. Yeah.

I mean it’s three of them. All right, great. You got three in the morning to quote, to quote a Gary Vee,it’s not necessarily what you do from eight until five, it’s what you do from 7:00 PM till 2:00 AM like that 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM timeframe. That’s where the guys who want to hustle and put in the extra work and the extra time that’s where they get it.

I mean, constantly you’re annoyed with me because I’ll text you late at night and I’m working from nine to ten o’clock. Hey, what do you think of this? I have no idea. You know, and my thing is it’s it’s it’s I get my kiddos I get home from work. We did it together.

I took my kids to bed. Hang out with my wife for a minute. And then all of a sudden it’s just like she needs her alone time and I don’t have anything else to do. So instead of watching House Of Cards or Netflix or whatever, I’m like, well, might as well work on the next day, put in some more time because I mean, that’s the big difference.

You can, you can gain that, just an extra leg up. If you, if you put in the time and you care about who you’re talking to, that’s a little bit of commitment. If you have a vision where you want to be and you can’t get there by working eight to five, well, guess what you got to put in a little extra work, whether that’s between nine and 11 or one in 3:00 AM.

It doesn’t matter. I got it, it looks like I gotta figure out the exact time, but I think I’m going to have coffee with a dude on Monday morning. and I don’t know who this guy is. I don’t know exactly what he does. He hit me up on LinkedIn. He owned some company here in Denver that makes concrete steaks, wooden, concrete steaks.

That’s all they do. Never heard of him. Don’t know anything about him, but he’s reached out. He’s like, I really don’t think either one of us holds any real legitimate value to each other, but we’re both in the lumber industry and we’re both in Denver, so let’s go have coffee.

He’s like, maybe I know someone that can help you, or maybe someone that can help me or, or maybe we just meet and create a relationship. And who knows what each other’s names and you know, down the road, maybe something does come off it and you just, you never, ever, ever. No, you know what’s going to happen a year or two from now?

No, like it’s just, it’s just part of, it’s just, you can look for other ways to make money. I know there’s there’s guys, literally a hundred other ways you just got to be willing to do it. That’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is. So when I was paying, paying my way through college, I was running a little landscape construction company.

You know, and nothing crazy. I was able to keep four guys paid year round. We did lots of different projects and stuff, but it was a constant deal of like, we had our core things that we did to make money. Uh, like shoveling snow leaf blowing hard stuff, but you would not leave the random projects I would take on.

Cause it was just like, I know this stuff will be done by Thursday and everything will be paid for this week, but man, we could do this job on Friday and like maybe it’s a cheap job. But that’s extra profit. We had a, I can’t remember exactly how many properties it was.

It was somewhere between 100 and 150 properties where we just maintained the people. People’s crashes, nothing special. Like you go in and you mow your hedge, put fertilizer down, do aeration, those same properties. We would do snow removal in the winter time, fall cleanups, nothing crazy on that part of the business.

I didn’t make a dime. Let’s just be, I didn’t make a single dime, but it paid for my entire company’s crew infrastructure costs to do everything else that we did. So, I had three guys that focused on that, but the revenue from that paid for the other two to three guys and these other two, three guys, we would do landscape projects.

We would like to design a building. We would do cleanups. Every now and then we get a call from a guy who got a property. You need to remove a bunch of trees. Like, like we would take on those jobs, but this one little thing actually covered the foundation of the company. And then these other one-off projects that became the profits.

And none of it’s sexy. None of it’s great. None of it’s just this wonderful thing, but I’ll tell you what. You know, I was a 19, 20 year old kid. You don’t have one in Florida. I think the most I ever had was like seven guys, seven grown-ass men working for me and, and it worked. And this was to put this in perspective.

I don’t even think about this, or I never thought about it back then, but this was, this was at the bottom of the recession, I graduated. It would’ve been a decade ago, so yeah. I graduated about a year and a half ago, and graduated high school about a year and a half before the recession.

10 year challenge. There you go. Yeah, there you go. Take your challenge. But I got her about a year and a half, uh, before, like the whole bottom dropped out and my thing was, I needed to go to school where I grew up and like, we didn’t have money. There was no way, like my mom wouldn’t even fill out my FAFSA paperwork for me to get us a student loan.

Okay. Like she wouldn’t do it. I was like, your mom pulled us out. She’s just like, no. Hashtag true story. But, it was like, great, well how am I going to go to school to be a firefighter at the time. That’s a different story, but you know, it was just like, how am I going to pay for school?

And I wasn’t, I wasn’t living at home. Like I was living with roommates and had car payments, rent payments, like all that kind of stuff. It was on. It was just like matter life goes on. Yeah. So I work 40, 50 hours a week during the day. And I went to school at night, but we were able to get enough done to where I was able to take care of those guys.

Take care of my responsibilities, and I had enough leftover living super dirt poor with the two to three other roommates the whole time. Yeah. Until I get through enough college, I actually go start doing some other stuff, but I still do. I mean, I still do side work even today.

Like if somebody came in and offered me something and it wasn’t going to kill me physically and you know, and I could get it done over the weekend, I’d take it. I would totally take it. Absolutely. And it’s just, there’s just, there’s different ways to make money and you shouldn’t write it off.

You just shouldn’t be my dad’s journeyman carpenter. Like I said, if you have a goal. Make it happen. Don’t wait for it to fall on your lap, make it happen, go find how you can make it happen. Don’t just be like, oh, I’m trying this and doing it the safe way. No,  go do it. It’s just baffling to see how many people make different little excuses here and there.

And then all the different ways you can actually make money on the internet nowadays. I mean, it’s insane. I was talking to a soccer player I knew, a family friend, and she sells a bunch of stuff on Etsy. She makes three to five grand a month. It’d be a nice side hustle shrinks three to five grand a month selling trinkets on Etsy.

And she asked me today, she was like, hey I know you I’ve heard you talk about Facebook. She was like, how hard is Facebook? I was like, it’s like, Facebook’s way easier than doing anything on Etsy. I was like, will it work for your products more? I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you, but I’ll tell you what.

Like if a lumber company, who’s just like, we’re selling things that aren’t sexy, like crafts and things with crafts and things are kind of fun, you know? Yeah. DIY stuff is fun unless it’s a huge project. Yeah. Like it’s a fun little blue stain wall or accent wall or fun little portrait. Yeah. No, that’s fun.

That’s enjoyable. I can have fun with that one. If it’s a whole let’s, let’s do the entire room. No, it’s not fun. We’re 350 feet of privacy fence because it blew down like, like that’s my thing. I’m like we’re selling lumber there and lumber is not, lumber is not sexy. Lumber’s not fun modernity though.

Like, like yeah, the people aren’t on there looking for it. Well, you don’t go there specifically looking for it, but you don’t and things get sold off Facebook all the time for 10, 15 bucks. Yeah. Like it, like it would, it would baffle you. Yeah, seriously. The other day I was telling somebody, cleaned out my garage.

I found five or six things that I just wanted to sell online. I literally took a picture, put them up on Marketplace. All of them were between $10 and $20 a piece. Every last one of them was sold within four hours. Like I made a hundred bucks on things I didn’t want. Yeah. And I just, I didn’t want to pay to throw them away.

So it was just like, okay. I bought a giant six foot diameter bean bag for $75. Okay. I feel like we overpaid to look it up. It was actually like a $300 beanbag, solar for a hundred bucks. This is such a thing as a $300 beanbag. Yeah, no dude, I don’t, I’m not kidding. I’m six foot three and I literally could lay across the thing and not be hanging off.

That’s huge. That’s a big bean bag. I moved out here. We didn’t have a couch. So, uh, the person that lived in the apartment last just said, Hey, do you want this? And I said, yeah, I’ll give you 75 bucks. Warren sold it for 125 after we got a couch after we ran out of room. But no, I just, uh trying to come up with something there at the last second, I just thought it was a pretty interesting idea.

Kind of a cool thing and it just kind of shows you that there’s so many different ways, a lot of different routes. You just have to be willing to take the chance, take it and work. Yeah. You got to put in to work like that. That one’s pretty simple. Absolutely, absolutely doing it once or twice a month, ain’t going to fly you.

Ain’t going to see any results and you probably will lose money. You have to be committed to it. It has to be a daily thing. If not, twice a day. If you’re doing something small, let me, it’s like working now. I know you want to go. Do you want to see results? You have to commit to it daily. Yeah, it’s not. It’s not just, Oh, I went to the gym once a month, 12 times all year.

Where’s my six pack? That ain’t how that works. No, you gotta want to work for it. Put in the reps. You gotta train. You gotta build it up. Is the thing you can’t just walk in and start curling 40 fives. You start with what you can start with and you build up, shut up, speak for yourself. Yeah, no, you’ve got to build it up.

I could, at one point I can’t really even close, but no, you have to build it up. Whether, because it just, you can think that, Oh, the world I was made in, this world doesn’t know what you, Jack shit. Hmm, you got to build up to where the world used something. Absolutely. You have to put in the work and then usually the world will say, eh, you did already when you too often than not, people are so focused on trying to get the world to come to them.

It’s amazing. How, if you start pursuing the world, what ends up happening is by default, they turn around and then they start pursuing you back.

So, no, that’s. Like, I mean, I really think it is that simple. It’s just putting in the work to care about what you’re doing day in and day out consistency, right? Yes. And persevering. And it’ll pull. Yeah. You got to roll with the punches. You can’t just, oh, this didn’t work. I’m done. Yeah. You got to roll with the punches and say, all right, maybe this one didn’t work.

Well, let’s try this route. And you’re going to take that past experience and make this one even better. Is the thing because you didn’t just stop and say, I’ve folded, I’m done. He kept going. I got nothing else. I don’t know what you want. I think that’s pretty much it. So kind of wrap this up. If, uh, if you’re wanting to find out more about who we are, you can look at RMFP.com.

Uh, Rocky Mount Forest Products is the name of our company. We’re a wholesale to public lumberyard based out of the Denver market. This has really nothing to do with that. That’s just where we’re from. That’s our lovely wall here at Tradecraft industries here, Denver. If you want to learn more about our conference, we’re going to be putting it on buildinghyphenempires.com.

It’s going to be a conference geared towards the building and construction industry. We’ve got some big speakers and things lined up for it. Super excited. Uh, looking for some sponsors for that. So if you, uh, if you’re interested in sponsoring some of the things that we’ve got going on, when they learned some more details on that, you can give us a call.

You can reach out on the website. There’s lots of different ways to get involved. you got anything other than that? No, I’m good. All right. Well, let’s just check out this fairly short episode. All these are going to be getting up on Spotify and on iTunes podcasts, whatever it is, pretty much all of them.

That’ll be done fairly soon. We’ve got the first four or five masters from the, uh, from the audio studio. That’s all done. We’re just literally building the accounts out. So I’ll have those linked up eventually and yeah. Yeah. So, this is The Dynda and Taylor Poole with Rocky Mountain Forest Products, this was today’s RMFP, The Mill.