80. Building a Leadership Academy with Nolan Gore

Brock Briggs  0:00 

Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast. I'm your host Brock Briggs. And each week, I bring you a conversation with a current or former service member at the top of their craft. These conversations will make you smarter. They'll help you explore new ideas that challenge you personally and professionally and it'll make you more money. This week, I'm speaking with Nolan Gore. Nolan operates a landscaping company that's going to do over 5 million in revenue this year, which is more than 2x since he bought the company back in 2017.

In this conversation, you'll learn why work-life balance doesn't exist and why if you're an entrepreneur striving for work-life integration is much more effective. You'll learn how to have difficult conversations with customers and why positioning really is everything. And you'll also hear about his Leadership Development Academy where he takes Deewan athletes and students with master's degree and puts them to work mowing lawns and reading all the entrepreneurship books that made us. It's really an impressive program and inspiring to hear Nolan's love to foster young people coming up in the world. You can find this episode as well as the other SMB focused episodes, transcripts, weekly newsletter and the YouTube channel all on scuttlebuttpodcast.co. Please enjoy this conversation with Nolan Gore.

Brock Briggs

Like I was saying, one of the best ways I think to start these would be to talk to you just about like a high level of what's going on that you're thinking about and you're working through today. Is it personal life? Like what is occupying your mind space today?

Nolan Gore  1:45 

Absolutely. When you mentioned that's where we would be going at the beginning, the first thing that came to mind is my son. And so I kind of give you an update on what's going on with my kids. I'm married to my high school sweetheart. I have four kids, 7, 5, 3 and a newborn. And our newborn is currently in the NICU. And so in the context of work, what I've been processing is that there are seasons that it's okay, this is hard for me to accept, but it's seasons that it's okay to not be performing as well as you want to be because of other places in your life, you have to carry a heavier load. My wife and I are just looking at each other daily right now. And saying one bite at a time, we're just gonna get through today. So big picture what's going on in our lives. My son was born in 24 weeks, which is really freaking early. He's been in the NICU for over three months now. He's doing really well, which is a miracle of modern medicine and God's grace upon us.

And there's a really good chance that he comes out being totally fine, maybe a little bit behind from a developmental perspective. But that's extraordinary. A lot of the growth that I would have seen or like to have seen in the business, not capable of me having an influence on. It's meant that I've had to lean on my team in ways that I'm not necessarily comfortable in doing. It's meant that I've had to wrestle through how vulnerable to be with my team, how much weakness do I show? How do I show what's appropriate? How can I demonstrate what hard turns look like? And how do you work through those hard times because we're all going to have them. And I mean, I don't know, if we're three or four weeks out from him coming home or if we're 8 or 10 weeks out. It could be longer than that, depending on how things go. But that's a really big part of what's going on in our life right now. And I'm gonna be a really big part of our personal story and our community story for when I look back on this season in life.

Brock Briggs  3:50 

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. It is such like a vulnerable time. And when we're connecting the cup a couple of weeks ago over the phone, I went and told my wife about what was going on with you. And I was just like, this is literally crazy to me. And it's even more hitting close to home because my wife is like 26 weeks pregnant. And we're right in that window. And I think one of the things that you highlighted there is like, one, we live in a time. Like, it's crazy for me to even think that that's possible, that we are able to the medicine and the doctors and we have all of this tech to just like take care of babies like when things happen. That's why we have them there. My hat is off to you. I literally don't know how you could be focusing and like trying to manage a business and like you just pointed out all of these big things that you're facing. That's unbelievably trying. My hat is off to you on that.

Nolan Gore  4:47 

Yeah, I appreciate it. Let me dive a little bit. I think it's an interesting topic about how and when it's appropriate to be vulnerable with your team or your co-workers. I I think it dramatically depends on your team. It depends on your role. But generally the framework that I've used is, I believe in sharing life. First of all, a big thing for me is I don't really believe in work-life balance. I believe in like work-life integration. One of the coolest things about working in my job in small businesses is that I can bring my kids to the office, sometimes I can step away if I need to accomplish something for the family. But it also means that when I'm with my family, I also gotta think about work and working through that stuff. So I try to overlap all of it. I was the son of an entrepreneur, small business guy.

So I was the kid running around the office and I was the kid going on trips with clients. And because they were friends and they were also clients and they're also co workers and all that. Those interactions is a very natural part of my life. But I recently went through, there was this meeting we had the other day and I'm like, hey, guys, I want to know, you guys are being kind about asking you about how my son's going, I want to update you. And I also, don't you on me, and then I want you to know what you can do for me because you're always asking what you can do for me. First of all, the most important thing you can do for me is do your job really well. Because when you do your job really well, it gives me the space to go and focus on my family. So that is a huge lift for my family. Secondly, I want you to know that I've been crying every day, you don't see it. But I feel it. And it hurts really bad. And that's okay.

But first of all, I think you can also see that I'm carrying, I'm still doing my job with excellence. Maybe not quite to the highest standard that I would like, but I'm sharing with you guys where one of my timelines are slower than they would normally be. And I'm communicating that I'm not letting it impact the way that customers see me and how I do my job in that regard. When you have a hard time, it's okay to acknowledge that to the team. You still have to perform at a really high level and be able to communicate around that. And we're all going to have these moments. We've all got to have the moment to understand what it feels like know that someone else has done that. And we have to feel, understand how to react and have empathy to that. But it's still not, it isn't excuse, but it's still gonna hold you to a higher standard like me pulling myself to a high standard.

And I got a ton of really positive feedback in those conversations and my team do care about my kids. I'm excited about bringing this boy and driving them to work and for them to see him. I'm excited about him running around and then being like, I'm gonna write for you when you were born. And he's like, cool, whatever, old person. And that's going to happen for his whole life, right? I think as far as my personal understanding of vulnerability and learning how to lead in vulnerability and also have expectations for people when they're in their own shitty time. I've done a lot in that recently.

Brock Briggs  7:48 

Everything that you're saying, really, the fact that you're able to do that in your workplace really speaks to the culture that you've already built in your business. The fact that you can come to them and say, hey, look, this is what's going on. But it's not this thing, like the show still needs to go on, you're like, hey, this is how like, you're using it as a rallying cry to say we need to perform better because I'm not doing good. And that's like, that's hard for a lot of reasons. I'm sure it's like an operator, like you're kind of used to being the one driving results.

And so I think that that is a really cool, like, outlook and that you're able to do that. Being a former service, I was having this conversation with somebody the other day. The military does a really good job of like, getting us to kind of like stuff, those feelings on stuff. And when things are really hard, it becomes easy to just like, I'm putting that away. I'm just gonna like because you still need to show up exactly like you're doing now, a little bit more of an adverse environment, though and you may not get the same type of positive support and lifting up as you maybe are here.

Nolan Gore  9:02 

Yeah, so actually, let me reference that a little bit. I think that the really good leaders know how to walk that line. And again, it's hard, but I remember very specifically being deployed and I was in Kuwait and Iraq on that deployment. And our ops XO had a kid while we were on deployment and now I didn't have a great relationship with this guy, but he was who I directly reported to. We had a respectful relationship but his inability to articulate how hard it was to be away from his wife and son when his was born actually, frankly, decreased our level of respect for the guy because we wanted to see like clearly this is all hard thing. Like, it doesn't make any sense for us for you to pretend like it's not a hard thing. And if it isn't a hard thing for you, I don't know if you're the kind of person I want to lead or I want to be led by.

And so I almost wish that he had been a little bit more vulnerable through that season because it would have even shown a little bit more weakness because we would have done more better work for him. And so I think counter to what we read about and see and a little bit of what we're taught by example in the military, the really effective guys and gals that can lead in their full human self, it makes their team even more effective in the long run. And when I did have leaders that showed that stuff and when I had the gumption to show myself I saw better results. And so that's if you're still in, that's what I recommend and then take it on beyond the time and service.

Brock Briggs  10:49 

I think that there's an element of that to that when you can, as the leader, you’ll be the one to break the ice on doing something like that and kind of expressing some vulnerability, it sends these messages without saying anything directly. It's like, hey, this is something that is okay to do. And it also sets the tone for how we're going to operate even when something is really bad. It's not like we're going into full breakdown mode and things are just going to shit. And then you ask why. And it's like, oh, well, I've got this going on at home, it's like, no, we're going to address this upfront, set the kind of the tone for how we're going to maneuver around this. And like you said, it's kind of a rallying cry for the people below you to kind of come together and operate at a higher level.

Nolan Gore  11:36 

Yeah. And I think a big part of it, too, is that if you ask me, those people in those other rooms and they would still say I'm doing pretty damn good jobs, right? I'm still performing really well. It's just not as well as I know I shouldn't be performing. And I know I could have performed have this not been the circumstance I'm in right now.

Brock Briggs  11:56 

How do you manage the feeling you were referencing this a few minutes ago, but manage the feeling of it's okay to not be operating at 100% all the time? Well, can you kind of, like unpack that a little bit?

Nolan Gore  12:11 

Although my brain went first. So my whole life, I'm one of those annoying people that my whole life is always expected great results and always expected to win even if it wasn't rational. I don't struggle with a lack of confidence is maybe a best way a better way of saying it. But this has been tempered with a faith that teaches me that I believe genuinely, when my head is in the right place, my heart’s in the right place, that no matter what I do, I'm not going to be good enough, right? And that's okay. And that's actually encouraging to acknowledge because we have a God that loves us, no matter what. And so a big part of my story and this might be an appropriate time for me to kind of back up and talk about why I got here and address this question or how I got here from a story perspective. But like I mentioned, my dad was a business guy, a business guy, very, very successful business guy, very esteemed in our community.

And has built very large businesses. And it was a really hard thing for me to come back to business and realize, frankly, I'm probably not going to top the guy. Now let me be clear, I still believe I will. And there's a pretty good chance and check in with me in 50 years, but it's gonna be the chances are not good if we're just looking statistically. And that's okay, you know. And this is also the guy that's coming from a farm in the middle of Kansas, who really did pull his own weight the entire way. And so I started higher and I'm still gonna probably envelope work and I had to get clinical.

So the idea that that's okay, that's not dealt the hand up and down. All I can do is act honorably within the hand up and down and bring a lot of other people up with me. And that's the goal now, right? And I get to still work on my dad. I still love him tremendously. I respect what he's done tremendously. And again, the only way I can get around that feeling is just the belief that all I've been given us by God's grace anyway. And so I'm going to be grateful for what I have and do my best.

Brock Briggs  14:19 

There is kind of like a weird sense of understanding where you're born. And also like acknowledging the things that your parents had. And I think there's kind of this natural belief that we're like, oh, we're obviously going to achieve more. I mean, like, look, they they busted their butts and it sounds like in your case busting their butts to give you, put you in as good a position as possible. Not everybody has the fortune to do that. But it sounds like that was the case here. And I think that it's like kind of a default thought to imagine yourself like expanding and improving on that. But yeah, a tough situation. Maybe we should take some time and talk a little bit about maybe his background and then maybe what he has taught you about business and kind of get into that a little bit.

Nolan Gore  15:13 

So my dad was born and raised on a farm in Kansas. And his dad was pretty ill. And so because of that, he was kind of the man of the house by 11. It's not something you end the battle that I want for my kids. It's something that was really hard for him and his family. So he was doing school and running the tractor in the evenings, right? Or in the mornings and all the other things that have happened on a dinky farm in South West Kansas, which is right in the heart of the Dust Bowl is a pretty terrible place to farm, frankly.

And because of that, there's like always been the sense of like, there's no excuses that are good enough. He's never articulated that explicitly, but like, knowing his story, so on and so good. There's no way I can talk back on anything. He went to Kansas State. And just I mean, he was a genius. We don't need to get too hard into that. But he likes to leave doors open. So he went and took the MCAT, the LSAT, the GRE and the GMAT and scored the top 5% on all of them. And because he didn't know what he wanted to do

Brock Briggs 

What a situation to be in!

Nolan Gore

Ended up doing none of those things because he wanted to marry my mom. And they moved to Texas because she wanted to go to UT Law but he never ended up doing. And he was like, joining the landscaping company with my uncle, just as like a minimum. And that thing turned into a big company that they sold. And then he started other companies after that and all that stuff. But that led to me being a kid running around businesses going to the same school. I went to Texas, went into the Marine Corps. And a big part of it went to the Marine Corps was in retrospect, I don't think I realized this at the time. But in retrospect, it was because I needed to leave that.

And then you've already worked through the bid on the heading the process that coming out of the Marine Corps, when I came out of the Marine Corps, I was gonna get my MBA this business someone just called my dad on it, the one I'm in now and said, hey, you want to buy this thing? My dad called me and said, hey, you want to put your life savings into a business that's losing money? And I said, that sounds like a great idea. Let's do it. And I think an interesting topic would be like there's this constant refrain in the ETA community, the Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition community about whether or not you what size business you should buy from a risk tolerance perspective and everything. I bought a really small business, right? One and a half million at the time of buying into it. I still have a business partner who was here before. And I think it was fantastic for me to buy that small.

Again, we can get into that. But to answer your question, really, when it comes to like, what my dad has taught me about business and how that applies to what I do now, first of all, I spent hundreds of hours listening to my dad on speakerphone, working through stuff, right? Just driving around in the car, you had like the speakerphone in the car, when it was still really shitty and you had to kind of yell at it and stuff. I mean, it's still kind of that way, but it was really bad back then you have to like get it special installed. Well, I didn't realize until maybe three years ago how valuable it was for me to have those hundreds of hours of working through how to choose someone out, how to give someone your confidence, how to talk to a client, how to work through an issue with a client, by telling them that it's not really your fault, without telling them it's really your fault, and getting them to believe that all that stuff, super valuable. I do that stuff all day, every day now.

Secondly, I got to live the world of like the small business owner. The key was constant, everything again, integration, everything was integrated, right? Like we went on vacations be cut to specific places if we get to go on vacations because that's where clients told him to go because he wanted to go back and talk to the client about it because it would help build that relationship. His best friends that are still his close friends and now are like uncle figures to me in many regards, where clients and there still are, which is a great thing. Which leads me to the know thing he built or that I learned from him is he just is an extraordinary representation of what long term looks like. He's had these relationships in Austin, Texas for 35 plus years that have been built on integrity, quality of service over the long term not the short term. And he can just make moves that look impractical in the time because he believes in what 10 or 20 years from now looks like. And they built an extraordinary community around that.

And not only have they been very successful in business, but it really impacts a lot of lives, which towns for more in my opinion. It's enabled by making money, you have to make money and we've had that opportunity but he's provided a lot of opportunities for his employees and a lot of relationships with clients. So those are some big things taken away. I do not do the exact same things as my dad. I don't plan to pretend to. I am not my dad. I run things differently. I focus on different things. I'm organized in a different way than he is. I have far different leadership skills. And he does not better or worse, just different. But I saw my dad today because he wanted to chew me out about his yard, which was cool. I still learn stuff from him all the time. So call him to ask questions.

Brock Briggs  20:25 

What do you think was the final release for you of that getting out of the shadow feeling?

Nolan Gore  20:33 

It was the better understanding of God's grace. I mean, that's it, right? Like it doesn't matter how big or small I build something. I think there's a pretty damn good chance I'm gonna build something big that I can be really proud of. But it really doesn't matter. I'm gonna die. And people aren't gonna remember who I am only valuate half years from the life God's given me and then the love I can pass on to others. And love doesn't necessarily be all soft, a lot of it's hard. But in coming to grips with really, truly believing that, which is a progression thing, it's not as a sign as some snap moment. That's like, you're working on that hard thing for lots of years. And dealing with that, that's what's really pushed me over the edge. And I'm just grateful.

Brock Briggs  21:19 

It seems like one of those feelings that as you said, it's a slow burn over time and then all of a sudden, you don't even really notice that you've changed your mind about something. But then somebody asks you and you go to respond and you're like, oh, I didn't think that before. It's kind of like a weird, kind of out of body experience almost.

Nolan Gore  21:40 

Yeah, I actually think one thing I've learned is talking back to the very beginning of conversation about my son being in a hospital. I realized that being willing to have the conversation repeatedly has helped me process a tremendous amount. So I don't know what I've told who. I just try but I can tell that I'm having the same conversation and shifting slightly each time based on how he's doing and how I'm processing things is the same thing, but over a larger period of time, right? So just the same with my son, like, my heart is changing about how I'm handling it. The circumstances around it are changing.

But me communicating that to people every single day, whether it be with my wife or people at work or my friends or our church or whatever it ends up being that has helped me really understand what I'm feeling. Same thing goes here, right? Every time I talk about it, I understand myself a little bit better. I understand exactly what I'm doing a little bit better. And like you said, like I took me until maybe two years of being out of the Marine Corps and back in the exact same industry that my dad was from in a different business to really realize, oh, I didn't realize I went to the Marine Corps because of this. I didn't realize it while I was in the Marine Corps. I didn't realize it until years after getting out that that was a big one of the top five reasons I was over there.

Brock Briggs  22:50 

You've talked about the balance or integration as you call it of like your work and your family life. What is your wife think about that? And how do you, in the best way, bring those things together? Because I think the way that you describe that, to me sounds like the most optimal thing because it tells me that you love what you do. When you can bring your work home with you and you want your personal life to be combined with your work, that means you're doing something that you really love. And it's like it can become this all encompassing thing. I feel in a similar position on a lot of stuff with this podcast. I love that. And I love being able to like be at home and do this and facilitate these conversations drawing that line. Or oftentimes I think there needs to be a line. It really when you've got a partner that maybe doesn't understand that, how have you worked through that with your wife? And maybe how does she feel about it?

Nolan Gore  23:53 

Yeah, so let me answer a little bit of my story that goes into how my relationship with my wife is framed, a bit about what it means to me to love what I do. And then how that ties into what your passions from a work perspective is is something I feel pretty strongly about. So my wife and I grew up together, which is not something most people can replicate. I knew her since I was a little kid. Her little brother from the same kindergarten class. We used to vacation together growing up so that framed a deep understanding of each other's families and how our families work. Like she literally was on vacation with my parents way before we were dating, right? And I was on vacation with her parents. And so that was never, like she understood my framework and my growing up in the small business world way better than I could have articulated anybody else going into marriage, right?

Because she just saw it growing up. Secondly, I believe this is a really a thing I never heard someone talk about but it's a big part of our story. The military was a fantastic starting point for us in marriage. It can be a really bad place for certain marriages. But it was really, really good for us. I don't know if you've ever heard the phrase leave and cleave. Like we didn't live together before we were married, it was very much a new start. She was, she's several years younger than me. I took her out of college to get married. A lot of our community was very confused and concerned about that. We said, screw it, we're doing it anyway. We had her family's blessing and my family's blessing. But a lot of our ancillary community was confused by that and concerned because she was only 20, barely 20 when we got married. But we went to the Marine Corps and within weeks, I was gone for a week at a time.

And then I was gone for every single week for four days for a while. And then two years in marriage, I deployed for seven months. And her ability to grow in herself confidence of running our home, her life in a different part of the country without me wasn't a huge confidence boost to her, huge confidence boost to me. And that sprained the next stages of life, right? Now, if I work long hours, I'm still not gone four nights a week, you know, I'm still not about to leave for seven months or longer at a time. And so we just don't feel it's like it's really good. Even though I work way worse, different hours than many of her friends’ husbands. That's been hugely valuable to me. Now, let's see a little bit into how I view this like love of work thing. I'm not like, like, I just love business. I just love thinking about problems. I love thinking about different ways of moving the pieces around to accomplish things a little bit better.

That's what I think about in the shower. That's what I think about when I'm running, like, I can't help myself or listen to a book on anything. And I'm gonna think about what it can do for work. But I don't necessarily love it does break into the passion thing. I don't necessarily like love it. We’re in the landscaping business, right? I think it's cool. I value it. I think it's a valuable service. And I'm proud that we do well. And they're definitely services that I wouldn't be as proud about. But it's like, give me the opportunity to lead a team with a lot of humans that is building something that is we can be proud of. It gives us valuable service to customers where we can make customers happy and do God glorifying work. And I'm pretty happy in almost any service business. And I've thought about doing a service business and likelihood at some point, I do another service business.

And let me be clear, I don't have any intention of service business. I tell my team that all the time. I believe that I've seen my dad go through some painful times with resigned business, seeing close friends with these painful times that are signed business. That is not my intention. But it doesn't mean necessarily that I'm the right person to be in a seat for the next 30 or 40 years. There's someone better than me, then bring it on you do it. I'll do something else. I think that we get this thing about being passionate about what you do wrong. I think that there can be parts of it that you can be excited about or passionate about. But a lot of times, when the work is cursed we are promised that this is a broken thing, it's not going to be satisfying all the time, it's still gonna come up short.

But I do believe that the idea of work is a blessed given thing that use can be and should be an act of worship. And other than that, we have fun every day doing it. But I'm really grateful to be a part of something that I believe in and going forward. So passionate about like landscaping? No, passionate about building the team and the people that are around here and providing a good service and working with bro Haley and Felix and Lea, Azar and Joe and Leroy and Vanessa and all these people. Yeah, super passionate about that. I love it.

Brock Briggs  28:52 

The people that I listened to that talk, like you say similar things. And I think that my takeaway has largely been that. You may not always be passionate about what the specific thing is, but there is an intangible thing that you're optimizing for personally. And it sounds like yours is impact. You really enjoy the impact that you get to have on your customers. Like as you get the impact of growing this team and positively impacting their lives. You enjoy that. And I think that in good entrepreneurs, they are chasing something that is qualitative. It's not like, oh, I'm really passionate about like this specific act of work because on a long enough time horizon, you're not going to be doing that. You know, if you start out a lawn care company today, you're going to be mowing lawns. Maybe you really love to mow lawns.

If you want to mow more lawns, you can't mow lawns like it's you eventually kind of graduate yourself out of the business and I think that those bigger more qualitative elements seem to be an interesting trait that I'm picking up on in some successful entrepreneurs that I've talked to. We're about 30 minutes into it. So now it seems about the most appropriate time to kind of get your introduction. You've hinted that a couple things, maybe spend two to three minutes talking about what lands you here today and maybe up through your acquisition. You said, private school, Texas A&M, us the Marine Corps  and then buying a business, maybe kind of fill in a couple of those gaps and bring us up to speed and we can roll from there.

Nolan Gore  30:31 

Yeah, let's see if I can make it more interesting than I did before, which is gonna be a challenge. But I'm born and raised in Austin, Texas. I'm bullish on Austin. I love Austin, my wife, Mrs. Old Austin. So at the constant tension for us because I like the opportunity to, was in Austin before Austin was cool. So born and raised small, classical Christian school, which they really focus on teaching you how to think and not regurgitate knowledge. So I was not at all. I mean, I was prepared, but not like I was not good at like standardized tests and stuff like that. I was much more it's like every week classes, sit around a table and have a discussion and argue your way through anything, including like math and science classes, went to Texas A&M. And I was a finance major, decided to, I went and worked at Wells Fargo and the bank for summer.

And it was so miserable that I called the Marine recruiter at like, I remember standing outside and the recruiter actually said, hey, sure, you probably wanted to call an officer recruiter. That's how incompetent I was. I had no idea what I was doing. And so he pointed me towards another. So thankfully, based on my general interests and I went and talked to him and got in the Marine Corps. I think it might be interesting to talk a little bit more about how it shows the military, at some point if it's interested in you, but we'll move through that now. Aside from just fact that I hit the bank, went to the Marine Corps, did for just four years and had a really great experience and in fact, had such a good experience. It was part of the driver of me getting out. I knew I was gonna have a worse experience by today, then I got to be a fantastic bass, meaning I was in California, living on Texas taxes.

I knew I was gonna end up in Twentynine Palms or North Carolina. It's not terrible but compared to Twentynine Palms, it wasn't going to be as much fun. I wanted to be as close to the NCOs as possible. And I was an engineer. So the farther I progressed, the more of a staff officer I was going to become. That was not interesting to me. I wanted to be in the field with corporals and sergeants and below and I wanted to really, I liked the physicality of it and I just knew it was gonna become less physical. I also got super lucky with the assignments I was in. I got to deploy really fast. I got to be in Iraq as a first group and interact after the ISIS stuff. It wasn't exactly kinetic. But it wasn't exactly boring, a bunch of rocket shot at us, but I never was actually looking at a bad guy in the eye, which is a good thing.

If you're most Marines and I still feel this, sometimes we wish that we would have had a little bit more opportunity. But when I am wiser, I remember that it's actually good thing that I didn't, I got to go and do a big exercise in Oman as well. And my boss got hurt right before he went to actually get to be in charge of the security delegation to Oman, where I was in charge of 100 plus guys, for that 60 plus days. And I mean, fantastic leadership experience. Again, I was doing things that shouldn't have been able to do, I knew that I wasn't going to have the same opportunities. And I knew I wanted we had our first daughter, and our first kid and I wanted to get back closer to home. And so my wife actually wanted me to stay in. And it wasn't like a strong argument. But at the end of that, I decided, we decided that we were going to get out and we came back to Austin.

And like that kind of mentioned earlier, this company kind of fell into our family's lap. I have. There's a guy named Golden, who was running it day to day. He was not one of the owners, but he was really good friends with the owner. And we gave him ownership when I came in. And we were equal partners. And when I came in I was 20 between 2017 and 2016. Again, doing one and a half million. And since then we had some really significant sites in 2020 around COVID not because of COVID. But around that time by, again, by God's grace, we came through that season and bought out his majority share. So I now own the majority but he's still a really fantastic business partner to me, and I still treat him as an equal. Since all that happened. We've had three more kids, like I mentioned earlier, so I've got four kids and my world generally revolves around about 15 minutes from here.

So I live 15 minutes from work. I work 30 minutes from home. I go to church 15 minutes from home, my kids school typically minutes from home both my mom and my parents are 15 minutes from us. My best friend is basically down the street. That is the as the life we're in the plan going forward as I'm kind of doing this for a long time. I plan on raising our our kids and seeing where God takes us whether it's in this business or not. doing something else. I'm tremendously passionate about leadership development, I'd love to talk a little bit more about that, what we do specifically in the businesses to do that. And so I spend a lot of time around younger guys, specifically, but sometimes your junior gals that are looking to grow in business and we spend a lot of resources and time helping them get there.

Brock Briggs  35:19 

I would love to get into you buying this business. I always think it's interesting when you've got a second party that's involved, especially as like another owner of the business. Can you maybe like, unpack that a little bit? Talk about maybe why that was a good or a bad decision. And maybe with the benefit of hindsight, what you would have done differently knowing what you know now?

Nolan Gore  35:46 

Yeah, so first of all, I'm just a kid coming out of the Marine Corps. We don't have any idea. I know how to make money, right? Like we can, the way my dad talks about, I think it's actually a pretty good analogy was like when you have someone go through like the NFL Combine, you know, which guys ran the fastest, who have the did the most bench press and squat the most the biggest hands, whatever, like, this guy's got all the intangibles. But those guys don't always translate to actual player like good players, right? And like, you end up with those Tom Brady's like and maybe he kind of sides but we'll take a risk. And it turns into Tom Brady. So we have that as a great story about one of his first ops guys had checked every box would come back to your question. I'm sorry, but I'm excited with the store, checked every box, cleared his desk every day, was extremely organized, great communicator, weren't making money.

My dad couldn't figure it out. He ended up having taken a job to move with his wife back to Oregon. And his number two was like a field guy didn't even have a high school degree. And he's like, I literally looked at him, you’re in charge until I find someone else. And the next week, they started making money. And it was not organized. And it was like a little bit sloppy. But the guy just knew how to run a business, like just run his little portion of the business. Like I know, like, number one of the top guys in a $100 million company, never finished high school. But he had it, right? Whatever it is, he had it. He looked at me and we said, oh, he's got some pretty big hands, he can run pretty fast. And he's got a good legacy and his dad played pros, but you know, we don't know if he's gonna be any good. So we're gonna take a huge risk there, right? And here's the opportunity. Let's see.

So it wasn't and it was a very significant financial risk for me because I put all of our savings into it and borrowed some money to make it happen. But it was like borrowing from my dad, so I wasn't putting our livelihood really at risk, that was going to be uncomfortable. Colton had been running the business. And he had a track record of helping customers. I mean, I say they were losing money. They were sneaking along, right? They were surviving, but barely. I mean, at first glance, it looked like a weird decision to put somebody else heavy on top of that structure. We decided to take a risk on it. So it was a coupling me with someone that had a lot more life experience and specifically experience in the business, right? And so that was really wise and worked out really well for the beginning. And my first task was just like, figure out how to make money. Like no, no, you gotta cover your own costs. Like, that's how I'm gonna do.

I came in there. We treat each other as partners, like, I'm gonna raise prices and find expenses to cut and not pay myself very much in order to figure out how to like, survive this first year while I get my feet under me. And we figure out which of our roles better fits. He is much more operationally focused. He's system oriented, he's organized, he's task driven and I’m much more big picture. I'm more employee focused for a long time. He focused on today and tomorrow, and I focused on everything else. And I worked really well for us. In the end, a great quote that applied to why we ended up having to do what we did, is that it was not better. It was not that one general was better than the other. It's that one general is better than two. Again, it's not that one generally better than the other. It's that one general is better than two. And so we came to this point where we were just fighting like cats and dogs and not his fault, that in many cases, it was my fault.

I wasn't a great communicator around some of the things that were driving him nuts and vice versa. And we got to this point where we realized like one of us has to be in charge here. But there was also some misalignment from what was needed from a financial perspective. I had little kids, he had grown kids. And so what he needed from that perspective versus what I needed and what I wanted to pour from the business versus what he needed to partner with. Were not aligned. And we realized we could solve both of those issues both the leadership issue and the financial issue in the short run at least, by me paying him a significant chunk of money to buy out a bunch of his shares and become the majority owner and therefore the de facto leader.

And to his credit, he's done a fantastic job of being number two and I felt very comfortable being number one and another one super that a lot of people are suited for. They want to be in number two. And that's not better or worse. It's who you are. That's okay. So we went ahead and did that. And you know, we could have been far from a perfect system, but much better. And I'm really, really grateful to have him around. We still fight and we had uncomfortable conversation this morning. But that's normal. That's life, right? I guess we just spend so much time around each other. And I see him more than my wife a lot of days, right? So

Brock Briggs  40:28 

Need to find a way to get along with as much time as you spend with them. As you talk to other junior people looking to buy a business or maybe looking at another acquisition or something similar, do you recommend that people partner with somebody whether that be in an ownership format? Like, I don't know what your guys's split was, but if it was 50/50, is that in your best interest if you're maybe not as familiar with the business? Or do you think that eventually it's going to come to that point and maybe you should just rip the band aid off and pull the trigger on just taking it all and figuring it out? Or hoping that you can figure it out?

Nolan Gore  41:10 

I think it is a unique relationship that can manage 50/50. I think like I said, I think it's important to have a leader. The second thing is, if you're going to look at partnerships, you have to look at some really important things. I think writing those things down about what I mean, actually, Gartley had a really good thing on this on Twitter the other day about like a two pager from a partnership perspective on like, let's talk through all the important things before we go to legal. I want to hold this property for over 10 years. And he's like, oh, I want to do two years like, oh, okay, we shouldn't do this. So like, out what is your goal? I would even work through it. But we both have like, we want to grow really big. If we both wanted to like go into the backlog, neither one of us had a, we are misaligned there one of us like I only want to get to 5 million and I want to coast. Whereas no one wanted to just keep pushing that would have been really uncomfortable.

So like, what is your vision for the company goes? What is your personal vision of what you think you need to be making from a financial perspective? What is your vision from a geographic perspective? What kind of hours do you expect to be working? All those things that you're doing currently does a good thing of breaking out that thread. Those things are really important. Secondly, you have to have a really different skill set, I think. You need to realize otherwise, why are you doing it. It needs to be beneficial from a like golden, again, goal is really systems oriented, is really do with detail oriented, and not. And I need that, in order for me to reach my full potential. If he was a lot like me and had a lot of my personal issues, then we should go we shouldn't be in the same team, we need to be reinforcing each other. And we do that really well. And if you don't do that, then you probably shouldn't be partners with someone, I think goes without saying.

But I will say if you don't have very similar worldviews and moral alignment. You're gonna have some pretty significant issues come up. And then the last thing I'll say on this one is, even if you love and trust and respect the person, without question, you should still pre fight everything. While emotions are still good. You should talk about what happens and paper up what happens if the shooting happens? What I was going to show you thing happens? How do we handle this thing? What happens if I die? What I like was to work through all those things while we're thinking clearly. And we still have a vision of everything working good. And let's just hope they never need it. But if we do, I want to know what the answer is before we get there. And we were almost at that. I mean, we use those documents to help us resolve a lot of things and that is a really hard time. I was so thankful to have it.

Brock Briggs  43:50 

I think you highlighted some really good things there. Just getting not just a verbal agreement. And like because it's so easy to kind of fall into talking with a friend even about like something that you want to start together. And you know, like, oh, we'll just do this. And we'll make this big thing. But the reality is, you guys largely have different views or likely have different views about how things ought to be handled.

And especially like, hey, maybe even if the business isn't a success, you still need to know like, hey, when in their head, they wanted to get to a certain point and then just kind of lifestyle business their way out of it and just chill. You know, that's something that you might need to know. And like you said, did you call that pre fighting?

Nolan Gore

Yeah

Brock Briggs

I like that. That's cool. Just hey, if I die or you know, we have a fight over this, this is how we're going to resolve it kind of a System 1 System 2 type of thinking. You were saying that you guys had complementary skills. Did you know that at the time?

Nolan Gore  44:54 

No, super lucky

Brock Briggs

Just lucky

Nolan Gore

Again, I didn't know what I was doing. And I think my dad just felt comfortable throwing me to the fire.

Brock Briggs  45:02 

It's worked out well. So you could thank him for it.

Nolan Gore

Yeah, absolutely. I learned a lot.

Brock Briggs

How do you think about finding people with complementary skills to you now? Is that to do that successfully, does it just a matter of knowing where you're weak?

Nolan Gore  45:17 

Well, so can go in multiple directions, right? Like, it can go in this, like how you work in process but it can also go in like a hard skills perspective. So I had lunch with a guy yesterday, who was an engineer, trying to do his real estate deal. And I was like, hey, man, I don't know how to do this development stuff. But I can be a tenant that will pay the bill. I'll pay the bill, you figure out how to add value. What do you think? And like, that is another way to look at it. And we'll look at it now more, I've got my guy sitting right over there. He works through it, we both make each other way better. And I plan on that being my guy for a while, pending, something crazy happened. And we're going to be on this road together for a while.

As far as like other individual deals that help benefit our company, etc. That's when I start looking at hard skills. Now, again, something else we could talk about, if you're interested, it's like I believe pretty strongly in incubating businesses rather than starting or buying. I think that people don't talk about incubating near enough. Now, when that comes to pass, I'm gonna take some of my young guys. I'm gonna send them out or I'm gonna start something internal, and then spin it out that that's when we're gonna have to start thinking about their skill sets and what kind of partners we need to find for them. Or if they can lean back on the mother structure for those skill sets as they grow.

Brock Briggs  46:36 

Have you incubated anything so far?

Nolan Gore  46:40 

We have started other service lines internally, which I don't consider incubating. I consider just building service on that. We started an irrigation department internally. So when we really needed and it made sense. And that was a whole story in itself, figuring out how to pull that off because it's licensed based. And so how do we get all that taken care of and holding the personalities and all that stuff. But what I have seen work really well is my dad's janitorial company spun out a window washing company and a surface refinishing company over the last bunch of years. And that was really, it's been really powerful. So they leveraged all of their back office and relationships, created a new company, started off very small. The person that ran it, they purchased a small window washing company. And then they started providing this service to clients that were already on their books, right?

It's the same billing processes, the same people they're calling people. Customers know most of them as the janitors, hey, we're also doing window washing, isn't that cool? Let's do it too. At first, they started subbing it. And then they got to where they could do it all internal. And now they clean like 70% of downtown Austin, the high rises are the guys on the ropes that are dropping down the side of stuff. They're their own standalone. They have their own back office, they have their own culture. They don't even office in the same company as a junior portal anymore. They have their own relationships. Some cases, they have different relationships. But it was they were able to take a really high powered young guy that sat not literally at the feet, but in the same office as my dad for years, figured out how he did things not from a systems perspective, but more from a relationship perspective, some system stuff and go when they needed to.

And it's been very successful. They're now doing it with security company, the surface refinishing is going really well. It's not going to be a huge business, but it can be a really good business. And, and so I think that we'll probably do a similar thing here. Because we do residential landscaping, I think we'll probably eventually get to where we're running a fencing company, I think we'll do fencing and decking. And we'll eventually do a pressure washing company or a fertilization company or a pest control company or whatever it ends up being. I've got 4000 credit cards in my system. There's a lot of power there. And a lot of people that trust us. We have the ability to leverage that into a much easier way of starting something then just going and starting with a fencing company. Brand reputation, only the customer list, the trust, all that stuff makes it way easier to start that kind of thing and it wouldn't in any other way. So we'll probably do that. I don't know if that'll be it'll be dependent on how fast we grow and whether or not some of my young leaders are itching to go do their own thing or they want to stay under our wing for a little bit longer.

Brock Briggs  49:35 

When do you think about is the right time to be looking for opportunities like that? As you said, like it's you want to be like kind of established and make sure that you can deliver one service really, really well. But as you said, it's probably hard to not look at other opportunities where you know, maybe you're mowing a lawn or something for a client and you know, there's a different company that's they're washing the windows or, you know, they're doing something that you're right there next to them. And maybe you could be doing that too. Is it, you know, listening for when the customer asks you? Is it a certain size and scale that you think about? How do you go about thinking about that process?

Nolan Gore  50:18 

I think a big part of it is the people, right? If I had a pest control guy from Houston show up in my office tomorrow, I knew his friends and trusted him because I had some depth of relationship there. And he's like, no, I want to start a pest control business. I’ll do it tomorrow. Some of the guys that are happier one day in particular, I think can really know a couple guys who folks should do, but I think it really ruin things for themselves, they still probably need a couple of years of experience of people managing people developing their skill sets and stuff before they're ready. And a lot of that's going to be every six months we have a conversation and you still just want to be here.

And now I understand that someday you're not going to want to be whether you're doing your own thing or you want to go back to law school or whatever you're gonna want to do, it's great. I want to support you, let's just do it really well. And so at that point, if they want, like, you know what, I really want to start something I'm sick of working for you. I'm like, okay, let's, let's do it together. Because we built the depth of trust, you understand how I work and I'm willing to address risk a little bit of my reputation on you. I'll bet on you. And I'll help you do that. And that's the kind of thing I've seen my dad do for a long time where the risk in the short run looks like it's not very smart because you're putting a lot of money and energy and capital into something. But in the long run believing in that person relationally and financially can really make sense.

Brock Briggs  51:43 

So you think about it more so from a perspective of less about the opportunity set but more about the leader to go and take on a challenge like that finding a skilled or has the potential to be a very skilled operator.

Nolan Gore  52:02 

Yeah, I also think it matters tremendously. But the leadership and stability of the company we're already running, right? If it was just smooth, and man, we're just making really good money. And they don't need me day to day. And like the best thing I can do for everyone here is don't figure out the next opportunity for the company. That's a different question, right? Like I just expanded to a North location this year. I've been wanting to do it for four years. But this year was the first year I had the leaders in place internally that I felt comfortable doing that. If and when I had those extra people and I’m like, when you're ready to go do this thing and the rest of us, it would be sad to lose you but it's better for the world for you to go do this. I'll push them.

Brock Briggs  52:42 

I think now might be an interesting time to kind of like ask you about the business as a whole. As you look at it, maybe can you give us some figures in terms of like size? You said I think you were doing a million and a half in sales when you took over the company, maybe talk about the growth that the company has experienced under you. And then maybe what have been some of the biggest challenges that you've hit in the process of trying to grow that?

Nolan Gore  53:09 

So we now did 5.4 last year. So by again, my perspective on the world is like really skewed, right? Because like my dad has built the landscape can be to over 100 million, right? So like I've us is literally anybody. But you look at the random guy on the side of the road, that's mowing lawns and done pretty well for himself and has three crews and he's doing a millionaire. That's really impressive already, right? So like, they look at me and they think, wow, they're doing it. They're really big. I look at me and think like, yeah, I'm not even close, right? But we're gonna be we're gonna be if we're not already I don't, there's really no way of telling the biggest residential landscaping company in town. I don't think that's, I'm gonna, I wrote down a year ago that we're going to be in the top 100 landscaping companies in the US. I think that's very realistic. I'm actually not, it's like graduating. 

For me, I was at an expectation, I was gonna graduate from college. That's not to say for some people, that's like a really big deal for me, it wasn't because I just there was no question that it was gonna happen. I just never thought about it twice. I don't know how my life's gonna change when I reached that point because that's just kind of my expectation for myself. So, again, I think of us at 5.5. And I'm proud of where we come to. But I have a full expectation of us doubling every four years. The way that we got from one and a half to five and a half. It's not there's like if people are giving you, maybe this is my own incompetence, but generally at this size business, there's so messy and fluid into people based and stuff that like it's hard to project how you get that next million except just keep doing the thing better. And keep doing more of it and figure out how to find the next piece.

So we added irrigation that's now going to be this year. I hope it's not going to be 400,000 hours, but I hope that it's gonna be at half a million dollars. There's a chance that's so cool. That's a whole half a million dollars revenue that we wouldn't have had we not done that thing, but it was kind of rocky to get there. This year we have traction, it's just so it's a breath of fresh air. We've been saying it for three years, this year, we're gonna, I'm tracking that personally, this year, we're gonna shit, that person. And we've got the team in place and the leader in place to really make that cook. And we got the experience to really make that cook. So that was a big thing from a growth perspective. I love, I'm not like a marketing nerd in that, like, I don't go and look at all the things I do look at some of the analytics and all that stuff. I love building a brand and like communicating with customers and communicating internally.

And at the end of the day, if you answer the phone, which a lot of companies don't do and you're doing your say, gonna do, we do the vast majority of the time, so if we screw up. People appreciate that at a fair price. And we're gonna go. I'm also very aggressive from a pricing perspective. And that's been very helpful. So I've got a half, we're on pace right now at 20% for the year over year. So that would put us at 6.3 or four for next year and that'd be for this year in 2023. And I'd be really pleased at 20%. You know, I'd like it'd be a little bit higher, but again, our life circumstances, I mean, if we can pull up 20%, this year, I'm gonna be really, really proud. And we're really, really pumped up to have the same exact facial expression

Brock Briggs  56:13 

What you're looking at is what I guess back with 20% growth or 100% growth, like it'll be this is what you see is what you get. In that type of business where or how do you think about a mix of volume and price growth? Because there's only so much that you can charge for. And in any service business, you know, one of the pluses for the consumer is there's a million lawn care companies. But as you highlighted, there's a million lawn care companies or maybe you know, 75% of those don't pick up the phone when you call them. So there's opportunity there. How do you balance unit growth and charging aggressive pricing?

Nolan Gore  56:59 

One, there's not a clean answer, right? We push it, right? Like we've just pushed it as much as we can. A lot of is, if you're going to call it strategy, was based on what I can get away with, right? Like, I'm not saying like, sure, I'd love to make 75% margins. That's just not gonna be reasonable unless I have some sort of cheat codes from an efficiency perspective, which I haven't figured out yet. For mowing, let's call it for mowing, that's just not going to reasonable. So it's like, alright, well, I just told the number, right? Like, alright, well, for sure, we're gonna see we're gonna make 50 bucks an hour mowing. And I went and ran this, the numbers on the data because my business partner again can’t handle all the data. And I said, okay, these all need 25% increases. Oh, shit, it's gonna be really hard. Those phone calls were uncomfortable. We kept a lot of them, you know.

And so we pushed it. Next year, they're gonna go 35 or 35 dollars for me now. Like, that's how I thought about it. Now we're up to 65 plus. And that's how I price things from a modeling perspective. Everything's a little bit different. But I've got I actually, I don't think they have it in here. But I have like a poster that is a joke poster that I made. That's like just repeatedly different ways of saying raise prices, just like that's the answer from a financial perspective in a lot of ways. I also just am really very careful about how I communicate with customers around raising prices. I made this infographic last year when everyone was talking about inflation all the time, right? It's funny to me that we don't talk about it anymore, but whatever. And I took a picture of me with a lawn mower, some gas cans, some plants, a truck and I made labor 18% over last year, truck 33% over last year, plants 25% over last year, gas 100% over last year, that was when the gas went up.

And I sent it to customers and said, hey, I want to work with you for a long time. The only way I can do that is if I raise prices, otherwise I die. But the only way I can do that also is if I provide a fair amount of value for what you're paying. So this is me telling you, I have to charge this and I hope you accept it and if not, that's okay. You can go somewhere else. But I'm telling you, those people are not much better than me and they're gonna die if they don't raise their prices too and you're gonna end up coming back to me. And we've had really really good success over the years raising prices with that general methodology of attacking it very specifically giving them like inflation as a buzzword not useful. Inflation as an infographic that shows what everything changed in price. Very useful had a lot of people we have more people respond with. This is so helpful. I wish everyone would talk like this. Thank you so much. I accept it, have a good day than we did with I'm going to quote find out their service.

Brock Briggs  59:36 

No, I like that because the customer is not thinking about every guy on your cruise saying hey, like groceries are getting kind of expensive. Can I get an extra dollar an hour? Or you know, when you go to fuel up like all of a sudden gas is 50% more expensive, literally overnight. Like they're not thinking about those things. They're just associating with the service and not all of the other things that need to go into that. I think the general monetary you want to be increasing in excess of the inflation. But that's the time to pass it down to the customer when you have all of these other things. And that's how you continue to make more money. And I think that you're able to do that when you provide a good quality service. You're gonna have a hard time. Either they won't leave because they know you're good. Or they will leave and then they're gonna go try somebody else and then they're gonna come back. So

Nolan Gore  1:00:29 

If you don't mind, let me tell you a bit of our leadership program because I'm really proud of that.

Brock Briggs  1:00:32 

That was going to be one of the other things we're definitely going to talk about today. So yeah!

Nolan Gore  1:00:38 

Okay, cool. You want to go there now? Okay.

Brock Briggs 

Yeah, let's do it, though.

Nolan Gore

We run this thing called Leadership Academy. And I'll tell you the origin story there. Well, I'll start with the origin story. So 2020 happens, no one's getting jobs, right? Because COVID in the whole world is terrified, still and we believe that you can get COVID from the Amazon package that was left outside for two days, right? And we got to, I was literally at the office the next day, right? You can't mow laundry. Like nothing changed in our life. Except, I mean, we still showed up to work. A lot of people weren't remote, etc. all the things, but I was on the phone with my dad. And we were thinking, man, shit, there's a lot of really good college graduates that would never think about service world, that we can maybe go get. Let's see if we can do it. So we hired this girl. And we said, hey, go find really cool college kids. And we'll make a curriculum.

And we're going to run them through our businesses, multiple businesses. And so this is what it now looks like. And this is our we're about to complete our third iteration, we're hiring for our fourth. So if you're out there looking for small business experience, look up leadershipacademy.io. Or if you're just curious, go look at and you can message me on Twitter and I'll send you resources and stuff. But what we did is we basically rotate them through three businesses. We got a coalition of businesses. Right now it's our landscaping business at 5 million. The window washing business at about 3 million. It is a fertilization company at about 16 million and there's a landscaping company and about 100 million next year. We're going to add a surveying company, which I'm really excited about Frank Rivera. He's going to be great.

And you go through these verses, you rotate up about three months at each of them, you start at the very bottom. And we're very explicit about how physically grueling this is. You start at the very bottom, you might like a top choice, you mow lawns for weeks. But then you move into some more of a logistics role and then a problem solving role. And we have a schedule and it always gets screwed up because of the needs of the business. At the big business, though, is that the 100 million dollar business they have different departments that they spend time in for over that time. But again, even then we get screwed up because they need you in HR. So you get showered with HR for solving that problem for a while. These are very smart, competent kids or kids is the wrong word.

But like we're talking about, like master's degrees, talking about Deewan athletes, like SEC track stars type stuff like these are really impressive, folks. My communication department has a master's in law from Northwestern. Like, that doesn't make sense for him to come work for us. We convinced him to and we've provided a place for him to grow and challenged him. Anyway, you go through those three rotations, but at the same time, you're doing a tremendous amount of leadership development stuff, too. So you read 25 books in the year. You mentioned type one type two thinking, they read thinking fast and slow. They read all the classic business books and our goal is to give them a doctrine or bait like a doctrine, the base knowledge that everyone talks about. If you're gonna listen to podcasts or read other books, like what books do all the other books refer to, they refer to good, great, all and we're gonna refer to Nassim Taleb, all of them are going to refer to Daniel Kahneman and Thinking Fast and Slow.

We also give them a whole bunch of core knowledge around like entrepreneur business stories. So they're going to read Made in America by Sam Walton. They're going to read Shoe Dog. They're going to read other practical, useful business books like Voss’ book on negotiation. They're going to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. They're going to read the Constitution. And every single one of these books and articles, they're going to write about what they learned, they're going to apply it to the current business. They're going to take practical lessons and accounting, in Excel, in personal development and strengths, quests and all this stuff. And we pay them while they do it. And how do we do that is because once a recruiting effort, we're getting really good recruits for the long term.

The majority of people still work with us after the program. Not all of them, you have good relationships everyone's gone through. But a lot of them still work with us. And then two, they're doing work like this is all need more labor. And so while that person is practically more expensive, from a day to day perspective than the guy that you can get to Milan's typically, they're also problem solvers. So they're flex players, which gives a lot of value. When we need things done, they can get a lot of things done. So not only has it been really effective from a recruiting and practical perspective, we've really impacted a lot of lives, going back to the impact thing. This is what I love to do.

I love having these conversations about what's your gift and what's not, what do you like working in a $5 million business, you like working in $100 million business. Let's find the right place for you. And I think that when this thing is 10 years old and we've got 100 people that have gone through this thing, the network there from a time perspective and a skill set perspective, whether they're in the business or not, whether all over Austin running different things are part of different things can be exceedingly powerful. And really, really special. From a relationship perspective, we have some really good retreats and really good meaningful conversations and relationships built. So it's something we're proud of.

And that's one of the reasons I got on Twitter in the first place was trying to share that stuff, which I always believe that most. There's not enough ways for young people to go and taste small business before they see eta and a headline or the silver tsunami and a headline and think, Hey, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go buy a business, I don't know, if you should buy a business, you haven't done anything in the business, all you've done is ibanking ibanking. Isn't that all the same? Like, how are you going to handle it when your guy comes in and tells you as cargo showed up, which is what happened to us yesterday, you don't know until you go and feel it and you bow like that you need to go see if it's like so you can what it's like so you can see if it is a good fit for you. And then if it is, more power to you. You've got all the tools you need in your toolbox to succeed in that.

Brock Briggs  1:06:17 

How much do you pay these kids or college students? Or, you know, we’ll call them kids, I'm probably right in that same category of people. But how much are you paying them?

Nolan Gore  1:06:28 

So we started 50. And then I think I would arguably probably add 10-15 worth of education on top of that, essentially. So it's enough to survive. But my general thesis to people in their 20s is that 20s is about learning. And the ROI on learning is going to be far higher than dollars if you can get that in your 20s. And so while these folks could, almost all of them, every one of them, assuredly could have gotten paid significantly more. It's the kind of personality that does long term thinking and likes the physicality of it that comes and succeeds.

Brock Briggs  1:07:04 

I think that you've really laid out a good thesis for why it's good for you guys. Like and it's obviously, it will be good for them. Okay, I was gonna say, like a hard sell to say, hey, come and do this, like, what is it that they are saying? What are they hoping to get out of it?

Nolan Gore  1:07:23 

Yeah, yeah. So, I really felt this mindset, the way I did it, I have this like visual in my head, there has to be an overlapping zone, right? If our companies, we're only going to pay them $0, of course adore that to us, like we would get all the value, you're going to pay them 100,000, of course, it'd be worth it to them, right? Like no brainer, we've got to find this middle ground in a place that adds enough value to them to where they're deeply grateful for the experience and that we get enough value other than to justify running the program, right? That's hard and that number is different for every human. We've had a lot. I mean, I had a conversation yesterday with someone that was in the program. Ultimately, it didn't work because of that price point, right? And you based on their life circumstance and what they were looking for in the world to go somewhere else.

So we tried to find a place that we think overlaps that well. What we get out of it, I've already taken what it is we're looking for, I'm not just looking for someone this year, I'm just trying to break even this year because it doesn't make sense for me to pay one that kind of money and go mow lawns fairly poorly, right? Because I suck at the beginning. What makes sense for me, if I can find someone that's going to be running the next business in 10 years. I find one of those people is totally worth it, right? If I find three people that are going to work here for three or four or five years and help build it while they grow even farther, that's totally worth it for me. But for them, you go and you search Indeed and you search LinkedIn, you look at development programs, there's nothing out there like this that we've seen. If you find it great show me I'd love to talk to him because I want to share resources.

But there's no other place where you can go and look at a company that's $2 million and a company that's $100 million in the same year. There's no other place where you can go and look at what the very bottom role looks like all the way up to getting. I don't even know if I mentioned we get speakers almost every week or every other week. People all across the community that are running organizations or have extraordinary resumes or so much wisdom that like there's not anything out there that has this kind of thing. And frankly, really, we're a community that really cares about you and we communicate that really well and that you and it's not just what we communicate with our words, but you're going to talk to anyone that's gone through the program. They consistently hit on this thing that Nolan and Josh and Chris and Alex and Allie and Townsley and all these people that are the mentors and coaching students think.

They are here in large part because they care about you if they don't. Why on earth would I spend this much time away from my kids? And I want my kids to see me doing that. So I'm willing to give up that much time and energy because I believe it's a worthwhile thing. So they get a tremendous amount of value and experience and to maybe they're lying to me, but I think it's accurate, they need to come out of it. The last assignment, they have a kind of a tee up here for what their feeling is, they have to write their own eulogy. And go to a state cemetery and read it to each other out loud. And so processing what you want your life to look like with a community of people that you've worked your ass off with for a year, around people that care about you and care about the community and tremendously push you harder than you feel comfortable with is a very valuable thing. And we've had really cool results from it and tremendous relationships built through it.

Brock Briggs  1:10:51 

That is fantastic. That is so cool, as you highlighted, like not only such a great and positive, unique experience for a high achieving young person looking for kind of a different perspective. But as you said and also kind of mentioned earlier, you're seeding your own pipeline of like, hey, we need business leaders. And that allows you to kind of go serve this irrigation company and allows you to go, you know, maybe more opportunities come up. You've got the people, the ones that stick around that are proven and they've kind of gone through the process. I really liked that eulogy thing. What are some other things that you guys do in the program that are kind of like that, that are a little bit unique?

Nolan Gore  1:11:31 

I mean, I already mentioned it, there's just not many things in the world where someone forces you to read 25 books in a year that we know are good, right? So like I read a lot. I primarily listen to books actually, based on my learning style and availability of time because I layer things, but I wish someone forced me to write out my thoughts on every single one of these things. So I'm not disappointed enough to do it. And so they have a forcing mechanism that makes them do that. Or they look stupid to the whole group because we send them an email on Monday saying, hey, Bob, you're the only one that hasn't sent in your writing assignment, do it now.

And, you know, just accountability from that respect. And so I think that's a tremendous value add, we pay for them to have the audible and the physical book of every one of these books. And they have their own running assignments. We have these buckets of like, practical skills that they're learning, which I told you, again, as an accounting book, an Excel book and structure of a business kind of conversations and efficiency conversations. And then we have some self development stuff like strengths finder, and a bunch of things like articles and stuff like that. And then we have like, practical, soft skills like we make can give speeches, we can give a business pitch. And there's, I think there's six buckets of those kinds of things. So

Brock Briggs  1:12:53 

For all those other SMB owners out there seeding their own pipelines, this is definitely a unique program. But I know a lot of folks out there that are training kind of those up and coming leaders kind of instilled in them. And those kinds of cool exercises really get you thinking.

Nolan Gore  1:13:11 

Yeah. I mean, again, send me a message on Twitter and we'll email you a lot of the book lists and the questions we asked both of the writing assignment and the discussion conversations. That's why we're here.

Brock Briggs  1:13:22 

Yeah. One last question on that. What is the reaction? And how does the integration of these individuals work with the people who are in the business? Is there ever weird clashing there? Well, how exactly does that go down?

Nolan Gore  1:13:40 

Good question. It's important. It's very important to have champions in the businesses at the beginning that believe in the thing and what trust them. But to some extent, we throw them out there, right? Like you're on a crew, you have a much higher standard than the rest of them on the first day, right? Like, you can't show you've got to perform at a really high level, you got to learn really well. And also, here's three things I want you to think about throughout the day. I, by temperament, have done internship programs and stuff. So like all my guys are used to this kind of thing. They're used to the guy coming in and I'm sure eyes will roll a little bit, but we've had enough good people come through that. They now understand that these are our good saying they have to kind of do a little bit of babysitting at the beginning.

But again, can pick lawn mowing pretty quick. What I think, I suspect, actually don't suspect I know is that when you're a crew member, you'd rather be led by someone that's done it and you'd rather have you got the guy was telling you hey, go do two more houses. I need you to get these done. It's way easier to take that feedback from someone that you've mowed next to than it is from like the guy on the opposite in AC that you know has never done the work. And so from a credibility perspective, I know it's really I know, it's really, really good from a long term cultural perspective. But yeah, there's some, there's some eye rolling stuff. There's some additional babysitting that's done. But I am the one that advocates for it. So they know it's something I care about and I go inside for each business handles a little bit differently.

Brock Briggs  1:15:22 

Nolan, this has been a really, really fun and enlightening conversation. One of my last questions here for you would be if we were to take away one thing from Nolan Gore and implement it in our lives today, what do you think that would be?

Nolan Gore  1:15:37 

I mean, most importantly for me, is that there's this, so most importantly, big picture and then kind of practically for the audience, I'm gonna answer with two things. That one, I'm sorry, not that sorry, I'm gonna do it. I think that most people's exposure to Western cultures, Christianity has been a watered down shitty moralistic therapeutic morality. And that is not at all what Jesus intended. And it's a gritty, hard, beautiful, raw, say, I love sharing that with people. That's what's most important to me and to my family. As far as practically, I just really believe in this developing young leaders thing.

And just really think it is a good thing for the world and tremendously rewarding relationally. And I believe it is already showing that it will be tremendously rewarding financially. And I think people love the Berkshire Hathaway's of the world and the index fund investing, but just do it for a really long time, it'll pay off. But people don't do the same kinds of things with relationships. We're quick to cut things that are not profitable in the short run. And we're slow to invest in the really long term of business leadership development. And people need to do that more. That's a really, really powerful thing that people don't have the resources or the ideas to go do or talk about near enough. I think if we did that, the world would be better and have more fun doing it, too.

Brock Briggs  1:17:26 

I think that everything that we talked about here today and everything that you shared really exemplifies. And I think that you really do a good job of driving both of those points home, so I appreciate that. What can myself and or the audience do to be useful to you?

Nolan Gore  1:17:45 

Ah, I appreciate that question. I'm gonna go take a chance on young folks, man. It doesn't mean tell them a slog. It doesn't mean let them do shitty jobs. It just means actually believe that they can do more than you think they can and call them out when they don't because honestly, if we went and just said this program was super shiny, we'd have a lot less interesting people do it. But because we go and say oh, let me tell you, you don't you probably shouldn't do this.

You're probably not tough enough. It's probably going to be miserable for you. Those are the people you want. So one, if you know one of those people, send them to me. Two, if you want to do some of yourself go do it where we'll send you some of the resources to do it because I believe in that. And the best way again to contact me is through Twitter. It's Leadership Academy or just Nolan Gore. And message me and me or I believe the girl that runs the program now we'll send you the star. I mean, that'd be the best way you can help us.

Brock Briggs  1:18:43 

I'll include those links and your info in the show notes. Nolan, I really appreciate your time, man. Thank you so much.

Nolan Gore

Yeah, absolutely.