Hardscape Insider Podcast

1.) Aaron started Ageless Concrete in 2006 with a friend who had concrete experience, but the partnership dissolved after 2 years.

2.) Hiring and retaining a good team was a major challenge, especially during the winter months when concrete work slows down. 

3.) Mastering job costing and accurately tracking labor and material costs was a game-changer that allowed Aaron to start making decent profits. 

4.) Incorporating overhead costs into his estimates was another critical step that helped Aaron price jobs profitably. 

5.) Focusing on a niche of custom concrete and outdoor living spaces, rather than trying to be a generalist, allowed Aaron to position Ageless as a premium provider.

6.) Developing a marketing strategy, including a strong website and branding, was key to generating consistent leads and closing sales.

7.) Aaron created an estimating software tool called Creek Quote to streamline the sales process and improve his closing rate.

Speaker 1 (00:01):

Okay, welcome to the Hardscape Insider podcast. We’re here all about building success in the hardscape industry. I’m your host Brian Basic owner of the city of law, hardscape marketing. After spending 20 years in corporate America, leading sales organisations and scaling and selling my own home services company and launching a marketing company, I discovered my passion helping hardscape contractors grow and dominate their local markets. Each episode will bring you real life success stories, expert interviews and actionable strategies to help you take your business to the next level. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale, we’ve got your insights, ideas, tools to turn your business into a market leader, and we’re going to do that and have some fun along the way. So let’s dive in and start building your success. This is the Hardscape Insider podcast. Hey, this is Brian Basic with the Hardscape Insider Podcast, and I’m so excited about today’s podcast.

(00:51):

I have a good friend of mine, Aaron Es from Ageless Concrete. He’s volunteered to join us and I really appreciate you joining us today. I’ve been excited about what we’re going to talk about today because I think it’s going to be really important to a lot of the business owners that are in our audience today. So again, thanks Aaron for joining us today. Absolutely. No. So what I’d like you to do is, I know a lot of people don’t know who you are, not a lot, but I know many of the folks on this podcast don’t know who you are. So maybe you can just give a brief description of your background and how you got into concrete, which is kind of what you do with leading ageless concrete. So go ahead and take it.

Speaker 2 (01:30):

Absolutely. First of all, honoured to be here talking with you, Brian, really appreciate the invite. Your podcast is awesome. I’ve seen a lot of your episodes so far, and man, just throwing down some serious knowledge, so that’s awesome. But yeah, guys, I’m Aaron Ness, founder of Ageless Concrete. I’m from Madison, Wisconsin. Our niche is really creating outdoor living spaces, stamped concrete hardscapes, and really creating custom outdoor environments. Oasis is, that’s really my passion. We do all the classic concrete too. We do a lot of driveways through the years. We’ve done a lot of all the traditional concrete as well, but really our passion is in doing colour and stamp concrete.

Speaker 1 (02:17):

And so how long have you been doing this?

Speaker 2 (02:19):

This will be my 19th year in business, so yeah. Oh 6, 26 years old. I started my concrete company with a good buddy of mine, and yeah, we’ve been rocking and rolling 19 years now.

Speaker 1 (02:35):

And so really that’s one of the major reasons that I wanted to bring you on. You are a veteran, not only a military veteran, but you’re a veteran in concrete. You’ve been doing this for 19 years, I think you started what, in 2006? Is that right? If I do my math right?

Speaker 2 (02:49):

That’s right.

Speaker 1 (02:50):

And so tell me a little bit about, I knew you were coming out of the military, if I remember correctly, came out of the military and just kind of fell into this. And so how’d you get into this and how did you start?

Speaker 2 (03:01):

Yeah, kind of a crazy story. I really didn’t have a concrete background. My good buddy from the Marines, he was from Dallas, Texas. He moved up to Wisconsin where I’m at, and he was framing houses. He’s like, nobody’s doing staying concrete around here. Okay. He’s like, we should do it. I’m like, alright, well, I have an entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve always been a hustler and always trying to make money. Even through high school and through the Marines, I would always have some kind of little hustle going on. So I knew I was going to own some type of business. That was my passion. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be real estate or if I was going to be in the trades or what I was going to do, but he’s like, we should start a concrete company. And I’m like, alright, let’s do it, man. You know how to do the concrete. I’ll run the business, let, let’s go. So that we had nothing and we had nothing to lose. So off we went.

Speaker 1 (04:01):

It was you and him for a couple years and then I think he ended up going somewhere else and you kind split at that point in time. And so what did that look like? And then how did you kind of hire your first guys? What did that look like and how did you kind of get started from a Manpower’s perspective?

Speaker 2 (04:19):

Yeah, so we hit it hard for the first two years and concrete is definitely a team sport. So we started on our own, but we very quickly recruited all of our buddies that just, we were in our twenties, so there was lots of the bros were still around, just kind of figuring out what they were going to do in life. So we were like, come work with us. We’re getting a free workout, getting a tan, working outdoors. So we just recruited our friends and we found one really good guy that had just recently moved into the area and that was it. We had a small team and we were rocking.

Speaker 1 (05:04):

So how long were you able to just, you and a couple guys just do that before you thought, you know what, I need to add some folks if I’m going to really grow this thing. And so how long into your venture did you think about growth and adding some folks?

Speaker 2 (05:22):

Yeah, so the partnership dissolved after two years. So personal reasons, my body, and we’re still close to this day. We still talk all the time. We split on good terms, but he had to move on and I was left with a choice. We were two years in, we had X number of dollars in debt, we had x number of dollars in equipment that we’d accumulated. So the business was literally worth nothing. So I decided

Speaker 1 (05:52):

It’s easy to split nothing, right?

Speaker 2 (05:54):

Exactly. It’s like, okay, hey, 50 50 partnership, let’s dissolve evenly. Okay, you get nothing. I’ll keep the name and all the hard work that’s about to come down my path. So yeah, at that point it’s like, okay, my main man in the field, my business partner, he’s gone. So for me it became very real. I needed to learn concrete more than just running the business side of it and definitely needed a team. It’s always been about a team for me because I didn’t come from that spot of, I worked for x, Y, Z concrete for 10 years and then I jumped out on my own. We just kind of dove in full blast. So team in hiring was huge and for me, and I was very fortunate to have some good people that I was able to recruit right away that first year after me and my partner split

Speaker 1 (06:51):

One even more hardscape business tips, insider knowledge and network opportunities. Join our hardscape contractors mastermind on Facebook, connect with other hardscape business owners, share your success stories, ask questions, and get exclusive content from our guests. It’s a free resource designed to help you grow, learn and network with other top contractors in the industry. Joined today by searching hardscape contractors mastermind on Facebook or clicking the link below the show notes. Now you live up in Wisconsin, and so how does that work during the winter when I think all concrete comes to us, halt. And so how do you retain good people when for a good chunk of the year you’re under snow before and you’re not doing any work. So how does that work?

Speaker 2 (07:36):

Yeah, keeping good people is definitely a huge challenge, especially when you’re doing hard work, you’re seasonal and people just fight out. Just they don’t want to do anything anymore. So let alone pushing wheelbarrows and raking concrete and all that. So for us early on we got into snowplowing. That’s the go-to thing that everybody, all the tradesmen, everybody ploughs. So that, I did that for a lot of years and it used to be able to count on the snow up here. You could set your watch to it. I mean it would snow a few times in November and all of December, January, February, little bit in March, you could count on good income coming from snow, but it’s not really the case anymore. We’ve had just less and less snow every year. And I actually got out of doing snow probably like three years ago. And man, honestly that was the best thing I ever did was get out of doing snow removal. It is good money, but it sucks, man. You’re on the clock on call 24 7 all year round.

Speaker 1 (08:44):

You’re pushing snow when people aren’t up yet, right?

Speaker 2 (08:47):

Oh yeah, you’re on when people are up. You got commercial accounts. We were doing big stuff, man. It was crazy. But that’s kind of the one thing. And I also got into doing basement waterproofing was another thing that, so yeah, we were doing drain tile systems, crack repair, stuff like that. So I really take pride in trying to keep my guys busy. And so we pretty much do whatever we can. We do some inside concrete too, but we’re mainly residential remodel with our niche being the decorative side. We hit a really hard slowdown when it comes to winter,

Speaker 1 (09:27):

But on the opposite end of that is when the weather breaks, you got to be all hands on deck. And so you’ve got to start prepping before season so that when you start going, you’ve got jobs in the queue so that you can go full bore from March through November, right?

Speaker 2 (09:44):

Yeah, exactly. And how the guys get by now is really, and when I quit ploughing, I made it optional. I’m like, how many of you guys actually want to plough anymore? I knew a lot of ’em hated it my guys. And they were like, I had two guys raise their hand, I want to keep ploughing. Alright, so we did it for one more year and then I’m like, are you guys going to come back next year? Do you have enough money to make it through winter? If I lay you off, are you going to come back? And they’re all like, yeah, you pay us. Great all summer, we get the overtime, we got great pay. And that’s really what it comes down to now it’s just I think you got to just pay your guys, you got to pay ’em more than they’re worth because more than the perceived value of them because the guys are so important. And that’s how we get through winter now is I try to just pay my guys so good through the summer and really have all this work lined up for ’em. So we’re getting overtime on a pretty regular basis and the guys are really banking some money for eight, nine months and they’re able to just kind of chill for a few months, collect a little unemployment and have that cash reserve stored up from a good year.

Speaker 1 (11:02):

So tell me how many years did it take you to be able to say, yeah, I’m doing this now I’m making money because a lot of guys in your position go hand ’em out, they’re making just a little bit of money, but really not enough to really grow the business and that kind of stuff. And so how long did it take you to right size the ship, get it moving in the right direction where you could take a deep breath and say, okay, now how do I make this even better? How long into it did it take you to do that?

Speaker 2 (11:30):

Yeah, it took me a lot of years to figure out the business side of the business. I started off by saying, yeah, I’ll take care of the business. You do the work, but I didn’t know shit about running a business. So there’s so many things that you don’t know that you don’t know. So it took me a lot of years to really actually start making money. And I think a lot of contractors and now the more as I get more into helping other contractors and sharing the systems that I use to make myself successful and our business thrive, and the more guys I talk to, the more I realised this is so widespread that guys just really don’t know their numbers. And it took me a lot of years of making mistakes of just getting to the end of the year and just like, where’s the money?

(12:17):

I owe the tax man, he’s telling me I made money. It’s like, okay, I paid myself for eight, nine months, but now I got to pay my tax bill. I owe 40 grand and there’s not 40 grand sitting there. So I had a lot of really lean years man, where it was not glorious to be the business owner. I mean it straight up sucked a lot of times. So it’s really when I started getting a good enough team and trusting the guys and being able to delegate that I was able to actually work on the business, not in the business. And that sounds cliche, but you really got to work on the art of being a business owner to understand what it’s going to take and what you need to do to actually make money and to put a number on it probably took me five, six years before I actually started making decent money.

Speaker 1 (13:18):

And so I just want to pick up a couple of key things You said number one is you got to the point where you could rely on your team that you hired, you had enough faith in them that they’re not going to just kill the ship and just run it around, right? They’re going to do a good job and it allowed you to then focus on the business. And what were the one or two things that you focused on that is the difference between success and failure for most concrete or hardscape guys? What is that?

Speaker 2 (13:46):

Yeah, the number one thing that I did that was just the light bulb going off was job costing.

Speaker 1 (13:54):

So explain that a little bit more because that’s a big deal.

Speaker 2 (13:58):

Yeah, job costing is huge guys. It is not that hard to do. What we did was we basically printed off a very simple sheet that had the customer’s information on it and then it’s got all the specifics of the job. So for us doing concrete, we’re talking about how many loads of material did we haul out, how many loads of gravel subbase did we bring back in? Obviously the big stuff like volume of concrete rebar, and then the big thing was tracking the labour and how we broke it down was by crew. So set up crew, three guys, six hours pouring crew the next day and this is the stuff the poor men are filling out or you if your main guy. But once I broke it down and created the system of, look guys, this is what we’re going to do. We got to keep track of these numbers, you guys need to keep track of these numbers for me.

(14:59):

And then after each job I was taking my estimate, I got a deep Excel spreadsheet that I break down every job cost and that’s actually how I put together my numbers. But you balance that out with the real cost of the job versus what you actually estimated at. And what I was finding was I was way off in the labour. The materials are easy, but it’s the labour that I was underestimating, the actual labour that it was taking me to complete the jobs and that job costing was the, it just blew my mind. I’m like, oh my God, I under business by two grand. It’s like, no shit. No wonder you’re not making any money, you’re not bidding it, right?

Speaker 1 (15:43):

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(16:30):

Then you’re missing out on so much. You’ve got to really refine your estimating tool so that you can be really in line. Otherwise you’re just seeping through. And so also it helps you understand, you and I were talking about this before, the guys took four hours to get there to do this job. This was an hour job. Well, they went to the gas station, they did this, this, and this. And so you can have other conversations with them about how they’re spending their time, but at least you’re tracking that stuff and that’s so important because you’ve got to know, did I make money on this job or did I not?

Speaker 2 (17:05):

Yeah, exactly. And it goes so deep because especially when the economy’s a little tighter for us, it feels like the economy’s a little tighter right now. We still got a good back load of work, but you can tell people are, they’re not spending money. The covid years when it was just like, name your price, get here, you got to work a little harder right now in 2025 than you did in 2021. So knowing what is your floor, what is the lowest you actually can charge? That’s huge When you’re in a negotiation and you want the work and you need the work and you need to know, okay, I’m at break even right here, if I go any lower, I’d rather go fishing than lose a hundred dollars to go do a little concrete repair,

Speaker 1 (17:59):

Right?

Speaker 2 (18:00):

So knowing your numbers is so huge.

Speaker 1 (18:03):

So not only is it important for the estimating, but tell me a little bit about the overhead and the importance of including overhead in your estimates in order to make sure that you’re covering all your costs.

Speaker 2 (18:17):

Yeah, so you asked about two big things that made a huge impact on what took me from kind of scraping by your average guy to shooting into seven figures and holding there for a decade plus. The first thing was job costing. The second thing was calculating my overhead and applying that to my estimates and putting a section or a portion of the overhead into all my project estimates and proposals I was sending out.

Speaker 1 (18:49):

And you can probably tell you’ve been around where you’ve seen estimates and you walk into a job and a guy says, Hey, I got this estimate from another guy and he bid it at this. And you’re like, dude, he is going to lose his shirt on this thing. I know what it takes to be there and I know how big his crews, they’re the same size as mine. He’s going to lose his shirt on this. So you walk away from those kinds of jobs and say, Hey, you know what? Business is business. I understand that, but I will not do it for that because I’ll lose money, right?

Speaker 2 (19:18):

Yeah, exactly. And when you know that you have say $120,000 a year in overhead, you got to cover 10 grand per month. You have to cover 10 grand per month before you actually make a dime of profit. So if you take a $10,000, say your small crew, you could do 5,000 or say you could do I $5,000 a week or whatever. If you don’t add that extra $2,500 a week to cover your 10 grand a month in overhead, you didn’t actually make any money. So you might feel good about yourself and you say, oh, I made 20% profit, I charged extra 1500 on that job. Well, if that was a week long job and you needed to cover $2,500 in overhead, you actually lost a thousand dollars on that job because your time material plus your overhead equals breakeven, then you start making profit. And when I figured that out, that was a game changer for me.

Speaker 1 (20:21):

And so as you look at, and I’ve seen people who have done this and done it well, when it comes to being able to explain the job and the costing of a job to a customer, they know their numbers and somebody who knows their numbers and can sit down with a customer and say, Hey, this goes this, and so here’s the deal, here’s what it’s going to cost. I’ve seen ’em get a premium for that because they know what they’re talking about and the customers understand that and say, I’d rather go with a guy that’s higher because I know knows what he’s talking about. I know he’s going to cover all of his costs. He’s not going to come back and say, Hey, I underbid this is the deal. He knows this stuff, and so I’m willing to pay a little bit extra for guys who know their business. Right?

Speaker 2 (20:58):

A hundred percent. Yeah. I just went and met with a lady the other day and she, she’s like, well, I got a bid for six grand. And I’m like, okay, most of our jobs start at 10 grand. And she’s like, oh, him and it haw. And by the time we have the conversation and it’s like I’m explaining things that we do and it’s like, well, we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that. And she’s like, well, he didn’t say nothing about that. I’m like, we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that. Oh, he didn’t say anything about that. And by the end of it, the same job. You got a guy that’s won two years experience charging 6,300 and I’m at 10,700 and I get that job.

Speaker 1 (21:43):

So the good thing about what you’ve just described is your value and you’re willing to sell value, which is what you need to do,

Speaker 2 (21:50):

Right? Yeah. That’s the only way if you’re going to, I came out saying, Hey, our niche is custom concrete. We love doing outdoor living spaces, custom stuff. I love hardscapes, I love fireplaces, fire features, outdoor lighting, outdoor kitchens, all of that. But you can’t come out and try to be the value guy in that space. You just can’t make money doing it. It takes time to build quality stuff. So you got to sell the value and the quality, and that all comes together with your branding, how you package yourself, your company, and it all ties together. But that’s really what it’s about is break away from the commodity, separate yourself from, oh, well, you’re the same as this guy. No, I’m not the same as that guy. Here’s why. And that’s really how you could get out of the trenches of, shit, I barely could pay my guys this week and everybody’s talking me down in price and all that. That’s the difference between that guy and the guy that’s just killing it and making the proper profit so that you can reinvest in your equipment, in your guys, you could pay your crew what they need and you have nice stuff and it all comes together. It’s all full circle.

Speaker 1 (23:12):

I did a podcast a couple series ago and the guy was Jeff Everest from Paver Productors, and so all they do is paver ceiling and paver restoration. That’s all they do. So their niche is very narrow, but yet he’s the premium guy, just like you are the premium guy when it comes to stamp decorative concrete and outdoor living type of things. That’s your niche. And so the more you can focus instead of doing everything now, there are times when you have to do everything, but when you can really niche down and you can prove yourself as the expert in this field, people are willing to spend extra to be able to do business with an expert. Just like in healthcare, if I’m sick, I’m not going to go to, I have a heart issue. I’m not going to go to my general guy, I’m going to go to the cardiologist because I know he’s an expert in what I need.

(24:00):

And so that’s what people want to do. If they’re going to, especially if they’re holding onto their money a little bit more, they’re going to want to know that when I do release my money, I’m releasing it to the best guy available, which is going to be you. So can never be ashamed of being that niche guy, being the best in that area because it only makes sense to do that. So tell me a little bit about, from your perspective, how long did it take you to scale to seven figures? You’ve been in business for 19 years. How long did it take you to do that?

Speaker 2 (24:29):

Yeah, I was trying to remember what year we first broke through, but I think it was maybe my seventh year, sixth or seventh year in business when we broke in and did a million in sales. And yeah, that was a goal of mine. That was a goal of mine for a lot of years and I was so far from it and it really took me a while to figure that out. But it’s a cool benchmark to shoot for if anybody’s not there yet. I’m sure you’re thinking about it, but I actually got a cool little way to figure that out, which was huge for me to really actually break through.

Speaker 1 (25:12):

And so what was that thing that you figured out to break through?

Speaker 2 (25:15):

So if you want to hit a million dollars a year, you got to start with your goal, then you got to work backwards and figure out what is my average cost per job? How many jobs can I do a week? And then you got to figure out, okay, so a million a million dollars divided by 12, then divided by, so that’s how many I need to make per month. Then you divide it down by week, how much do I need to make per week? And then you divide, how many jobs can I do per week? And you say, okay, and there’s my number. So once you break, you take your goal and you break it down into bite-sized pieces and then you actually have something tangible to shoot for. That’s what it took me to actually break through when I had the daily number I got to get. For me, it was because we worked eight, nine months, I had to hit 33 or $34,000 a week to break a million. And once I knew that it changed how I bid jobs. If I only do $23,000 of work this year, or excuse me this week, I’m not on pace to get my goal. If I don’t hit 33, 30 $4,000 in a week in sales, I’m not going to break a million.

Speaker 1 (26:28):

Today’s episode of the Hardscape Inserter podcast is proudly brought to you by Ageless Concrete, the trusted name for premium, concrete and outdoor living solutions. Whether you’re looking to add texture to your concrete surfaces by getting one of our stamp patterns, or you want to completely redesign everything around your home, including putting a pool in, the folks at Ageless Concrete can set the design and bring it to life. Don’t be satisfied with boring surfaces and outdoor living spaces that don’t fit your lifestyle. We can make your outdoor living space dreams come true. We handle everything from design, installation, lighting, and regular maintenance. We do it all with over 55 star reviews. Ageless Concrete is a go-to choice in Dane County. Visit www.agelessconcrete.com today to get your free estimate and take the first step towards giving you the yard of your dreams. That’s such an important thing.

(27:18):

I actually put together a spreadsheet and I give it out as part of one of my webinars that says, once you identify your goal, do everything that you just said, the goal will be divided in 12, then you’ll figure out what do I need to do monthly? And then more importantly, what’s my average job size? And then based upon my average job size, how many jobs do I need to do per month to hit that number? And then what’s my close rate? And so once I can figure all of that stuff out, I know how many leads I need to get at that close rate at that average job cost to hit that number. And so those are really important numbers for people to understand because you’re just shooting on the dark unless you have targets. And that’s one of the targets that we try to get folks as quickly as we can.

Speaker 2 (27:57):

Exactly. You nailed it on the head because the part that I described about how many jobs do you need to do per week to hit a million, that’s one half of the equation. And the marketing component is the other half of the equation, which you nailed on the head. How many leads? How many people need to enter my funnel to convert to site visits? Then I can close what’s my closing percentage, and then what’s your average cost per job? And then it takes, and how many jobs can you do a week? So it all starts with the marketing plan and how many eyeballs can you get on your company and how many quality leads can you get out of that attention that you’re attracting? And then on from there.

Speaker 1 (28:45):

So tell me a little bit, because marketing is one of the key things we’re going to talk about next, and that is, so you’re a very successful guy. You’ve now been about a decade and seven figures, and so marketing’s been a big part of your journey there. And so how did you figure out, I mean your website’s good, I dunno if it’s always been good, but you’ve obviously invested in your website, you do Google ads, you do other things to make sure that you are figuring out how do I get those leads that I need in order to hit the numbers that I need to do? And so tell me a little bit about your marketing strategy, what you’ve done and how important that was for your success.

Speaker 2 (29:20):

Yeah, marketing is everything, guys. If you want to build a company that’s worth anything, you have to have a brand, look at all the big brands out there and their packaging is tight, everything is uniform. You got to be, it is not just about the digital side or just about having a company t-shirt. It all has to come together. So for us, it started with yard signs and a cheap website. I actually built my first website straight from GoDaddy website builder, and I think they called it website tonight or something like that. In oh seven, I built my first website and no one had a website then. So for me it was this, I’m like, this is no brainer. Everyone was running, this is the phone book was the dominant place, and there was three phone books in Madison, Wisconsin. So for me, that was crazy money.

(30:16):

The guys that had, they had full two page ads in the phone book, they were paying four or $5,000 a month. And to me that was mind blowing money. I was just like, holy shit, I could build a free website. And I was dominating online, I mean, dominating. We were doing 50 jobs a year that year, but still started with a good website. My website, it is the digital showroom. I look at the website as a very, very important tool that you need to have, and then all your branding goes along with that. So keep it clean, keep it tight, have your shirts, have your yard signs, have your trucks have your trailers, everything ties together and unifies your brand. And that’s really what we’ve done. And that’s been the biggest thing for us.

Speaker 1 (31:10):

And so you guys are now the market leader in the Madison area, is that right? And what you guys do?

Speaker 2 (31:16):

I mean, for stamp concrete, we get, I’m not going to say we’re the best, but we’ve been doing it probably as long as anybody else. And yeah, we’re good at what we do.

Speaker 1 (31:28):

And so where do you see your company in the next, are you going to grow a lot? Are you going to stay about the same? And I know the economy is what it is right now, but where do you see yourself in five years and how are you going to get there?

Speaker 2 (31:41):

Yeah, so the funny thing about being in business that I’ve found is that there’s always pressure to grow. Hey, the government gives you incentives to buy new equipment. You can get write offs if you do this. If you do that, you always, it always feels like there’s just so much pressure to grow, to build your business. But where I like to grow is on the bottom line. And that’s really what I’ve been focusing on, is really just dialling in our message and our quality and our service so that we can position ourselves as the leader and that we got, and then we rate the profit at the end of that, we can charge what other guys aren’t charging. So five years from now, I could see myself, honestly a very similar size as far as the company goes, but I just to be just hands down, recognised as if you want stamp concrete in the Madison Wisconsin area, you go with Ageless.

Speaker 1 (32:48):

And so that’s a great point. I mean, some people think that you got to strive for five, 10, 20 million of business. And with all of those, that growth comes headaches as well. Hopefully you can scale, but at the same time, profitability is key. And so if you’re making good money and a good living and you’re doing it at a comfortable level, you don’t need to significantly grow. I mean, you got to continue invest in your marketing and keep your place in the region, in the area, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I’ve seen guys make a tonne of money and just say, you know what? I do really well and I’m not going to franchise. I’m just going to continue to do this. And they become very good targets for acquisition towards the end. If they ever want to sell, they think, okay, people are looking for those kinds of businesses that are in the one of 5 million in revenue that generate a good bottom line, that you’ve got good infrastructure already there, you’ve got good people. And so anybody can buy your business because you don’t have to be a concrete expert because you have all the procedures and processes in place. Those are nuggets when it comes to acquisition. And so if you’ve positioned yourself, you built standard operating procedures, there’s guys know what they’re doing. Everybody has a job description. You’ve got people that come in and training and all that kind of stuff. If all of that’s there, you become an acquisition target. I don’t know if you’ve already had people, have you had anybody approach you yet?

Speaker 2 (34:09):

I’ve gotten some just random emails and it’s just so hard to tell if it’s scammy or I’ve gotten a bunch of emails that just don’t seem right. I haven’t had anybody make me a legitimate offer, but we’ve gotten solicited. But it’s just like from random nationwide companies. And if you’re serious, you’ll follow up. And yeah, I haven’t had any serious inquiries.

Speaker 1 (34:36):

It’s funny, here in Florida there’s a whole accumulation of different industries. There are guys who are aggregating roofing companies and plumbing companies and electrical and trying to merge not only those separate verticals, but maybe even merge those together. I can’t tell you, I’ve had two customers in certain verticals both got acquired by different national companies because they’re just trying to roll ’em up now. So who knows, it could be coming your way. So the other thing I wanted to tee up was you and I talked about one of the biggest issues with business owners is just time. How do I manage my time? How do I do everything that I need to do? And in your case, it’s so estimate intensive because you got to sort through all that kind of stuff. And so I know you’ve struggled with that and you’ve kind of mastered it now, and you’ve even come up with a solution to actually do some of that. Tell me a little bit more about, describe how you got there, what you developed and how that helps you.

Speaker 2 (35:36):

Yeah, time, money, and my biggest time killer in my business was running around doing free estimates because every time you leave the job site, productivity is going to drop. And you got to decide when are you going to go and do the site visits because to provide a proper estimate, you do need to have boots on the ground, you got to see the job site. So I was spending hundreds of hours every year doing free estimates, and I’m just like, what is happening? And I had a good closing percentage for a high price guy. I was closing in the upper 30 percentile of my actual site visits. But one year I did the math, I did over 1100 hours of free estimates. I think it was like 370 something estimates I did that year. And I had been keeping track of the time and average anywhere from one to three hours. By the time you add up the gas money, the travel time, the time with the customer, the time that you’re back crunching the numbers, sending out the bids, and doing the follow-ups, it takes a lot of time, especially on more complicated, not your cookie cutter jobs. So that’s when I was just like, enough’s enough. I got to figure out some kind of way to streamline this sales process. And that was kind of the spark that really lit a fire under me to build out Creek Quote, which is our estimating software that we’ve created.

Speaker 1 (37:12):

And so you send, now your sales process looks completely different than it did before. When you run around doing estimates, you now try to throw everybody through Creek Quote, which gets them a ballpark estimate of the job. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (37:27):

Correct. Correct.

Speaker 1 (37:29):

And you tell ’em that upfront. Hey, this is not an exact quote, this is a ballpark estimate. So those of you are just looking for a budget number. This will give you what you need. If you’re a tyre kicker and you want just kind of a ballpark, this will get you what you need. And so you kind of remove all those guys and now you’re hopefully focusing on those people that are, okay, I want more than just a ballpark, I want more of an estimate. And that’s where you spend your time, right?

Speaker 2 (37:53):

A hundred percent. So we actually built the system out. We tested the proof of concept in 2018. So I put my office manager, I rented an office in a strip mall, high profile area, and we would encourage every person that wanted a free estimate to come to our office, meet with our office manager, and she would give them, okay, what are you interested in? Okay, driveway, roughly what size? Okay, got it. Or a patio. Okay, do you want a fire pit? You like a seat wall? Okay, got it. And we had a rate card and we say, okay, here it’s going to be like say 10 to $12,000. Is that within your budget? And say, okay, no, that’s not alright, fine. I think, wait now, now we’re done here. Or Yes, absolutely. That’s totally within our budget. It’s like, okay, cool. Now we’re going to book a site visit with Aaron and he’s going to come out and do a free design consultation and roll in. I’ll show you all the cool stuff that we can do for you and design it and all that. So when we started doing that, my closing percentage went from the mid thirties to the mid eighties.

Speaker 1 (38:58):

Wow, that’s

Speaker 2 (38:59):

Unbelievable. And it was great because at first it was crazy. I went from meeting four or five people a day, anywhere from four to five days a week working on the weekends. I was like, bid, bid, bid. And every time I’ve gone, I’m leaving the job site or it’s the end of the day and I’m missing dinner, I’m missing my kids’ sporting events. My girls are in soccer and they’re swimmers and so I’m missing all this stuff to do all these free estimates for people. So when we got this system in play, the first beta version of it, I’m like, holy shit, this is crazy. I’m only meeting two people a day, but I’m closing two to three times the percentage of people that I’m meeting with. And that’s when I brought in some techie buddies of mine and that’s when we built the prototype of this and went digital with the exact same thing.

(39:49):

And that just blew the doors off of it. I was still meeting with, again, instead of meeting 20 people a week, I’m meeting seven or eight people a week. Instead of closing 30%, I’m closing 90%. Instead of making a 10, 15% profit margin, I’m making a 30% profit margin because you’re only meeting with the top 20% out of your a hundred leads that you’re going to get that month. I’m only physically meeting with the top 20% of those that saw my budget number, didn’t think I was outrageous, didn’t give you the middle figure through the computer and wanted to meet with me. And of those people we’re just slaying it.

Speaker 1 (40:31):

Wow, that’s incredible. And so you not only use this internally, but now it’s available to anybody. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (40:38):

Yeah. So 2019, I built out the digital version called it Creek. My buddy, actually my former business partner, he started his own concrete company up in Minnesota. He was our first user outside of Ageless Concrete. He was having the same exact success I was and once it worked for me in Wisconsin, it worked for him in Minnesota. We were like, alright, we got something here. This is pretty cool. So we actually launched it at the World of Concrete in 2020 and yeah, it’s for sale. It’s a subscription. It’s less than a hundred dollars a month for the whole deal.

Speaker 1 (41:17):

Right.

Speaker 2 (41:18):

So it’s pretty cool. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:20):

Awesome. Well you’ve been able to take a solution that you needed desperately for yourself and now share this with the rest of the industry, which is really cool. So I applaud you for that.

Speaker 2 (41:29):

Thanks man.

Speaker 1 (41:29):

Well listen, I appreciate it. Was there anything else? I’m trying to think if there was anything else that we wanted to talk about. I think that’s about it. So once again, I really appreciate Aaron, you being on the show today. I enjoyed our conversations on a regular basis. I know you and I are working together on some other things as well to try to help you improve your local presence there in Wisconsin and we’ll continue to work on that. But really appreciate your time and your experts sharing your expertise and hopefully the people watching this got out of the lot out of this and I’m sure we’ll have you back on the show in the future.

Speaker 2 (42:04):

Awesome. Yeah, Brian, thank you so much for having me. And hey guys, you’ve got to check out Brian’s book, cementing Success. This is an awesome book. It is a resource. Check it out. Brian is the man and he knows what he’s talking about.

Speaker 1 (42:19):

Alright, well I appreciate the commercial there. I do and we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks.

Speaker 2 (42:23):

Alright, thanks man. See you.