Culture, Leadership, and Sustainable Growth with John Watson

Jeff McLarty (00:07)
Ever wonder what it really takes to build a business from the ground up? Welcome to Owner’s Roundtable, where successful business owners pull up a chair and swap stories and lessons from their own adventures in business. From surviving their first half-baked business plan, the time they almost went broke, the time they got lucky, and the strategies and tactics they used along the way.

This isn’t about a polished success story on the company About Us page; it’s about the real story behind the business. The pain, the people, the setbacks, and the big break that changed everything. Each episode, you’ll sit down with the owners who’ve been in the trenches, build something meaningful, and live to tell the tale. Whether you’re starting out, scaling up, or just curious what it takes to go the distance, there’s a seat at the owner’s roundtable for you. Subscribe now on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m Jeff McLarty, seasoned entrepreneur, executive coach, and business trainer, and I want you to have your own seat with us here at the Owner’s Roundtable. Real owners, real stories, real insights.

Jeff McLarty (01:15)
On today’s episode of Owner’s Roundtable, we are happy to host John Watson, CEO and Owner of Eager Beaver Moving and Storage, Edmonton’s premier moving company. We’ll be hearing John’s insights into maintaining company culture, developing a scaling mindset, creating long-term sustainable growth and more. So pull up a chair and join John and I as we discuss the journey to earning a seat here at the Owner’s Roundtable.

Jeff McLarty (01:38)
Hello and welcome back. We’re here with John Watson of Eager Beaver Moving and Storage. For listeners that haven’t met you yet, John, do want to tell us a little bit about who John Watson is and what Eager Beaver Moving and Storage is?

John Watson (01:50)
Yeah, John Watson. I’m a third generation mover. So my granddad was a mover, my dad was a mover, and I grew up a mover. I tried to get out of this industry. Got out for about five or six years. But then I had an opportunity to essentially buy the business. It wasn’t doing much, my dad was just going to close the doors. And I just figured, Hey, well, why not give this a shot and see what I can do with it.

That was in 2013. So 13 years later, it’s grown quite a bit. We have roughly 25 trucks now. We have a hundred portable storage containers. And then we operate out of a 22,000 square foot warehouse that also offers climate control and storage. So, that’s where we’re at today.

Probably hovers between 55 and 85 employees throughout the year. Summer is our big peak season. It’s a very seasonal industry. We have to scale up rapidly every spring and then scale back down.

Jeff McLarty (02:55)
I think that’s a bit of a huge challenge with a seasonal business like yours, trying to find good people, working with them all summer, and then having to let them go at the end of the season. Is that ongoing seasonality a big challenge for you in the business?

John Watson (03:12)
Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely a challenge. Though there are some benefits to that challenge. One of which is that you kind of also get to be highly selective about who you keep on board

It’s a tough industry because it’s hard to get good, reliable, hardworking people that want to keep doing it. It’s very hard on the body. You got to really learn how to maintain your body if you want to do it long-term. Most people don’t want to do it long-term. So, yah, I mean, it’s hard to find those good ones.

But we have established this sort of baseline culture that–it’s almost self-reinforcing at this point. So that’s a huge advantage for us when we’re onboarding. If we bring someone in that maybe isn’t quite where we want them to be, our staff will let us know.

Jeff McLarty (04:03)
I think you hit on an important thing in business, thinking about how do you maintain a good company culture, making sure that those people that aren’t a great fit don’t continue to drag the company in a direction that you’re not comfortable with. How do you approach protecting the culture you’ve built there at Eager Beaver?

John Watson (04:25)
I think a big thing is listening to your people. Taking their concerns seriously when they address them. Sending a message when you have to by, you know, it’s that old saying where, I can’t goes exactly, but, it’s like your good people are not going to be good for very long if you keep bad people on board and keep looking the other way and let them do things that you’d never let the good people do and get away with.

So, it’s just making sure you take their feedback people that aren’t up to snuff. I mean, you’ve got to obviously have those metrics in place. You’ve got to be keeping an eye on the key things that you want your employees excelling at, and identifying those aren’t really maintaining those standards.

That’s why I say like, it’s a bit of an advantage every fall, to sort of identify those that you don’t want to continue on with the company and let them go. Because you’re slowing down anyways. You just make sure that you prioritize all your best people and give them all the hours and..

Jeff McLarty (05:35)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Can I ask you a follow up question? You’ve grown Eager Beaver from a much smaller company to a much bigger one. At what point did you start thinking about company culture as more of an intentional thing and less of a byproduct of just what was happening day to day? Was there a certain team size you were at where you really started to think, okay, we need to protect our culture and grow it in a certain way?

John Watson (06:03)
I think the first time I really gave it much thought was in, I think it was in the spring or fall of 2020. We hired a gentleman to help us implement EOS into the business. So EOS, of course, standing for entrepreneurial organizing system or something like that.

Jeff McLarty (06:27)
Entrepreneurial Operating system, if I remember correctly.

John Watson (06:30)
Yeah. So, you know, the book Traction, Gino Wickman. I had read it, but I felt I didn’t have a hope of implementing it without a professional to help us. So I hired a guy named Andrew LeMoine, and he was actually my first business coach. I’d met him back in the BNI days – probably 2014 or so.

And, you have these two days, they call them the vision building days and you really have to sit down and figure out what’s the vision for the company, where are we going, what are we really doing here? And that was when we really started to document what are the goals of this business? What are we doing? Where are we going?

Andrew put it like, you’re not inventing core values. You’re discovering them. You’re identifying the things that you already stand for. And one of the ways that you can do that is to think about, what is the best employee at this company? If you could hire 10 more of them tomorrow, you know, what are the things that make that person so great for the organization?

Jeff McLarty (07:34)
Is culture something you talk about internally or how do you approach communicating culture throughout the organization?

John Watson (07:43)
I mean, a big part of EOS talking about the core values. I mean, Andrew used to say like, sure you can get signs made and put them up everywhere, but that really is secondary. Like, the more important thing is to be talking about them all the time. Hiring, firing based on your core values. So, every year when we’re trying to identify who we want to keep on board or who we maybe aren’t going to keep, we run them through the people analyzer: gets it, wants it, has the capacity, meets all the core values.

So, there’s that. We talk about them. We used to do monthly town halls, now quarterly. Get up in front of the whole company. And one of the first things we do is go through the core values.

And not just list them, but define them. Every morning at the toolbox talks, we ask like “Hey, who can name the five core values?” and give them a little prize if-whoever can recite them. So just stuff like that.

The other thing I think we introduced about three years ago now was this award that we hand out every month. We call it the beast of the month award. It’s like that guy that he’s a beast, like he can pick up anything, and work anybody in the room.

And the way that award came about was a pivotal employee or hire that I made maybe two years into taking over the business was this guy, Ben LePage. He was 18 years old, just the hardest working guy you’ve ever seen. He didn’t look like he was like jacked or anything, but like he could just pick up three boxes at a time. Like he couldn’t even see his body behind them. And he would, like an ant, just walk up to the truck.

Like this guy just was nonstop work ethic. If someone was falling behind and they finished their job, he would be there to help them. He was that guy that like you write your core values around. And unfortunately, end up passing away in 2022, think it was. It was devastating when we lost him. And I wanted to recognize him in some way and recognize his contribution to really building his company and making it what it is, strictly from a culture standpoint

And so we just introduced this award. We named it after him. And, you know, we got these big kind of billboard sized things up in the warehouse. And when you win the beast of the month award, you get your picture up there beside Ben and – and you get a t-shirt commemorating the award. You don’t get this award you haven’t done something, if you haven’t spent a month, like really just exceeding expectations and just crushing it.

Jeff McLarty (10:34)
That’s amazing. I mean, it’s great to build that as a recognition and help demonstrate what great values look like. And that’s a great way to commemorate the past employee as well. So I compliment you on that.

Now that we’ve talked about company culture, I wonder if we could switch gears for a minute. One of the things I was curious about was your early experience with entrepreneurship. Before being the owner of Eager Beaver, you grew up around the business when your father ran it. What was it like being the kid of an entrepreneur – growing up around the business and then later taking that business over?

John Watson (11:07)
I can honestly say like, I don’t really think I thought too much about the fact that my dad was a business owner. Like, I didn’t understand what the significance of him being an entrepreneur and starting up a business from scratch really meant.

When I was young, from the time I was 10 until I was 18, like we didn’t go on vacations as a family. He just seemed to work all the time. He would be out moving all day. We might eat supper as a family, but then he was down in his office making his phone calls.

He was very technologically, challenged in the sense the most advanced piece of technology he had was a cell phone. So what he did was like a customer would call him during the day and then when he’d get back that night, he’d return all his phone calls. And he had this great big calendar at his desk with all of the days of the month on it. And he would write down their info on a sticky note. And then if they rescheduled, he could just lift it up and put it to a different date. And then he just – he didn’t know when he was out and about if he was free, because he didn’t have a calendar most of us now have in our pocket.

So, he would have to wait until he got home in order to tell them whether or not he was available that day. So, it was a very rudimentary way of running a business, but he made it work. He ran it for 20 years like that. When I was growing up, I was just this looks like the worst existence ever. You can’t take holidays. You’re always working, you’re working late into the night.

There’s not really days off, like everywhere you go, you have to be ready to answer the phone. So I – that’s why I ran the other way. I went through university. I did a degree in history, which, I don’t know what I was thinking I was going to do with it. But that’s just what I was interested in, so that’s what I studied.

And, uh, I worked for him all that time through university. As a worker in the moving industry, like, it’s so tiring. I used to nap any chance I got, you know, I could fall asleep anywhere. Ask my friends, like, you’d be talking to me and I’d drift off. So I would say that like my perspective on entrepreneurship growing up and then even into my early 20s was just informed by what I saw my dad was doing. It didn’t look inviting whatsoever.

And then, it kind of flipped as I got a bit older and, you know, I started to see other people, like some of my friends started businesses and all of a sudden I was like, that actually looks pretty sweet.

I do think I asked my dad like, maybe I should take this over. And he was like, ahh, I don’t know if you want these headaches. Too hard to find guys to do the work, and this and that. And I was like, okay, all right. And then a couple more years pass and now I’ve got a kid of my own and I bought a house, and now I’m kind of like strapped in for the ride in Edmonton and not going anywhere.

So I mentioned I was third generation. So, my granddad in Winnipeg had started Eager Beaver Moving in the early eighties. And he ran it until I think it was the late nineties, but by then he was in his early seventies maybe. And so he sold the company to this guy who had bought it for his son to run. And within one year, this guy had ran into the ground because he didn’t have a work ethic. Like he just thought, I want to be in the bar by four o’clock every day. And like, no, I don’t want to work weekends. If you’re working weekends, it means you’re making enough during the week. Within one year, every truck had broke down and they just closed the door. So my dad seeing that happen was not willing to let somebody tarnish the reputation by screwing it up.

I mentioned I, at 25, I left and I didn’t return until, around 30, when I just kind of realized like, well, what the hell do I have to lose? So I had another chat with my dad, and he was at that same time just talking about just closing the doors.

So yeah, like, I didn’t get the idea of entrepreneurship until I took over.I started to read the books, you know, the, the classics, the E-Myth, probably the most foundational one. And I saw my dad as that owner operator, you know, they don’t work on the business, they work in the business. So that was kind of my wake up call, like, hey, like, I gotta think about working on the business if I ever want to get off the trucks.

Jeff McLarty (15:50)
I think that’s a great story about how you got here. I love that you mentioned the E-Myth and going from an owner-operator to running a much larger business, and that mental shift.

For anyone listening that hasn’t read the E-Myth, that’s usually the first book I recommend to anyone who wants to become an entrepreneur.

I usually give it to them when they’re first starting out and then I say, come back in two years after you’ve suffered running a business a little bit, read it again and it’ll teach you a whole bunch more things.

What do you think the biggest transition is in going from the owner operator mindset to building out a business? What do you think is that key change or the biggest difference?

John Watson (16:24)
I mean, you really have to free up enough time to be able to work on the business. Like the entire first year, I was on the trucks. There wasn’t anybody else. So, I was my dad for the first year. The only difference was I was a little bit better at technology. I always joked that like, well, my family actually likes me being around. So I can’t spend all evening on the phone phoning customers. I got to book these jobs during the day while I’m out on the job.

I just had to be a little bit more, efficient with my time, guess. But yeah, back to your question, um, you have to go through that of time where you think like, even though I could do this myself, it’s going to take away valuable time from working on the business and figuring how I’m going to scale this or grow it or book a few more jobs.

Right. So, you got to just be prepared to hire people that aren’t going to necessarily do the job as good as you. I think the rule is like, if they can do it 80 % as good as you, that’s all you can ask for.

And be prepared to let go of the vine, so to speak, as Gino Wickman would say, and let them do the job. And one of the things I noticed was different about me versus my dad is that he liked to insist that the job was done one way and that was his way. And so he would hover and watch you and like, no, no, not like that, like this.

There’s more than one way to do something. As long as the customer’s happy, nothing gets damaged. I don’t care if you want to wrap a chair a little bit differently than the way I would do it. Or load the truck a little bit differently. Like as long as everything fits in the truck, there’s no need for me to stand around and watch and make sure you’re doing it how I would want to do it.

You’ve just got to be able to let go and, and empower people to the job and like, yeah, sometimes they’re going to make mistakes. But that’s just the nature of being in business, I guess.

Jeff McLarty (18:28)
I think you’re 100 % right on with that because until you get to the point where you can accept that somebody else is doing things maybe slightly differently than you would necessarily do them yourself. One of my favorite quotes that I always repeat is out of the book by Dan Martell called, Buy Back Your Time. I’m not sure if you’ve read it, but there’s a part in there where he says 80 % done by somebody-someone else is 100 % awesome. And I think there’s a powerful lesson in there about accepting work done by others and that if somebody else is doing it and it’s done to a standard that’s good enough for what your needs are and what the company needs are that frees up your time to spend or invest it in building out the company instead of doing the work of the company. And that is 100 % awesome.

Was there something that helped you get over that hump or was that something you just kind of always had built into you?

John Watson (19:27)
Uh, just being able to let go. I think it just came from being annoyed at my dad growing up, that like, he always insisted on us his way. And so I think to myself, I don’t want people to think that about me. Don’t get me wrong, if someone’s doing something wrong and I can see that it’s going to lead to a consequence that I don’t want to happen, then I’ll step in. Or if they’re doing something poorly, that’s totally different.

But I think by nature I’m like non-confrontational. Even when I was running my own crew, I wasn’t like a bark orders type of leader. So I think just approaching things a little bit differently than my dad did is probably what helped. I think fundamentally what I was able to do to grow this business is just attract people that wanted to work for the company. You know, to this day, people see what’s going on here and they want to work here.

Jeff McLarty (20:31)
Speaking of your people, in other interviews and a couple of places on your website, it mentions bringing professionalism to a traditionally blue collar industry. How do you help train your people to bring that higher level of professionalism that maybe sets you apart from some of your competitors? Is that something that just kind of grew naturally as you grew the company? Or did you intentionally set out to go in that direction?

John Watson (20:54)
Well, that one I can credit my dad for. Like that’s how I was raised: Do it right, do it right the first time. Use your whole ass, not half your ass. He was very particular and with local moving, there is tons and tons of shortcuts you can take. Long distance moving versus local – they are the same fundamentally, but then they’re completely different in other ways.

And so even the best long distance movers, who I would argue like are the cream of the crop, these guys are so professional. If they hear that it’s a local move, they’ll be like, ah, we don’t need to wrap the furniture in the house, it’s only going across town. So they’ll just carry it out as we’d call it dry, and drape pads over it in the truck. But my dad’s approach was just to basically bring that professionalism from a long distance moving truck onto a local moving truck. And so the guys that I started to attract as movers in the early days, that was our expectation. Like, no, you wrap it in the house. That’s what a professional mover does. Just ‘cause this is a local doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do it as professional as we can.

And I should mention that like early on, I also had my brother working for the company. And so he was pretty integral in instilling that in the culture as well. And like when we hired Ben, who was that guy I referred to earlier, Ben and my brother were just the green team. So it really just started early and spread from there. And then it eventually spread through all aspects of the business. You know, when we started to have salespeople, that was an expectation of a salesperson: you’re professional.

I joked about my history degree and how useless it was, but, I honestly credit like in the early days, my written communication was what helped us stand apart from the competition. Because I would write these professional emails that were eloquently written, and when I would do a proposal or something, it was all very well presented.

When I started to hire salespeople, I used to joke, I need to find some Bachelor of Arts graduates that don’t have a job because they don’t know what to do with their degree, because they’re the perfect sales people. Because they know how to talk. They know how to write. They can type fast. They can rattle off email communications. It just started right from the beginning.

I realized pretty quickly, not everyone’s like this. Not every moving company out there does things this way. and it just became our competitive edge.

Jeff McLarty (23:42)
Well that’s amazing. I mean having the clarity and understanding that that professionalism is a competitive advantage for you and purposefully maintaining that as part of the company’s value, that makes a lot of sense to me.

Another question I wanted to ask you. I’ve been wondering about when you launched into storage services and portable storage. That was a seemingly obvious fit for your business, but has there been opportunities that have come along that were hard to determine if they were a good opportunity or just another shiny object? Because we all know how much entrepreneurs like to chase a good shiny object.

When things come across your desk, how do you decide if they’re a good opportunity or a shiny object distraction? How do you decide what should come into the company and what doesn’t come into the company in terms of service expansions and things that fit well?

John Watson (24:30)
Portable storage. I’ve sort of flip-flopped multiple times on that one. I mean, that started out like a shiny object. Obviously there’s portable storage companies and there’s moving companies, but there was very few that were doing both. Like, Hey, this is a good way to stand out and like, you know, I’m gonna brand the shit out of these things and they’re going to be in every driveway in every neighborhood eventually.

And it didn’t really work out that way. And I found that like, it’s very capital intensive. These things cost a fortune. Just to like enter that market. I think it was about $400,000. And then you, got to keep buying them. So I stopped at, I think I bought a hundred units. It just seemed like a lot of money to spend for not a lot of profit.

The way I had to start thinking about it was like, well, no, but it’s a value add for our client. It helps them, and so therefore it helps us book more moves. But, as a consequence of that, well, it really isn’t a true storage business because we really only use them to help people move. A true self storage company..their goal is to have people just use it forever. Not enough room in the garage, so let’s get a storage unit so we can keep stuff there and then just pay for it forever. Whereas like, our type of storage is, fundamentally, it’s not the same at all as self storage.

It is a true value add for somebody that’s moving, but needs temporary storage for their goods.

One great thing for the entrepreneurs out there is that like, what this is allowing is, is I was able to buy some commercial real estate. And now that that income stream is stabilized, it’s not spinning off as much cash as say, investing in a couple more moving trucks would have. But it is paying down a parcel of land that, you know, will one day be worth something and, you know, a store of wealth and whatnot.

So, there’s other angles to it, guess, where it’s not just like, what is this going to add to my bottom line? I guess one distraction that I did succumb to that I could say that I regret a little bit is, you know, I’m always looking online for different things that’ll help the business. And one company I stumbled across was called Flatpack Containers. They’re essentially like portable storage units, but they’re made out of galvanized steel. And they come like panels, and then you can just assemble them quickly and easily.

They look really nice and they come in all sorts of colors. They’re powder coated and stuff. And so I reached out just to see like, oh hey, how much are these? And of course the guy, oh, you’re in Alberta. Like, we’re looking for distributors in Alberta. There’s so much demand there. And you know, our closest supplier is in BC. Are you interested in wholesaling? And I’m like…I don’t know, maybe like, what do I have to do? And he’s like, well just buy one container load, and we’ll put you on our site as our supplier for Alberta.

So I kind of hummed and hawed and then I was like, I know we can sell storage as a service, ‘cause I know we have the best service out ther. But I’ve never been one to compete on price. And when it comes to like selling goods, you know, you can be a little bit more responsive, but like fundamentally you’re selling a product. And so if someone has like, the same thing, but cheaper, you’re going to lose.

So I wasn’t going to do it. And then I was talking it over with my leadership team and like, they were kind of excited by it. So I’m like, ah, okay. Plunked down like $85,000 for a container of these things. It was 27 units in total. And that was like three years ago, we built out this website on top of our website.

And here we are like three or four years later and I’ve sold and I kid you not, think I’ve sold two. So yeah, not everything I touch turns to gold, that’s for sure. And that is a great example of a shiny object where it was like, it was a distraction from our core business of selling moving and storage services, because that’s a totally different client. Someone that’s buying container to store their goods in versus someone that just needs temporary storage.

Jeff McLarty (29:12)
So is that what you think you missed in that scenario or was there a different client profile or what do you think was the missing piece in retrospect?

John Watson (29:22)
A different skill set. When I think about like, where is my salespeople’s time best spent? It’s selling moves. That’s where our sweet spot is. That’s our niche. That’s our core focus. And so, do I want them trying to sell these things at like, the margin on them, let’s say it’s 20 %. Let’s say we had sold them all, we’d have to buy more. Like that’s a whole different, like buying inventory and selling it at 20 % margin. And that’s like, before you paid your commission and all this stuff. So. It was just not what we’re good at. We’re known for moving and storage, not for selling storage units. So.

Jeff McLarty (30:06)
I appreciate you sharing that. And I think a lot of times everybody sees from the outside all the successes they don’t see the missteps and the things that you have to learn from. And I think we’ve all had some inventory sitting in the back room that we wish we didn’t have, but that’s just the way it goes.

So can I ask, what’s next for Eager Beaver? I noticed you’ve moved to two locations and you’re now in Calgary and Edmonton. Are you moving on to another location after that or are you working on those two primarily now?

John Watson (30:35)
For now we’d just like to get Calgary… it’s a pretty small operation obviously compared to what we’re doing here. So yeah, I’d like to get that more established and get it running smoothly, get our sales funnel bowed in. Because like that is another, you know, that’s a shiny object where I haven’t given up on it yet.

And I don’t think I will. I’m kind of stubborn about that. Like, I’m sure that eventually that’s going to work out, but it hasn’t been easy. You think just ‘cause you’re successful in one market that it’s going to come in another, but it’s a totally different ball game. Going back to being like a scrappy startup. You know, we had become quite comfortable. We’re kind of the hometown dominator in Edmonton. 65 % of our business comes from repeat and referral customers or sources. And then to go from like, to having like zero of that almost and having to do straight marketing. We had to learn that because we just didn’t have to market here. We didn’t have figure out Google ads, pay per click and LSAs and all that stuff.

The other thing that we’re really focused on right now is, we actually started a commercial moving division last year. We hired a gentleman that’s been in the game for about 25 years. Very experienced, very well connected in that world, so like basically all of the major office furniture suppliers are now, we’re now approved suppliers for them. So we can do office installations. You know, if you’re opening a new office and ordering new furniture, cubicle systems, all that good stuff. Like, we’re now in that business. And we see that as probably the biggest area of growth.

And part of it is because, during COVID obviously everyone starts working from home, and that business essentially collapsed. Maybe collapsed is a strong word, but like a lot of the companies that were performing that service kind of went out of business because there just wasn’t enough work. All of companies selling these products, they do have in-house teams that can deliver and install, but on a fairly small scale. But now, with the government trying to get everybody back into the office and then, you know, a lot of corporations following suit, it seems like that’s going to be something where that grows quite quickly. And we potentially are positioned to capitalize on that and erupt to get people back in the office.

So yeah, that’s kind of the thing I’m most excited about right now is growing that commercial side. We just actually, we did a whole new brand identity for that side of the business. And we just got our first wrapped truck back on Friday last week and like, man, I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures. Like the truck looks epic. We’re going to be rolling up in these shiny green trucks that are like fully branded. Right across the whole top is “eagerbeaveroffice services.com”. So like, if you’re looking down from an office window and we’re parked on the street downtown, like you’ll be able to, oh, and I mean, I’ve never seen any company in Edmonton do that, which, not that it’s like this out of the box thinking or anything, but just stuff like that, helps us stand out a little bit.

Jeff McLarty (34:13)
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t take that much more effort. You might as well do the top of the truck and there’s not a lot of competition on advertising on tops of trucks. So that’s a great idea.

All right, last question for you. If there’s one thing or piece of advice you could tell someone getting into business that wants to grow and scale at a company, what advice would you give them?

John Watson (34:34)
I mean, how I feel personally is like, don’t be in this huge rush to try and make it happen all at once. You know, one of the things that happened in the moving industry, as a result of COVID, is everybody started moving around. Whether it was because they were starting to work from home, so their house wasn’t big enough, or because they were spending an awful lot of time at home, they wanted more space.The moving industry just absolutely boomed during and shortly after COVID.

And then of course, the next thing that happened was the interest rates flight, right? Obviously inflation, too much money, chasing too few goods. So they had to crank up interest rates, cool off the economy. Well, movers were hit pretty hard by that.

And so all of my peers, and most of them are in the States, so it was much more extreme down there. But they just like, they called it Mount COVID in the numbers because it would literally go – went up and then they all crashed. A lot of them had gotten a taste of this and thought sky’s the limit. And they just started buying trucks and hiring people. And then they all kind of tanked and they, and they went through a couple of really difficult years.

And meanwhile, there’s me. I mean, it was a little bit higher growth in the early years because we were so small. But ever since we kind of got to that, you know, two, three, $4 million range, you really can’t grow as fast as you used to because to double in size, is actually insane. So, you know, we’ve just been adding that 10, 15, 20 % growth every year. And it’s slow, steady, manageable growth. Predictable, You’re not going to run out of cash.

Just build it over time. One of my mentors said, you don’t actually make any money until you’re in your fifties. And I’m like, dang, like, I feel like I’m making good money, and this was in my late thirties, what’s going to happen when I’m 50?

And starting come into focus for me is if you continuously reinvest the profits of your business back into the business. Now, I also like to take some out so that, you know, you’ve got something in case stuff does blow up in the business. You know, just keep reinvesting into slow, steady, repeatable growth every year.

Eventually, you are going to reach that point where you might not want to keep growing, but you’re a more mature business. And then it’ll just be enough cash and, you can live a good life. That’s my like plan. All my peers talk about like, I can’t wait to sell, I can’t wait to sell, I want to get this five X multiple. I’m like, why? Create a business that runs really smoothly without you having to be the lynchpin of it, and there’s no reason to get out of it.

I mean, obviously there’s always risk of things getting rocky, but you’re always there ready to step in and, and right the ship. Don’t take your eye off the ball or anything, but like, I just look forward to continuing to let this thing grow. Like bringing people in that I can incentivize with, with growth and success. And that attracts the right people. Like I’ve always felt if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And so I’ve, I’ve almost been a little bit worried about having the growth stop because then it’s like the really great people that you’ve brought on board, they’re going to want to leave because there’s no opportunities to strive for. And you’re not going to bring in fresh, new, hungry people, because you’re not creating opportunities inside the company for them to aspire towards.

Kind of the way I think about it. I’m also thinking this is gonna last my lifetime, where some people want to like build something up quick and exit. So, that’s a totally different story and I have no experience shares on that but it comes to a nice slow, steady, growing business that’s healthy and and fun to run? I can speak all day on that

Jeff McLarty (38:44)
I think in the end that’s what a lot of people want is what you’ve built with Eager Beaver is having that consistent growth. It’s not crazy making, but it’s continuing year after year and having bought and sold a few businesses myself, I always find it interesting when other guys are saying, I hate this business. You should buy it. Like, why would I want to buy something that’s making you miserable? That’s insane.

John Watson (39:06)
And then on the flip side, why would I sell this business that is running so smoothly? You couldn’t offer me enough money. It wouldn’t make sense to pay me what I would have to ask for this business to give it up because it’s like an ATM.

Jeff McLarty (39:23)
That’s it. I mean it’s admirable what you’ve built with Eager Beaver and that you’re happy and you want to continue to grow. I think that’s what a lot of entrepreneurs aspire to. So I appreciate you taking the time to share your insights on how you got there. I would like to keep you for another hour and ask you another 20 questions but I know you’re a busy guy, so maybe we can have another go around sometime and continue the conversation.

John Watson (39:44)
All right, thanks so much.

Jeff McLarty (39:50)
That’s all for us here at the Owner’s Roundtable. If you’re looking for more support for your business or your own ownership journey, you can contact us at www.focalpointeventon.com.

Thanks for pulling up a chair and don’t forget to like and subscribe, so you don’t miss out on more great success stories, misadventures, lessons and advice from real business owners just like you.