Catch Marc Mason of RCL Mechanical in this episode of Beyond the Tools as he discusses a growth mindset and managing employees that get your business to the next level.

For the full show notes, head on over to https://reflectivemarketing.com/podcast/Marc-Mason-Secrets-of-Growing-a-10-Million-Home-Service-Company

Krystal Hobbs 0:04

Welcome to Beyond The Tools, the podcast that helps contractors attract more leads, grow their business, and finally get off the tools. In each episode, you'll discover marketing tactics that work. You'll get actionable insights from other successful contractors, and connect with experts to help you grow. I'm your host, Krystal Hobbs, owner of a social media agency that helps contractors attract and convert more leads. Get ready to take your business to the next level so you can finally enjoy the fruits of your hard labor. Ready, let's go!

Krystal Hobbs 0:46

Welcome to Beyond the tools. I'm your host, Krystal Hobbs, and today I couldn't be more excited to introduce you to an amazing entrepreneur and someone I'm very proud to call my client, Marc Mason. Marc is the CEO of RCL mechanical. He's the owner and founder of Eastside Home Solutions, and the owner of Riverhouse, a restaurant in Taunton, Massachusetts. In our chat today, Marc really talks about some of the keys to his success, particularly with RCL mechanical, but also really digs into his mindset when it comes to business growth and strategy. We talk about some of the systems and automation and key hires that really helped him to get to that next level, and where his drive really comes from. If you're in a position in your business right now where you feel stuck and you want to get to that next level, this is the perfect episode for you. So let's head on over and chat with Marc.

Krystal Hobbs 1:56

Marc, welcome to Beyond The tools. I'm so excited to have you here today.

Marc Mason 2:01

I'm excited, too. Let's do this.

Krystal Hobbs 2:03

All right. So, Marc, you've described yourself as a serial entrepreneur and you're running multiple businesses. I guess, tell us a little bit about where you're at now and where your businesses are.

Marc Mason 2:19

Krystal Hobbs 4:19

Marc Mason 4:51

That's a good question and it's tough to wrap it up all in one conversation, right? The first thing is how you do one thing is how you do everything. I say that a lot because if you start your day off behind, your whole day is kind of ruined. You're always trying to catch up, always rushing, and you're doing things just to do them. So I think you had to be very aligned in your home life in order to be a business owner because you're leading so many different lives. Humans just want to be led, right? So you come in and you don't give them leadership, they're not going to stay. You're not going to build a culture. I just did my painted vision for the next three years. And something on my painted vision was I want to be recognized as a top place to work in Boston, Massachusetts, like, that's where I want to go. It's an award, and we want to be there. So, as I said, it all starts from the minute you woke up. And I feel like since I've learned and gotten mentors and coaches in the game, I've developed 100 times faster than I did prior. I learned more in the past year by spending $60,000 on coaching than I have in the past five or six years. And people are probably like, “Oh, my God, it's crazy coaching. I mean, 60,000.” But we've done over $20 million within our company. So like, what's the 60,000 compared to the 20 million in revenue that we brought in? I feel like so many business owners are caught up in like, “Oh my God, I spent $200,000 in marketing.” I spent this much money on leads but what if you didn't do that? Would you be stuck at that million-dollar company, that $600,000 company? We are negotiating to purchase a company near me and the minute I looked at that company was like, wow, I would not want to be in this company, because if it’s $600,000, you know, it’s owner-operator, and all they really have is contacts. Contacts were very valuable back in the day, but now, these days, I just tell you to boost on marketing, and we're gonna bring those contacts in. So, to kind of go over how the successes came and stayed within the organization and me is, it's discipline, consistency, it's doing the work when nobody's looking. It's just, and honestly, giving. I always want my employees to take my position. I'm not that guy that's gonna be like, “Hey, I'm the owner. You're not getting my spot,” No, fire me. I want out. I want to get fired. I want you to come up, give you a family, that vision; I want you to be wealthy. I tell that to all my employees. It came to life when we went over our painted vision, our three-year vision on Wednesday before we left for Thanksgiving. And a lot of them got up, like, they were just amazed that we gave them direction. They’re like, we've never seen it like this, like, nobody filled us in, like, we were this small and other companies now we're like part of the vision, we're part of it, and it all comes down to that CSR like I treat that CSR just like I respect another owner of the company. And they are the first point of contact so, like, you have to be disciplined, and you have to be consistent across all boards. It's like going to the gym. If you go to the gym for a week, you're not gonna see results. But if you go to the gym for four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, you're gonna see results. It just doesn't happen overnight. And “I'll make you a millionaire this week” doesn't work like that. If then, whatever it was, I'd be all in. It just doesn't work like that. So, I feel like it's a little bit of everything, and I feel like people want to be led as I said, and you have to create leaders, I'm creating leaders so I can follow behind them. That's the best way to put it. I come across and prospect the people that I want to do business with and be friends with, like you. I was interviewing another Facebook marketing company but I told you I selected you because of your personality and your hungriness, and I do business like you. I loved it. So I just thought you were genuine. The old-school sales are gone. There's no more pressure. There's no more elevator pitch. It's like people can read it. People can go online and they can see the reviews. They can see who you are as an individual on all platforms. Like, if I can wrap it up in two words, it's consistency and discipline is the key to success.

Krystal Hobbs 9:41

Absolutely. And I think you mentioned a lot of things there that we could really dig into as well in terms of having a strategic direction and getting your team to buy into that. Having leadership and transparency with your people. I do want to go back to one thing that you said there that I thought was really interesting when you're looking at the value of a business, and that it's not really about the contacts anymore, that's not something that's viable or sellable in some cases. So I know that you are really big on systems in your business. And that's been a big part of how you've been able to grow so quickly while being involved with other businesses as well. So, in your view, what are some of the key systems that you've implemented in RCL mechanical that have made a big difference?

So, systems and processes, I didn't know that these were so valuable until I started building the business. And I'm not perfect. None of my systems are perfect. I've been taught by mentors and coaches that even though they're not perfect, you have to implement them. Because I feel like everybody's waiting for that perfect system, that perfect employee, that perfect anything and that just doesn't have it. It’s not life. It's never going to be perfect. So, if you waiting for the perfect business opportunity to come, it's never going to come. So, you have to go get it. It's going to be imperfect. And I have a nickname the in the office, it's called Sugar mock because I pull the trigger almost too fast but I execute. And it's funny because I go over this a lot and they're like, you just get it done, you know. I fail fast, guys, like, you gotta fail fast. I pulled the trigger and if it’s the wrong decision, I live with it, and I move on, and I learned from it. I keep going. So I feel like everybody procrastinates and it's so easy to procrastinate, “Oh, I don't want to sign up for this marketing because it's just a lot of money, or I don't want to hire that employee, because that's the highest paid employee,” but that's gonna get you to the next level in business. I can't go out and install heating systems. I can't do that. I can't bill. I can't manage. I can't lead. I can't do any of that without systems in place. We're not perfect here but we've come a long way and we're doing it as we go. And finally that I've been building that office staff, I have people that allow me to implement it, and it's been a hell of a ride. We probably are a two or 3-million dollar company if I didn't follow my gut, stick to the marketing stick to leads, and get mentors and coaches. There's no way we'd be where we are today. But I feel like everything starts from the bottom with your core values, like, did you hire because of the core values? Like we have so many people that come in the door that's just like the skill sets not there but the core values aligned. Everybody's teachable. If they have those core values, they’re teachable. So, those systems and processes start right at the beginning, like every interview I have, my system is, right at my conference table, “These are our core values, definitions” Our system is if they do not take these after the interview, automatically no hire. And sometimes it's tough because you're maybe an accident, but it's like, we just gave them value. And we just give them the most important part of our businesses and what we stand by, and they didn't take them. So can they live by him? I don't know, it's up to you guys to be the determinant of that.

So what are some of the core values that you impart to your team?

So we have a lot of them. But a couple of the ones that I really hit on daily are Extreme Ownership, going the extra mile, and being customer-centric. So those are like the three big ones. And it's part of our brand promise, we just did that painted vision. So it's all written in there. So when someone comes in for an interview, it's right on the wall. They get to see where we're going, what's going on, and they see you get to see the team, and they get to know the core value. It's easier for somebody to buy into it if they know everybody else was bought in. Like if you have a meeting and you have your top three producers in there and you bring a new hire, and that new hire's perception of you and the company in that first meeting is pretty much kind of the path for her throughout the journey because they're respecting you and they're bought in. She's going to be felt left out if she's not bought in, right? So, it's a big game.

I guess going back to the systems piece, I know that you've got a lot kind of set out on the backend, even when it comes to your marketing. And obviously, that's the area that I know most intimately about your business. But automation I know you've mentioned has been a really big part of that. So what are some of the things you have automated at RCL Mechanical?

Automation is new to me as well. Anybody that's like marketing automation, like, I don't want to do it like why, like, people don't pick up the phone call, like, that was me. So you're able to change and innovate and monetize as well. And that's what we're doing. It's hard for me, like, I look at all these CRMs. And like, sometimes I'm not leading because I don't understand them properly myself. But what I do is I just call whoever the Pro is, I'm a master delegator. I feel like delegation is probably another thing that goes to the top with consistency and discipline. Like, if you're able to delegate and lead, then you're going to be successful in business. But as automation lies, we've been dipping into it a lot. It acts as almost an employee or another two employees and the best part is they don't make mistakes. They very rarely make mistakes. If there's a mistake, it’s made on the backend. So, and how we work in our business, a lead comes in on portions of it, they're going through a webform on our website, and it's a big joke in the office because Ashley answers them. So it's Ashley, and Ashley has an email. She's a robot in the company. So, somebody calls and “Ashley’s not available, I can help you today” which is really cool because everybody's bought into it. And Asley emails people, text people, and she almost to a point set the appointments, up with the comfort advisor, or the commercial sales salesman goes out and looks at everything. There are just so many things you can do from getting a lead, working the lead until you can set the appointment, nurturing it after the appointment with the follow-ups, and just repeating that. And even texting, like automating text messages of Happy Thanksgiving. We just sent out a text message to everybody on Tuesday to all the customers. “Hey, hope you guys have a great Thanksgiving.” I wasn't trying to sell him anything. I was just saying Happy Thanksgiving. I think we have 2500 customers right now. If you're able to text 2500 employees in one second, think about that, that little text “Hey, Gary, Happy Thanksgiving from the RCL team.” It just seems very homey.

Maybe that's why we have eight calls on a day off today with trying to figure out people to do it. It's just a little bit of everything. And now we have automation where our salesman sends out an estimate. And then four hours later, they get a ringless voicemail saying, “Hey, it's RCL mechanical here, just following up to make sure you get your estimate.” That does two things - it lets them know that we're touching base. They think they missed the call so they call back to schedule the appointment or they sound the estimate. Number two is it makes sure that Jimmy does this job, or any sales guy does his job, and they have the right email. They have the right contact information. So it does multiple things. And it almost follows up for the salesman. So 100% I mean, automation is king. And we're automating the commercial end, which is like the behind me, these are all the commercial jobs. It's a lot different. It's a different beast in service. But I feel like this is something you should probably get into Krystal because I feel like the commercial sector is so behind the service sector with like automation and customer relationship management tools and stuff like that. So, right now we send out proposals to a CRM and they get follow-ups every couple of weeks. And it's not a very in-depth software where we're doing a bunch of different things like service, but it's still software that tracks all your KPIs, you can text message, you can email through it, keeps all the notes in there, so I feel like it does a lot more things than a human can do on a day-to-day basis. You'd have to hire three or four people to do that.

Absolutely. And I think you're totally right that when we think about automation, we think it's this big, complicated thing. But sometimes it is as simple as having a text message go out. Or one thing that we recommend for any company is having a sort of like a long-term nurturing sequence that, maybe it's the top questions you get about a heat pump that goes out, the first couple of weeks that a new lead comes in, or even having something that, they get a series of three to five emails over a six month period if it's a cold lead that didn't really go anywhere. So it can be those really simple things.

I agree. Sometimes simple is better. If I knew this years ago, we’d be crushing it. I feel like not a lot of people are doing this automation and CRM management in our area. And that's why we've been able to grow as fast as we can because now we have a team and we might be higher in price, but at the same time, we can get there. People have no heat. Price doesn't matter especially if there's financing in front of them, “Hey, it's gonna be hard this month, the next 60 months.” Okay, let's do this. So the thing is just getting in front of the customer. Once you’re in front of the customer, it's an easy sale.

One thing I really like about you Marc and how you run your company is that you do seem to have that long-term vision, like, you're always looking at the bigger picture and not getting too involved in the weeds of things because you bring the right people in to handle those things. I am curious. If you look back on your growth over the last couple of years, what were some of those key hires, or what were some of the things that you handed off early in the process that really helped you get to that next level?

So the number one thing I think holds business owners from growing is trust. I feel like it's so hard to trust people. It was tough for me. Luckily I have a big network, and we created a pretty big vision that everybody kind of was like, “What are they up to? What are they doing?” So like, everybody that looked us up was like, “They're cool,”. So it kind of gave everybody like that good feeling about us, which put trust in us. So we can put trust in them that kind of brought in guys that were, you know, that could handle the positions we gave them. And I feel like when you bring employees in, some employees are gonna get you here but those aren't the same employees who take you to the next level. And a lot of people get emotionally attached to that. And sometimes you're gonna repurpose. You're not gonna fire them, you're gonna lay them off, but sometimes you just repurpose people. Some people grow exponentially faster and some people get complacent. For some people, things change, personalities and personal life, there are always so many different parts of the puzzle that you really have to navigate. So the first hire, I'll go back, the first hire I hired was more than we made together as business owners. And we put the company on the back burner to hire them for the better of the company. That employee is not here anymore. It was well north of six figures. Me and Rich did not take a paycheck from the business for the first year and a half. But we also started a company with $20,000. And now we are an eight-figure company. So it's awesome to look back. It's been a hell of a ride.

But that one hires left me on a daily day-to-day basis so that I could sit back and figure out what the vision was. Because before, I was taking service calls. So, once I was able to take a step back from that (and that happened fairly quickly probably six months to a year in the business) and people just started rising. I had a mechanical company that I worked for prior. And I knew I didn't really know what my plan was, but at the same time, I knew there was going to be something going on. So I developed a bunch of relationships with employees that were unhappy there. And I brought probably, like, over the course of two years, probably like 10 or 12 or more from that one company. So that was a great feeling. I feel like they had extreme, like, mental abuse there. So they come here and they're like, “Oh, my God, like it's family here. Look at what they're doing.” We're going to the Red Sox game. We're gonna Bruins games, we're doing all kinds of stuff, like, there's so much culture. They care and they have a vision that they share. They don't email you and morally just bring you down. So I feel like there were a couple of key good hires, which is my product manager now, which was hired as a service manager. There was an operations manager that almost came in as an operations manager because we thought we were going to be ready for him sooner than we were, but we were not so he act as a service manager. And we brought in an estimator for the commercial, which took me out of that seat, and it put him in that seat to estimate full-time. And I believe our first year in business we did, we estimated $41 million in commercial work. And we landed 4 million. And usually, you got about a 10-12 % hit rate in the commercial industry, but it's a little harder for us because we're a new name in the industry. So people are just getting used to us. Getting bids out was big for us just for branding, like, who are these people? I mean, look them up on LinkedIn. Well, I see they hit my LinkedIn because I get the premium version, and I'm on it. And so those hires are the scariest hires because you can't afford them. There's no business owner that can afford them when you hire, but what think of it is, you're gonna 52 weeks, there might be $150,000, but you have 52 weeks to pay him. Right? That $150,000 divided by 52 is it breaks down a little bit better. And then those numbers are a little bit easier. Okay, I can work with that, so, could we afford them? No, but you know what? We did it anyway. Because I mean, you have to execute in this business. She never gonna grow. When you don't have butterflies and it's easy, that's when you're doing something wrong. I just said this the other day to somebody about me speaking on stage a lot. Geez, I got butterflies again. It's kind of weird, like, I'm nervous. I love that because it means I'm doing something that's out of my comfort zone. It's going in a different room. So, you have to do that in business. And you're never going to be ready for that second, or third or fourth employee, you're never going to be able to afford them unless you're born with money, and you get a couple of million dollars, and you can start a company like that. But you got to, as I say the whole time, you got jumped out of the plane and build a parachute on the way down because that's what equity in your company.

And really knowing when to make investments that are going to pay off long term, even if it's painful in the short term.

I agree. You got to think long-term. Every time I have a conversation with everybody, it's always like, long-term. Hey, guys, I'm downloading everything in here to give it to you, because this is your position soon. Like, I don't want to know it all. And you've probably heard me say that a couple of times. So I think it's just having a bigger vision and everybody's dreams fit inside your dreams. And when they know that, they're gonna ride with you.

I love that. So, Marc, I love the way that you think about business. And again, you're one of the most driven people that I know. How do you think that your upbringing has influenced you? How do you run your business and your life and your drive?

It's probably the hardest question to answer. Some people just don't have a fair shot. Did I have a fair shot? I say it's 50-50. I was lucky enough to have grandparents take me in at a young age. A lot of that is a blur, but maybe around five or six. So my grandparents took us in. And thank God they did, because who knows? I could have been in foster care adopted. I don't know where I'd be. But it was amazing that they did. They did a great job bringing us up, although it was two 70-year-olds bringing up a bunch of kids. There were parties every weekend. It was epic. So as we got into middle school, I think a lot of my trauma was starting to come out. And, I was always in school, and I was the child that was always a disaster. I was getting suspended for days and weeks and talking about being expelled, getting expelled, and hanging out with people that I shouldn't be hanging out with. And I was going down that downturn. And, I remember not even being able to go to the eighth-grade dance. So that was tough for me. So, where it really started turning around, and in middle school, I was doing things, like, I had that hustler in me still. We are playing poker in the bathrooms for money. We were doing these weird things that you normally wouldn't do but we were all kind of like the hustler's group. We were playing poker for money. So fast forward to high school. I somehow got into a technical school, which was very hard to get into at the time because they only took like 300 kids, and there were a bunch of different towns, but I think I got in because my cousin and my brother got in, and he was very well known in that school. So, I got into high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I explored all the shops and land in plumbing. Same thing. I was a class clown. I was the ringtone dealer. I was fixing people's necks tells. I was changing 860 screens. I was selling soda. I was selling candy bars. I was just hustling. And now thinking back, it was in my blood. And it was just a matter of that one path. Was it going to be left? Was it going to be right? It could have been good or bad. I remember my grandfather saying back in the day, “He's either going to be in jail or he’s going around the country.” So it was pretty funny because that's how I was as a kid. I was a kid that rolled around with his bottle that had soda on it for some weird reason.

So freshman year was a tough year for me. The same thing: suspensions. And then in my sophomore and junior years, I started coming out a little bit. I almost got expelled because of my grades. When I really started taking the turn is when I got a taste of money. I was making money doing all these other things on the side but once I went on Co-Op and I got a plumbing job, like “Oh, alright, good money, good money.” Don't forget we were in the recession. I came out of high school 09. So we came out just on that back into the recession, just getting through it. It was a different game out there. People were getting laid off. A lot of people sit on the bench, and I came in and they needed somebody in my town to take the plumbing job on a prevailing wage work in high school. And my plumbing vocational teacher actually got the newspaper article and gave it to me. He's like, man, you gotta go try this. So right out of high school, I was making 30 bucks an hour. My base pay was $8 but my prevailing wage was 30. So it just snowballed. I saved that. I was always a saver. I don't know what I'm gonna do with it. But I'm gonna do something. And I didn't have a plan at that. It's so hard to have a vision and to have a plan for what you're gonna do the rest of your life at 17-20 years old. Some people don't figure out what they want to do in their mid-20s and 30s. So I got my plumbing license. That was okay. I was like the first person actually in my high school. The plumbing program was new. It was like 10 years old or something. And I was the first one in high school to get a journeyman plumbing license in Massachusetts, out of the high school. So it kind of felt good in the end. My vocational teacher that always believed in me were great. They were ex-Marines. And they ran the place like it was boot camp. So we developed a great relationship.

And actually, fast forward to now, and that was one of the people I hired that I couldn't afford. He came back and he work for us, which was awesome, because he's like, he's seen us since we were kids. And he's like, I love what you do and I want to be a part of it. So it was really cool. And its life comes around circles, so, you go through high school, you graduate, I'm making all this money, and I start doing a lot of side work. The partner I work with now, Rich, we're doing some side work. I have Mason plumbing at that time. And I'm just learning as I go. And I started working for a company that was doing rehabs on houses. So I started working for them. And I came to the conclusion really fast that like, I didn't want to work for them. Because they couldn't lead me right. They would degrade me. They would want me to push a schedule. They'd say they're ready when they're not ready. It's like no, just no respect. So like, I can do this way better. There's no way they can do this better than me. So I said, “I'm gonna get into real estate.” And it was like, probably two weeks after I heard something on the radio. It's Okay, come in for your free three-day training to be a real estate investor for Fortune Builders. I'm sure you've heard that radio ad before, probably it's been going on for a while to Fortune Builders, they ultimately try to sell you an education, but they gave you like 24 hours of free training up front to try to beat you into it. And I went through my iPad, and took my days off of work. I sat there for three days laser-focused, where everything was down. I went in head heels and there was one thing I took from that (was a couple a lot of things) but the biggest thing was I think they kicked off entrepreneurship was they said that like you have to let people know what you do. Once I projected that and everybody found out I was in real estate and plumbing, it blew up because everybody want to do business with me. “Oh my God, Marc the plumber.” Like, I changed everything. I had a whole new operating system on what to do like, you know, my Instagram name was Marc the plumber. Then it went from Marc the plumber to Marc buys houses. And finally, I was like marketing and I didn't even really know I was marketing.

So I bought my first house. Oh, no, sorry, it was a wholesale. I told everybody what I was doing. I had somebody that I worked with whose father was selling their house, and they sold to me for 125 first house I didn't put $1 into it actually. It was actually a screwed-up deal so I'll tell you the story about that. I bought it for 125 I was going to rehab it. But somebody came in and bought it for 185 like 30 days later. So I'm like, Oh, this is fun. Like, this is cool. In the meantime, I was going to rehab it. And I hired somebody that wasn't licensed and wasn't insured. And they stole all the aluminum siding off the house. So I had to reside the house, to say the least, so everybody was laughing. But at the same time, I was thinking in my head, “Whatever, I'm still making 50 grand 60 grand,” I'm cool with it like this is a learning experience for me.

So, everybody’s laughing and I had like another 50 grand in my bank. So that was like the start of real estate entrepreneurship like, “Oh, okay, I get it.” The next house was a house hack, a three-family. I ended up dropping all my money into it, buying it for 178 put about $75,000 into it, and maxed out my credit card. I had a $60,000 limit on my credit card and maxed it out. And I was actually paying, I was actually paying contractors on the credit card saying, “Hey, I'll buy you tools.” So, that's what I was doing to get by. I had to get creative. What was I going to do? I didn't have the money. So, I bought it, rehabbed it, rented it, and then refinanced it, pulled all the money out, and they call it the burr strategy, pulled all the money out, and here we are today. I've fixed and flipped probably over 150 houses and 36 units. And I would have never thought that would have started with that day. So, you guys listening need to know that like, you just gotta get that first deal done. Because not only did that start a real estate journey for me, it started obviously, on mechanical too. It started the restaurant too because everybody wanted to do business with me. And my reputation I built orthodoxy, everybody trusted me. So like when they couldn't get to the finish line on the restaurant, who they call, I had the real estate team, I had the people in the field that could bang the hammer, they could get it done that we're known. And I built equity and I was a long shot pretty much for that, and it led me to today. All those experiences led me to how to build RCL Mechanical because RCL Mechanical is the machine of the three, right? It's a machine. It's $75,000 we can payroll. It's a machine. So, it forms you into who you are today.

And what I'm hearing from some of those things you're talking about, too, it's really that resilience and to be able to see like, “Oh, that's just a little hurdle, not a big deal in the long term when you run into those challenges.”

One thing that I am pretty good at is I'm decisive and I handle stress well, like an entrepreneur getting into business, I feel like those two things you need to be good at. Nobody's born with that, right? But you have to surround yourself with positive people and people that are good at that. So you can kind of figure out what they do. Like I can have the worst day in my life, but I'm gonna come in and put a smile on in the office because my energy radiates to everybody else. And, I felt like I was one path away from going down the wrong road in my childhood, and I've seen it with friends so I feel like you need to surround yourself with the right people. And, everything else will fall into place. You are the average of the five people that you surround yourself with. That couldn't be more true. It is crazy. So that's kind of how I pulled myself out of the maze that I was in throughout middle school and high school, and thereafter. I had fun. I did everything. I was a kid but sometimes your goals change, and your friends change. I'm not friends with the same people I was, but it's not that I'm not friends with them, but I just don't talk to them as much. I decide to follow different people on Facebook, I decided to do these things, and I decided to podcast so I feel like you are the average of the five people you're around. So if you take a look around, see where you're at, I feel like that's going to be. If you've hung around with somebody that does fitness, you're gonna know what macros are. If you hang around with some of those marketing, you're gonna know how to do marketing and everything in between. So I feel like, it's who you're around, who you're influenced by, and you're one step away. The biggest thing with me is I'm nervous to fail. I'm nervous to like to do something wrong because I don't want to have an addictive personality. It's like, I didn't want to smoke a joint because I'm like, I don't wanna get addicted. I want to be lazy, you know what I mean? So I’m nervous, too.

So, that kind of goes back to the discipline piece for you.

100%. And all that created an opportunity for today. It's so fun building a business like this. It's so fun seeing your employees win. It's so fun ringing the bell. It's just a different game. Real estate is fun in its own way. The restaurant is fun in its own way. But there's nothing like building a service business with a lot of employees that you're impacting so many different people. We have about 50 employees, that's like, probably over 140 people that we're supporting gas, utilities, mortgages, car payments so it's really cool and it's very rewarding.

So I know that we have a lot of contractors listening to this show, any last piece of advice or wisdom that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Make a decision, and you’ve got to execute it. It's easy to procrastinate. Procrastination is a form of depression. So you need to execute, whether it's good or bad. If it was a wrong move, embrace it. Whatever happens from that you're going to learn and you're going to pivot, and you're gonna get into the next lane. You're going to pass the next person. I feel like you're going to compete with yourself, not with others. You cannot measure where you're at with everybody else. What can you do in the 10, 12, 14 hour day that you're working? Because as an entrepreneur, contractor, whatever you are, you're working all day. It just doesn't end, I guarantee, if I text Krystal at eight o'clock at night, she's probably gonna text me back. And it's just who she is. It's probably because she's thinking it's not working just like I don't think it's working. Sometimes we’re just wired differently. We want to help and I feel like a lot of business owners just want to help. I feel like we are just addicted to the process and we want to help. So, anybody out there listening, there's probably a lot of stuff that you can take from this episode. But I feel like if you have an idea, embrace it, be confident and make the decision, and just stick with it a little bit. It's not like someone on a deathbed if you put it on green or red, it's gonna go so just embrace it.

I think that is a great note to end on. So for anybody listening that wants to connect with you, Marc, what's the best way that they can do that?

Instagram and Facebook are probably the best. For Instagram @marcmason_. And then Facebook's Marc Mason. And you can follow us at @rcl_mechanical, and real estate @eastsidepropertyllc. And if you guys reach out, I'm willing to help with any questions you guys need any help with systems or processes, or anything like that. I'm willing to answer. So just hit me up in the DMs.

Fantastic and we'll put all those links in the show notes as well. So if you're listening, you can go to beyondthetoolspodcast.com to grab all that. Thank you so much, Marc. I really loved our conversation today.

No problem. It was a blast. Thank you.

Hey, guys, just wanted to say thank you again for listening to Beyond The Tools. I love hearing from our listeners and knowing what topics, what guests, and what's resonating with you from these episodes. So if you want to share your feedback, please do so. You can DM me @reflectivemarketing on Instagram and Facebook. We're also on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tiktok - wherever you want to, so @reflectivemarketing. And if you are enjoying the show, please go ahead and leave us a review. It really helps us to spread the word to other contractors about our podcast. Thank you so much again.