“I think that’s the biggest opportunity for business owners. The candidates are out there; they want to work. It’s just what business owners are going to invest: the time, the energy, and the money to find them. There’s no better time in history to own and have a great company with a great team of people. It’s the most valuable asset you can have.”

Matt DiBara, CEO of DiBara Masonry, and The Contractor Consultants

Starting as a fourth-generation mason, Matt DiBara learned the trade from an early age. He soon graduated from picking up trash on the job site to fieldwork and now runs the family company and the Contractor Consultants. Focused on creating an unbeatable company culture and educating other business owners to do the same, listen in as Matt shares his wisdom.

Whether you struggle with hiring skilled and dedicated employees, fostering a strong company culture, or scaling your business to take on larger projects, Matt has some great advice from his experience running a successful business and helping others nationwide.

Topics discussed in this interview:

- The DiBara family history in construction

- Choosing construction as a career

- The benefits of college for contractors

- Implementing shared wisdom in business

- Managing your company with data and tools

- Being prepared for any economic conditions

- Building and scaling a great team

- Hiring processes for today’s world

- The importance of culture for retention

- Always have a hiring process ready

- What do the Contractor Consultants do?

- Rapid fire questions

To transform your business, visit thecontractorconsultants.com or email Matt at mattd@thecontractorconsultants.com

This episode of Construction Disruption is sponsored by TrueLook, the easiest way to view, secure, and document your jobsite. Get your free, no obligation quote at TrueLook.com.

For more Construction Disruption, listen on Apple Podcasts or YouTube

Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn

This episode was produced by Isaiah Industries, Inc.

Todd Miller: Ryan, I've worked with a lot of contractors over my years in the construction industry and they are a hard working lot. They take pride in their work and in their businesses. And it's only right that they look for ways to protect what they do and what they have.

Ryan Bell: Exactly, Todd. And now with TrueLook's job site surveillance, contractors can stop worrying about protecting that hard work. Their Five Diamond-certified monitoring center provides 24/7 peace of mind.

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Ryan Bell: Contractors can protect their work and equipment with TrueLook. Visit truelook.com for a free, no-obligation quote today.

Intro/Outro: Welcome to the Construction Disruption podcast, where we uncover the future of design, building, and remodeling.

Seth Heckaman: Welcome to Construction Disruption. I'm Seth Heckman of Isaiah Industries, manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building materials. And today, my co-host is Ryan Bell. Ryan, how are you doing today?

Ryan Bell: Hey, Seth, I am doing well. How are you?

Seth Heckaman: Doing really well. So thanks for tag-teaming this with me. Really looking forward to our guest today. That guest is Matt DiBara, fourth-generation mason and owner of DiBara Masonry, serving Los Angeles, California, as well as co-founder of the Contractor Consultants, a full service consulting firm serving the construction industry. Matt, thank you so much for joining us. Really looking forward to the conversation.

Matt DiBara: I'm excited. I'm looking forward to it.

Seth Heckaman: Awesome. So, wow, fourth-generation mason. That's a pretty cool legacy in your family, would love to hear more about that story and then how that led to you following them into the construction industry.

Matt DiBara: Yeah, well, I'd say I was born into it, but that's a little obvious right. You know, my family's been been in construction for as far as we can trace it back. It actually goes further than that. But very much the blue collar American dream. Both great grandfathers came from Italy to America. You know, they wanted a better life. They bought land. They worked menial jobs, and they just built literally their homes from the ground up. So made a little money, framed the first floor. They lived in the basement while they built the rest of the floors. So very much like that true grit, American Dream story. And there's a joke in the family, which is that we became contractors when we worked for people who spoke English. Because at the time they lived in an Italian section when they broke out. And my grandmother would tell me stories about how she'd try and translate the contracts from Italian to English so that they could, you know, communicate with customers. And that's our humble beginnings. And now obviously a much more established grown company, but very much humble roots.

Seth Heckaman: Wow, that's powerful. Such a great legacy of resilience and hard work and all those things that then set the example for how you want to be and move forward. So what did that look like, you growing up or involved as early as you can remember? And then what was that transition and then ultimately choosing your invest your career there too?

Matt DiBara: Well, I always grew up admiring what my dad did. He always took photos and he'd show me pictures and I thought it was cool to build things and see the before and after. And I couldn't wait to go out there and work. I had a lot of energy as a kid, and I started when I was nine. That was my first day on the job. My dad was smart because my first project was to pick up trash on the job site and I was talking to somebody about this about a week ago. But it's so funny because doing that taught me humility, right? Picking up all this trash. But it also taught me to be a clean mason and a clean, you know, project manager and obviously business owner later. So my dad had all these dual lessons and things that I didn't pick up. Some of them still figuring out 20 years later where it's like he did that as well as this. But it was a, it was very much just, here's a black trash bag, go around, talk to the electricians, the plumbers, the HVAC guys and anything that you need to pick up, do it. And then I graduated to sorting rocks after that. And it's been a steady climb. A steady climb up in the industry.

Seth Heckaman: Cool to hear that your dad came home with that pride. And then that pride just, you know, instilled in you, too, because it seems like a story common in our industry is it's hard work. It takes a lot of grit, go out, work in the elements, you know, and put food on the table for your family that way. And there's a lot of folks that seem to then aspire for their kids to earn their own living a little bit differently, but that, you know, not having that same perspective and being just as proud to then come in yourself, that's that's super cool.

Matt DiBara: Yeah. I mean, we didn't, we it was interesting. So we had a family rule that passed down. So my great grandfather's my grandfather and my father, my uncle and me, which was you had to learn the business, but you didn't have to stay in the business. So that was the rule. My dad is like, You will learn this. He's like, but if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer, he's like, You want to do whatever it is your heart desires, just like I don't care. But you will learn what it means to work with your hands and build things and see that. And I already wanted it, so it wasn't really hard. But it was interesting because, you know, I learned it. And then later in life it was like that was all I wanted to come back to. Now I'm in college and I'm, you know, I had opportunities and internships, but I just wanted to work in the family business. So it was very much that freedom where I knew I could take those opportunities. But then the desire to not want to do that, which made it nice for us.

Seth Heckaman: So I know, I did want to touch on that. I had it planned for a little bit later. But you mentioned college. I thought that was interesting, where, kind of unique, for a unique element of your story for someone that did get birthed into this business and has been around forever, but then did ultimately go that college route as well. And you got a degree in UMass from Construction Management. How has that? Has that been of great benefit? Would you recommend kind of going off and getting some more formal education just in this industry when there's so many points of entry without it? It seems like we're relegated to that. If you don't want the college route, start thinking about construction, but would love your perspective.

Ryan Bell: Yeah, I mean, my story was a little unique because my great grandfathers knew home building, they knew construction, but they didn't know the applied principles. Like my, I remember sizing fire boxes with my grandfather. He's like, You got to make it two inches wider. And I'm like, Why? He's like, You just do. And so they knew. They didn't know the applied science behind it, but they were geniuses when it came to making things work. And so it kind of, I think, passed on a little bit of an insecurity with my dad, who was always like, I knew the stuff, but I couldn't, you know, I couldn't open a textbook and tell you the the reasons why, like I'd mix a batch of mortar and my dad would be like, Half a scoop of sand more. And I'm like, Where is the rules for, like, how am I going to figure this out? And so I think that seeded my foundation for college because I wanted to understand, much like when I went to a vocational high school and I learned the different types of mortar, why some of the things my grandfathers did actually worked, you know, like the applied sciences behind it. So it made me curious. In terms of end result, I made good connections, you know I walked on a union job when I was a sophomore in college. They were building, they were doing stonework. And I walked by and I was like, You got the ashlar powder wrong. And they're like, What do you know? I was like, You gotta flip these. I'm like, You're longer than four feet. I can tell because the rest of the wall. He's like, What do you know about this stuff? And I said, Well, give me a trial and I'll show you. And so I ended up laying some stone and they hired me. So I was doing union stonework while I was in school. So I made connections. That proximity is power. But in terms of the degree itself, I mean, it wasn't something. I leveraged more the experience and the projects we did than the degree.

Seth Heckaman: Comes back to the benefit of the both and, and having that, yeah, all that information at your disposal and obviously has then propelled you where you are today. So coming out of college and getting back into the family business, I'm sure you kept leaning on all that experience of the family. But you know, undoubtedly like anybody would who's passionate about it, come in with fresh eyes and energy. Start looking around and start getting some visions of what could be what could be different or innovated and start or start making some changes. What were some of those ways that once you started coming into the business and thinking, looking at everything through your eyes, that you started changing things?

Ryan Bell: This is what I think is the single hardest but biggest opportunity in businesses, especially family businesses. But any company is figuring out what things you get rid of and and basically destroy to allow for innovation versus what things become golden pillars in your company. And this was really difficult because we had things that my great grandfathers did that passed down and some of those things it was like sifting through and being like, okay, where's the golden nuggets? The like, for example, we had one saying which was treat customers like they're your neighbors. That's what my grandpa, they worked for neighbors, right, when they started. So we, like that adage is gold. Never try to retire off any one single project. My grandfather told me that when I was nine and a half years old, he sat me down. He said, Do you want to know one of the most important things You'll never get rich off one customer and treat a $1 job the same way you would a $1,000,000 project. That one tip has made me millions of dollars, millions. I mean, I've landed multi-million dollar projects by fixing a $300 thing for a client and they see the attention and care and then they're like, Well, you did this so well. I can't imagine on this church restoration, that's a million bucks that you're not going to go above and beyond. So sifting through these these adages, like for us, the big one was adding in technology, adding in marketing, but not diluting the brand promise and the customer interaction. Like, you know, not going so far, like we automate things, but there's still a personal touch. I mean, if you call the office, you're going to get an answer within 3 seconds. It's going to be a person. They're knowledgeable. So if you call up and you're talking about the products and services, it's not, Oh, well, we'll get back to you or we don't know. It's like that foundational knowledge. But that I would say to anyone listening like that is the gold and it comes with experimentation. So we get rid of something, measure it, keep an eye on it. Ooh, that actually didn't work. Like but that's one of the biggest differentiators for, for us over the years in terms of, I can actually chart the growth of the business when we implement something and it's like boom, we up level.

Seth Heckaman: I love that. It's like finding the golden nuggets, the good stuff that you want to keep and making sure you're not having the golden calves around, you know, the idol that's holding you back and not, you know, preventing that that innovation. So you mentioned technology, you mentioned marketing. You know, I think that's probably, marketing especially, is a big one for a lot of family businesses that come in, start up working for neighbors, just sort of a word of mouth referral, you know, sort of model. Obviously you've had to implement and expand beyond that to to grow to where you are today. How did that start? What does that mix look like for you now?

Ryan Bell: For me in particular, I realized, I mean, you know, I started picking up trash, as I mentioned earlier. So this has been a graduation. Mason, right, then foreman, then running projects and the like. But when I became the true business owner, I realized that I'm kind of like the captain of the ship. And the more levers I have, the better captain I can be. So I need data, optics and levers. I need control. So, you know, I looked at areas of the business where I didn't didn't have control. Word of mouth advertising was not a lever I could turn on or off. So if my team is like, Hey, we're running low on leads, I can't be like, let's crank up that word of mouth lever and really get more leads, you know? So I just started looking at because I didn't have a business background. So I just started looking at things from a commonsense perspective of like, if I'm the trusted leader of the team, my job is to help see problems before they happen, right? So I need optics, but I also need control and levers. It's like having a ship that can only turn to the left. You know, it's like if you can only turn to the left, you've made your job a lot more difficult, but if you can turn in any direction. So I looked at areas for us in particular, to be specific. One of the areas was was job flow. Like if I said, you know, if I needed to get four more projects of this size tomorrow, could I do it? If I needed to get more commercial work tomorrow, could I do it? If I needed to hire six people tomorrow, could I do it? And so I started looking at areas where I did or didn't have these levers. And then I started also looking at optics, like, for example, if I wanted to know how much money I made in a project, could I do it? If I wanted to understand quarterly or annually what good investing decisions I should make, how would I do that? And so for me, not being a business person, I just looked at it as common sense, that pilot analogy of like, where are areas where I don't have and I almost play a little game, right? Like I mentioned earlier, it's like I got to hire six more people. Am I confident I could do that? And if I'm not, I'm like, Ooh, there's a potential weakness in my business. And so I just chart those points and then I start to see, Oh, I don't actually have control of my marketing or my financial forecasting really isn't good. If I had to buy a piece of equipment tomorrow, do I know whether or not that's a good idea? If I can't answer that, then there's something in my financials that I don't have. So that's how me as a layman was starting to understand business.

Todd Miller: Did that philosophy, was that inspired by something or did that come from somewhere, or is that just kind of how you figured it out on your own, in your head?

Ryan Bell: It came from jobs, like I started. I'll give you the best example I can give. I was interning for a big construction company and I was sitting in in a meeting and they had the site super, engineer. They had all of these executive teams that were trying to figure out this massive crane operation that to bring a crane in. They had a crane this massive, at the time it was like a religious statue. Huge, it was a logistical nightmare. And I remember listening and they figured out they were charting the wind, the weather. I mean, they had thought of everything. And I remember thinking and I went to my direct report who was like a junior site super, I think at the time. I said, can I ask a silly question? He was like, What? Right now, where in the model they're showing the crane. I said, It's all mud. I'm like, How are we getting the crane in? He's like, Oh, shoot. He goes, I better tell them. You stay there. And so, I tell that story to summarize, like my, I learned in the field, right? And so, like, when I think of running projects, I'm like, I need to build a control and have, it's the same concept. It's like if I can't see around the corner and I've got a new mason, like, how do I know he's laying out the project, right? And how do I know I have enough material? And if I had to get the project done a week earlier, what are the levers that I can pull? So it started really fundamental and I was able to grow into it. So I think that was the seed or the root was running projects and then managing multiple crews, right? Because I went from one job to the now I sit above it, I'm managing eight, nine, ten different crews and projects. Like what are the levers that I can pull to do better or ultimately to screw it up? Like what are the controls that I have? And then I just carried that into the cockpit, if you will, when I was when I took over the business. And I'm like, okay, I'm driving this machine. Well, if you drive a machine, you need a gas, like you need you need levers and you need optics. Like my car tells me how fast I'm going, but like, how fast is my business going? I can't see any of this right now.

Seth Heckaman: I love that angle on it because it's, you know, it seems like so many business owners, they, it's what they're at the mercy of whatever is a problem at that given moment. So, you know, whatever, whatever's hurting, they start diving in and trying to work on it. And as you alluded to, typically it's too late to avoid some real tough pain at that point. But you're asking a question, you know, much earlier on of, do I simply have influence over this or not, whether it's going well or poorly at the moment? You know, it's the example I think of is a lot of our customers. They've had great last couple of years, this remodeling, post-COVID, remodeling boom. And they're you know, they're enjoying it. They're living off of it, getting fat and happy. But then you start talking to some of them and, you know, they've had record-breaking years, but they're spending you know, they don't even know what they're spending on marketing. And in reality, it's, you know, a percent at best. And it's like, you know, all you're doing is riding the wave, man. And when this wave dies, you've got, you've got nothing. So at least you know those companies that are established and know what they're doing. And yeah, they're they're capitalizing on it, too. But they have systems in place and they're spending 10% of their revenue on marketing, and at least they know they're actually driving their ship at that point rather than just getting blown around aimlessly and, you know, doing well when everyone's doing well and doing poorly when everyone's doing poorly.

Ryan Bell: And I think the industry is, you know, our construction as a whole is very unforgiving. It's like the weather, right? It's like you can have sunshine or you can have a tornado. I mean, I saw I started when it was the Yellow Pages and I saw the evolution on to like websites and the companies who got those first and then people who jumped on SEO so their website ranked. And I saw how unforgiving this industry could be to the people who didn't pay attention. I mean, I remember we had a big competitor who spent tons of money on the Yellow Pages, two full page ads. At the time, we typically did like a quarter-page ad and they got wiped out like we jumped on online stuff fairly early on. And I mean, they were wiped out. I remember when we were hiring their their people, right? It was like, boom, their number one person ten years. And I remember seeing and going, wow, this is wild. Or in 2008 when I saw people who relied heavily on word of mouth and I sat at the table and my dad got asked to give a $250,000 loan to one of his friends who had an electrical company. And he's in tears. And I'm sitting there with him, you know. So I was fortunate enough to be traumatized at a young age and realized, like, our industry is like the weather and it's like, there's needs to be a certain level of respect. And the the smart business leaders that I study are most worried when it's sunshine and rainbows, that's when they're the most worried because at which point it starts to rain, they go, well, I prepared for this. And the harder it rains, the more they go. Well, yeah, I reinforced the roof. You know, my house is strong. I floodproof my basement and they're ready and they know that the golden lesson in that is they go, Well, if I can survive this storm, which will eventually come, so to speak, and I come out stronger. There's so many people who aren't prepared for that. And I've just I've seen so many companies that are on top. I mean, you could do with anything. You look at music, you look at film, you look at, like nobody is on top forever. So the first question, as soon as you make ground, is ask yourself, how can I stay on top? Who's coming after me and what are the problems that are going to come up? And if you can't see them, then that's a blind spot. Because, I mean, even the most famous musical artists in the world, then you don't stay on the Billboard Top 100 forever. So what's going to pull you down? Gravity is a real thing in this world.

Seth Heckaman: Exactly,what what goes up comes down. It's inevitable. So you got to be prepared and to be resilient through all of those. It's powerful for sure. So now, before we, that's all, love learning about your business. And I want to dive in here then to this the Contractor Consultants and hear more about how you're then taken all these lessons and and trying to help you know, so many other folks with those. But one thing I did want to ask first, I was listening to a podcast, another podcast that you were on and you mentioned that DiBara Masonry is still going strong, still owning that has that, you know, leading masonry company there in L.A. You mentioned that at this point you've got a team that pretty much handles all the day to day that lets you be on Construction Disruption and whatever other ventures that you're working on. So I'm curious what have been the keys to building that such a capable team that you can trust? You know, that's the dream for so many business owners, right? So how have you been able to achieve that?

Ryan Bell: One of the big things was establishing the things that we were going to get rid of versus the things we wanted to keep. Like even as we grew, you know, nine, ten crews, we wanted to keep that family feel. So that was one of the things we latched on to. So clarity of like, what our culture is and what it means to be. What is DiBara Masonry? What does that mean from a client perspective and what does it mean internally? Because those aren't always it's like a two-way marathon, they're not always the same thing. Technology was a big one and optics. Being able to see a lot of business owners, like if I look at me three years ago, my reason for not pulling away was two things. Number one, I didn't have optics. And number two, I didn't empower. So I couldn't, like I didn't want to create distance with my project managers or my management staff because I didn't have the optics, which by right then meant I didn't want to empower them to do. And because if I can monitor their mistake, it's almost like being a pilot and seeing the course of the other plane and being like, okay, they're one degree off course. We'll let them go, let's see if they crash. Okay, they're two degrees off course. Okay, they're seven. I need to jump in. If you don't have that, you want to hold the levers forever. So I created a way in which I could measure and monitor things from a distance. And then that gave me the confidence to empower. And I think far, far too many leaders and business owners and managers, you know, it's like you read a leadership book and it's like empowering people and gives them the keys to the kingdom and let them do that. It's like, Yeah, that's great. But like if I lose, you know, $500,000, I'm out. This person has the ability to take my company so. It looks good on paper, but what do I do? So for me, it was it was the optics. Like even right down to our team events, like, we'll record those. So like when we do our awards stuff, like once a month, everyone gets together, we record it and I get to watch that. So I'm not the overbearing owner who's there, but I get to see it. I get to call out certain people. I get to say, Hey, I saw what you did a great job. So it's really asking yourself, how do I have the optics, which is how can I measure what's happening and spot things quickly? And then once I do that, how am I then empowering people to take more and more individual ownership so that they can build their careers through the business? I mean, and high level essence? That was the key. and then hiring, which I mean, I'm sure we'll get into, but hiring the right people and having control of the hiring and confidence around it.

Seth Heckaman: Do you mind sharing some more of the nitty gritty details on those optics? What are the tools you're using or the disciplines you're using in order to maintain that visibility?

Ryan Bell: Yeah. So financially, I mean, I get financial reports, you know, once or twice a week. I get to see I get my CRM, which is like the brain of our company. I get to see how much work is sold, how many appointments we booked. I get to see customer, how many review requests we sent out, how much work we've done. We report on everything. So like my production manager will do a forecast of like hiring needs. So every Tuesday meeting he looks at, and does what's called a two-month look ahead. How many people do we need to hire based on the work coming in? So it's it's getting departments to self-regulate. So like in the old days when I was involved in sales and production, it was easy for me to be like, okay, I have this huge project that's going to land. I need to start hiring. When you put yourself out now, it's like Department A is like, Yeah, I'm crushing it in sales, but Department B is like, Well, I didn't know that I need to start hiring three months early. Like, you didn't tell me you had this $2 million project that was coming in. So it's it's the optics around all the departments. I mean, we have honest employee audits, we do team breakfasts. So I'm constantly monitoring, like, how happy is my team? We do these company branded poker chips that we give out for like good things that we want to see more of and they get to spin this wheel with like, really cool prizes they win. And so I track how many of those we give out, what we give them out for. I track what's called process improvement meetings. So if you're management at my company and there's an issue, you as a manager are required to have a process improvement meeting. So we always blame the process before the person. I'm going to assume that the process broke down before I believe that my person broke down, that there was something that they, before I assumed human error. So I'll read those reports. How many meetings that we have. I mean, gosh, I just I try and get optics on all the key areas from like marketing to then sales to then, you know, the handoff into production and then how many jobs, how fast, how many crews and then client satisfaction, you know, serving clients, the end reviews. And I just look at it a circle like if you follow a lead, the easiest way to do this if you're listening is take your your marketing efforts and then just track that customer journey. Imagine it's your perfect lead and track that journey all the way through. And those are all the touch points that you want to typically measure.

Seth Heckaman: Awesome. Love those process improvement meetings. How, are those kind of booked as needed when there is a failing or something slips through the cracks? Or is that both, you know, scheduled regularly and as needed? Or what's what's the system there?

Ryan Bell: Yeah, so they're impromptu. So this came about about three years ago when there was a disconnect between management and field staff and everyone had different sides of the story. And I realized the root issue was communication. And so I told them and I said, Look, I can't go to bat for you if if I don't have information, essentially. And I also can't go to bat if I only have one side of the story. So we came up with this philosophy. It's always process, not person until proven otherwise, just like in our legal system, right? Innocent until proven guilty. We say process until proven person. That's an internal silly joke we have. And the way it works is if something happens, right, that affects your bottom line or culture or whatever, maybe it's a conversation. So they sit down. It's what happened, what went wrong, what can we do differently? And they both sign it. Well, what's nice about that is I get the written perspective of both people. So now the person in the field is just as valued as the manager. They get to write out what they think happened. And sometimes those two things don't agree, right? It's like, no, I didn't forget the you know, to pick up the cement, make sure I wasn't told by X, Y, Z, and but you get it in writing and it forces a conversation. And what's also nice about it is, you know, if management is like, Hey, I'm struggling, this person's been giving me a hard time and duh, duh, duh. Okay, great. Let's audit how many process improvement meetings have we had with them? We haven't had any in the last month. Oh, so this has been happening for two months. The three things you just mentioned. But we never took the time to sit down formally and really dive into what's happening here right now. All right. Let me do a process of proving meaning. I'll stay on this. It's now accountability for your management team. And, boy, what's nice is it's a double-sided coin because there are some managers that are, you know, they'll they'll go to my office manager, be like, look, this is the seventh time in the last two months that I've sat with this person. Here's all of them. Here's the reasons. Like we got to figure this out and now my ops manager can go, okay, I can support this now and also analyze the data. Is there a certain pattern or trend? And we found things where it's like we found we've needed to create positions in the company, like we've outgrown certain things, like we'll look at it and be like, Oh, it's not your fault, it's not your fault. We need somebody at the yard, like a second junior person who's making sure all these things happen are like, it's just it's another layer of optics.

Seth Heckaman: I think for many people listening, you know, that's just one component of that you just rattled off of all these systems that you've put in place that allow the organization just to thrive, people to be happy, all those things. So I think that's probably a easy lead in to the Contractor Consultants. You started, would love to hear about you starting that. And then you know what, how you come alongside and help people identify the first building blocks of the multiyear process to get to where you just described you folks are.

Ryan Bell: Yeah. I mean, we primarily focus on on hiring, you know, and the business came out of necessity. I didn't follow my own rules and 2019 roughly into 2018. And I so I was like the American Dream. I was doing, I think, three celebrity homes. I was doing a big government project, and I wasn't paying attention to my team talking about hiring. It wasn't an optic that we had really clearly defined as well as we do now. And so I was the victim of of the same storm that I mentioned earlier, lost nearly $1,000,000 in the course of just a couple of weeks. I mean, it was, it was messy. Jobs falling apart, like losing projects left and right because we didn't have the right stuff. And so the business was born out of me really spending time to figure out what's this hiring system look like, what's the new version of hiring. So I ended up after about a year and a half, two years, figured out a system that I helped my friends and contractors I knew, then trade associations. Then we built a course, partnered with Ziprecruiter and Indeed on basically showing business owners how to find that hire and retain top talent. And then from there went on to basically doing that entire system for contractors if they don't have the time to go through the course and do it on their own.

Seth Heckaman: So going back to the start of that sort of that process, your own tough experience with that was it sounds like, you know, typical scenario of sales just outpacing production and getting in the deep end and then going sideways.

Ryan Bell: Yeah, sales outpaced it. And the ways we were hiring it, you know, for us it was like we had certain subcontractors. I knew certain, you know, small business owners, one or two people. Like we always had ways to flex what we call flex our, our production, and they just weren't working. And my team came knocking, Hey Matt. Little bit of an issue. You know, so-and-so's busy. I'm like, Oh, we'll call this person. Alright, call them. They're busy. I'll post an ad on Craigslist. All right. We didn't get any hits. Well, then go to Indeed. You know the drill. Let's post on Indeed. We did that three times and nothing happened. Oh, okay. Now we're in trouble, right? Because we're still selling as if all those things are working. And what I realized is there's no one size fits all to hiring. For example, I think we have 37 different ways to find proven ways to find candidates. And those go all the way from like incentivizing your team members to go out and find people for you to high-skilled digital strategies like geofencing your competitors and building referral partnerships with your suppliers, right, because they come in contact with your potential candidates. One strategy that listeners can implement is if you're looking for those hard to find, like high-skilled foremen or project leads or whatever, you know, whatever the industry is that you'd call it. A lot of times they have a company truck, they're gainfully employed, right? They're already working. They're not looking for work. We've shown our clients how to approach your suppliers and offer to sponsor free coffee and donuts during the busiest 2 hours every morning. And in exchange for that, put a recruiting card on that table. And so that one day that John, who's been working at X, Y, Z company for ten years, he's waiting for a truck to get loaded up and he got yelled at for being 3 minutes late because his daughter was sick, let's say looks down and sees this card. It says how much they're paying, what they're doing. There's a QR code you can scan and it's a way to get in front of your account. That's like one active, easy strategy that you can use of probably 200 we have.

Seth Heckaman: Wow, that's awesome. And this, you know, the issue with hiring skilled labor shortage, it comes up pretty much every single episode of people talking about that just being the biggest challenge facing our industry. So, yeah, give us more on don't expect you to spill all the secret sauce, but what's that process look like? What are the keys? And, you know, any stories along the way of how you figured that out?

Ryan Bell: Well, it's so interesting because at the end of the day, what you're really after is a full team, an amazing culture. Right. Like the best companies that you and I, if we're going to talk about companies that you and I both know. You're in Ohio and I'm in Los Angeles. Those companies typically have a really great culture because that's how you retain and maintain your team, excite them, motivate them, and the like. And the problem is, is a lot of construction business owners can't enforce their culture because of scarcity. Mike was late for the third time. Well, you know the rules in the handbook. We got to fire him. Well, if we fire him, we can't finish this job tomorrow, we lose 50 grand. Well, then don't fire him. We'll figure it out. Like we're in this weird situation, which, you know, And so we need amazing culture to build a longstanding, long-term company. But the the Tylenol, so to speak, is to sacrifice culture just to get stuff done. So what do you get? What do you have to do? You have to have control over your ability to find candidates. You need, like I talked about in the course, you need a massive find list, right? Tons of candidates. But then when you do that, you need a way to vet them or quickly sift, sort, and screen. Because like this happened to me when I finally figured out, like right now for our clients, we post to 157 job boards and we've got a way to do that. We've got ways to, I mean, all sorts of different things. But when you build a robust list of candidates, you need ways to quickly sort, sift, screen because you can't do a traditional one-hour interview for everybody.

Seth Heckaman: Sure, yeah.

Matt DiBara: So in essence, you know, looking at the type of role posting to lots of different job boards, it takes keyword testing, headline testing. You need certain screener questions to be able to bring great candidates to the back of the line right away. You need to get them right to the, or not the back of the line, the back of the process. Because if I'm amazing and I just moved here, let's say I moved from Ohio to L.A. and you're like a dream candidate. You're going to find work within the first week. So if you come in and I've got this very lengthy hiring process and you do a screener and then you do this, and I don't have a way to skip the line, like we have ways in which it's like if they're perfect, boom, they go right to final interview and then they have a skills assessment. So there's a lot. But in essence, I can tell you, if you don't have an ability to build a really big list of candidates, that's your first problem. Then you've got to figure out how to vet them quickly. Then there's a question of like, Well, do I send them the offer letter? And they shop it to their current employer, right. And get a $10,000 raise and never even have to leave. So there's ways to do that. And we have some of the content available online. There's a lot. It's a system like baking a cake. But those are in essence, some of the key areas you can focus on.

Seth Heckaman: So I would think that so many people that you're coming in contact with have just lost all faith in, you know that there's there's enough candidates to even build a big list in the first place. But I had no idea there was 137 different job boards out there, though, either. So it's got to just be a matter of variety of how you're getting into contact with the people. But also, like you mentioned, getting creative because the best candidates are likely going to be working somewhere else currently, right?

Ryan Bell: Well, yeah, I mean, a lot of times we'll do calls with with construction business owners and they'll be like, there's no good people out there. I'll say, Great. When your client goes online and they go to find you. Who are the other two companies they're likely to call? And unless it's a one-man band and a pickup truck, then there's some people out there. And typically in every market, you can take the smallest town in Massachusetts or Ohio. Doesn't matter where you are? Typically there's two or three or four other people. So that's a big part of it. In some markets, we find, you know what, you are pretty dry. You know, you really in your local area. But at that point, it's like, well, then how how do you have the people you have right now? Well, you know, Jim came out of high school and I trained him up in three years, that's great. Okay, well, then that's what we need to look at. We need to look at bringing people in and making sure that we can retain them. Why don't you have more Jims? Well, I had Tom and Tom worked for me for two months, and then he quit. Well, why did he quit? It's the retention model now, so it's bringing people in. But we really need to safeguard that retention. Because what you don't want is to train someone for six months, get them decent, and now they're working at your competitor and you did them a favor and you spent all the money and time. So it's different for local markets. But I would say across the board companies are surprised that how many people are available when you put enough of the feelers out and you're doing the geofencing, the partner lists, you're incentivizing your current team members to go out, like giving your current team members either a cash or some other type of incentive. Ideally, it's unique, meaning 1 to 1. Like if I know John works for me and he's a big Patriots fan, I'd say, Hey, I'll get you tickets to your favorite game. If you find X, Y, Z position, if you can deputize your current team, you'll be amazed at what they who they know, how they know them, who they can bring into your team. Just one simple strategy to get you the right people without you having to do all the heavy lifting.

Seth Heckaman: All of that comes down to getting creative and thinking about doing things differently than you've always done them right. So one thing that we've been kicking around here lately, it's yeah, if you're perfectly designed to get the results you're getting today. So if you want different results, we start have to do it, do things differently. But, you know, I think some of the companies we work with and here in these challenges are skilled labor. You know, sometimes my first thought is you have less of a labor problem than you do of a sales problem. Your margin is too low to give you that flexibility of buying the Patriots tickets or, you know, investing in these new systems. So does that come up with some of your clients, too?

Ryan Bell: Yeah. I mean, you have to have a situation where, and that's like my journey, for example, like I figured out the marketing first and then hiring was later. You have to have the margins in place to do that. If you can't give... It's also a clear understanding because if you really track and have the metrics around like how many jobs did you not bid because you didn't have the right people in the field or how many projects went over because you didn't have enough or enough of the right people? So when you start measuring these optics, we even have clients with really tight margins, like real tight commercial margins, let's say, or in the residential space. And they find if they just look at the optics a little bit differently, they go, Oh, wow, you're right. It is costing me a lot. This project went, you know, 15% over budget because I didn't have enough, you know, I didn't have enough laborers that could feed my installers. And if I did, things would have gone a lot faster and they wouldn't have gotten so burnt out, would have been less over time. So if you look at overtime, you look at job cost overruns and you look at how many projects you either lost or couldn't bid or didn't want to bid because you were full. I mean, those are all indicators that it actually is saving you money to heavily incentivize your hiring.

Seth Heckaman: Are you finding that does this vary much trade to trade? Or any feedback there on whether looking for roofers looks really different than masons versus, you know, yeah, window installers?

Ryan Bell: The only thing we've seen is that like the railroad, like masons, for example, where there's a long apprenticeship program, where it takes a long time or concrete, for example, concrete finishers is a little bit more difficult. The trades and fields where you can train somebody quickly, like roofing, for example, is a dream for us. Roofing, painting, you know, those those types of trades work really well. We do great with masonry companies too, we've noticed. It's just we have to go a little bit wider and a little bit deeper to get the same results we would for like a roofing company or a painting company or a general labor, you know, like window cleaning, for example, those types of companies. But it's the interesting thing is, I had a mentor early, early on, a marketing mentor, and he said the biggest marketing travesty for companies is not knowing how high is high. And I said, Well, what do you mean? He said, Well, like how much money you could be making? He says, So many times I'll work with a company like you, Matt. He said, They're making 20% net margins or, you know, 25 or 50, right. And he said, and we could find ways to make them 40% or 45%, and they don't even know that it's possible. He says, I know it because I'm a marketing consultant. I'm very good at it and I know how to find these levers and do this, he said. But that's the biggest thing. And I think hiring for a lot of construction business owners is that next blind spot. Because it's like until you've, I mean, it was for me. Until you really have the system in you and you have everything working and you can find that hire, meaning get the offer letter out and get them to accept and then retain. You don't know how many people are available. I didn't know. I never would have imagined my own masonry company that I could have as many quality, talented people as I do now. I had no idea until I really started figuring this out. I think that's the biggest, biggest opportunity for business owners. Listening is like the candidates are out there, they want to work. It's just what business owners are going to invest, the time, the energy and the money to find them. But if you do that, the people, there's roofing industry-specific. There's no better time in history than to own and have a great company with a great team of people. It's the most valuable asset you can have. No longer, when we're looking at the acquisition model right now, so many of the acquisitions are built around the team, like they don't even care about pipeline. The big acquisition companies are beating up smaller companies, two people, 20 people, 100 people just for the team because they're going for me to go out, find and and incorporate these people on my own is a nightmare. So it's like it's the payoff on top of the payoffs if you put in the work.

Seth Heckaman: So what does that look like for your company right now? Does that, you've got a full time team devoted to this day in and day out, or is this something you pull the lever more? You mentioned the two month work forecast earlier. So, yeah, what's the or is it something you pull the lever and just ramp it up when you need it? What does that look like?

Ryan Bell: Well, we're into like organic growth now, so we're kind of, we're in a very nice spot where we kind of keep the floodgates open. We're always screening candidates, but we're not in like hiring like, I need somebody right away. We typically have a waiting list of candidates that might require a little bit more training them. We may or may not want to invest in right away, but we've gotten to a point where it's like maintenance mode. If you think of like an exercise example, it's like, you know, it's hard work to get to that peak physical condition. And then once you've perfected nutrition working out and all those things, it's like you're kind of like maintenance mode, autopilot. You just go to the gym three times a week, you're just maintaining we're at that point. It's the hard part is to go from hiring crisis, which is typically also culture crisis, right? Because like when those two things coexist, you can't enforce good culture. It's impossible. Like you just can't because then you'd have you know, it's just it's a slippery slope downwards. So it's like fixing your culture, getting your hiring up to a point where you understand locally the market, the model that works for you. And then when you do, you get to this beautiful place called maintenance mode, where it's like I keep my hiring going. You know, if somebody happens to move to my area or maybe a business shuts down, like you have your floodgates open to capture people, but you're not in this dying. I mean, we just had somebody my team alerted me to somebody who would just shut down their own company. I mean, we don't we weren't like actively needing this position, but we got an awesome candidate because he's like, I'm done is like I had family stuff. I'm working too much on my own. It's too hard to sell work right now. I just want to go work for somebody. We were ready and waiting. You know, we had our net wide open boom and they came in. So that's like the ultimate, ultimate payoff for business owners. And then you've got that hidden benefit of like you have the asset that everybody wants you, you have the ability to perform the work.

Seth Heckaman: Yeah, you mentioned all this goes hand-in-hand with culture. So was there companies out there, our industry or otherwise, that you look to as examples for what you wanted to build and what have been the key principles for that for you folks?

Ryan Bell: Culture comes down to a couple of things. One of the big ones is communication. If you look at companies with poor culture, there's typically poor communication. Meaning I could be saying things that aren't nice, harmful things. I mean, I got I grew up in the business where, like we used to see fist fights on the job. We used to see, you know, it was like the bigger mistake I made growing up when I was young, the louder I got yelled at. So like my dad would really yell, I was like, Oh, that's a big one. I gotta quit. The industry's changed so much now, especially because you're incorporating, like the old timers that we used to. My dad is, you know, we had an old time mason, who was in his seventies, probably 20 years ago when I was really starting out. And so it's you're integrating like younger people who know tech with people who have really earned their stripes in the industry. And so, like, the the ultimate important thing is good communication, like. We spend a lot of time looking at it. It's communication and team building, right? How do I how do I incorporate elements of fun in the business and things like that? So specifically, what that looks like is one strategy is an honest employee audit. So we recommend either monthly or quarterly. We have a framework, but you're essentially on a 1 to 10 scale anonymously surveying key areas of satisfaction. So like on a scale of 1 to 10, how valued do I feel my input is to my manager when I give or like, how how fair do I feel my pay is right? And you be in there. I mean, you get his reports back and we talk to owners and we're like, How confident are you this is going to be good? Oh, my team is amazing. They love it. They're happy. Okay, We get it back. A couple of areas, you know, it might be pay, it might be communication around job delays, things like that. You find there's opportunities. So anonymous communication, open communication, like those on our like the process improvement meetings are huge. And like once you get the baseline, which is just getting people to talk because nobody quits the day they quit, right? You know, it's like I quit. It's like, No, you didn't quit today. You quit three weeks ago and you were just waiting for that last little thing to happen that you quit. So if we know that, we know that if I can catch it early enough, I can solve almost any problem. So one thing we do is if somebody new comes in really good onboarding plan, right? Who do they go see? What are they? Especially the first two weeks? Do they have everything they need to be successful? Then we mandate it's it's three reviews in the first basically four months. So you get a two week review, a 30 day review and a 90 day review. So three reviews, all of these are eligible for a raise. I've had people in the span of four months get three raises, like it's actually fairly common because the next thing we do is we are very clear about expectations. So now that we've eliminated the burden of I'm going to bring you in the office to talk to you, it's like, well, no, it's not weird because on day one we're like, So, you know, two weeks from now you'll be back here. And after that again in 30 days and after that, 90. Now, it's not weird anymore. I'm not bringing you in the office. After we've established that. Now we get really clear during those meetings on how you get an A, because if you bring a level talent, they feed off of getting it. It's like they are like the I want the pat on the backs. And so our job is as business managers is to clearly define how do you get it? So in these reviews, we're like, Hey, you did amazing. And these four things, we're really a stickler about time. I know it was 703. You're supposed to be there at seven. No big deal. But like if you could really get there at seven or earlier, like, that's our culture. No problem, because we open the channel up instead of having, like, pull them aside and like, Hey, can I talk to you? So this whole 703 thing, it's not where it's like you're making a big, heavy thing out of something that can be casual in a pre-planned meeting. So the communication is big. And then the other thing with culture to other things is team building. So and then and then team structuring and they're different. So team building is like events for the whole company or events for departments. We really bring everybody together and it's close. Team structuring is where you're looking at. Okay, I've got this young person and they've got a lot of energy and they just they go a million miles an hour, but they're not super clean. I'm not going to put them with somebody who has no patience because if I put them in, someone who's got no patience is going to tell what sort of place they want to fire. Like, you know, like that was like my dad in the field, you know, like I would never put that guy out. I would if I did that, I would be like, guarantee they're gone in a week. So we spend a lot of time crafting teams. So as soon as something doesn't work out and I have a crew of six, eight, ten people, I'm immediately like, Well, we're there with the wrong team, you know? Did I put them on the wrong team? Did I miss structure the way they needed to be located within the organization? And and those are just some of the actionable strategies.

Seth Heckaman: Excellent stuff, man. So I love hearing your passion and just the intentionality that you've approached your own business and really our industry now. Yeah, letting so many other people benefit from it. So what, what is that next step and process for someone is listening and understanding that they need a hiring culture beyond help and that things the contractor consultant consultants can help. What would that process look like for them?

Ryan Bell: I mean, typically we start with just reaching out to us now. Websites great online through the website is probably the easiest, fastest schedule to call. And then we just we look at your market where you are and there's probably a good chance we can help and honestly figure it out. We have a pretty good framework and what's nice about what we do is everything escalates. So we I can't sit here and say we're definitely going to do this in this timeframe, but we've got an escalation process. Some markets are really easy. We start with step one and two or we're getting great results. But what we're trying to do is we. We handle the biggest problem for business owners, which is I don't have the time to do this, but I know I need to do it. So like the business owner, we do all the job postings, we do all of the headline testing, the weekly reporting, so that business owner is just showing up to final vetted, approved interviews. That's it. So like all of the like job boards, all of the screenings, our team gets to the average candidate and think as of last week, it was 4 minutes. You apply within 4 minutes for contacting you. So, you know, it's we take care of all of that so that the business owner can do what they're good at, which is if I got somebody who is all pre qualified, they get to qualify them that second half and then we handle the hiring letters, the drugs. We like all of that coordination for them. So it's a really, really neat service that that we've had great success with.

Seth Heckaman: That time to conversation, it reminded me one of our customers a couple weeks ago was telling me that just on a whim he started experimenting that rather than call up the the candidate, try to schedule them a week later for an in-person interview, you know, it became, hey, can you jump on a Zoom call in an hour, not in an hour, okay, two this afternoon? Let's do it. And just really ramped up their success rate and just getting into a good conversation quicker and taking them out of the the pool for everyone else to try to capture. Awesome. Well, good deal, Matt. Thank you so much. I think we're getting close to kind of the end of what we call the business end of things here. But one thing I did want to ask you, one last question was, you know, obviously as a still young person building a really impressive career in this industry that we all love and care a lot about. What words of advice, what would you say to another person, you know, at that stage in life who is evaluating where to invest their career and construction in one way or another is is on the table for consideration?

Ryan Bell: I mean, I'm a huge proponent of this industry. I think there's no better time to be involved in construction. I think that we're going to see artificial intelligence integrate nicely. But last I checked, ChatGPT is not laying bricks or installing roofs. So I think we're at a great juncture in history. And the people that get involved now and can embrace the the evolution that we're going to see, it's going to be remarkable. And not just that, but I think that we're going to find that the industry is going to change. And growth, if you enter this industry is going to be so fast, in my opinion, I think you're going to have an opportunity to accelerate so quick in this industry because we need new talent, we need new ideas, we need new energy that if I was a young person considering, I mean, no brainer.

Seth Heckaman: If you're ready to get stuff done and get excited about doing something, you're going to get to the top quickly because there's such a such a need for it, absolutely. Awesome. Well, before we wrap up completely, was there anything else that you wanted to mention or talk about or share with our audience today?

Matt DiBara: No. Other than just spending more time focusing on hiring. You know, really, one of the most fundamental things you can do is, is just take your week and say, how much time do we spend focusing on hiring genuinely, like really diving in and focusing it and measuring it and treating it like we do sales or some of the other key areas. And that's the first big step. And then if you're doing that consistently and you're struggling, well, then you need to change your approach. You might need someone like us or somebody else out there, but for a lot of business owners, it's just literally time. It's like you got to block out, you got to do it because it's something that pays off not only today or tomorrow, but many, many years down the line.

Seth Heckaman: And like you said, for your own company, if you're not at a position where you need to go out and hire 20 people, that doesn't change that. You need to be focusing on that lever. If you needed to hire 20 people, could you? If you hired 20 people, does your culture breed a, you know, an environment that people would want to stay or are they going to be gone in six weeks after that? And you're starting to build the groundwork from there? That's awesome. Well, we we're not going to let you go before we ask if you're willing to participate in something a little more fun here at the end that we do called our rapid fire questions. So just allow the audience to get to know you a little bit better. We have seven, ranging from silly to serious questions that we like wrapping up for. As always, those listening, Matt has not seen this or did not get any warning ahead of time, but are you up for the rapid fire questions?

Matt DiBara: Yeah.

Seth Heckaman: Awesome. So we'll alternate asking those here. Ryan, if you want to go first, take it away.

Ryan Bell: Sure. I'd be happy to. Question number one, when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Matt DiBara: With family and traveling.

Ryan Bell: Traveling like far traveling, or just going places in general.

Matt DiBara: U.S., U.S. and then international, new places.

Ryan Bell: Cool, new places.

Seth Heckaman: What's next on your list? Do you have a bucket list one you're working towards now?

Matt DiBara: I want to spend some time in Greece. I'm Italian, so I've done Italy a lot. But Greece is like kind of like the cousin that I didn't really get to see, so.

Seth Heckaman: Question number two. Well, we just asked you like four questions in the first one, but the second rapid fire question. If you had to eat one food for every meal going forward, what would you eat?

Matt DiBara: I mean, I'm a pasta guy.

Seth Heckaman: There you go. No surprise there, I guess.

Ryan Bell: Question number three, What is the last job or career that you would ever want to have?

Matt DiBara: Oh, data analyst. Like, just they're like.

Seth Heckaman: Cold, sterile spreadsheets for hours on end. Doesn't seem like that would fit. Four, if you could pick a superpower, what would it be?

Matt DiBara: Inspiring others to see their true potential.

Seth Heckaman: Beautiful.

Ryan Bell: It's a good one. Question number five. If someone were to play you in a movie, who would you want it to be?

Matt DiBara: You know, if I could do it like a future me, I'd have George Clooney play it. Maybe Robert De Niro and have them fight it out first and see whoever wins can play me.

Ryan Bell: I like that question.

Seth Heckaman: What product or service have you purchased recently that you would consider life-changing?

Matt DiBara: Oh, you know what I just purchased? It's so funny you say this, I'm traveling right now. I purchased a really small power inverter that like is, so cigarette lighter to outlet so I could work in the car. But like a small one, life-changing. I'm going to take it with me.

Ryan Bell: So it has like an actual plug, like a... Is it on Amazon, I'm assuming?

Matt DiBara: Yeah.

Ryan Bell: Because we had a need for one of those recently and I was like, why, why haven't I ordered that on Amazon? Like, why don't, why don't cars come with that now? But anyways, okay, final question. This one's a little more serious. What would you like to be remembered for?

Matt DiBara: I probably gave it away with my superpower, but inspiring others to see how high is high? Like my my earlier mentor taught me when I was really getting into all this.

Seth Heckaman: Well on your way to that. And thank you for fulfilling that partly with this time here today with us. I really enjoyed it. For those that do want to get in touch with you, Matt, what's the best way to do that?

Matt DiBara: You can email us, mattd@thecontractorconsultants.com, mattd@thecontractorconsultants.com or the website.

Seth Heckaman: Awesome. So thank you again and thank you listeners for tuning in to this episode of Construction Disruption with Matt DiBara, with DiBara Masonry and the Contractor Consultants. Again thecontractorconsultants.com. Please watch for future episodes of the podcast. We are always blessed with great guests and if you would, don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. Until next time we're together, keep on disrupting and challenging the status quo. God bless and take care. This is Isaiah Industries signing off until the next episode of Construction Disruption.

Intro/Outro: This podcast is produced by Isaiah Industries, a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing and other building products.